After Cornwallis’s defeat, however, both the British troops and the loyalists who depended on them for protection departed in huge numbers, some for England, others for Canada or the Caribbean. When General Washington officially entered the city on November 25, 1783, he found a ghost town of just over ten thousand people. Washington entered Manhattan this time at its northern tip, crossing over the Harlem River into Harlem Heights, reversing his journey of seven years earlier, when he had been chased from New York City all the way up Manhattan by the British commander, William Howe, and narrowly escaped onto the mainland. It was important to General Washington to ride the entire length of Manhattan to show that the whole island—all twelve miles of it, and not just the city clustered on its southern tip—was once again an American province.
For the first ten miles or so, Washington encountered nothing but forest and farmland. The farms were fallow for the winter, but even so, one could see the desolation. The sheaves still stood in many fields from last fall’s harvest, half rotted from rain and freeze and thaw, while herds of cows clustered forlornly before the closed doors of abandoned barns, waiting in vain for someone to drain their swollen udders, and brown chickens scratched for stray grains in the frozen soil, with nothing hunting their eggs besides foxes and skunks. After mile after mile of this, the neat white-and-brown farmhouses slowly grew more numerous, but only occasionally did one see smoke coming from a chimney or a sturdy farm wife retrieving a basket of apples or squash from the fruit cellar.
Finally, about two miles from New York Harbor, the city itself came into view. From a distance, it looked as Washington remembered it, and at the sight he must have breathed a sigh of relief that the British hadn’t burned it like modern-day Vandals or Huns desecrating the new Rome. As he got closer, he could see that some buildings had indeed been burned, but these were so scarce and randomly placed that he suspected they were simple house fires, unquenched due to the lack of a fire brigade. Hundreds more buildings stood empty, though, with many others only nominally inhabited and often in terrible disrepair. Shutters sagged on hinges and broken glass had been replaced with wood or oilcloth. Holes gaped in gabled roofs where shingles had not been replaced for nearly a decade.
Even more haunting, though, were the dozen or so derelict ships that stood a half mile off the island, and the smells of disease and death that wafted across empty streets from the salty chop of the East River. The British had anchored a chain of some of their oldest (and least seaworthy) frigates off Manhattan to house their prisoners of war. Even now, hundreds of American soldiers, starving, ill, and freezing, were still desperately awaiting release. By some accounts, eleven thousand patriots had died in these ships, nearly three times the number who perished on the field of battle. Bones would wash up on shore for years to come.
Yet the city still stood at the mouth of the Hudson River, from which the furs and grains and timber of the Northeast flowed to European markets, poised to become a great mercantile center and quite possibly the capital of the new nation. Its climate was milder than Boston’s and its island status rendered it easier to defend than Philadelphia or Williamsburg. The Congress of the Confederation was so convinced of the city’s bright future that they chose it as the new nation’s temporary capital, after stints in Philadelphia and Trenton. Washington shared Congress’s high estimation of the city’s symbolic value.
Still resisting all calls to take a position in the government, Washington chose Samuel Fraunces’s Queen’s Head Tavern as the place to resign his commission and bid his faithful troops farewell on December 4, 1783, before returning to Mount Vernon, his beloved plantation in Virginia. One era was closing, while another was beginning, and though the past was cloaked in victory, the future was shrouded in uncertainty. Was this the end of the beginning for the emerging nation, or was it in fact the beginning of the end?
*
NOT FAR FROM Fraunces Tavern, Eliza Hamilton stood in the middle of her new front parlor staring forlornly at her husband, who was balanced atop one of the room’s few chairs measuring the windows with a long spool of tailor’s tape.
“I don’t understand why you don’t just walk over to Pearl Street and bid adieu to General Washington,” she said cautiously, to her husband’s white-shirted back.
Alex waited until he had measured the height of the window and recorded the figure in his notebook before answering. “If General Washington had wanted to bid me adieu, he would have invited me,” he said curtly, before climbing down off the chair and carrying it to the room’s second window.
“Oh, Alex, you’re just being stubborn.”
Alex didn’t meet her gaze. “I served at the man’s side for four years.”
“I mean about the window,” Eliza said with some exasperation. “They are very clearly the same size. There is no reason to measure them both.”
For a moment, it seemed as though Alex was going to ignore her. He remounted the chair and reached his tape to the corner of the window. Then a chuckle erupted from him, and he hopped from the chair to the floor. “I suppose you’re right, my darling.”
Eliza pulled her chair closer to the fire. Though it was barely noon, she had been on her feet for some six hours, having awakened at six to a cold fireplace and even colder bed—Alex had already risen, and must have secreted himself in the study so as not to disturb her. She had dozed in bed for a few minutes, waiting for the maid to come in to tend to the fire, but then she snapped awake when she remembered that there weren’t three chambermaids and an equal complement of footmen to attend to such mundane duties. If she didn’t light the fire herself, no one was going to.
Alex heard her going up and down the stairs and emerged from his study to join her, and though Eliza thought to go back to bed once the fire was going, there were ash buckets to be emptied first, coal and wood to be brought in and distributed among the house’s three floors, and then the measuring tape had appeared in Alex’s hand, and here they were.
She fixed him in the eye and smiled wanly. “You’re also being stubborn about General Washington.”
Alex opened his mouth to argue, then thought better of it. He looked about for somewhere to sit, but there was only the faded floorboards, bare of any rug or carpet.
“You shouldn’t take this personally,” Eliza continued. “I have heard from at least three different people that General Washington invited no one to see him off. The only reason he came to the city was to sign the documents that formally transferred governing power from General Carlton back to the state of New York. By all accounts, his goal was to slip out with as little fanfare as possible.”
“A ludicrous idea,” Alex dismissed.
“Don’t be disrespectful,” Eliza said curtly. “And yes, maybe it was unrealistic of General Washington to think he could escape to Virginia without some kind of ceremonial before his men. But can you blame him? By your own description, he was never a public personality and accepted his role as commander in chief only because of his love for his country. But the bonds he built with his men—including you!—were real, and he deserves a final embrace from them before he resumes life as a country squire.”
Alex sighed. He had been up since four in the morning answering letters, and was as weary as his wife. The bare window made the room rather cold on this late fall day, and so he walked toward Eliza and sat at her feet in front of the fire, his back leaning against the draped fullness of her woolen skirts. “Mark my words, Eliza, he shall not remain a country squire for long. This country is not yet willing to accept a unifying central government, but it will rally behind its heroes—”
“As the gathering at the Queen’s Head demonstrates,” Eliza put in.
“Indeed. And when General Washington realizes that the independent nation he fought on behalf of for seven years is in jeopardy, he will return to public service. As I said, the American people are not yet ready to accept a single government. But they would accept a single leader—if that leader were General Washington. Although I sup
pose his title wouldn’t be general then. It would be prime minister or perhaps president or, heaven forbid, king.”
“Oh, Alex, no! You don’t think the American people would ever again consent to become subjects of a monarchy, do you?”
“Stranger things have happened. The problem with kings and queens is that when a worthy figure appears—a Solomon, say, or a Charlemagne—their grateful subjects make the mistake of thinking that their descendants will be every bit as wise and just as they are. But the ability to lead a nation is not a heritable trait like hair color or skin tone. It is a rare skill, indeed, and manifests itself only in persons whose unique combination of temperament, training, and experience have made them capable of seeing past the benefits that they can derive from their country, to the benefits that they can bestow upon that country.”
Eliza smiled to herself, glad that Alex’s gaze was fixed elsewhere—she didn’t want to make him self-conscious, or think she was mocking him. Even after four years, she was still moved by her husband’s articulateness and vision, and she found tears had come to her eyes. He had the ability to sound as though he were reading from the pages of a well-edited book, even when he was speaking off the top of his head.
She stroked a lock of his strawberry-blond hair. “It sounds as though you are declaring your own qualifications for the role,” she said, curling the strand around her index finger and giving it a teasing tug.
“Me? To be sure, I hope to serve my country. But if I am honest about my own capabilities, I am less executive than administrator. I am, perhaps, too selfish to be a great leader. So selfish,” he added, turning to her with a smile and catching her hand in his, “that I would rather measure rooms for curtains and carpets with my beautiful wife than abase myself one last time before a man who was willing to make use of my services but not reward them until he was threatened with losing me. Well, let him have his turtle soup with his admirers. He has earned their veneration. But I have earned his, and if he cannot see that, then I see no reason to leave the far more amiable company in which I find myself.” And, pulling her hand to his lips, he bestowed upon it a dozen quick kisses.
Eliza listened to her husband with mixed emotions. On the one hand, she understood his frustration. So much of their marriage had been consumed by the war, by Alex’s service to his country, and by General Washington’s needs. But she also knew how much General Washington had meant to Alex, and how much his country meant to him, too. Still, she also adored it when he kissed her hand like this, and it was another moment before she was able to speak again. Duty could be an annoyingly inconvenient thing, but that was the blessing of marriage: There would always be time for more kissing later.
“Turtle soup?” she said at last, making a face. “The general eats that? Really?”
“I am told it is quite delicious.”
“And I am told that opossum has a gamy flavor not unlike rabbit, but I’m still not going to eat anything that sports a hairless tail like a rodent. Well then,” she continued, “far be it from me to ask you to leave my—what was the word you used—”
“Amiable.”
“Yes, my amiable company.” She patted him on the head and he lolled under her touch like a spaniel puppy. “But perhaps you would care to accompany me to the Broadway, where I saw a charming dry goods merchant.”
Alex chuckled. “I think it’s just called Broadway. No ‘the’ needed.”
“I like the way ‘the Broadway’ sounds,” Eliza retorted, to further laughter from Alex. “At any rate, I found this shop quite charming, and thought that we might find some fabric for the curtains, and perhaps also something to cover the sofas and chairs that Mama is sending from Albany.”
*
THEIR LACK OF china was solved not a half hour later, in the mercer’s shop that Eliza led Alex to on Broadway. In the middle of a relatively scant, though not unattractive, assortment of brocades and jacquards sat an entire service of the finest bone china Eliza had ever seen, painted with an intricate yet delicate pattern of brightly colored birds and flowers: cups and saucers, plates and chargers, salad bowls, dessert plates, and a full complement of serving dishes as well, including a four-legged covered fish plate that could have held a thirty-pound lobster.
It was an odd display to see in a fabric store, and Eliza was half afraid it was for show only, to set off the embroidered tablecloth beneath. She was delighted, then, when she made inquiries of the proprietor, to learn that the dishes had been left behind in one of the many empty houses the British abandoned when they fled the city. They could be had, she was told, “for a song,” though the price she was quoted, fifty shillings, seemed more like an opera than a ditty. In comparison, they were only going to pay their servants two pounds a month, for instance, in addition to room and board.
“A song?” Alex echoed, overhearing. “Well, turn up the lights, Broadway, because I’m about to start singing!” And, in fact, he crooned over the dishes as if they were a nursery full of newborn infants. Like Eliza, he savored the finer things in life, but unlike his wife, he had not grown up surrounded by them. On the one hand, this ensured that he never took his newfound privilege for granted, but it also made him a bit covetous, and sometimes a spendthrift as well. An impoverished childhood never fully leaves you, and Eliza was learning that her husband needed to surround himself with expensive items to remind himself that he was no longer poor—even if he wasn’t exactly rich either.
Eliza agreed that they were exquisite, but she had never thought of eating off dishes that did not originate with her family, or the family of friends. Still, they were as fine as anything that had ever graced her mother’s table, and clearly had belonged to gentlefolk. And she knew the price, however dear, was indeed a bargain. Her mother had paid as much for a single soup tureen. Admittedly the tureen was as large as a Russian samovar, but still. This was a steal, and she knew it, and before the offer could be rescinded, Alex was making out a promissory note and signing it with more flourish than John Hancock inscribing his name on the Declaration of Independence.
The Hamiltons were so astounded at their find they almost forgot to pick out material for curtains. But soon enough the dishes were purchased, along with the fabric, and Eliza made arrangements with the proprietor to return with Rowena to retrieve them. They had finally hired a few servants: Rowena, a middle-aged lady and her young son, Simon, who were starting the next day. Normally, Eliza would have sent her maid alone, but the proprietor told her that he expected to receive a wide assortment of pewter, crystal, and plate in the coming days, as more abandoned houses were claimed by Americans, and their booty entered the market.
“The spoils of war!” Alex said cheerfully as they left the shop. “At this rate, we shall have a home to rival the Pastures in a few months’ time!”
Eliza nodded, though she couldn’t help but feel a twinge of guilt as she imagined all those families fleeing and leaving behind their heirlooms and memories. It could have easily been the treasures of the Pastures in the store, if the war had gone the other way.
“Don’t let Papa hear your ambitions for our home,” she admonished. “He’ll be moved to outdo you, and Mama is already at wits’ end with his extravagances.” As she tucked the four pounds’ worth of promissory notes in her string purse, she couldn’t help but wonder if she, too, would soon be attempting to rein in a profligate husband. Well, her father had always made good on his debts and then some, and he had not half the mind Alex had.
We’ll be fine, she told herself.
They walked for a few minutes, discussing this or that detail of the household, when their conversation was cut short by the staccato of a single drum beating out a military cadence.
“What on earth?” Alex said, involuntarily snapping to attention.
Before Eliza could hazard a guess, the drummer came into view around the corner of Broad Street, followed by a great throng of men in Continental military uniform. The men wore sabers but were otherwise unarmed, and there was nothing ur
gent in their demeanor. Indeed, they seemed slightly somber. Still, Alex asked incredulously: “Have the British returned?”
“I think not,” Eliza said softly. She nodded at the rear of the column.
A large gray horse came into view, and on it sat the imposing figure of General George Washington. His cheeks were florid, as if he had just come from a warm room and had not yet accommodated himself to the chill December day. A sheepish but proud smile was on his sealed lips, and when Alex turned to Eliza, he saw a similar expression on her face.
“What is this?” he demanded.
Eliza shrugged. “It would seem that General Washington’s troops are seeing him off to his boat,” she said in a light tone.
Alex scoffed, and Eliza couldn’t tell if he was amused or annoyed, or both.
“It would seem that you knew he would be passing down ‘the Broadway.’”
“How on earth would I know something like that?” Eliza said, meeting Alex’s gaze with a flat expression, though her eyes were merry. “I am merely a lawyer’s wife, after all.”
“Didn’t you say something about a ladies’ spy network?”
“I’m sure I said nothing about spies,” Eliza protested. “Still, someone might have mentioned something about a formal farewell …” She shrugged. “I do not recall.”
Love & War_An Alex & Eliza Story Page 14