Angelica arrived on the scene in New Jersey at a crucial moment.
The first winter ball of the season was just a week away, on Wednesday, February 23, timed to celebrate the birthday of George Washington a day earlier, and no one at camp was laying great odds on the chances that the fickle Alexander Hamilton would still be courting Miss Schuyler so many days in the future.
True, Alexander talked of nothing now but Eliza. His fellow officers groaned when he waxed poetic after a few tankards in the Morristown tavern and teased him for his “cavalry-like advances on the latest feminine arrival.” This week, the colonel was in love with Miss Schuyler and her eyes. But only a few weeks ago it had been Miss Lott’s dark tresses. The other fellows felt for the girls and especially for poor Polly Tilghman. Still, the lads supposed, it was up to the ladies in the end to catch a husband. But it would take a rare lady, indeed, to catch and to keep a playboy like Alexander, and the good-natured Eliza Schuyler did not yet strike any of them as a ruthless tactician.
It turns out they were underestimating the Schuyler sisters.
Angelica swept into camp with her usual dramatic flair on her way to Philadelphia in the second part of February, bringing her little boy Philip, her three-month-old baby Kitty, and more trunks of extravagant French fashion than was strictly decent in wartime. The sisters quickly closeted themselves for a long talk—Angelica wanted to hear at once all the gossip—and Eliza poured out her heart. Angelica quickly assessed the situation. Her sister was in love. So was the colonel. Tench Tilghman was no more. Well, then, they would have to see to it that there was a marriage, n’est-ce pas? Angelica couldn’t get through a sentence these days without dropping in some French expression or another, Eliza noticed. There was a ball to plan for and the small matter of arranging a marriage proposal. Angelica laid out gauzy silk ball gowns and their strategy, and they quickly drew their sharp-witted cousin Kitty Livingston—Alexander’s old friend and love interest, a strategic advantage—into their lively war council. Then, behind closed doors, the girls put their heads together, laughing.
The snow fell thick and heavy all the next week, and when the night of the ball at last arrived the girls traveled by horse-drawn sleigh with their aunt and uncle to the Continental Store above the village green. The military storehouse had been commandeered for the festivities. Wrapped in thick cloaks, their hands protected in beaver muffs, the girls tucked the fabric of gowns neatly underneath them and wiggled just a bit to stop their stays from pinching. As they were handed down from the sleigh in a cloud of powdery snow, the sisters were in high spirits, and Angelica recognized among the gentlemen General Henry Knox, General Washington, General Greene, and Eliza’s old beau Tench Tilghman. Their cousin Kitty Livingston was there with her sisters. Eliza’s eyes searched for and quickly found Alexander. When their eyes met, her heart pounded.
The wide-pine-board floors gleamed with polish, and Eliza saw that the doors along the length of the second-story veranda were thrown open to let in cold, fresh air when the dancing started. Would Alexander ask her to dance? Or had his interest already faded? Angelica had advised her all week in the coquettish arts of keeping a man’s attention. There were three times as many officers as ladies, and some of the girls would end up sad wallflowers.
The ball opened with a dainty minuet, danced by a series of couples, one after the other, and Lucy Knox, the wife of General Knox, led off the dancing that night—a mark of her social superiority—with the famously handsome eligible bachelor General Walter Stewart, a heartthrob among the ladies. General Greene’s wife, Caty, fumed quietly, tired of being perennially ranked one notch below her archrival. The incongruity of the leading couple did not go unnoticed on the dance floor, and Caty Greene didn’t let pass the opportunity for snide, whispered commentary to members of her party, who included Cornelia Lott and her sisters. Lucy Knox’s waistline was bigger than ever, she snickered.
Lucy was keenly interested in fashion, especially faddish and outrageous headdresses. The exaggerated styles of the day, Eliza had to admit, did not favor Lucy’s especially ample figure. As one particularly unsympathetic observer described Lucy Knox in the 1780s, “Her hair in front is craped at least a foot high . . . and topped off with a wire skeleton . . . covered with black gauze, which hangs in streamers hangs down her back.” Eliza liked Lucy. Still, the effect was ridiculous.
Eliza touched her neck gently. The room was warm, and a lady’s fan could hide blushes. Had she and Angelica misjudged her artfully chosen fashion choices this evening? An extravagant beehive updo was the height of style in London and Paris, and American patriots added whimsical touches to the elaborate designs to include frigates of war that billowed under full sail on the dance floor and miniature cannons camouflaged by hair powder. Coiffures dressed à la Americaine featured thirteen fat curls at the back of the neck, in homage to the thirteen rebellious colonies, and a fluttering wake of red, white, and blue ribbons. Even Benedict Arnold’s wife, Peggy, had sat for a wedding portrait the previous year with her hair teased two feet tall and festooned with trailing ribbons, Angelica assured her.
Eliza hadn’t gone quite that far—few went as far as Lucy Knox—but, in fairness to Lucy, she was not the only lady that winter to indulge in this whimsy. Eliza and Angelica, after all, had called in the hairdresser, and all afternoon he had teased their hair into high rolls, molded around pads of itchy cow hair. Eliza’s headdress that season was a dramatic and patriotic confection of ribbons and feathers, made up in the style à la Bostonne and sent to her as a gift from one of her father’s commercial agents in Paris. Eliza called it later her “Marie Antoinette coiffure.”
Now, there was a moment’s hesitation. But when Eliza looked up to see Alexander making a little bow of greeting before her, any trace of worry was forgotten.
She must have said yes, because the next thing she knew she was dancing.
As the night went on, the band played faster, and the formal minuet soon gave way to reels and quadrilles, and there at camp, in the midst of an uncertain war and a hungry winter, everyone sang along to the refrain of tunes like “The Liberty Song,” with lyrics that went “Come join hand in hand, brave Americans all.” In front of fifteen ladies and nearly sixty officers, the romance between Eliza and Alexander blossomed. When he asked her to dance a second time, the other officers exchanged glances. Just a hint of a smile passed between Angelica and their cousin Kitty. Colonel Hamilton would find himself engaged if he weren’t careful. When he found his way to Eliza and Angelica’s side for supper, it was clear that Alexander was indeed a “gone man,” as Tench Tilghman had predicted. So, the field belonged after all to Miss Schuyler, the gentleman chuckled.
If Alexander didn’t propose that night, he proposed the next morning. Dancing twice with the same unmarried lady was tantamount to a declaration. By the time Angelica left camp the following week, to join her husband, John, at his new post in Newport, Rhode Island, Alexander and Angelica were fast friends, and John Cochran thought it wise to send off a hasty note to the general, advising him of Colonel Hamilton’s respectful attentions to his daughter. Within days of the ball, Alexander sent off a gallant letter introducing himself to their younger sister Peggy, declaring his love for Eliza and affection for all this charming family. He wrote that Eliza was all “good natured affability and vivacity unembellished with that charming frivolousness which is justly deemed one of the principal accomplishments of a belle.” Time after time, those who knew Eliza best would say the same things. Those who loved her did so for these reasons.
The young people were making their plans, talking, their hands brushing, for hours in Aunt Gertrude’s front parlor. Aunt Gertrude was a hopeless romantic and found all sorts of reasons to leave Alexander and Eliza whispering alone in front of the fire. But, her aunt reminded her, Alexander would need to speak to her father before these castles in the air had any real foundation.
Alexander was more than a little anxious. Alexander knew he was nothing but an upstart. His background was distinctly checkered, and he had too much good sense to be anything other than completely honest with General Schuyler. Alexander was the illegitimate son of a woman who had abandoned her husband for a lover, and he had grown up an orphan in impoverished circumstances on the West Indian island of Nevis. Precious few in America were privy to the story of his origins, but Alexander was determined to come clean with the general. His background was not the kind of thing you let a man discover after you married his daughter—especially when that man already had one duplicitous son-in-law. Alexander might have been born out of wedlock, but he was a gentleman and meant to act like one.
That Alexander had completed university with a law degree and risen to the rank of colonel in America spoke to his immense intelligence, but he did not possess even a small fortune either. There was hardly any point in trying to hide that from the general. They would need to depend on some of Eliza’s family inheritance in the beginning to make it. Not all parents from Eliza’s elite background were likely to accept talent and promise as sufficient. As Alexander candidly put it to his friend John Laurens, “I am a stranger in this country. I have no property here, no connexions.”
Whatever else they talked about, head bowed together by the fire, the couple never considered eloping. Eliza had witnessed firsthand the hurt and anger that Angelica’s elopement had caused, and Eliza was not the family rebel. So when General Schuyler passed through camp briefly in early March, not entirely by chance, Alexander jumped at the chance to speak to him in person. What would Alexander say that could persuade her father? Eliza was on tenterhooks. She hoped Alexander would find the right words, because she already knew that she would not disobey her father. If her father said no and told her to break off the connection, it would be the last time she would see Alexander.
The clock in Aunt Gertrude’s parlor ticked relentlessly. At last, Alexander emerged stunned and bewildered, sooner than Eliza had dared to imagine. To Alexander’s great surprise, General Schuyler had taken his hand as though Alexander were his son and had welcomed him wholeheartedly into the family without hesitation.
Alexander Hamilton was a rising star, and for Philip Schuyler his acumen and ambition far outweighed the young colonel’s small purse and modest background. He could see clearly that his daughter was in love with a young man whom he liked and respected. Why throw up obstacles when the young people had gone through the proper and dutiful motions? Besides, even the general was not so old a relic that he couldn’t see that Alexander was any young lady’s idea of extremely handsome. He could only shake his head in wonder and wish for the best for the young people. “You cannot, my dear sir,” Philip Schuyler wrote to Alexander in the days that followed,
be more happy at the connexion you have made with my family than I am. Until the child of a parent has made a judicious choice, his heart is in continual anxiety; but this anxiety was removed on the moment I discovered it was you on whom she had placed her affections.
But Eliza’s mother would also have to be asked, the general warned Alexander. If “she consents to Comply with your and her daughters wishes,” then Philip Schuyler would bless the marriage. If. Men may have ruled over women as a matter of law in the eighteenth century, but Philip and Kitty Schuyler enjoyed a long and happy marriage, in part because he did not undercut her household authority as either mistress or mother. Philip knew how wounded Kitty had been by Angelica’s elopement and deception. He also knew that the main issue was that she wanted the confidence of her daughters and the pleasure of a family wedding. “You will see the Impropriety of taking the dernier pas [final step] where you are,” Philip warned Alexander and Eliza sternly. Don’t spoil it all now by jumping the gun and upsetting your mother. That was the gist of the message. Getting married in a hasty “do” at Morristown was simply not an option. “Mrs. Schuyler did not see her Eldest daughter married. That also gave me pain, and we wish not to Experience It a Second time.” When her next daughter married, Kitty Schuyler wanted a proper hometown wedding. A big one. With white paper chains on the tables and the Schuyler-family wedding cake, made according to a recipe passed down for generations. A wedding where all the neighbors could see how finely the Schuylers did things.
Kitty Schuyler had never met Alexander Hamilton, and she was less immediately certain about the wisdom of this match. She took a full month to give her answer. But if Eliza’s mother had seen the ardent love letters passing between the couple, she would have known that it was already far too late to ask her daughter to end things with Alexander. The romance was passionate, and they were already laying out together the foundations of what would be an extraordinary marriage.
They had to write letters, because General Washington sent Alexander away on assignment for several weeks in mid-March, tasking the young colonel with arranging an exchange of war prisoners with the British. Perhaps the thought occurred to General Washington that his old friend General Schuyler might appreciate a bit of distance between the ardent young lovers. General Washington knew from firsthand experience that Alexander was not a young man who easily took no for an answer.
The Schuyler sisters had long been favorites among the British officers, as Alexander soon discovered at the British camp. The redcoats and the Americans might be on opposite sides now, but Eliza and her sisters had grown up with many of these officers in and out of their father’s house before the Revolution. “If I were not afraid of making you vain,” Alexander wrote to Eliza, “I would tell you that Mrs. Carter, Peggy, and yourself are the dayly toasts of our table; and for this honor you are chiefly indebted to the British Gentlemen.” Sometimes Alexander couldn’t help feeling a bit jealous. He depended on Eliza’s letters to assure him of her love and devotion.
When Eliza’s letters arrived, all was well, and Alexander was happy. “I cannot tell you what extacy I felt in casting my eye over the sweet effusions of tenderness [your letter] contains,” Alexander enthused in one missive. “My Betseys soul speaks in every line and bids me be the happiest of mortals. I am so and will be so. You give me too many proofs of your love to allow me to doubt it and in the conviction that I possess that, I possess every thing the world can give.”
His letters to his male friends were boastful and far more laddish. Eliza might have been less swept off her feet had she seen them. “Have you not heard that I am on the point of becoming a [newlywed],” Alexander asked his friend John Laurens,
I confess my sins. I am guilty. Next fall completes my doom. I give up my liberty to Miss Schuyler. She is a good hearted girl who I am sure will never play the termagant; though not a genius she has good sense enough to be agreeable, and though not a beauty, she has fine black eyes—is rather handsome and has every other requisite of the exterior to make a lover happy.
Not a beauty. Not a genius. Alexander’s friends thought he was underrating Miss Schuyler.
By April, the engagement was official, and Kitty Schuyler quickly arranged a house for the Schuyler family in Morristown. The wedding would be a gala affair in Albany come December. Kitty was determined to see to it that no early infant arrival or swelling belly would force a rushed marriage before then. She wanted that wedding.
For one glorious season, Eliza was given free rein to shine as one of the belles of the ball, even if she was “not a beauty,” and throughout the spring and summer Eliza and Alexander danced at a round of assemblies, laughed late into the night at parties. Eliza bounded out of bed each morning happy, knowing that before the morning was out, Alexander would come to call or would send a note. She spent her afternoons making social calls and busily planning her trousseau and wedding with her mother.
For everyone at camp, it was a brief season of celebration, at least among the officers and their wives. Eliza’s mood matched the mood of those around her. For the enlisted men, life was harsher. But the officers were jubilant that spring. The war was hard going, but the French were joining the fight. That would turn the tide. Everywhere, everyone said so. When the French troops arrived, amid splendid fanfare, the sky above Morristown was lit with fireworks, and, as one of their fellow camp officers, Captain John Beatty, remembered of that season, we “kicked up a hell of a dust” until June, when the party ended.
As the spring drew to a close, Eliza’s mood shifted. The war began again in earnest with the summer, bringing with it a dawning new reality: Eliza was in love with a colonel caught up in a war that the Americans would not win for several years still, at a moment when, despite the French intervention, an American victory was not guaranteed. As the winter camp broke up and Eliza and her mother bent over leather trunks, folding away the ball gowns and satin slippers, Eliza’s heart was heavy. Who knew how long it would be before she saw Alexander again? It might not be until December.
At the end of June, the women set off in the coach that would take them along the bumpy roads to the boats that would bear them north to Albany. Eliza craned her neck for as long as she could to keep Alexander and her father in sight, and held close to her heart, carefully folded into a locket, a love poem Alexander had written.
If that poem is any evidence, not only was Alexander Hamilton not a great poetic talent, but Eliza had heeded her mother’s warning and not consummated their relationship before the wedding:
A love like mine so tender, true
Completely wretched—you away,
And but half blessed e’en while you stay
. . .
Deny to you my fond embrace
No joy unmixed my bosom warms.
Alexander professed a love “tender, true,” but he did want to point out that she was refusing his “embrace” and denying him a lover’s pleasure.
In coarse, private letters to John Laurens, Alexander bemoaned his sexual frustration more bluntly. “I intend to restore the empire of Hymen [i.e., marriage] and that Cupid [i.e., erotic love] is to be his prime Minister,” Alexander wrote. “I wish you were at liberty to transgress the bounds of Pennsylvania. I would invite you after the fall to Albany to be witness to the final consummation.” A ménage à trois or a mere witness to the marriage? Alexander was not blind to the double entendre.
Alexander loved Eliza, but she did have two other flaws as a bride he felt he needed to point out to her: her conversation skills and her letter writing. Alexander couldn’t help but try to mold Eliza and press her to be a bit more sophisticated in her book learning. A bit more, say, like her sister Angelica. “I love you more and more every hour,” Alexander told her,
The sweet softness and delicacy of your mind and manners, the elevation of your sentiments, the real goodness of your heart, its tenderness to me, the beauties of your face and person, your unpretending good sense and that innocent simplicity and frankness which pervade your actions; all these appear to me with increasing amiableness and place you in my estimation above all the rest of your sex.
But then he added:
I entreat you my Charmer, not to neglect the charges I gave you particularly that of taking care of your self, and that of employing all your leisure in reading. Nature has been very kind to you; do not neglect to cultivate her gifts and to enable yourself to make the distinguished figure in all respects to which you are intitled to aspire. You excel most of your sex in all the amiable qualities; endeavour to excel them equally in the splendid ones. You can do it if you please and I shall take pride in it. It will be a fund too, to diversify our enjoyments and amusements and fill all our moments to advantage.
He wished Eliza had a bit more book learning. Her response to the rather tactless suggestion that she might think about some intellectual self-improvements has not survived. But when Alexander’s letter arrived, she knew instantly the sight of his elegant and easy hand and eagerly looked forward to the pleasure of reading words of longing and devotion in private.
When she folded up the thin sheet of paper, her heart must have raced. Alexander’s words cut her to the quick. They struck at the heart of Eliza’s greatest insecurity—that she was tongue-tied in speech and clunky and halting in her letters. That she was dull and stupid. Eliza knew she had in her heart a world of feelings. But she could never find the words to express them. Alexander pushed. He wanted to know everything. But her love didn’t work like that. She felt like a failure. When Eliza was hurt or angry or even just worried, she retreated. In time, Alexander would come to understand that he should worry most when Eliza’s voice grew quiet.
More embarrassed than angry, she retreated now. Alexander’s letter sat unanswered in Eliza’s wooden writing box, and she searched for the words to apologize for how she stumbled in the arts of courtship and conversation. She tried to turn her mind to one of the thick history books Alexander had recommended. The words swam, and she felt like crying.
Alexander waited days for Eliza’s reply. None arrived. Soon, Alexander was in a panic. “It is an age my dearest,” he wrote, “since I have received a letter from you; the post is arrived and not a line.” Alexander spoke too fast, wrote too fast, sometimes without fully considering. He knew it. It was slowly dawning on him that he had upset Eliza.
“I know not to what to impute your silence; so it is I am alarmed with an apprehension of your being ill,” Alexander wrote,
Pardon me my lovely girl for any thing I may have said that has the remotest semblance of complaining. If you knew my heart thoroughly you would see it so full of tenderness for you that you would not only pardon, but you would even love my weaknesses. For god’s sake My Dear Betsey try to write me oftener and give me the picture of your heart in all its varieties of light and shade. Tell me whether it feels the same for me or did when we were together, or whether what seemed to be love was nothing more than a generous sympathy. The possibility of this frequently torments me.
Eliza melted. In the next week, she cheerfully wrote Alexander three letters. And she had been thinking of him: she enclosed as a gift a bit of embroidered neckwear that she had passed her afternoons patiently making for him. Eliza showed her love through small acts of work and patience. The subject of letters, though, would remain a touchy point between Eliza and Alexander as they started their life together. Letters, lost and found, written and unwritten, would define, too, how their marriage unfolded.
Letters—and money. Despite the wealth of Eliza’s family, or perhaps because of it, Alexander was also at pains during their months apart before the wedding to explain to Eliza that he did not have a fortune and could not promise her the lifestyle of her parents or, indeed, even the lifestyle of the free-spending John and Angelica Carter. A happy marriage did not include the bitter complaints of a wife who would later regret that she hadn’t married someone richer. “Do you soberly relish the pleasure of being a poor mans wife?” he quizzed her:
Have you learned to think a home spun preferable to a brocade and the rumbling of a waggon wheel to the musical rattling of a coach and six? Will you be able to see with perfect composure your old acquaintances flaunting it in gay life, tripping it along in elegance and splendor, while you hold an humble station and have no other enjoyments than the sober comforts of a good wife? . . . If you cannot my Dear we are playing a comedy of all in the wrong, and you should correct the mistake before we begin to act the tragedy of the unhappy couple.
Alexander dreamed, too, of a career building a republic, if they were to win their independence, and he warned Eliza that this would also come at a price in their life together. Was Eliza prepared to sacrifice to the republic in ways that were not only financial? “I know too you have so much of the Portia in you,” he wrote, “that you will not be out done in this line by any of your sex, and that if you saw me inclined to quit the service of your country you would dissuade me from it. I have promised you, you recollect, to conform to your wishes, and I persist in this intention. It remains with you to show whether you are a Roman or an American wife.”
Eliza understood the reference to Portia. The classical history of Valerius Maximus was a staple of a young man’s education and one of the sober, improving books in her father’s library that Eliza was especially determined to finish. Her preference inclined toward romance novels. Portia was the Roman wife of Caesar’s assassin, Brutus, and showed herself strong enough to bear any pain to keep the secrets of her husband. Alexander and Eliza spoke often of the sacrifice and loyalty of the Roman wife in service to the republic. Was Eliza courageous enough to be a Roman wife? She promised herself she would rise to the challenge.
By “an American wife,” Alexander meant someone like Angelica—always dressed in the latest fashion, her carriage lined with satin and velvet, her lifestyle extravagant. Eliza didn’t long for that. She had found the social whirl of Morristown exhausting, and it was her growing friendship with the older Martha Washington that most inspired her. Martha Washington—with her homespun dresses and quiet modesty—was Eliza’s ideal. Eliza had loved the afternoons when she and Martha sat together at camp, chatting quietly over tea and patiently working on their embroidery, a shared passion. Theirs was a friendship that would sustain Eliza more and more in the times ahead of them, though Eliza yet had only a dim inkling of the sacrifices that would be required of her. At the hardest moments, Martha would be there for her. If a life of modest domestic tranquility was all Alexander feared he could offer her, she teased him in her letters, she could manage. Could Alexander? That was the real question.
That Eliza didn’t constantly write him letters, even after they had made up their lovers’ tiff, unnerved Alexander, though he had the grace to laugh at his insecurities. Eliza was home in Albany throughout the summer, and in August, having written three letters to her one—and having obstinately counted—Alexander warned her playfully, “When I come to Albany, I shall find means to take satisfaction for your neglect. You recollect the mode I threatened to punish you in for all your delinquen[c]ies.” Eliza responded teasingly by sending Alexander a cockade she had sewn for his hat and a now-lost satirical poem, set to music by Peggy, on the subject of what ridiculous things they would do together in their happy poverty. But Eliza’s promise that money would never come between them was one of the other bedrock foundations of their marriage.
In September, after three months apart, the scandal of Benedict Arnold’s treason broke, rocking the army. At General Washington’s headquarters, Tench Tilghman raged at the dawning realization that his cousin’s husband had played him a fool, at Peggy Shippen’s urging. Benedict Arnold slipped behind British lines and quickly fled for London. Eliza’s youthful crush, the British major John André, the spymaster, was not so fleet-footed and was captured behind American lines.
Benedict Arnold had conspired to deliver the American troops into the hands of their enemies for a bounty of a mere 20,000 pounds—a couple of million dollars today—and luckily had failed, but his betrayal brought home to everyone how fragile a thing was their revolution. “If America were lost,” Alexander assured Eliza, “we should be happy in some other clime more favourable to human rights. What think you of Geneva as a retreat?”
Alexander also acknowledged what all the Schuyler women understood: more likely than not, if the campaign failed, General Washington’s officers would fall in battle. Death was a constant presence, always possible. “I was once determined to let my existence and American liberty end together,” Alexander told Eliza. “My Betsey has given me a motive to outlive my pride, I had almost said my honor; but America must not be witness to my disgrace.” Eliza and her family had made him feel that he had a true home in America. That was everything to Alexander, an orphan and an immigrant. More than anything now, he wanted to live and to start a life with Eliza. The Schuyler family, for their part, drew him into their circle.
There was one other deeply personal betrayal awaiting the Americans that autumn and Philip Schuyler especially, and it was part of the wall of silence that encircled the Schuyler family. It would place the life of Eliza and her family in even greater personal danger as the war unfolded.
John André wasn’t the only spy risking his life. The patriots also maintained spy rings buried deep in the rural communities up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and their operations were crucial to the Americans’ progress. Eliza’s father led the espionage network embedded in upstate New York, with the help of his native mistress, a high-ranking Mohawk woman named Mary Hill. What Philip Schuyler did not yet know was that Mary had betrayed him and his network to the enemy that autumn. All he knew was that the Indian raids were growing closer and closer. The Schuyler house was already a fortress. The general had to warn Alexander of the chances. “I have no body between me and the Enemy except two poor famalies and about one hundred militia with me,” Philip wrote now to Alexander. “We are surrounded from every quarter and the Inhabitants flying down the Country. I believe my turn will be in a few days unless troops are sent.”
The idea of Eliza in danger gnawed at Alexander. Everyone knew the story of the scalping of poor Jane McCrea, Eliza’s neighbor. All autumn, Alexander searched for any chance to travel north, even for a few days, to hold her and to know she was safe and still loved him. But the war made it impossible. General Washington could not spare officers. Alexander urged her to be careful, urged her father to take greater precautions. He promised Eliza in long letters that he would arrive in Albany by the first of December for their marriage.
Could he keep that promise? Eliza, the daughter of a general, knew as well as anyone that in the midst of a war that had not gone well that year for the Americans, anything could happen. They kept loaded guns by the thick oak door, and all night shadowy sentinels stood watch in the garden.
At night, as she drifted off to sleep, Eliza listened to the creak of the wood beams, moaning and settling in the cold autumn air, and wondered if the falling snow beyond her window had been loosened by the breeze or if it heralded the start of the attack they dreaded. With any luck, December would come and bring Alexander.
In the meantime, as her pragmatic mother briskly reminded the girls each morning, there was nothing to do but hope for the best. They needed to get to work planning a Schuyler family wedding.