The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (33 page)

Hamilton could not say more without revealing his real reason: he wanted to reassure and comfort Eliza. He knew that Mason would not consider this a sufficient reason to alter the regulations of his church; Mason might even have concluded Hamilton’s profession of faith was insincere.

A distraught Hamilton begged Bayard to persuade Bishop Moore to
change his mind. At this point, Eliza arrived at the house. Knowing her emotional fragility, Hamilton had ordered the friend who brought her from The Grange to say nothing about his condition. She hurried to his bedside thinking he was suffering from stomach spasms. When Dr. Hosack told her the truth, she started to sob and gasp for breath. Hamilton writhed on the bed, wondering why either or both of those clergymen had refused him communion so he could offer Eliza proof that he had made his peace with God. Now all he could utter was a desperate reminder for her to seek the solace that had sustained her marriage: “Remember, my Eliza, you are a Christian!”

At first the words did little good. Elizabeth began to unravel. Dr. Hosack and others tried to comfort her. Hamilton repeated the words several times as Elizabeth sobbed and shuddered with grief. Suddenly there was another woman in the room, tears streaming down her tormented face: Angelica Schuyler Church. Eliza flung herself into the arms of her older sister. Only she understood the pain of losing this unique, incomparable man. Whether the love between Angelica and Hamilton had ever been physical was irrelevant now.

A few hours later, Bishop Moore returned to the Bayard house. Hamilton’s friends pleaded with the prelate to change his mind. The bishop had another talk with the dying man, who told him he had been planning to join the Episcopal Church “for some time past.” He declared that he detested dueling and bore “no ill will” toward Aaron Burr. He had gone to Weehawken “with a fixed resolution to do him no harm.” The bishop gave him holy communion, and Hamilton’s head fell back on the pillow. In spite of his agonizing pain, a faint smile played across his lips. He had achieved the only gift he could offer Eliza now: his reborn faith in the mysterious God who had allowed so much grief to engulf their lives.

IV

Alexander Hamilton died peacefully the following day with a weeping Eliza and Angelica at his bedside, along with at least a dozen other friends. Gouverneur Morris found the scene so unendurable that he fled to the garden of the Bayard House. New York City gave Hamilton a public funeral replete with orations and a huge crowd of spectators. When his friends examined the will Hamilton had left among his papers, they realized he
was penniless. His only meaningful investments were in western lands that would take years, perhaps decades, to appreciate in value. Meanwhile, he had debts that amounted to almost a half million dollars in modern money. It was unarguable proof that Hamilton had never dipped into the millions of dollars he had handled for the federal government or used his insider’s knowledge to speculate on Wall Street.

The friends, led by wealthy Gouverneur Morris, raised enough money to enable Eliza to keep The Grange. But contributions lagged, because many people thought she could turn to her wealthy father for support. Four months later, when Philip Schuyler died, they learned that he, too, was close to bankruptcy. He had lost a great deal of money in unwise investments during the 1790s.

Over several years, Hamilton’s friends managed to raise about $80,000 for Eliza—more than a million and a half dollars in the inflated currency of our time. She was able to live in reasonable comfort and dignity. In the first few years, she sometimes expressed near despair. She spoke of her “wounded heart” being unequal to the burdens cast upon it. But she found strength in Hamilton’s deathbed conversion. She spoke of him as “my beloved sainted husband and my guardian angel.”
³

The words were not chosen casually. She believed Hamilton’s faith had been reborn and that he had joined the ranks of the “sainted” in eternity. She also believed, like Episcopalians and Catholics today, in the “communion of saints,” which enabled the dead to protect and nurture those they loved who were still on earth—the role of the guardian angel. Knowing that her prayers and example had played a part in this transformation was enormously meaningful to her. Gradually, she began to see that Hamilton’s early death had given her a mission in life. She would devote herself to protecting and even enlarging Alexander Hamilton’s reputation as one of the founders of the American republic.

This was a task that needed doing. Hamilton’s tragic death did not change the Jeffersonian Republicans’ opinion of him. John Beckley, the man who had given the Reynolds story to James Thomson Callender, gloated openly at Hamilton’s fall. He mocked the magnificent funeral and the eulogies that Hamilton had received. “Federalism has monumented and sainted their leader up to the highest heavens…. The clergy, too, are sedulously trying to canonize the double adulterer as a moralist, a Christian and a saint.”
⁴

As the Jeffersonians saw it, Hamilton was a menace, a perpetual threat to the republic’s political purity, and Burr could and did gun him down without an iota of blame or remorse. Proof that this conclusion was not confined to a few politicians of Beckley’s stripe was the way Burr was treated by Jeffersonian Republicans, especially in the South, after the duel. He fled to Saint Simons island off the coast of Georgia to escape the threat of a show trial concocted by his New York enemy, Governor George Clinton. Burr’s host, wealthy Republican Senator Pierce Butler of South Carolina, lavished hospitality on the fugitive. On his way back to Washington, D.C., for the next session of Congress, the vice president was feted in Savannah, Georgia, and Petersburg, Virginia, by Republican admirers as if he were a general returning from a triumphant campaign.
⁵

Other ex-revolutionaries were equally unsympathetic to Hamilton. Thomas Paine wrote a mocking satire asking Christian believers why their God had arranged to have Hamilton killed in a duel. John Adams, brooding in Quincy, wrote that “a caitiff had come to a bad end.” He would only concede a hope that Hamilton was “pardoned in his last moments.”
⁶

V

Eliza Hamilton set herself the task of collecting her husband’s papers. She devoted many hours to retrieving copies of the hundreds of letters he had written to friends and supporters. She even persuaded the Washington family to let her borrow and copy Hamilton’s letters to the president. She interviewed politicians who had worked with Hamilton and added memoranda of their memories to her files. For the next twenty years, she tried to persuade one of Hamilton’s friends or admirers to write his biography. She met with one frustration after another. Various prominent politicians and writers studied the papers for years at a time and then returned them, pleading ill health or advancing age.

A climactic disappointment was the failure of former secretary of state Timothy Pickering. He kept the papers for almost a decade. When he died in 1829, his heirs found only a few disjointed, unfinished chapters. By this time Eliza’s second-oldest son, John Church Hamilton, was ready to undertake the task, and he began his seven-volume
History of the Republic as Traced in the Writings of…Hamilton
, which would consume the next thirty years of his life.

This devotion to her husband’s memory was by no means the only thing that occupied Eliza Hamilton. Long regarded as a fragile, dependent woman, she began demonstrating an independence and originality that amazed everyone. All her life Eliza had been dominated by strong-willed men, first her father, then her husband. Now that she was free to act on her own, she joined a group of equally religious women who founded The New York Orphan Asylum Society.

Eliza was perpetuating for friends and family another memory of Alexander Hamilton, the orphaned West Indian boy. She became a hardworking member of the board, with the title of deputy director. Over the years she devoted an immense amount of time to the rescue of New York children who had met a similar fate. In 1821, with her own children grown and launched on respectable careers, Eliza became the asylum’s director. She learned to know and care about each of the 158 children then in residence in the building the society had erected in Greenwich Village. She helped them get jobs and persuaded a New York politician to recommend one boy for West Point. Later she persuaded the New York state legislature to give the school annual grants. In 1836, she presided over a ceremony that began the construction of a larger and more permanent orphanage at Riverside Drive and 73rd Street.

On the side, in 1818 Eliza founded the Hamilton Free School on land she owned between 187th and 188th streets in Washington Heights. It was the first school in that developing part of Manhattan Island. She enjoyed all this hard work immensely. Once, she told a son how grateful she was to God for “point[ing] out this duty to me and giv[ing] me the ability and inclination to perform it.”
⁷

A portrait of Eliza Hamilton in her later years is the most telling evidence of how profoundly she had changed. The mouth is now a strong emphatic line and the dark eyes are bright with self-confidence—and kindness. The anxiety and uncertainty of her married years have vanished. A woman friend described her face as “full of nerve and spirit.” As she grew older, the same friend marveled at how she “retains to an astonishing degree her faculties and converses with…ease and brilliancy.”
⁸

In 1848, at the age of ninety-one, Eliza Hamilton moved to Washington, D.C., to live with her widowed daughter, Eliza Holly, who had a comfortable house only a few doors from the White House. Here, Mrs. Hamilton launched a new career as a celebrity. Politicians of all ages and parties
rushed to meet her. Southerners may have been dismayed by her brisk interest in the politics of the day: she was a critic of slavery. But everyone was charmed by the “sunny cheerfulness of her temper and quiet humor.” She was a frequent guest at the White House, where presidents from Polk to Fillmore were fascinated by her still-vivid memories of chatting with George and Martha Washington and John and Abigail Adams.
⁹

Perhaps the most startling of Eliza’s Washington, D.C., activities emerged from her friendship with another woman who shared many of her memories of the republic’s early years—Dolley Madison. Dolley came to her one day proposing to do something about the stalled monument to George Washington. For the better part of a decade, the proposed 855-foot obelisk had remained nothing more than an embarrassing idea. Eliza Hamilton called on the know-how she had acquired in her forty years of lobbying and fundraising for New York’s orphans.

Together these two remarkable women loaned their names to a campaign to raise enough money to begin the huge task. Their appeal inspired startling numbers of people to open their wallets, and on July 4, 1848, the city fathers laid the cornerstone of the great marble pillar that would declare George Washington’s singular greatness. Among those at the ceremony were President James K. Polk and his wife, Martha Washington’s grandson George Washington Parke Custis, and an obscure congressmen named Abraham Lincoln.

Elizabeth Hamilton died in 1854 at the age of ninety-seven. In a small pouch she wore around her neck, her daughter found the letter Alexander Hamilton had written to her on July 4, 1804, testifying to his wounded, wounding, but ultimately transcendent love.

T
he first woman close to his own age who stirred Thomas Jefferson’s affection was his older sister, Jane. She shared his enthusiasm for music and books, which was not widespread in the Jefferson household. In later years, Jefferson described Jane as “a singer of uncommon skill and sweetness.” Often on summer nights, he would play songs on his violin and the two would sing together. Even in his old age, Jefferson spoke of her to his granddaughters “in terms of warm admiration and love.”

Jane remained a spinster until she died in 1765 at the age of twenty-five. One suspects she had fastidious tastes, like her younger brother. No one mourned her more than Jefferson. Years later, when he began planning to build a house on a nearby small mountain, one of its features was going to be a family cemetery; at its center would be a small stone altar, dedicated to Jane’s memory. In one of his account books, after describing this memorial, Jefferson wrote a touching epitaph:

II

Jefferson’s father, Peter Jefferson, was another rural strong man, on the model of Augustine Washington. His main interest in his son seems to have been figuring out how to toughen the skinny, dreamy youth to qualify him for manhood, Virginia style. Peter died when Tom was fourteen, probably suspecting he had not succeeded. At an early age, Tom was sent into the woods with a gun to bring back a wild turkey. He blazed away but hit nothing until he found a turkey trapped in some sort of pen. He pinned the bird in place with a garter and shot him at point-blank range. We can be fairly sure that his father was not pleased by this performance. Tom continued to spend most of his time with his head in a book—or practicing his violin as many as three hours a day.

With his mother, Jane Randolph, Jefferson seems to have had an uneasy relationship. It was not as overtly turbulent as George Washington’s conflicts with Mary Ball Washington. But there are hints in Jefferson’s papers that he chafed under his mother’s role—or rule—as overseer of the family’s finances until her death in 1776. Even when he was twenty-five and a practicing attorney, she seems to have expected him to submit all his accounts to her for approval.

There are also hints that Jane Randolph tended to play up her family’s heritage, which supposedly went back to Scottish and English nobility, at the expense of the Jeffersons’ more mundane Welsh origins. Jefferson had a lifelong habit of making disparaging remarks about coats of arms and noble ancestors. Jane was the daughter of one of the seven sons of William Randolph and Mary Isham, who are sometimes called the Adam and Eve of Virginia. Their numerous descendants married into virtually every notable family in the colony.

Jane Randolph Jefferson was born in London, where her father was living as a merchant, and the Jefferson home, Shadwell, was named for the London parish in which she had lived. At least one psychobiographer has speculated that Jane Jefferson disapproved of her son’s participation in the Revolution. One of Jane’s brothers was so disgusted by the upheaval that
he sold his Virginia lands and moved to England. Another brother was already living there.

As the older son (his brother Randolph was twelve years younger), Tom inherited the pick of Peter Jefferson’s lands along the Rivanna River and elsewhere, totaling more than five thousand prime acres. The income from these fruitful fields left him free of financial worries. At seventeen, Jefferson enrolled in the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, the little town that served as colonial Virginia’s capital.

The year was 1760. A new king, George III, had just ascended the British throne. The British Empire was in the process of winning the Seven Years’ War. The American side of it, usually called The French and Indian War, had already ended in victory with the capitulation of Canada. Ex-Colonel George Washington was discovering unexpected happiness in his marriage to Martha Dandridge Custis and working hard to wring a profit from Mount Vernon’s mediocre soil. Benjamin Franklin was in London, enjoying the international celebrity he had achieved for his epochal discoveries in electricity.

As a country boy, Jefferson approached the scions of Virginia’s first families—and their sisters—with not a little diffidence. He was thin-skinned and rather shy, and he feared rebuffs. He concealed his inclination to be sociable behind a facade of studiousness. “He used to be seen with his Greek grammar in his hand while his comrades were enjoying relaxation,” one friend recalled.

Family legend has him studying fifteen hours a day, but other evidence indicates that he knew how to have a good time, like most Virginians. He joined the Flat Hat Club, a college society that recorded its zany doings in mock-Latin verse. He made lifelong friends such as John Page, a descendant of “King” Carter, who invited him to Rosewell, the magnificent three-story mansion in which Page had grown up. There and in other great houses to which his Randolph kinship opened doors, Tom discovered the fascinations of the female sex. Their names still twinkle in his youthful letters: Rebecca Burwell, Susanna Porter, Alice Corbin, Nancy Randolph.

Tom spent the years between nineteen and twenty-three adoring Rebecca, an heiress from Yorktown whose parents were long dead. “Enthusiasm” was the word her contemporaries used to sum up Rebecca in later years. In the eighteenth century this meant a strongly emotional personality. In
the early decades of the century, when the severe, controlled classicism of Joseph Addison and Samuel Johnson dominated English taste and wild-eyed revivalists had Americans leaping and shouting in their churches, the word had a negative timbre. But by the 1760s, romanticism was in the air, and people with vivid emotions were not only tolerated, they were admired.

For two years, the romance percolated while Jefferson struggled to bring himself to ask the ultimate question. He rhapsodized in letters about “Belinda”—the exotic name he gave Rebecca. But something about her tied his tongue in knots. Perhaps it was the simple knowledge that marriage meant the end of youth, farewell to the bachelor’s freedom. Perhaps it was another hint that his parents’ marriage had not been very happy and he was wary of choosing a member of Virginia’s aristocracy as his wife.

For Jefferson, marriage also meant the extinction of his ambition to travel to Europe to see the monuments and palaces and paintings of England and France and Italy, about which he had read so much. Once, in a garden with Rebecca, he hinted that he would begin his grand tour at once if she promised to wait two years for his return. But her frown cast a shadow on this idea, and Jefferson returned to his studies. By this time he had passed from college Greek and Latin to the hard work of mastering “Old Coke”—Sir Edward Coke, the English jurist whose commentaries on the laws of England were famed for their crabbed style and “uncouth but cunning learning.” The young man had decided to become a lawyer.

Retreating to Shadwell, he lamented that he was certain to spend his time thinking of Rebecca “too often, I fear, for my peace of mind, and too often, I am sure, to get through Old Cooke [Coke] this winter.” A month later, he was writing plaintively to his friend John Page: “How does RB do? What do you think of my affair, or what would you advise me to do? Had I better stay here and do nothing or go down [to Williamsburg] and do less?” He decided on the first choice, and spent his days and nights struggling with Coke and planning a voyage in an imaginary ship called
The Rebecca
in which he would visit “England, Holland, France, Spain, Italy (where I would buy me a good fiddle) and Egypt.”
²

Jefferson was not the first lover in history to be tongue-tied at the sight of his beloved. But the duration of his reluctance is significant. He seemed to revel in the idea of love, the beauty and transcendence of it, and to recoil or at least hesitate from its physical expression. He seemed to enjoy the brood
ing, the semisweet despair of his frustration. This experience was becoming familiar in the emerging romantic movement in Europe. Lovers devoted themselves to unattainable women and sometimes shunned consummation to prove the depths of their devotion. It would gradually become apparent that this division was an important part of Jefferson’s psyche.

Another college friend, Jacquelin Ambler, began pursuing Tom’s unattainable damsel. All through the following spring and summer, Jefferson stayed home, philosophizing: “If she consents I shall be happy, if she does not I must endeavor to be so as much as possible…. Perfect happiness, I believe, was never intended by the Deity to be the lot of any one of his creatures in this world.”

His friend Page, acting as both adviser and ambassador, warned Tom that Ambler was making ominous progress. So the philosophic lover came to Williamsburg for the social season. He was soon giving Ambler strong competition—until a climactic night at the Raleigh Tavern, the favorite gathering place of the young bloods and their belles. Arriving for a ball, the ladies were dressed in that “gay and splendid” style that made Virginia famous, their hair “craped” high with rolls on each side, topped by caps of gauze and lace. The men looked almost as splendid in clockwork silk stockings, lace ruffles, gold- and silver-laced cocked hats, and breeches and waistcoats of blue, green, scarlet, or peach.

Jefferson had spent the hours before the ball composing a whole series of romantic compliments, witty remarks, and bright observations for Rebecca. “I was prepared to say a great deal,” he told his friend John Page. “I had dressed up in my own mind such thoughts as occurred to me in as moving a language as I knew how, and expected to have performed in a tolerably creditable manner.”

But when the lover came face to face with Rebecca in her finery, “Good God!…a few broken sentences uttered in great disorder and interrupted with pauses of uncommon length were the too visible marks of my strange confusion!”

“Last night,” the despairing suitor groaned, “I never could have thought the succeeding sun would have seen me so wretched as I now am!”
³

The following year, Rebecca became engaged to Jacquelin Ambler, and Jefferson was stricken with the first attack of what he called “the headache”—a disabling migraine-like disorder that would periodically torment him for the next forty years.
⁴

III

Jefferson retreated once more to philosophizing—and making matches for his friends. He proposed to Sukey Potter for his fellow lawyer William Fleming. A few weeks later, he was cheerfully reporting to Page the fate of their friend Warner Lewis: “Poor fellow, never did I see one more sincerely captived in my life. He walked to Indian camp with her yesterday, by which means he had an opportunity of giving her two or three love squeezes by the hand, and like a true Arcadian swain, has been so enraptured ever since that he is company for no one.”
⁵

These examples of romantic bliss did not impress Jefferson. After his disaster with Rebecca Burwell, he settled down to practicing law and enjoying life. He dated his Williamsburg letters “Devilsburgh” and needled friends such as Fleming for falling in love. Soon he was making cynical comments on the matchmaking all around him. When William Bland won Betsey Yates, Jefferson wryly remarked, “Whether it was for money, beauty, or principle, it will be so nice a dispute that no one will venture to pronounce.”
⁶

The beleaguered Jefferson began copying from his favorite books dour quotations that traced a frequent evolution of the bachelor’s psychology:

Here, too, we can see a recoil from the power of the erotic, which compels a man to surrender to his physical desire for a woman. In the eighteenth century, this meant a surrender of not only sexual freedom, but a host of other freedoms. Jefferson placed more and more value on the company of his men friends, conveniently ignoring the fact that most of them had married. One day he was writing John Page about how much he enjoyed “the philosophical evenings” at Roswell. The next day he was copying,
I’d leave the world for him that hates a woman, woman the fountain of all human frailty
.

IV

The remarks about frailty may have special significance. Around this time, the roving bachelor became involved in an affair that he would bitterly regret in later years. One of his close friends in Albermarle County was Jack Walker. He had married a buxom miss named Betsey Moore and was living only a few miles from Shadwell. Young Walker was offered the job of clerk to a Virginia commission negotiating a treaty with the Indians at Fort Stanwix in northern New York. He made a will before he departed, making Jefferson his executor if some warrior planted a hatchet in his skull or he drowned in the cold, swift waters of the Mohawk River. During Jack’s four-month absence, Jefferson frequently visited Betsey and her baby daughter to make sure all was well.

What began as a favor to a friend suddenly erupted into desire. Jefferson had no interest in idealizing, much less marrying, Betsey Walker. Perhaps the sophisticated lawyer began assuring Betsey that there was nothing wrong with a little fling—everyone did it. To back him up, he may have quoted Ovid and other poets on the delights of illicit love. Perhaps Betsey encouraged him, either deliberately or inadvertently. Although they were supposed to feign disinterest, many women in the eighteenth century enjoyed sex, and Betsey had been married for well over a year. She may have resented her husband abandoning her for a jaunt to the northern woods.