In early November, Alexander made his way home at last to Albany and Eliza.
She had been watching for him. Her father read the military news. It would not be long, General Schuyler said each night at dinner. Alexander was ebullient now in his letters. His fondest wish had been granted: he had seen active service as a commanding officer. “Two nights ago, my Eliza, my duty and my honor obliged me to take a step in which your happiness was too much risked,” Alexander had written in one letter that autumn, assuring her the danger was past—but not wanting either to diminish too much the adventure. All the men said that the tide was turning in Yorktown.
At the wharf in the mornings on their way back from church, Peggy and Eliza would stop to ask for news of the schooner masters. When Alexander came at last up the broad avenues of trees from the river and swept her up in his embrace, Eliza could hardly believe the wait was finally over.
The Americans won their independence with the surrender at Yorktown in October, but in the autumn of 1781 the decisive nature of the victory was not yet apparent. It would take two years to hammer out the withdrawal of thirty thousand troops and a peace treaty, amid ongoing skirmishes and frontier raids. But the British were fighting too many wars, in too many foreign theaters, and Yorktown had the welcome effect of clarifying priorities. The campaign, at any rate, was over for the winter, and Alexander was back in Albany.
His arrival came not a moment too soon. Eliza was exasperated with spending so much time apart. She was weary, too, of living with her parents. Alexander reassured her that from here forward, her wish for the future would be what mattered. She had, he had written tenderly during his last weeks at Yorktown, “the assurance of never more being separated. Every day confirms me in the intention of renouncing public life, and devoting myself wholly to you. Let others waste their time and their tranquillity in a vain pursuit of power and glory; be it my object to be happy in a quiet retreat with my better angel.” That was all Eliza wanted. And for a little while, it seemed possible.
The news of that new winter season in Albany together was the death of Eliza’s great-uncle.
Kiliaen Van Rensselaer, the father of Eliza’s wayward younger cousin, Maria, was buried in December at a family funeral in nearby Rensselaerwyck, where the new heir and feudal patroon was the seventeen-year-old Stephen, a heavy-drinking and headstrong young lord of the manor fresh from his first term at Harvard. Alexander, who arrived home and promptly got sick with a cough that lasted for weeks, was not well enough to attend the service, but Eliza and Peggy went with the family. Aaron Burr, living by now with the Van Rensselaer family while studying to pass the bar examination in Albany and in and out of General Schuyler’s law library at the Pastures, was also almost certainly in attendance.
Marriage was still very much on the minds of the Schuyler sisters. Alexander called them simply “the Girls,” and the girls were furious with Alexander’s friend Major Nicholas Fish for jilting one young woman of their acquaintance. “I am told Miss is in great distress,” Alexander warned Fish, and “you must be cautious in this matter, or your character will run some risk, and you are sensible how injurious it might be to have the reputation of levity in a delicate point. The Girls have got it among them that this is not your first infidelity.” Peggy was also still man hunting.
The young teenage patroon Stephen Van Rensselaer, home at the estate in Albany for the funeral and holiday season, too, took one look at his sexy and sarcastic older cousin, the now twenty-four-year-old Peggy Schuyler, and became infatuated. Wiser heads quickly packed him back off to college. That would not, however, be the end of the story.
For Eliza, the beginning of 1782 was the last month of her pregnancy and was exhausting and uncomfortable. Alexander fussed solicitously, and she worried that his cough lingered. On January 22 she finally gave birth safely to a little boy, whom they promptly named Philip after her father.
After several weeks of rest, Eliza and Alexander then moved into a small farm owned by her parents, not far from the Pastures, where the new young family happily threw themselves into housekeeping. Alexander confessed to a friend, “You cannot imagine how entirely domestic I am growing. I lose all taste for the pursuits of ambition, I sigh for nothing but the company of my wife and my baby.” He cast aside his law books and his papers, sat by the fire rocking the cradle, and turned his mind to sorting out their glassware and china. He was putting together a little wine cellar and planned some elegant entertaining. Could an acquaintance help him find four pint-size wine decanters? A dozen wineglasses? Beer tumblers? Eliza sorted little jars of seeds and planned for springtime and their vegetable garden. There on their little farm, they spent the winter nesting.
Alexander retired from the military and found employment as a state tax collector. They were short of cash, and Eliza sometimes wondered how to make the household accounts come right, but she was happy. She loved being a mother, and Alexander was a devoted, doting father. Alexander had wondered in his letters before his marriage if she could live simply. He need not have worried about the good-natured Eliza. What more could she need except this?
All spring and into the summer, they lived quietly in Albany. Alexander was engrossed in studying for the bar examination, with an eye toward becoming qualified as a lawyer. General Schuyler had the second-finest law library anywhere in New York, and in the afternoons Alexander read in his father-in-law’s study. Also granted permission to use the law library and to live, for a time, at the Pastures, was the twenty-six-year-old Aaron Burr, who had been introduced to the Schuyler family by the good offices of General Alexander McDougall. Large estate homes frequently opened their doors to other members of the well-networked gentry, and the Pastures was no exception. But when Aaron Burr soon became fast friends with Stephen Van Rensselaer, Aaron confided in his amorous letters to Mrs. Prevost that the teenage patroon gallantly arranged for him to live instead with Schuyler and Van Rensselaer aunts in Albany. Aaron and Alexander, whose futures would someday be bound together so disastrously, studied side by side in companionable silence in the early 1780s.
In the evenings, Eliza and Alexander rode together along the lanes that Eliza had known as a girl, and Alexander shared her enthusiasm for fine horses and galloping. He listened with interest as Eliza and her mother talked about the deer in the garden and the plant specimens they were always hunting. Aaron Burr came for tea in the front parlor. Kitty sent her daughter gifts of fresh fruits to preserve for the winter, and new potatoes. Alexander wrote and studied, and they sat in church on Sundays in the family pew with her parents. “I have been employed for the last ten months in rocking the cradle and studying the art of fleecing my neighbors,” Alexander reported cheerfully to his friend the Marquis de Lafayette.
Changes came with the autumn. Alexander passed his bar examination and was honored with an appointment to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia as a New York representative. Now started the hard work of building a country. In November, Alexander went south ahead of Eliza and baby Philip to find a new home for the family. So much for Alexander’s promise to abandon ambition and a public life for domestic quiet.
Eliza understood. And she tried to be patient. She had promised to be a Roman wife, and she believed in the republic. But it meant time apart again, and Eliza hated it. Once again, Alexander could not help pressing Eliza for letters, however affectionately. “Remember your promise,” he wrote. “Don’t fail to write me by every post. I shall be miserable if I do not hear once a week from you and my precious infant. You both grow dearer to me every day. I would give the world for a kiss from either of you.”
The separation would grow longer than either expected, as one delay after another cropped up. Angelica and John were already living in Philadelphia, and Peggy was spending the winter with them, still husband hunting. When a letter arrived at the Pastures warning that Peggy and Angelica were both gravely ill, their parents rushed south in a panic to join Alexander and John, leaving Eliza behind to look after her younger siblings, nine-year-old Rensselaer and six-year-old Cornelia. By the time her parents returned north, relieved at the survival of both the girls, the roads were too sloppy for a carriage to pass. Eliza was forced to wait several weeks more for the winter snow, so a sleigh could carry her and baby Philip as far as New Jersey, where she could visit with her cousin Kitty Livingston and wait for Alexander to fetch her. “When you are in the Jerseys write me of your arrival and I will come for you,” Alexander urged, reminding her tenderly to pack rum for the cold journey.
As Eliza traveled south to Philadelphia at last in January, weeks later than planned, Peggy returned north to Albany to help their mother with the children, and there was one other addition to the Schuyler household in the winter of 1783. Their nineteen-year-old cousin, another Kiliaen Van Rensselaer, took a position as Philip Schuyler’s estate secretary. Cousin Kiliaen was especially close with their impetuous cousin Stephen Van Rensselaer, who was away until June at school in Harvard.
When Eliza returned home for a summer visit in June, not long after Stephen Van Rensselaer’s return to Albany, she walked into a household rocked by chaos.
Peggy was determined to marry, and she would turn twenty-five in the autumn. Finding a husband, even for a rich and pretty young woman, was far from certain. Seven years of war had translated into the death of a generation of young men, and in America in 1783 there were 120 would-be brides for every hundred-odd eligible gentlemen. Eliza’s favorite cousin, Kitty Livingston, was both older and richer, and she still hadn’t managed to catch a husband. Twenty-five was practically an old maid, and Peggy saw her window quickly closing.
Stephen Van Rensselaer was a scrawny young man. He had high, dark eyebrows; a long, thin nose; friendly eyes; an easy laugh; and extremely deep pockets. His fortune still ranks today, centuries later, as one of the largest ever in American history. He liked to drink fine wine and, like Peggy, enjoyed boisterous dinner parties.
Stephen arrived home from Harvard in June and, still enchanted by his feisty older cousin, promptly proposed marriage. Peggy, in no mood to turn down any suitor, accepted with great alacrity.
General Abraham Ten Broeck, the teenage patroon’s uncle and guardian, exploded with fury. Abraham was Philip Schuyler’s oldest and dearest friend, since their earliest days at school together, but Stephen was too young to be thinking of marriage, and it all looked very opportunistic on the part of the lady. Philip Schuyler agreed entirely and promptly took matters in hand by calling off the engagement, forbidding his daughter from accepting the proposal, and packing the entire family off to remote Saratoga for the summer, where, the burned-out summer house still in ruins, there were only tents for accommodation. That, Abraham and Philip agreed, should cool the young man’s ardor.
The problem with the young patroon’s marriage, everyone agreed, was not Peggy Schuyler. The trouble was the youth of a teenage Stephen Van Rensselaer. In a few years, when Stephen had come of age and was no longer a minor, when his fortune was his to manage, and he had found his sense of himself as a man and estate master, then, of course, no one could object to one of General Schuyler’s daughters, even “wild Miss Peggy.” If Stephen felt the same way at twenty-two or twenty-three, the path was open. If. After all, crushes came and went, and young men were often fickle.
But in three or four years, Peggy would be approaching thirty. If the rest of them had missed that fact, Peggy certainly hadn’t.
Peggy Schuyler was not about to wait years to see if the young man changed his mind and risk losing her certain chance to get a husband. Their unfortunate cousin Kiliaen Van Rensselaer was pressed into duty as a secret messenger, despite his protests, and Stephen set off in a boat for Saratoga. Peggy carefully folded a mauve silk gown, worked with an overskirt of damask flowers, and some of her nicest bits of lace into a satchel and, when the signal came, slipped away from their summer encampment and down to the river with her suitor. The next morning, Peggy got her wish. They eloped and were immediately married. No minister in Rensselaerwyck was going to refuse the patroon.
When Peggy was missing in the morning, there was little doubt as to what had happened. Philip and Kitty Schuyler heard the confirmation of the marriage that afternoon, and this time they were more disappointed in their daughter than enraged or worried. But Abraham Ten Broeck was furious, and Philip Schuyler sympathized with his old friend in his anger. He knew what it was like when a disobedient child ran off on the sly to marry. Philip still thought that Angelica’s husband was a cad and a fraud. John was even now masquerading as late as 1783 under his assumed identity as “Mr. Carter” to shirk responsibility.
Stephen Van Rensselaer was kin, part of that interconnected web of Dutch landowners, and the lord of a vast feudal manor that reached for miles around their hometown of Albany. Scandalized letters flew in the weeks that followed, and Cousin Kiliaen was in an especially uncomfortable situation. “Stephen’s precipitate marriage has been to me a source of surprise and indeed of regret,” one friend wrote him. “He certainly is too young to enter into a connection of this kind; the period of his life is an important crisis; it is the time to acquire Fame, or at least to prepare for its acquisition. . . . Our friend has indulged the momentary impulse of youthful Passions, and has yielded to the dictates of Remorseful Fancy.”
Stephen would regret it, the locals tutted. Some went further and said that Peggy Schuyler, facing down spinsterhood, had taken advantage of the impulsivity of a young man to catch a husband.
Peggy didn’t care. Let the gossips moan and flutter, she thought. She was tickled when Alexander nicknamed her “Mrs. Patroon.” Stephen had no regrets either. He was young, hopelessly rich, and reasonably handsome. He drank far too much fine wine, he sometimes gambled, and he reveled in flirtatious women and raucous parties. Peggy—always the impulsive Schuyler girl—was smart, funny, haughty, beautiful, and she never tired of dancing. And he was in love with her. The couple promptly moved into a mansion in the center of Albany.
Did Eliza, in Saratoga with the family for the holiday, know of her sister’s plans? It is unlikely that Peggy would have confided in Eliza. Eliza was closer to Angelica than to Peggy. Peggy talked fast and loud, and she had a fiery, explosive temper. Eliza was famously easygoing and thoughtful. Peggy boiled. Eliza simmered slowly. If she had known, Eliza might not have tattled. But she would have tried to talk Peggy out of disobeying Father.
Instead, Eliza stayed on to console her parents. The situation was an embarrassing one for General Schuyler. What would the world think of a military man who could not control even his daughters? June was wet and cold that summer, and they camped near the hot springs in Saratoga. In the mornings, Eliza walked the land with her father, who was determined now to build a small, two-room summer cottage near the medicinal waters. But tenting in the rain was sure to make everyone ill and bad-tempered, and the damage was done with Peggy. The family returned to Albany, traveling back and forth between the house and camp all summer. Soon Alexander would come to join the family, and then they would travel back south together as a family to Philadelphia.
But in July, Eliza was still waiting for Alexander to turn up. One letter after another from him announced some delay, gave some reason. Eliza did not like the pattern she saw emerging. She had been waiting what seemed like forever to live in their own house together.
Other old friends from Morristown were already arriving in upstate New York while Eliza waited for her husband. Saratoga was increasingly famous as a summer retreat, and the tourist population was growing. George Washington, who dreamed of a horseback tour through the Hudson River and Mohawk country, arrived that month to tour the military sites at Saratoga and to look for land in the area to purchase. The end of the war set off a frenzy of land speculation. Real estate—holding, developing, subdividing, flipping—seemed like a certain path to riches, and everyone wanted to get in on the action as prices skyrocketed.
General Washington brought with him many of Eliza’s old friends—General Henry Knox, General Nathanael Greene, her old flame Richard Varick, and even a recently married Tench Tilghman. His cousin Anna had finally agreed to have him. The house in Albany was full of laughter and celebration. Philip Schuyler, Abraham Ten Broeck, and Peggy’s new husband, Stephen Van Rensselaer, joined the touring party, which as it set off numbered nearly forty.
On August 3, the military men arrived back in Albany, and Abraham Ten Broeck threw a raucous dinner at a local tavern, followed by a more sedate reception with the ladies of Albany at the Schuyler mansion. Eliza, in her mother’s absence, played hostess. Alexander, still trying to make his way north and acutely conscious of his wife’s growing impatience—and of the fact that he was missing the party—was becoming increasingly exasperated with his mother-in-law, who was traveling up with him and who insisted on visiting New York City.
Part of what delayed Alexander and his mother-in-law, Kitty, at the end of July was news that brought Eliza sorrow. Angelica and John were leaving America, and it might be years before the sisters met again. They had seen each other through thick and thin, held each other’s hands during childbirth, and shared their most private thoughts with each other as new wives and householders.
On July 27, John, Angelica, and their children set sail for Paris. Alexander and Eliza’s mother watched them depart from Philadelphia. John was now a vastly wealthy man. The account books for 1783 showed that he and his partner, Jeremiah Wadsworth, had raked in profits of nearly 35,000 pounds—earnings upwards of a modern equivalent of $46 million. The partners were owed more payments from the French government for unpaid wartime bills, and they were traveling to France to collect. But John Church—still living under the assumed name of John Carter—also wanted to go home to London. He had fled as a bankrupt in disgrace, with the bailiffs hard on his heels, a decade earlier. The scandal of his dueling was long forgotten, and he was now in a position to clear his debts and cancel the warrants. He also wanted to show Uncle Barker that he had made something of himself after all in America.
When they sailed, Angelica had in tow three toddlers—Philip, Kitty, and John—and she was five months pregnant with a fourth child, who was destined to be born in Europe. A smooth transatlantic voyage meant a month at sea, but the late summer of 1783 was a risky time to travel. Banks of fog and a persistent haze blanketed harbors across Europe and America—the effects of a volcano in Iceland—and Angelica and John were fortunate to arrive safely at the start of September.
John set off almost immediately to settle affairs in London, leaving Angelica and the children in Paris, and, by the end of October, Jeremiah Wadsworth reported, “Mr Carter has found all his friends and relatives well a most cordial reconciliation has taken place between them and his Uncle is perfectly amended. He therefore assumes his real name John Barker Church.”
The prodigal son was welcomed home, and, on December 7, Angelica gave birth in Paris to a daughter. “I intended to have called my little girl Eliza after Mr. Church’s mother,” Angelica wrote to Eliza, “but she thinks Angelica is a much prettier name. Mr. Church is also of that opinion, but I promise that the next girl I make shall be called Betsey.”
By the time Eliza received the news, she and Alexander were settling—at last—into a new life of their own in New York City, in a rented house at 57 Wall Street, near the corner of Wall and Broad Streets, in what was then the urban center of the city, where Alexander now opened a law practice. This would be his postwar career. He had had enough of politics. He would be an attorney. They would raise a big family. He promised.
Old friends were congregating in New York City in the months after the British evacuation, and Alexander and Eliza’s social circle in the city now was dominated by Alexander’s fellow attorneys, Eliza’s extended network of more or less remote cousins, and other families associated with a controversial fraternity, the Society of the Cincinnati, an elite group of patriot senior officers that some bitterly charged with establishing a new American aristocracy. Among those friends and neighbors in the Cincinnati fraternity, Eliza could count her old flame and attorney Richard Varick; chief judiciary and kinsman Richard Livingston; and Peggy’s patroon husband, Stephen Van Rensselaer, who’d turned twenty-one at last in the autumn and had celebrated coming into his vast inheritance with a riotous house party. Perhaps most ominous, though, was Alexander’s growing friendship with the inveterate gambler and wheeler-dealer William Duer, the man who had introduced John Church to the Schuyler family and who was now married to another of Eliza’s Morristown cousins, Catherine Alexander.
Alexander was consumed with legal work, political writing, a banking project in the city, and the Cincinnati. He worked long into the night in his office and repaired inevitably after to the nearby Fraunces Tavern. His and Eliza’s lives were increasingly separate.
Eliza lived largely among other women, children, and servants. Her nearest friends were her cousins, Catherine Alexander Duer and Sarah Livingston Jay, and Marie-Charlotte Antill. All four of the women attended the same Anglican church services at the nearby Trinity Church, and in 1784 they were also all mothers or, like Eliza again that summer, pregnant. Marie-Charlotte’s chubby toddler, Harriet, was Eliza’s special favorite.
They were all part of the cast of characters in a drama that, before the decade was out, would change life for Eliza and Alexander forever and cause Eliza more grief than she ever could have imagined.