The scandal of Alexander’s death consumed the city. Aaron Burr fled, as much to avoid a beating at the hands of a mob as to evade arrest. In the weeks to come, a grand jury would indict Burr on charges that, “not having the fear of God before his eyes, but being moved and seduced by the Instigation of the devil,” he “feloniously and willfully did Murder” General Hamilton.
Eliza was deaf to all of it. She retreated into her family circle and turned to her sister. Eliza and the younger children traveled up the Hudson to visit her father at the end of July. When she returned to New York City a few weeks later, she felt more steady. She and the older children resumed regular Sunday church services and visited Alexander’s grave after the sermon. Eliza and her daughter now made a habit after church of visiting Elizabeth De Hart Bleecker, her brother Andrew Bleecker, and his young wife, Frances. Here, Eliza could talk about Alexander with those who knew and admired him. As a Christmas gift for one of Elizabeth’s sons Eliza tenderly wrapped a miniature statuary bust of Alexander.
The frequent references in Elizabeth’s journal to “Miss Hamilton,” who visited with her mother but also came alone for tea and parties with the other young people, show that, in the immediate aftermath of her father’s death, Angelica Hamilton’s mental state remained in balance. That was a relief. Eliza had enough troubles. Her greatest worry was for the future of her oldest boys—especially when she understood the appalling state of her finances.
By the end of August, still caught up in the dreadful business of responding to heartfelt letters of condolences, Eliza was only beginning to grasp the full extent of the financial catastrophe bearing down upon her.
Alexander had drawn up a list of assets and debts, and the plain facts were that the latter significantly outstripped the former. There was a large mortgage on the Grange and precious little in savings. Alexander—like Eliza, only in his late forties—had counted on another decade of working. Or more.
His friends, left to unravel the estate for his widow, were more concerned even than they let on to Eliza. And Eliza already knew enough to panic. Alexander had left his widow in a very difficult position. Letters went back and forth among the friends in July, debating what should be done, and a group of Alexander’s friends “immediately set about the execution of the plan suggested . . . to raise a competent sum of money to relieve General Hamilton’s family from the possibility of embarrassment and to provide a fund for their support.” On August 6, a sultry Monday morning in New York City, Oliver Wolcott called to order a meeting, “on the Subject of Gen. Hamilton affairs . . . at the election room in the Bank of N.Y.,” attended by a half-dozen men, including Edward and William Tilghman, to discuss the matter with some urgency. Among other plans to provide for Eliza and the children, more than thirty-five men donated to a trust of income-producing lands in Pennsylvania. John Church took a lead in arranging matters and added his contribution.
But Angelica was left to break the news to Eliza that she still could not afford to return permanently to her home in Harlem. John advised that carrying on alone at the estate, without Alexander’s income, would be difficult, even with her father’s offer to send down in the fall from Albany any supplies of beef, pork, and butter that Eliza and the children wanted. The Grange had been an extravagance they could barely afford, even when Alexander was furiously working. “Your brother[-in-law] deems it the most prudent,” Angelica wrote Eliza, “that you remain where you are, as it is utterly impossible for you to be at the Grange without horses, and their expense will pay for your house rent. He thinks the Grange might be let.” But renting the Grange would just delay the inevitable. Eliza’s heart broke to think of losing her last ties to a home with Alexander under the gavel at public auction, but there was no other choice. She rented a small home on Warren Street in the city, and toward the end of October Eliza began moving special items from the Grange into the city. Her father encouraged her not to stint, at least, on her rental accommodation. He would make up any shortfall. Philip Schuyler urged her to find a place “sufficiently large that you may not be in the least crowded, for remember, that it is my intention that you should be well accommodated, and make Every want immediately known to me that I may have the pleasure of obviating it.”
It was the end of October before Eliza could face the Grange. How painful it would be, her father perceived, to return to “a place where the Sweet Smiles, the Amiable affability, the Chearful and enduring Attentions of the best of men had been wont to meet your Eyes.” There was nothing for it but to start packing. “I have removed the Bust [of Alexander],” she wrote her father the next week, “from that habitation that I had expected it would have been for a length of time you will easily imagine my dear papa my feelings.”
How to launch her older sons into adulthood was her greatest concern. Eliza was the mother of seven children, ranging from two to twenty, and she needed urgently to find a career position for her now eldest son, Alexander Jr., who had graduated in August from Columbia. He was away in the autumn, traveling through the New York frontier as far as Montreal in the age-old coming-of-age Schuyler tradition, but when he returned, he would need suitable employment. Alexander’s second, Nathaniel Pendleton—indicted as an “accessory before the fact” in the murder of Alexander and still dealing with the fallout of his role in the duel in Weehawken—looked for a place for the young man in a merchants’ accounting house in New England. Eliza’s father and Oliver Wolcott had other ideas for the young man, and Eliza found herself in the unenviable position of having a half-dozen bossy and opinionated men, each with a different idea, all taking charge simultaneously of her future.
She was determined to make her own decisions, especially about the children. This was not easy to do and was met with opposition. She needed help, both with the boys and with money, and women without husbands were not encouraged to be independent. When Eliza resisted one of the men’s plans for her children, she softened the blow by playing to the hilt the role of the hapless, helpless widow. In time, it became a habit.
What she wanted more than anything else, in the end, was to have the children near her. She had never wanted to be apart from them or from Alexander. Now, the thought was unbearable. “The Grievous Affliction I am under,” Eliza wrote, rejecting the plan for Alexander Jr.’s prospective move to New England, “will be added [to] the trembling mother’s anxiety for her child least he should fall in to evil. I have every assurance from him that he will be careful of himself but [even] New York has a thousand snares for an unprotected young man.” She was thinking of her eldest son and George Eacker. “Do I not owe it to the memory of my beloved Husband,” she pressed Nathaniel Pendleton, “to keep his children together? It was a plan he made in his last arrangement of his family that they should not be with out a parents care at all times. A plan in which I made the greatest sacrifice in my Life, it was that of being one half the week absent from him to take care of the younger while he took care of the Elder.”
Eliza got her way, as she always intended. Alexander Jr. entered into a merchants’ house in New York City. Then she set about securing a place for her third son, John, at Columbia, where he would join his brother James, already a student.
Philip Schuyler was a constant support now, support that was importantly financial but also emotional. The idea to write a biography of Alexander—a book that would set straight libelous attacks on his reputation and character and tell the story of the man, the father, and the hero of the American Revolution—was one that Eliza and General Schuyler first began to discuss together in November. For Eliza, the dream of someday telling her story of her husband was a lifeline, and she and her father were already deep in discussions about who would be the best author. “My dear papa,” Eliza wrote, “I have not said anything to Mr. [John] Mason respecting the subject that you and my self wished he should undertake. It is doubted weather his mode of writing would be equal to it. There is a Mr. [John] Johnston thought of and tis said is desirous of it. Judge [James] Kent is acquainted with him and perhaps could give you an opinion.”
Already, Eliza was beginning to imagine the day when she would have the courage to read again Alexander’s letters and to gather up anecdotes of her husband. Philip Schuyler had piles of correspondence, too, and decades of memories of a man whom he unreservedly admired. In warm, loving letters, Eliza and her father together laid out their modest plans for a future.
Those plans were interrupted on November 18, 1804.
Philip Schuyler had suffered for years from gout, and the Schuyler siblings considered it the family affliction. That autumn, it had flared badly, but Philip assured his daughter that his most recent bout was no worse than usual and mending.
He had sent her on November 3, 1804, a sympathetic, heartwarming letter, assuring Eliza that her sorrow was not a burden. “That your afflictions, my dear, dearly beloved child, had added to mine,” he wrote, “was the natural result of a parent’s tenderness for so dutiful and affectionate a child, as he invariably experienced from you.”
His gout, he assured her, too, was much better: “Since my last letter to you I have no gout; [and] although the ulcers in my feet and above my knee have been extensive, they bear a most favorable aspect of healing.” He was unable to walk about, but he had no pain, and as far as he was concerned, things were looking up.
The trouble was not gout per se. It was the kidney damage caused after decades of the disease’s progress and the infected wounds in a seventy-year-old body. Peggy had died when gout went to her stomach. Faster than anyone in Albany thought possible, Philip Schuyler now succumbed, too, to organ failure.
By the time Eliza got the news in New York City, her father had already been buried. The ulcerous sores and cankers urged a hasty service in the Schuyler family parlor followed by a speedy interment.
The letter fell to the floor. Eliza was untethered.
The death of her father was the beginning of a bitter inheritance dispute that would further devastate Eliza. She would not have believed that autumn that further devastation was possible.
The passing of Philip Schuyler also meant that Eliza’s financial situation quickly went from precarious to dire. At those rare moments when her grief receded, worries about money and the children rose up instead to consume her.
The crux of the family debate—also the subject of public commentary and more of the gossip Eliza hated—revolved around claims that their father had made generous financial provisions for Eliza after Alexander’s death, provisions that her siblings now viewed as an advance on her share of the inheritance.
Alexander’s powerful friends had unwittingly fueled the rumor. When they’d met to untangle Alexander’s estate and had brought up the issue of raising money for a trust fund to support Eliza and the children, no one wanted to insult a rich man like Philip Schuyler by suggesting that he couldn’t or wouldn’t take care of his daughter. No matter what kind of a hash Alexander had left his finances in, surely, the men said, her wealthy father would support her.
And, if Philip Schuyler had lived, there is no doubt that he had planned to help Eliza with the children’s college fees and promised to fill gaps in her ongoing household expenses. Her other siblings were all on firm financial ground, and, with the marriage of the youngest sister, Catherine, to a rich, if rather unpleasant, man named Samuel Malcolm, Philip Schuyler’s other daughters were provided for. Alexander’s death had left Eliza alone without a good income.
The truth, however, was that the Schuyler fortune was smaller than the public at large imagined. Angelica, John, Alexander, and Eliza may have been the only ones in the family who knew the truth, and even Angelica assumed that the boom times of the 1790s had repaired some of her father’s earlier misfortune. What wealth existed was not only modest but largely illiquid, tied up in the family properties and real-estate investment. In the will recorded in early December at the Albany courthouse, the estate of Philip Schuyler showed a value of only $30,000 or $40,000, split among a half-dozen grown children and some grandchildren. Alexander’s debts were above $50,000, and Eliza’s share of the inheritance was nowhere near enough to provide her with a steady widow’s income, never mind the kind of windfall that might allow her to save the property in Harlem. Eliza accepted the inevitable, but it broke her heart to lose the house that had been Alexander’s family vision. The Grange would go on the auction block come springtime.
It was too much. Eliza tumbled into the darkness of depression.
She found herself now in the painful situation of also having to defend herself against accusations that she was double-dipping on her siblings. The family communications were tense and deeply complicated. Doubting Eliza’s integrity most openly were her brother Rensselaer, her sister Catherine, and Catherine’s husband, Samuel Malcolm. Cornelia and Washington Morton wavered. Angelica and John, who knew Alexander’s household affairs and finances intimately, sided with Eliza. The family divide left Eliza and her remaining brother, Philip Jr., as the eldest surviving son and an executor of his father’s will, to negotiate a wounding—and woundingly public—conversation that felt to Eliza a great deal like airing family laundry.
She wished nothing more than that the earth would swallow her. She wished that she were dead, so she could be with Alexander. “A report has prevailed,” Eliza wrote her eldest brother somewhat hysterically,
that my father gave me six thousand Dollars before I left it, let me assure you it is an untruth, it has given me some pain that I should be held up to the public in so unfavorable a point of view as on the one hand to request you to make provision for me, by some arrangement, and on the other, (as it is said) to be so amply provided for by my father. What but ill intent toward me could have been the motive to have given such an idea to the world and to my sisters and brothers? But this world is a world of evil passions, and I thank my God He strengthens my mind to look on them as steps to an entire resignation to His will, which I pray may fast approach me.
In his last love letter to her, Alexander implored Eliza to turn to religion and the hope that they would meet again in heaven. Eliza clung to faith now like a drowning woman. She carried on in those darkest months only by remembering that she was the mother of Alexander’s small children.
John Church acted in the estate matter for Eliza and Angelica, infuriating Samuel Malcolm and pitting the younger generation of Schuyler siblings against their two older sisters. John and Samuel butted heads, and things did not go smoothly. Some of the most hurtful accusations against Eliza were fueled by Samuel’s personal animosity toward Alexander and Philip Schuyler. Samuel and Catherine, like so many of the Schuyler girls before her, had eloped, but Philip Schuyler’s doubts about Samuel Malcolm had gone deeper than this ceremonial irregularity. The couple would not have needed to elope if the general had endorsed the marriage or this particular son-in-law. He must have wondered, at the end of his life, why so many of his daughters chose such dubious husbands. Alexander had been the exception.
Politics were, as ever, part of the conflict. Samuel Malcolm’s staunch allegiance was to John Adams, and John Adams had not taken kindly to Alexander savaging his character and public conduct in an open letter in 1800. Adams was among Alexander’s most vituperative enemies, and that he helped to spread and likely believed some of the most scurrilous of the rumors about Alexander did not help family matters. More than a decade after the death of General Schuyler, years yet in the future, Samuel Malcolm could still be found complaining to Thomas Jefferson—another of Alexander’s political opponents—of the injustice of Alexander’s promotion and of the damage to his career when “my marriage with the youngest daughter of General Schuyler, invited me to Separate myself, from all public Services.” He had felt pressured to resign in the wake of the family scandal. But Samuel was also in the newspapers himself in 1805, facing accusations of fraud and financial misdealing, making Catherine’s inheritance and money a sensitive issue.
Catherine, naturally, took the side of her husband, although her siblings tried to remember that she had little choice in the matter. Where Samuel led, she followed. When John Church tried to see Catherine to go over the will, she cut him and curtly sent word back with her housemaid that she was not “at home.” She also stopped calling on her older sisters and avoided her family.
“Dear Sister,” Angelica wrote to Catherine on December 8, hoping to smooth things over, “Mr Church waited on you to deliver the enclosed paper, but you were not at home. I have not sent it before expecting every day to have the pleasure to see you—any other papers respecting my Father’s Estate in Mr. Church’s possession you may recall whenever it suits your leisure to call.” Catherine still kept her distance, although she felt guilty. Eliza was deeply hurt. She and Alexander had opened their home to her youngest sister for years so she could enjoy society and life in the city with her cousins, and Catherine’s betrayal felt intimate.
The squabble about the inheritance went on for the better part of a year, but reached its lowest point in January of 1806. The terms of their father’s old-fashioned will left the largest portions of the estate to his sons. The lion’s share went to the young son of their late first-born brother, John, and much of what remained was left to Eliza’s brothers, Philip Jr. and Rensselaer. The will, written before the two youngest girls were settled into marriages, left legacies of $2,000 for Cornelia and $5,000 for Catherine. Otherwise, the surviving sisters, along with Peggy’s young son, Stephen, were left to inherit, as tenants in common, one-fifth shares of a partition of farms and land in the Saratoga Patent. Theirs was a modest inheritance.
The question of whether Eliza cheated the estate by hiding a gift of $6,000 poisoned even the simplest financial conversations with Samuel Malcolm and made working together as siblings and tenants in common impossible. Eliza learned in January from the Albany attorney managing the estates that she was due income of $62.35 from her share of the estates, but that the payment couldn’t be released because of the conflict with her siblings. Eliza was mortified—not least because she desperately needed the sixty-two dollars.
Her brother Philip Jr., at wits’ end, tried to broker the family peace with a compromise and saw clearly that Eliza was not the problem. “My Dear Brother,” Eliza wrote him,
Thus is our family situated, differences have arisen, and neither can recollect how much it is encumbent on them to be at peace, but ill will must prevail, against all the claims that goodness, and Religion Demand. . . . Mr. Church has read your letter to me and as it is my sincere wish that all differences should be done away, and your requests be complied with, I have called on all around and proposed a meeting at my house to endeavor to affect what you mention in your Letter but have no hopes.
Eliza had tried to bring all Philip Schuyler’s children together and find a solution. But her siblings and Samuel Malcolm, especially, were determined, it seemed, to quarrel. Eliza was exhausted, and it all seemed hopeless. She considered that the only silver lining in any of this was that it had brought her and her younger brother Philip Jr. closer. Nearly a decade separated them in age, and they hadn’t grown up together as children. But the stress of the past year and her brother’s calm, steady demeanor drew them into a deep adult friendship.
The stress overwhelmed Eliza. Was it perhaps better to sell up, rather than quarrel? Eliza considered it. “I am told a farm has lately been sold at the rate of six dollars per Acre,” she wrote to Philip in March; “my mother expected a handsome Inheritance and certainly their was a considerable tract. . . . With respect to the Saratoga property, the selling of it at present must be at a Considerable.” But the estate limped on encumbered.
After it was all said and done, by spring Eliza was left with an inheritance of $15,000—less than $300,000 today. It was nowhere near enough to allow her to dream of buying back the Grange from Alexander’s creditors. Their home went on the auction block at last and sold for $30,000. Eliza took the news calmly, but her heart ached when she turned her back for the last time and walked away from the home she and Alexander had built together.
What she did not know was that behind the sale lay a marvelous secret.
Alexander’s friends knew how hard she and the children had taken leaving the Grange, and they had searched for a way to show their affection, too, for Alexander and his family—a way that would give the family back some kind of equilibrium. So a group of them, including her brother-in-law Washington Morton, banded together, and, when the Grange went under the hammer, put up the money together to buy it. They wanted to sell it back to Eliza. They would take for a price the $15,000 she had in her savings. Eliza was humbled and deeply grateful.
The summer of 1805 marked the first anniversary of Alexander’s death. It was a hard rite of passage, made all the harder by the yellow fever epidemic that once again devastated New York City, with a virulence the locals compared only to the fevers of the 1790s.
Her son James graduated from Columbia, and Eliza and the smallest children spent the summer in Harlem. Home. Eliza smiled at the thought and walked again for a long time in her garden, where she and Alexander had strolled together on their last weekend. Her oldest daughter, Angelica, stronger and better as well, accepted an invitation to spend the summer in the countryside outside Boston with the minister John Mason, who had been with Alexander at his deathbed and whom Eliza and her father had considered engaging to write Alexander’s biography. Angelica remained with the Mason family until the start of autumn. “Dear Madam,” John Mason wrote to Eliza on September 23,
We have this moment parted with your daughter Angelica with much regret. . . . This good girl of yours has made herself extremely acceptable to Mrs. Mason & my daughter—& we shall anticipate with pleasure some future opportunity to enjoy her society in Boston—If she is spared to you, I most sincerely think, you have in her a promise of great consolation & Comfort, & a companion that will alleviate & soothe the sorrows, which probably never can be removed.
Angelica Hamilton might never marry. Both Eliza and Reverend Mason saw that. Angelica was childlike and sometimes simple and was perhaps a better companion than wife and mother. But Eliza had prayed for the return of her reason, and for the moment that prayer had been answered.
All summer, the smallest children ran riot at the Grange, and Eliza was glad to hear the house full of life and little people. Her three youngest—Betsey, William, and Philip—ranged from three to eight, but the house was also full of other motherless children.
Eliza was once again collecting around herself waifs and orphans. Sarah, the thirty-five-year-old wife of her brother Philip, died in September, leaving behind two sons under the age of ten, Eliza’s nephews Robert and John Schuyler. Would Eliza mother the boys? Philip asked his sister. Eliza did not hesitate. She was a warm and gentle mother, and nothing gave her as much pleasure as children. For the next year, her two young nephews lived with their aunt and cousins at the Grange, while their father courted a suitable stepmother. It was the third time that Eliza had taken motherless children into her home, beginning as far back as the adoption of Fanny Antill, now a young woman of twenty. Alexander, too, had been an orphan.
And that started Eliza thinking. When the next opportunity came along, she embraced it.
Eliza wanted to live up to Alexander’s vision of her as the “best of wives and best of women.” Too many times, she had been cross or impatient. She had not always borne the burden of sacrifice or public abuse, she knew, with complete equanimity. In his final words, Alexander had asked her to trust in religion and reminded her of the Roman ideal—piety, stoicism, charity, loyalty, motherhood—at the foundation of their marriage. Eliza was determined now not to fail Alexander.
Through church circles, Eliza had been friends with a small group of women, most of them widows, for years already. There was the widow Isabella Graham and her married daughter, Joanna Bethune, whom Eliza knew from the 1780s. There was Elizabeth Seton, the young and pious widow of Alexander’s old friend from the Treasury days William Seton, who died of tuberculosis in 1803. There was Sarah Clarke Startin, Elizabeth Seton’s godmother, and another Seton family relation, Sarah Hoffman, the widow of Nicholas Hoffman, whose nephews were Alexander’s legal partners.
These five women—Isabella Graham, Joanna Bethune, Elizabeth Seton, Sarah Hoffman, and Sarah Startin—had all been involved for a number of years as the leading lights in the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children, led by Isabella Graham and Elizabeth Seton and organized as a Christian response to the yellow fever devastation of the 1790s. Eliza was already a casual member and subscriber.
When Alexander’s friend William Seton gasped his last in Italy, where doctors had hoped the weather could cure him, his wife embraced Catholicism. It was, all the ladies said, a shocking and “barbaric” thing to do in Protestant America. Her horrified godmother broke off all contact, and the ladies agreed that Elizabeth Seton would not carry on in the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows, based out of Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan. Elizabeth Seton, ironically, would go on to become the first Catholic saint born in America.
Elizabeth Seton’s departure—from their society and, to their view, from her senses—would need to be filled by some other strong woman of devout purpose. Ideally someone prominent. Ideally a widow. Eventually, the ladies asked Eliza Hamilton to take Elizabeth Seton’s place in their evolving social mission.
Eliza was not a saint and didn’t strive to be one. But she did want to be a widow Alexander would admire. And in 1806, after the massive outpouring of grief at Alexander’s funeral, she was already New York City’s most famous and most cherished widow.
So when Sarah Hoffman discovered in a shabby tenement the heartbreaking scene of five young children weeping over the body of their dead mother and proposed the establishment of a society for orphans, she spoke to Isabella Graham. Isabella, who had been reading about the seventeenth-century church father August Hermann Francke, the founder of an innovative orphanage in Germany, proposed an American “ragged school” on his model. Orphanages did not yet exist in New York. The idea was revolutionary.
Sarah and Isabella went straight to Eliza. Would “Mrs. General Hamilton” join them in the radical project of building a home especially for orphaned children? Eliza only had to think of her two small nephews and how they cried at night for their mother. She thought of Fanny Antill, whom she had loved as a daughter, and how she saw in her the face of Marie-Charlotte and Edward. She thought of a young Alexander and the scars he’d carried with him in private, left alone to survive as an island orphan, and of the note in which he’d asked her to care for the woman who’d saved him. But above all, Eliza thought of her own children still mourning the death of their father, and thought what it would be to leave them without any parents. She knew instantly in her heart the answer. She immediately accepted.
And Eliza needed the society as much as they needed her. In the darkness of grief, she needed a focus. The fate of widows and children spoke to her and let her remember that, even in the loss of Alexander, she was fortunate. Eliza was also a natural organizer.
She threw herself into the society with the same determination and efficiency with which she regulated her household. All these women had been born and bred, in one fashion or another, to manage estates, and running a charitable institution was well within their skill set. At society meetings, Eliza and the other society widows considered and deliberated. They planned their projects. And then, in an act of faith, they signed a lease on a small two-story house on Raisin Street in Greenwich Village, hired a respectable man and his wife to care for the children, and gave a name to their new organization.
On March 15, 1806, the Orphan Asylum Society—the first charitable orphanage in New York—was founded. Eliza and her compatriots put out a public call for other society ladies to join them, and a dozen showed up at their first meeting at the City Hotel. By the time the meeting was over, “Mrs. General Hamilton” had been elected the second directress, essentially the organization’s founding vice president. Among the trustees were more society women, almost all of whom had long been part of Eliza and Alexander’s inner circle. These friendships were not new to Eliza; rather, they represented a deepening of old ones.
The aim of the asylum, the ladies proclaimed in their public statement, was to educate indigent and orphaned children, teach them to read the Scripture, and place them in apprenticeships or indentures. The asylum took in twelve orphans in the first few months, and by the time the ladies met again in January of 1807, with rather less fanfare and acrimony than the Founding Fathers, to ratify their constitution, it was already clear that they would need to find space for more children.
By April, twenty clean and well-fed children appeared before the board for applause and inspection. The names of those children were neatly recorded in the asylum record books, today preserved in the New-York Historical Society archives, and they were boys and girls with names like Thomas Birch, John Wilkinson, or—the only death among their children—Sarah Ann Morrison, who died as a four-year-old from illness. Most of the children were between the ages of three and ten when they arrived at the orphan asylum, and they went on to be mantua makers, bakers, and farmers. One girl joined the household staff of Sarah Startin as a housemaid. A little boy went on to become the gardener at the estate of Eliza’s kinsman Philip Livingston.
They had taken in twenty children that first year. But they had turned away nine times as many. The need was immense, and Eliza felt sure that this was her calling. Growing the orphanage quickly was a risk and a challenge, and the finances were daunting. But when the secretary asked Mrs. General Hamilton which way she voted on the question of pushing ahead, Eliza gave her resounding yes to the project. The ladies were determined to build a new, bespoke orphanage, large enough to accommodate more children, and, in the spring of 1807, they started fundraising. Sarah Startin donated a one-acre parcel of land on Bank Street, in Greenwich Village. Johanna Bethune’s husband said he would guarantee the $25,000 loan the widows would need to take out to finance the construction of a three-story orphanage able to accommodate fifty children. The women turned to the local churches and newspapers, asking ministers to encourage donations in their sermons and journalists to spread the word in their columns, and twisting the arms of their rich friends and neighbors. Eliza’s sons, watching her trudge out in even the worst weather when she heard of an orphaned child or saw the chance of rounding up a donation, teased her that she worked not like a lady of leisure but like a peasant.
They were on their way, but the ladies had not yet raised all the money to complete the project. On June 5, the New-York Evening Post gave the society a plug, advising that “the attention of the public is most respectfully solicited to the merits, the importance, the wants of a recent but valuable institution, ‘The Orphan Asylum of New-York.’ ” “In the space of fourteen months,” the editors gushed, “many of the children who knew not the alphabet when they entered, can now read the Bible fluently, and their progress in writing is also considerable.” The public was urged to contribute. By the end of June, church donations had reached $873.38. It was a long way off from $25,000. So Eliza and the ladies turned to their rich network of connections in government and convinced the legislature of the State of New York to donate the last $10,000 toward the building.
When the women triumphantly laid the cornerstone to start the construction of the new orphanage, Eliza, dressed still in the black of mourning, was there. But her heart felt so much lighter.