19

Out and About

Hanover Square

New York, New York

February 1784

After more than a month in virtual isolation, the Hamiltons were suddenly discovered by society. Eliza attributed their newfound popularity to Peggy—“she’s in town for one night and already knows more people than we do”—though the truth is, Peggy was simply a conduit, and it was Helena Rutherfurd who provided the real entrée.

The week after the impromptu dinner party at the Hamiltons’ Wall Street home, the Rutherfurds reciprocated with an invitation to “a small supper” at their town house on Hanover Square. The stone-fronted mansion was twice as wide as the Hamiltons’, much deeper, and a story taller, with an interior as opulent as those grand proportions would suggest. The floors in the entry were stone instead of wood, while the parlors were laid with yellowy pine planks at least a foot wide, and bordered by intricate marquetry work in oak, walnut, and limewood. The ceiling coffers were more elaborately patterned than the mandalas of Hindustan. The wainscoting was a rich ebony as dark as tar, yet so naturally lustrous that Helena and John had made the daring choice simply to varnish it rather than paint it in one of the muted pastels that was all the rage—Wythe blue or tawny port or dusty rose.

The paneling’s Spartan restraint, however, was more than made up for by the elaborately flocked wallpaper that covered each parlor in yards and yards of the deepest crimson and richest emerald, the most buttery of yellows or the surprising luster of burnished silver. Each chamber was its own jewel box, and Helena and John led the Hamiltons through them, one by one, with a pride that somehow managed to not be obnoxious.

Eliza whispered to Alex at one point, “If their taste had been one whit less perfect, this would all be too much.” But the Rutherfurds had done a superb job and they knew it, and so instead of feeling as if their hosts were bragging, Alex and Eliza simply marveled at the beauty to which they were being treated.

The silk-lined chambers were the perfect setting for the dazzling pieces of furniture the couple had accumulated, with many examples by the three great English masters: Sheraton, Hepplewhite, and Chippendale, as well as a virtual museum of American practitioners: Gilbert Ash, James Gillingham, and dozens of others from Boston to Charleston and everywhere in between. The Rutherfurds talked about the individual pieces of furniture as though they were paintings, a Jonathan Gostelowe here, a Samuel McIntire there, and of course they also had a stunning collection of paintings, including the American portraitists Charles Willson Peale, John Singleton Copley, Gilbert Stuart, and even, Alex pointed out to Eliza, a Ralph Earl, all of which were hung in a stunning salon they called the galleria.

The silver. The china. Even the servants, in bespoke livery (“John has a passion for buttercup yellow,” Helen confided to Alex). It was all too perfect. The mansion was everything he wanted in a home, and more.

Because it wasn’t just the mansion he coveted, but the people who filled it. Despite Helena’s remark about “a small supper,” the Rutherfurds seemed to have invited a representative from all the major families of New York and the surrounding environs, starting with the Morrises (Gouverneur was there, along with two of his and Helena’s cousins), and William Bayard and his fiancée, Elizabeth Cornell, and Lindley Murray, a lawyer like Alex, but also an aspiring writer. His mother, Mary, was revered throughout the Continental army for having invited General William Howe “to tea” at Inclenberg, the Murrays’ estate north of the city, and entertaining General Howe so well and so long that George Washington and his soldiers were able to escape the advancing British army. (“Mama won’t admit it,” Murray joked, “but I’m pretty sure she spiked General Howe’s tea with opium.”) There were also Pierre Van Cortlandt, Jr., and his brother Philip, the former yet another aspiring lawyer, while the latter was the heir apparent to the vast Van Cortlandt Manor north and east of Morrisania, which was rivaled in New York State only by the Livingston and Van Rensselaer holdings.

Aaron and Theodosia Burr, the Hamiltons’ one-time neighbors in Albany, and now their neighbors on Wall Street, were there, as were James and Jane Beekman, who turned out to be siblings rather than spouses. The Beekmans had grown up in a house called Mount Pleasant five miles up the coast of the East River, just across from the southern tip of Blackwell’s Island. Mount Pleasant was known for its beautiful greenhouse—said to be the first in the New World—in which the Murrays grew the exotic delicacy known as the orange. Alex had loved them as a child in the Caribbean, but Eliza had never tasted one. Jane promised to bring her some the next time she called. Mount Pleasant was also famous (or infamous) for its role during the occupation: General Howe had commandeered the mansion as his headquarters (presumably after he recovered from Mrs. Murray’s opium tea); it was there that the dashing Major John André, who had made such a profound impression on Eliza at the Pastures on the very same evening she met Alex, had stayed before sneaking off to meet the traitor Benedict Arnold, a liaison that eventually cost him his life.

There were Schermerhorns, Lawrences, Rhinelanders, and Wattses, and Abraham de Peyster, whose namesake ancestor had donated the land on which City Hall was built (not to mention the Hamiltons’ own house), and of course a few inescapable Van Rensselaers and Livingstons, who were all related to each other in one way or another, and indeed to everyone else seated at the twenty-five-foot-long dining table the Rutherfurds had set up in the galleria. There was even Pieter Stuyvesant, great-great-great-grandson of the last Dutch governor of the colony of New Netherland, who was at least eighty years old. Like his namesake, he spelled his name with an i, spoke English with a Dutch accent, and in a truly eerie coincidence, sported a polished walnut peg leg that rattled the china in the cabinets as he clomped through the Rutherfurds’ exquisite parlors. Though unfailingly polite, he still seemed to regard everyone as a step beneath his station. (“If the blood in this room were any bluer,” Eliza whispered to Alex at another point in the dizzying tour, “we could have used it to dye the uniforms of the Continental soldiers!”)

But of all the guests at the dinner, Alex’s favorites were John and Sarah Jay—although to Alex she would always be Sarah Livingston, eldest daughter of William Livingston, the governor of New Jersey and the man who had sponsored Alex’s passage from Nevis to the northern colonies. Alex had had a crush on her and her sister Kitty as a boy; but as the years passed and Eliza supplanted all others in his heart, he thought of the Livingston sisters as his own kin, the sisters he never had. He was thrilled that Sarah had made such an advantageous marriage. The Jays were perhaps not quite at the level of society as the Van Rensselaers and Schuylers—John’s family were Huguenot merchants, having fled Catholic oppression in France a century ago—but in the New World, one didn’t have to have a title before one’s name to be welcomed into high society.

Gold and silver earned in trade was every bit as shiny as inherited wealth, and spoke to a family’s cleverness and industry besides, and not just the blind cosmic luck of being born into the aristocracy. John was a decade older than Alex, and also a lawyer—“one more and we could start a boxing club,” he joked, which prompted Sarah to say, “Lawyers? Boxing?” and break out into laugher. John had studied with the renowned Benjamin Kissam, as had Lindley Murray, and, like Alex and Gouverneur Morris, was a graduate of King’s College. Alex was pleased to learn from John that their alma mater, which had been closed during the British occupation, was slated to reopen in the spring, and under the non-royalist name of Columbia College.

But what really drew him to John was the older man’s belief in the urgent need for a strong central government to unite the thirteen states, built around a code of laws—“a Constitution, if you will”—that would ensure that whether a citizen was in the Carolinas or New Hampshire or Virginia or Maine, the citizen would enjoy the same privileges and share the same responsibility as any American.

“Local pride is fine,” John Jay said at one point. “Each state, each county even, has its specialty. But if we are New Yorkers first, or New Jerseyites—”

“Jerseyans,” John Rutherfurd interjected.

“—if we are New Yorkers or New Jersayans first, we are Americans last and always. Virginia has its tobacco, Carolina its cotton, Maryland its crab, Massachusetts its miserable winters”—laughter all around at this observation—“but all of them have the American spirit, which is the spirit of freedom of industry and quiet but unshakeable piety. We judge a man not by his name or lineage, but by the accomplishments of his own hand and mind.”

“And what, pray,” Helena said, “do you judge a woman on? The cut of her dress, or of the figure beneath it?”

John reddened, as did several of the other men, while the women at the table all shared a knowing glance.

“Certainly, you would not say that beauty is a detriment for a woman to possess?” John said when he could speak again.

“I would say that it is a distraction,” Helena replied, “and just as arbitrary a measure of her quality as a man’s surname.”

More laughter from the women and red faces from the men. Then, Alex was surprised to hear Eliza say, “I do not think any woman at this table would disagree with you, but I do think yours is a statement only a beautiful woman would dare make out loud.”

It was the line of the evening, and it made the rounds of society parties in that mysterious way news travels, always arriving at whatever drawing room or dining table the Hamiltons found themselves at. For Alex, it was something of a relief not to have yet another gray-wigged, gray-shouldered matron or half-drunk dry goods merchant sporting a military-cut suit that had never seen combat say, “Are you the Alexander Hamilton who served with General Washington?” and then press him for story after story about the American savior. Now it was, “Oh, are you the Eliza Hamilton who stole the stage from Helena Morris at her own party? I’ve heard so much about you.”

Eliza, confident but fundamentally shy, now found herself at the center of social groupings rather than on the fringes, and though she managed to hold on to her modesty, she also embraced her new role as a “woman of society,” as she termed it, smirking a little as she said it, as though the term were somehow improper.

“People used to say that I married you for your name and money,” Alex jokingly grumbled one night as they made their way wearily home after yet another late-night party. “Now they say that I married you for your beauty and charm. I can only wonder what on earth they think I bring to the union.”

Eliza couldn’t resist teasing him. “You are very good at holding doors and umbrellas, and in a pinch you can lace a corset, too. A girl could do worse.”

Alex made her pay for that quip all night long.