HERE LIES
ALEXANDER HAMILTON
If we’d written about Alexander Hamilton’s grave site before mid-2015, this article would be a page or two shorter. But because one man was inspired by a history book, a whole new chapter has begun for a previously unsung Founding Father.
TRINITY CHURCHYARD
In 1804 Aaron Burr shot and killed Alexander Hamilton. In 2015 Lin-Manuel Miranda brought him back to life. But the story of Hamilton’s final resting place begins in the 1660s when Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam started burying their dead on a small plot of land next to what is now Wall Street in Lower Manhattan. In 1697 the parish of Trinity Church built the first of three churches that have stood in that spot. The most recent is a Gothic building with a tall steeple completed in 1846. Once the nation’s tallest building, the church is now dwarfed by skyscrapers. The graveyard’s most famous occupant, Alexander Hamilton, rented pew number 92 at Trinity Church, even though he wasn’t much of a churchgoer himself.
SELF-MADE MAN
What sets Hamilton apart from most of the other Founding Fathers is that he didn’t come from a prominent family. So, unlike Washington, Jefferson, and Adams, his surname got him nowhere. Openly called a “bastard” by his contemporaries, Hamilton was born out of wedlock in 1757 in the Caribbean and was an orphan by age 11. As a teenager, he taught himself to read while working random jobs in St. Croix. He so impressed his elders that they paid for his secondary education in New York City. Hamilton arrived there in 1774 to attend King’s College (now Columbia University), and was on a path to become a lawyer or a banker when he took up the fight against King George III and joined the militia. The young soldier worked his way up to become General George Washington’s chief military aide during the Revolutionary War. A natural-born leader, Hamilton was later put in charge of the new Continental Army.
ON THE MONEY
One reason Hamilton’s contributions aren’t more widely known is that they dealt mostly with unglamorous pursuits, such as banking and deficits and economics. But his part in the founding of the United States was huge: he coauthored the “Federalist Papers,” which led to the creation and then ratification of the U.S. Constitution (Hamilton was the only New Yorker to sign it). His input led to an independent judiciary, a professional army, and an economy driven by industry and innovation. He later served as Secretary of the Treasury (America’s first) under Washington, where he was the architect of the nation’s banking and financial systems. As if that weren’t enough, Hamilton also founded the U.S. Coast Guard and the New York Post. Also, unlike many of the other Founding Fathers who owned slaves, Hamilton was a staunch abolitionist who truly believed that all men are created equal. His most lasting legacy, however, is that his economic policies helped turn 13 weak colonies bankrupted by war into a strong United States. That legacy earned Hamilton a spot on the $10 bill…which used to be the main reason people even knew his name. That, and how he was killed.
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As a man who demanded satisfaction, Alexander Hamilton had a penchant for dueling (an upper-class method of solving disagreements, in which two rivals face each other and fire their pistols at the same time). And he wasn’t the most disciplined of the Founding Fathers. Any presidential aspirations Hamilton may have had were quashed in 1795 when, while serving in President Washington’s cabinet, his extramarital affair with a woman named Maria Reynolds went public. He resigned and went home to New York to mend things with his wife, Eliza. He started practicing law and had a bunch of kids, but he couldn’t keep himself out of trouble.
Hamilton had been in a few duels before, though none had led to a shot being fired—duels were more of a way for him to make a point. And that may be what he was up to in 1804, when he relentlessly taunted his political rival, Vice President Aaron Burr, whom Hamilton publicly called “unprincipaled, both as a public and private man.” After successfully preventing Burr from first becoming U.S. president and then New York governor, Hamilton published an open letter full of vague insults (vague because he knew his lack of specifics would anger Burr) that ended with, “I trust upon more reflection you will see the matter in the same light with me. If not, I can only regret the circumstances and must abide the consequences.”
There were consequences. As expected, Burr challenged Hamilton to a duel. At dawn on July 11, 1804, across the Hudson River in Weehawken, New Jersey, the two men faced off and fired their weapons. Hamilton’s bullet hit a tree branch 12 feet above the ground. Burr’s bullet tore through Hamilton’s gut.
LAST RITES
Barely clinging to life, Hamilton was taken by boat back to Manhattan and placed in the upstairs bedroom of a friend’s mansion. Knowing his end was near, Hamilton called for the Reverend Benjamin Moore, the rector of Trinity Episcopal Church, to give him communion, but Moore refused. Dueling, though technically legal at the time, was frowned upon, so Moore (the future bishop of New York) didn’t want it to appear as if the church approved of it. Besides, although Eliza was the devout Christian, Hamilton wasn’t even a regular churchgoer.
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Hamilton called for another reverend, who also refused (wrong denomination), so Hamilton called Moore back in and literally begged him for communion. With the reverend at his bedside, Hamilton professed his love of God and insisted that he’d never intended to shoot Burr, and that he forgave him for shooting him. (Some historians have speculated Hamilton told all this to the reverend in order to kill Burr’s political career, which, true or not, is what happened.) Then he told the reverend that, if he were to recover, “I would employ all your influence in society to discountenance this barbarous custom.” With Eliza and several of Hamilton’s friends also putting pressure on Moore, he finally relented and gave the dying man communion. “I remained with him until 2 o’clock this afternoon,” Moore wrote, “when death closed the awful scene—he expired without a struggle, and almost without a groan.”
LAID TO REST
Hamilton’s funeral was the largest that had ever taken place in New York City up to that point. Thousands of mourners paid their respects as his body was taken from Jane Street to Trinity Church. Even though Hamilton didn’t attend the church regularly, he had a lot of ties to it. In the past, he’d offered the clergy his legal services, and as a young soldier-in-training, he’d performed drills in the churchyard. And several family members were already interred there, most recently Hamilton’s son Philip. (Ironically, three years earlier, Philip was killed in a duel—against someone who insulted his father—in the same spot where his father would be killed three years later.) After Hamilton was eulogized by the governor of New York, he was laid to rest beneath a large white obelisk surrounded by four urns, at the edge of the graveyard next to an iron fence looking over Rector Street. His epitaph reads:
The PATRIOT of incorruptible INTEGRITY.
The SOLDIER of approved VALOUR.
The STATESM AN of consummate WISDOM.
Whose TALENTS and VIRTUES will be admired
Long after this MARBLE shall have mouldered into DUST.
A WITNESS TO HISTORY
There have actually been three churches built on the site of Trinity Church. The first one, built in 1698, burned down during the Revolutionary War in the Great New York City Fire of 1776. The second, completed in 1790, was where George Washington and other Founding Fathers worshipped when New York was the nation’s capital. In the winter of 1838, the 200-foot-tall church was heavily damaged by snow and had to be torn down. The third church, completed in 1846, was well within the debris field when the World Trade Center was destroyed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The church was saved by a 70-year-old sycamore tree, which didn’t survive. Today, an iron casting of the tree’s roots are on display in the churchyard.
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Looking up from Hamilton’s grave site, the Freedom Tower looms overhead. Across Rector Street is an outlet shoe store. And all around you are hundreds of weather-beaten tombstones, some from as far back as the 1680s. At the base of Hamilton’s grave, you’re likely to find flowers, wreaths, and lots of coins—which makes a lot of sense for the man who established the U.S. Mint. The grave site was rededicated in 2014, and in 2018 the church underwent extensive renovations, making it more accessible to visitors. These days, there’s almost always someone at the grave (when the churchyard is open). But until a few years ago, the most likely people you’d see there were Wall Street brokers taking their lunch break. Then a hip-hop musical turned it into the most visited graveyard in New York.
A TIP FROM UNCLE JOHN
Thinking of writing your own hit musical, like Hamilton? First, study the form by watching or listening to as many musicals as possible. You’ll notice that they all have a similar structure, namely that songs aren’t merely songs—they advance the action of the play, particularly the big emotional moments. Some experts say that the best way to start, after determining what your subject and story will be, is to figure out the emotional core of the play—what it’s about, emotionally speaking. Knowing that can help you figure out the big moments best expressed through song, and you can plan your script around those.
WHO TELLS YOUR STORY?
Before Hamilton the musical, there was Hamilton the 2004 biography, written by Brooklyn-born journalist Ron Chernow. Chernow’s sympathetic portrayal of Hamilton struck a chord that previous biographies hadn’t. One reviewer described it as a “popular biography that should also delight scholars”; it spent three months on the New York Times best-seller list. And unlike Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s historically inaccurate poem that greatly embellished Paul Revere’s midnight ride, Chernow tried to tell who Hamilton really was. “He had always been portrayed as this ferocious snob, the stooge of the plutocrats,” said Chernow. “For most Americans, there was a feeling that he was a second- or third-rate founder. And yet the more that I read about his achievements, they were so monumental that I decided that they needed to be up there with those of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin et al.”
And so did a rising Broadway playwright named Lin-Manuel Miranda, who read Chernow’s book while vacationing in Mexico. Inspired, Miranda decided to turn Hamilton’s life into a hip-hop musical with minorities portraying the Founding Fathers, and he hired Chernow as a consultant, telling him, “I want historians to take this seriously”…not an easy task when a black Thomas Jefferson is rapping about meeting lots of ladies in Paris. But it worked.
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Hamilton: An American Musical (starring Miranda as Alexander Hamilton) opened on Broadway—about six miles north of the Trinity Church graveyard—in August 2015. It became an instant phenomenon. Hamilton’s grave site even gets mentioned in the musical’s closing number, “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story.”
Before Hamilton, Hamilton’s grave site seldom drew a crowd, except for yearly memorials on his birth and death dates. Thanks to the play, people now come every day. It’s become something of a pilgrimage for fans to see the show and then pay their respects. “For years,” said Rand Scholet, president of the Alexander Hamilton Awareness Society, “huge numbers of people have visited Washington’s Mount Vernon, Jefferson’s Monticello. Now Hamilton is getting his due.”
HERSTORY
Located in the grass a few feet away from Hamilton’s obelisk is an unassuming granite slab bearing the inscription:
ELIZA
DAUGHTER OF
PHILIP SCHUYLER
WIDOW OF
ALEXANDER HAMILTON
INTERRED HERE
For 50 years after her husband’s death, Eliza never remarried, and she visited his grave site often. Because she’s a main character in both the book and the musical, her grave site now receives as many (some days more) gifts than her husband’s. Largely forgotten until Hamilton, Eliza (or Betsey, as she was also called) is now being celebrated for, among other things, advocating for the building of the Washington Monument. She was on hand for the laying of the obelisk’s cornerstone on July 4, 1848.
Hamilton fans even ask to see the grave of Eliza’s sister, Angelica Schuyler Church, who had a brief flirtation with Alexander. Her remains are located inside a vault marked “Winchester.”
A SINGULAR SENSATION
In April 2016, after Hamilton cleaned up at the Tony Awards and established itself as one of the most successful Broadway musicals of all time, a tourist snapped a photo that made headlines around the country. This one is from the Hollywood Reporter: “Lin-Manuel Miranda Pays Respects at Alexander Hamilton’s Grave.” (The fact that this photo was actually newsworthy is the kind of thing that pleases historians.) The musical was so influential, in fact, that it helped keep Alexander Hamilton’s portrait on the $10 bill. He was initially going to be replaced by a woman, but in 2016 Hamilton fans helped convince the U.S. Treasury Department to instead replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill with abolitionist Harriet Tubman.
…have 500 or more; Off-Broadway theaters have 100 to 499. Off-off Broadway theaters have fewer than 100.
Why has it taken so long for Hamilton to get his due? As Chernow explains, it’s because of who originally told the Founding Father’s story: “Hamilton’s political enemies were John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe—I just named presidents two, three, four, and five—and if history is written by the victors, history had very much been written by Alexander Hamilton’s enemies.”
THE CHURCHYARD TODAY
If you’re looking for a quiet graveyard, Trinity Church is not for you. The cacophony of car horns, squeaking breaks, and sirens can make it difficult to imagine what it was like in colonial days when horse carriages clopped up and down Wall Street, and the church steeple was the tallest thing around. The churchyard is the oldest of three cemeteries in Manhattan run by Trinity Church. The other two are Trinity Church Cemetery and Mausoleum in Upper Manhattan, and the Churchyard of St. Paul’s Chapel, which is still active today. A tour of all three cemeteries will take you to the graves of such luminaries as steamboat inventor Robert Fulton (1765–1815), whose monument is right next to Hamilton’s, and colonial American printer William Bradford (1660–1752). At the Trinity Church Cemetery and Mausoleum, located on Riverside Drive overlooking the Hudson River, the most famous grave belongs to John Jacob Astor (1763–1848), a business magnate whose family was known as the “landlords of New York,” and his son, millionaire John Jacob Astor IV, who died on the Titanic.
Bonus: In 1801 a New York sea captain named Robert Richard Randall left detailed plans in his will to create what would become the young nation’s first retirement home on Staten Island. Until it closed in 1978, thousands of old sailors lived at Sailors’ Snug Harbor, and most of them were buried there. (The cemetery made grim news in 2018 when more than 100 tombstones were discovered in a basement. They’d been taken there decades earlier to protect them from vandals, but now no one knows where the graves they belong to are.) The lawyer who drafted Randall’s will: Alexander Hamilton.
Our final installment—on page 491—takes you to Monticello, the home of one of Hamilton’s most bitter enemies.
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