Epilogue
Final Midnight Rendezvous
Hamilton Grange
New York, New York
July 12, 1804
Time doesn’t heal all wounds. Some fester, some scar. A mark remains, or an ache. Sometimes it’s just a memory embedded in the flesh, the fingertips drifting to an arm or a leg and rubbing at a bruise that hasn’t been visible in years . . .
But the body is almost always stronger than a single wound, and so it was with Alex and Eliza. The terrible summer of 1785 exposed certain weaknesses in their relationship, yet when it was over it also showed them that their spouse had reserves of strength to make up for their own follies. Such is the difference between a happy marriage and divorce. Alex and Eliza’s union survived, and with it came the understanding that love does not erase one’s flaws. It stands side by side with them and even sometimes obscures them, which makes vigilance that much more necessary. Though they wavered from time to time—they were human—they never again lost their focus. For the next nineteen years, they prospered as individuals, and even more so as a couple and a family.
And just as they reinvented themselves, so did their nation. Rather than drift along as thirteen separate entities linked by geography and language and the shared memory of having left the Old World behind to start a new life, the former colonies united into a single amalgam of states, stronger together than they were apart. Their enduring strength owes more than a little debt to the visionary genius of Alexander Hamilton, who, though he never again held elected office, was nevertheless regarded by most of his contemporaries, including George Washington, as the primary architect of the Union. If James Madison was the initial force behind the Constitutional Convention of 1787, it was Alex who, in his Federalist Papers, made the case for the new document, explaining it to the American people in terms so articulate and forceful that they would continue to be consulted by legal scholars for more than two hundred years.
And even as his work on the Constitution finally gave the country a cohesive political character, his work as Secretary of the Treasury gave it the financial stability it needed to ensure its prosperity. He had already established the Bank of New York. Now he established the Bank of the United States, formulated the plan by which the federal government was able to borrow money, and oversaw the formation of the US Mint as well. As Alex’s good friend was to say years later, “At the time when our government was organized, we were without funds, though not without resources. To call them into action, and establish order in the finances, Washington sought for splendid talents, for extensive information, and, above all, he sought for sterling, incorruptible integrity—all these he found in Hamilton.”
While all this was going on, the Hamilton family also grew. Following the much-anticipated birth of Philip came seven more children: Angelica; Alexander, Jr.; James; John; William; and Eliza (not Elizabeth like her mother, just Eliza), culminating in 1802 in their youngest son also named Philip, because the firstborn of that name had died the year before at the tenderest of ages, not yet a man, though no longer a boy. By then Alex had retired from public life to be closer to his family and especially his wife. He worked with architect John McComb to design a home on an estate he purchased in northern Manhattan. Hamilton Grange, as the house came to be known, was smaller than the mansions built by the likes of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, George Washington at Mount Vernon, and James Madison at Montpelier, but it had a delicacy of feature those other houses could never match, with a unique pair of oval parlors opening onto a pair of porches that gave grand views of the Hudson and Harlem Rivers, the Palisades of New Jersey, and the rolling hills of the Bronx.
Motherhood kept Eliza busier than she would have realized. Like so many other well-meaning society wives, her charitable work became largely financial. She gave to her church and the arts and the poor, but her plans for a permanent orphanage for New York’s foundlings and parentless children did not come into fruition until 1806. Despite the delay, the Orphan Asylum Society became the first private orphanage in New York City, and, under the name Graham Windham, continues to serve them to this day.
Yet through all their successes, individually and as a couple and a family, there remained in Alex that restless drive toward mortality—the same drive that had nearly gotten him killed at the Battle of Montauk and then again at Yorktown. It was as if there were some part of himself he needed to destroy. Perhaps it was the memory of his mother and father, the one who failed him through weakness, the other through selfishness. Perhaps it was the memory of his childhood self, dependent on the kindness of strangers yet never able to depend on them. Perhaps it was his need to win no matter the cost. Eliza didn’t think he knew himself. But she could always see it, behind the ever more elegant frock coats and larger and larger houses.
Even when he was at the peak of his power as Secretary of the Treasury and leader of Federalist Party, she could see that her husband wanted to do more than influence American political life: He wanted to control it as an extension of his own personality. When he couldn’t do that, he withdrew from public life, at least formally. But in private he still wrote constantly about American politics (and politicians)—letters, essays, pamphlets, some running to hundreds of pages—always piercingly, sometimes scathingly, on target.
It was one such letter that led finally to his long-postponed duel with Aaron Burr. Alex had campaigned extensively against Burr when the latter attempted to succeed to the governorship of New York State. Thanks to Alex’s efforts, Burr was defeated, and Morgan Lewis took over from the corrupt George Clinton. A furious Burr accused Alex of slandering his name. Alex coyly professed ignorance of the charge, yet also refused to deny it. The code of chivalry being what it was, Burr felt compelled to issue a challenge. Alex accepted eagerly.
By that point, in fact, Alex had already been involved in half a dozen previous face-offs, including with Governor George Clinton and future president James Monroe. In all of those encounters, however, he had either refused to fire his weapon or shot it into the ground. The important thing was not to kill one’s opponent, but to demonstrate that one’s belief in one’s honor and honesty was so great that one was willing to die to protect it. It was, in other words, a boasting ritual, more about impressing others than frightening one’s rival: a grouse’s puffed throat; a peacock’s fanned tail; the bark of a caged dog. And yet the guns were real, and loaded, and were sometimes aimed before they were fired, and so it was that fateful night of July 11, 1804.
Dueling, though popular, was illegal in New York, but not in New Jersey. In keeping with the tradition of “plausible deniability,” Alex’s and Aaron’s seconds stood with their backs to the two principals, so that they could honestly say they never saw the two men fire at each other on that moonlit riverbank in Weehawken. All that anyone could say with certainty was that two shots were fired, one by Alex, one by Aaron. Alex’s shot passed several feet above Aaron’s head. But Aaron’s pierced Alex’s abdomen and lodged in his spine, paralyzing him instantly, and killing him within a day.
Burr insisted that Alex had fired first. He testified that he had expected his rival to shoot into the ground according to custom, and when the bullet whizzed over his head, he said he fired back instinctively as anyone under attack would do. The courts believed him—enough to dismiss the charges of murder against him anyway, but some people were never satisfied. Why, after firing into the ground in every previous duel he had been in (or even refusing to fire), had Alex now decided to risk hitting his opponent? No doubt he had come to loathe the man, whose smarmy opportunism made him persona non grata in both state and national politics, but he had not been particularly fond of his previous opponents either. It didn’t add up, and there were those who insisted that in fact it was Burr who fired first, deliberately killing Alex, and Alex’s shot was nothing more than the reflex of a mortally wounded man. The suspicions were enough to destroy Burr’s reputation, and the one-time vice president of the United States never again played a significant role in American politics. Indeed, he narrowly missed being hanged for treason and passed his last days in relative (if well-heeled) obscurity.
Eliza knew what Alex was up to, of course, though he had pretended he was merely going south to the city for business. For all his skill with words, her husband had always been a terrible liar. She was too late to stop him this time, and even she could not save him from himself in the end.
July 11th was a hot night, but the Grange, high on its hill and cooled by western breezes blowing across the Hudson, was chilly enough that Eliza needed a shawl around her shoulders. The children were asleep; the house was quiet. She sat in a soft chair in the bay window in the west-facing parlor, with its view all the way down to the river. She was thinking back to long-ago days, when the country had not yet been a country, when the island she had called home for the past twenty years had still been a British stronghold, and when Alex had been a handsome young soldier serving at the right hand of General Washington.
But what stood out most sharply in her mind was a frigid night in November 1777. Her mother had thrown a ball that night in an effort to find husbands for her three eldest daughters. The party had gone off brilliantly, and though it would be a few years before anyone realized it, Angelica and Peggy and Eliza had all secured their futures on that single evening, Angelica with John and Peggy with Stephen and Eliza with a ginger-haired boy from the islands who, it was said, had no past but the brightest of futures.
“HE LOOKS A little . . . wan,” Angelica whispered, holding up her lantern to shine it more brightly on his face.
“Angie!” Eliza hissed, waving her hand at the lantern. “You’re going to wake him!”
It was the middle of the night—closer to cock’s crow than the witching hour. The sisters had sneaked out of bed to catch one last peek at General Washington’s chief aide-de-camp, who had been banished to the hayloft for the unforgiveable sin of being the bearer of bad news. They had shed their hooped ball gowns and jeweled slippers for nightdresses and heavy robes and a layer of woolen socks, and their lithe forms clung to either side of the ladder to the hayloft, from which came the sound of wet, heavy snores.
“Oh, please,” Angelica said, giggling. “Did you see the way he was hitting Papa’s cider at the end? That stuff packs more of a wallop than corn whiskey. He’ll be lucky if he wakes up before noon.”
Alex snored blissfully through this prognostication. Little bubbles rose from his open mouth and popped silently, leaving his lips slick and shiny in the lantern light.
“Only I wish he weren’t so cute,” Eliza said. “It would be easier to dislike him.”
“Eliza Schuyler!” Angie whirled on her sister. “Have you got an infatuation?”
“I most certainly do not!” Eliza insisted. “He said the most horrible things to Papa! What kind of traitor do you think I am?”
“Oh, you cannot blame him for that. He was just the army’s errand boy. Papa will admit as much as soon as his temper cools.” Angie sneaked a sly look at her sister. “You are crushing, aren’t you?”
Eliza gave Angie a little smack. “You’re terrible!” she said. But she couldn’t keep the smile off her face as she stared at the sleeping boy. “They say he speaks French as well as English, knows numbers like a banker and strategy like Cincinnatus. He is the very model of what Papa says we are fighting for: a country in which one’s talents will determine one’s fate, not one’s name or the circumstances of one’s birth.”
Angie stared at her blankly for a moment, then clapped her hand over her mouth to suppress a snort. “Cincinnatus?” she said when she could speak again. “Oh my word, if you don’t marry this boy I’ll never let you live this down!”
Eliza’s cheeks went so red she could have sworn they outshone the lantern.
“I will likely never see him again,” she protested weakly. “He is a soldier. There is probably a British musket ball out there with his name on it.”
Angie rolled her eyes. “He is a secretary in an office in Morristown, New Jersey. If he gets shot in war, it will only be because he went looking for the bullet.”
Eliza continued to stare the boy’s sleeping face. His skin was as fair as the frost-nipped grass outside, his hair nearly indistinguishable from the straw it was half buried in. His thin, taut body was curled into a tight curve beneath the woolen blankets, and one stockinged foot stuck out at the far end. There was a hole in the sock through which poked the shiny cap of a toenail. Eliza thought she had never seen anyone so innocent in her life. Her heart melted.
“Enough!” she whispered fiercely. “Let’s have some fun!”
Angie’s eyes narrowed. “You shock me, little sister. I thought pranks were more Peggy’s speed.” Then, grinning: “So? What did you have in mind?”
In answer, Eliza slipped down the ladder, leaving Angie no choice but to clamber after her. The two girls skipped through the barn to the chicken coop. Eliza’s first thought had been to grab a few eggs and slip them beneath Alex’s blanket for him to roll on in the middle of the night. But then she heard a disturbed clucking from the corner and looked over to see the coop’s rooster squatting atop the nesting crates.
She looked at Angie, then at the rooster, then back at Angie. Angie nodded.
There was a burlap sack hanging from a nail. It was a simple matter to toss it over the sleepy rooster’s head. He fussed for just a moment, then went silent as darkness engulfed him.
Suppressing their laughter, the two girls hurried back to the ladder and hauled their booty up to the top. Eliza unrolled the burlap gingerly, and the rooster half rolled, half tottered out, and immediately bedded down in the straw. Alex snored on, blissfully unaware of the feathered and clawed surprise that awaited him in the morning.
“I only wish we could stay to watch them fight,” Eliza said with a giggle.
“My money’s on Attila,” Angie said. (As little girls, the sisters had named their rooster Attila the Hen, not caring that his gender didn’t match his title.)
“Oh, I don’t know,” Eliza mused. “I think Colonel Hamilton might be more resourceful than we think.” She stole one more look at the sleeping boy. “There is something so innocent about him as he sleeps,” she whispered. “You’d never know he was so annoying when he was awake.”
Angie groaned so loud that both Alex and Attila actually started, though neither woke up. “Come on, you crazy girl. Let’s get you back in bed before you wake him up and he proposes to you right here. Is that the story you’d want to tell your children?”
Eliza didn’t say anything as she scampered down after her sister, but in her head she was thinking: I don’t think that’s such a bad story at all.