Alexander Hamilton (132 page)

In New York, Hamilton monitored the inaugural speech for compliance with the tacit deal that Jefferson had made with the Federalists. He was pleased to see that Jefferson promised to honor the funding system, the national debt, and the Jay Treaty. Hamilton wrote, “We view it as virtually a candid retraction of past misapprehensions and a pledge to the community that the new President will not lend himself to dangerous innovations, but in essential points will tread in the steps of his predecessors.”
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This grandly bipartisan tone wouldn’t last for long.

Hamilton had intuited rightly that Jefferson, once in office, would be reluctant to reject executive powers he had deplored in opposition. Madison was appointed secretary of state and Albert Gallatin secretary of the treasury. Gallatin had been a persistent critic of Hamilton, publishing a pamphlet during the campaign claiming that Hamilton had enlarged the public debt instead of shrinking it. But as treasury secretary, he discovered merits in Hamilton’s national bank, which he had lambasted as a congressman. Hamilton, meanwhile, began his long retreat to the status of a prophet without honor.

THIRTY-EIGHT

A WORLD FULL OF FOLLY

O
nce Jefferson became president, Hamilton, forty-six, began to fade from public view, an abrupt fall for a man whose rise had been so spectacular, so incandescent. If stripped of his former political standing, however, he remained at the pinnacle of the legal profession, exerting influence over a wide range of New York institutions. He drew up a will for a wealthy retired seaman, Robert Richard Randall, who wanted to set up a sanctuary for retired American merchant sailors. The resulting home on Staten Island was called Sailors’ Snug Harbor. Hamilton also tendered legal advice to the Church of St. Mark’s in the Bowery as it sought independent status within the Trinity Church parish.

But no legal fame or fortune could offset the painful decline of his political stature. From the time of his first newspaper essays at King’s College, Hamilton had shown a steady knack for being near the center of power. He had gravitated to Washington’s wartime staff, the Confederation Congress, the Constitutional Convention, and the first government. Now he was exiled from the main political action, a great general with no army marching behind him.

In his more despairing moments, Hamilton had long toyed with the fantasy of retiring to a tranquil rural life, especially as Philip Schuyler continued to badger him about his cerebral, sedentary labors. But something had held him back. Part of the problem was that Hamilton was a quintessentially urban man, who preferred to commune with books, not running brooks. The other founders—Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Adams—had plantations or substantial farms from which they had drawn financial and spiritual sustenance, while Hamilton had remained a city dweller, harnessed to his work.

This began to change in the late 1790s as Hamilton found increasing solace in his family. Away on a business trip, he chided Eliza mildly for not having written about their sick infant, Eliza: “It is absolutely necessary to me when absent to hear frequently of you and my dear children. While all other passions decline in me, those of love and friendship gain new strength. It will be more and more my endeavor to abstract myself from all pursuits which interfere with those of affection. ’Tis here only I can find true pleasure.”
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To fulfill his pledge of spending more time with his family, Hamilton formed a “sweet project” to build a country house nine miles north of lower Manhattan.
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He told a friend laughingly, “A disappointed politician is very apt to take refuge in a garden.”
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During the fall of 1799, he and Eliza rented a country house along with the Churches in the vicinity of Harlem Heights. This decision probably owed something to the yellow-fever epidemics that visited the city each autumn. Hamilton knew the area well. On fishing expeditions up the Hudson, he sometimes moored his boat to a dock owned by pharmacist Jacob Schieffelin, who had a lovely summer house on a nearby hilltop. Hamilton was so enraptured by the exquisite vista from this house that he tried to buy it. Instead, in August 1800 Schieffelin sold him an adjoining fifteen-acre parcel with a two-hundred-foot elevation with views of the Hudson River on one side and the Harlem River and East River on the other. From physician Samuel Bradhurst, Hamilton bought an additional twenty acres. The combined property was picturesquely wooded and watered by two streams that converged in a duck pond. It had outlying buildings, including stables, barns, sheds, gardens, orchards, fences, and a chicken house. The property was bisected by Bloomingdale Road (today Hamilton Place), which provided a fast, direct connection by stagecoach or carriage to Manhattan or Albany.

Hamilton called his retreat the Grange, a name that paid homage to both the ancestral Hamilton manse in Scotland and the plantation of uncle James Lytton in St. Croix. It was to be the only surviving residence linked to Hamilton’s memory and the only one we know for certain that he owned. Its name suggested both pride in his Scottish ancestry and a more relaxed attitude toward his Caribbean origins. One day, Hamilton was riding up to Albany to visit Eliza’s ailing sister Peggy and had to choose between bringing her a pie or a basket of crabs. Upon reflection, he told Eliza, he had opted for crabs: “Perhaps as a
Creole,
I had some sympathy with them.”
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Twenty years before, Hamilton would never have hazarded such a flippant remark about his boyhood.

The Hamiltons used the existing farmhouse as a temporary residence until they completed a new structure. For this home, Hamilton drafted a man whom he had once hired at Treasury to design lighthouses: John McComb, Jr., then the most prominent New York architect and soon to be in charge of constructing the new City Hall. The main contractor was Ezra Weeks, brother of Levi, whom Hamilton had defended in the Manhattan Well Tragedy case. From his sawmills at Saratoga, Philip Schuyler shipped planks and boards down the Hudson along with hand-carved timber, still rough with bark, to decorate the children’s attic. He also sent enormous bushels of potatoes and wheels of cheese. Hamilton brimmed with so much nervous energy that he could not remain aloof from any project for long and collaborated with McComb on everything from the design of the tall chimneys to the Italian-marble fireplaces. Like all new homeowners, he had scouted other residences for ideas. On one journey to Connecticut, he told Eliza, “I remark as I go along everything that can be adopted for the embellishment of our little retreat, where I hope for a pure and unalloyed happiness with my excellent wife and sweet children.”
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The two-story Federal house that McComb and Weeks completed by the summer of 1802 occupied a spot near the corner of present-day West 143rd Street and Convent Avenue. (It was later moved south for preservation purposes.) The neat, handsome structure had a yellow-and-ivory frame exterior, topped by classical balusters. With six rooms upstairs and eight fireplaces to warm the family in winter, it was clearly designed with Hamilton’s brood of seven children in mind. As elegantly meticulous as Hamilton himself, the house was small for a man of his fame, though marked with mementos of his past power. Visitors entering the doorway under a delicate fanlight glimpsed a Gilbert Stuart painting of George Washington, a gift from Washington himself. Ironically, the Anglophile Hamilton furnished the parlor with a Louis XVI sofa and chairs. The centerpiece of the house was two octagonal rooms that stood side by side, one serving as parlor, the other as dining room. When the doors were thrown open, they created a single, continuous space in which to entertain guests. The mirrored doors that covered three sides of the parlor reflected the leafy landscape seen through the high French windows. Further blending the living room with the sylvan setting, the windows opened onto a balcony with panoramic river views. Incapable of total relaxation—Hamilton had probably never experienced an indolent day in his life—he commandeered for his study a tiny room to the right of the entryway and fitted it out with a beautiful roll-top desk that he called “my secretary at home.”
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This compulsive bibliophile packed the Grange with up to one thousand volumes.

Perhaps the aspect of this hideaway that most captivated Hamilton was landscaping it and growing fruit and vegetable gardens. As a newcomer to the bucolic life, he humbly sought assistance from friends and country neighbors. “In this new situation, for which I am as little fitted as Jefferson [is] to guide the helm of the U[nited] States, I come to you as an adept in rural science for instruction,” he wrote to Richard Peters, an agricultural expert.
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He also drew on the expertise of his friend and physician, David Hosack, who also served as a renowned botany professor at Columbia College. Hosack had just established a botanical garden with greenhouses and tropical plants where Rockefeller Center stands today. En route to or from the Grange, Hamilton surveyed Hosack’s flowers and frequently rode off with cuttings, bulbs, and seeds. He even communicated a political message through his gardening. Among the many shade trees that he dispersed around the grounds, he planted to the right of the front door a row of thirteen sweet gum trees meant to symbolize the union of the original thirteen states.

We know about Hamilton’s supervision of the grounds because he was often away on business and left detailed instructions for Eliza, who oversaw much of the day-to-day development. Hamilton was enchanted by an ornamental bed of tulips, lilies, and hyacinths that Hosack had devised, and he sent a drawing of it to Eliza. With his usual exactitude, he told her, “The space should be a circle of which the diameter is eighteen feet and there should be nine of each sort of flowers…. They may be arranged thus: wild roses around the outside of the flower garden with laurel at foot…. A few dogwood trees, not large, scattered along the margin of the grove would be very pleasant.”
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Hamilton also planted strawberries, cabbages, and asparagus and constructed an icehouse covered with cedar shingles.

Eliza kept close tabs on outlays for the Grange, which proved an extravagance for a couple with seven children. Always a tightwad compared to Jefferson, Hamilton began to spend with an open hand and lavished about twenty-five thousand dollars, or twice his annual income, on the house and grounds. Since the property itself cost fifty-five thousand, the cumulative expense dragged Hamilton into debt. He was aware that his liberal spending was outstripping his wealth but anticipated that his growing legal practice would defray future bills. In the past, Hamilton had been somewhat cavalier about collecting legal fees, but he now demanded payment from clients in arrears. When he asked one client to pay for a will drawn up many years earlier, he explained, “As I am building, I am endeavouring to collect my outstanding claims.”
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For Alexander and Eliza Hamilton, the country house ushered in a new stage of their lives with a mellow, autumnal tone. The Grange did double duty as both rustic refuge and posh venue for dinner parties. The Hamiltons functioned as a complete, stable family as they seldom had before. Both Alexander and Eliza had been upset that his career had so often separated them and caused the children to be split up between them. Her life’s greatest sacrifice, Eliza once said, was “that of being one half the week absent from him [Hamilton] to take care of the younger while he took care of the elder children.”
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For someone with Hamilton’s early family history, these separations must have carried an extra burden of anxiety and frustration.

Hamilton made more and more time for his children. On one occasion, when Eliza went to Albany, he wrote to her from the Grange, “I am here, my beloved Betsey, with my two little boys, John and William, who will be my bedfellows tonight…. The remainder of the children were well yesterday. Eliza pouts and plays and displays more and more her ample stock of caprice.”
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He liked to sing with the family and gather them in the gardens on Sunday mornings to read the Bible aloud. Hamilton’s children tended to remember their father at the Grange, partly because they were older then and partly because it was there that they had the full attention of a man whose life had been hectic and distracted by controversy.

The new squire was no passive spectator of the national scene and followed avidly the fortunes of Aaron Burr. Once Jefferson entered the White House, Burr was no longer just expendable to the president: he was an outright hindrance. After betraying Jefferson’s trust during the electoral tie, Burr knew he would probably be dropped as vice president when Jefferson sought reelection, and in the meantime he was pointedly excluded from the president’s counsels. “We are told and we believe that Jefferson and [Burr] hate each other and Hamilton thinks that Jefferson is too cunning to be outwitted by him,” Robert Troup reported to Rufus King.
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As Burr became a pariah in Washington, he realized that he had to shore up his political base at home.

By coincidence, an acrimonious race for New York governor followed the electoral stalemate in Washington. That old Republican warhorse George Clinton decided to seek yet another term as governor. When John Jay declined to run for reelection, the Federalists turned to thirty-six-year-old Stephen Van Rensselaer, the incumbent lieutenant governor and Hamilton’s brother-in-law. That Hamilton would get involved was further assured when Burr began to meddle on behalf of Clinton. For Hamilton, this exposed the shameless deceit behind Burr’s flirtation with the Federalists during the tie election. He said in sarcastic tones to Eliza, “Mr. Burr, as a proof of his conversion to Federalism, has within a fortnight taken a very active and officious part against [Van] Rensselaer in favour of Clinton.”
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