Interlude

THE FIRST LETTER FROM MRS. ELIZA HAMILTON

WITH A PS FROM HER NEW HUSBAND:

Elizabeth Hamilton to Margarita Schuyler

New Windsor, New York, January 21, 1781

Dear Margaret

I am the happiest of Women. My dear Hamilton is fonder of me every day. Get married I charge you. . . . There is no possible felicity but in that state imagined me my Sister. I was much in want of it. Adieu. Give my love to Papa and Mama and our friends and the others. With every regard, Eliz Hamilton.

PS Because your sister has the talent of growing more amiable every day, or because I am a fanatic in love . . . she fancies herself the happiest woman in the world, and would need persuade all her friends to embark with her in the matrimonial voyage. But I pray you do not let her advice have so much influence as to make you matrimony-mad. ’Tis a very good thing when their stars unite two people who are fit for each other . . . But its a dog of life when two dissonant tempers meet . . . Get a man of sense, not ugly enough to be pointed at—with some good-nature—a few grains of feeling—a little taste—a little imagination—and above all a good deal of decision to keep you in order; for that I foresee will be no easy task. If you can find one with all these qualities, willing to marry you, marry him as soon as you please.

A. H.

LOOKING OUT THE WINDOW AT FEBRUARY WHITENESS, Peggy tapped the pane with a letter just arrived for her from Eliza and Hamilton. So her brother-in-law was going to revert to playfulness to give her advice. In her present mood, she’d prefer his blunt sincerity. How could he expect her to be lighthearted, given how her romance with Fleury had vaporized? But certainly Hamilton’s banter shielded her from gossip if the letter fell into enemy’s hands along the mail route. And Peggy could decipher the code in his PS and the cloaked empathy he was trying to send her. It made her smile—one of the first to grace her lips in weeks. Perhaps that had been his aim.

Since he and Eliza left for headquarters—at New Windsor on the Hudson River, ten miles north of West Point—Peggy had sunk into sadness and retreated to her room. Even though she had read Fleury’s letter to Hamilton only once, and that in a flash fire of anguish and shock, his words were seared into her memory. In the heat of that awful conference with Hamilton, she’d focused on the fact the man she had fallen in love with seemed just as content to wed a Duane daughter as he would be her. In her second blaze of grief, though, alone in her room, she’d remembered Fleury’s congratulating Hamilton for marrying into the Schuyler family’s interest and influence. It would help him do good in his country. And then there was Fleury’s calculating pronouncement that happiness is not to be found without a large estate.

Peggy had been an afterthought all her life. Meet the Schuyler sisters: the scintillating, enrapturing Angelica, the saintly sweet Eliza. Oh, and Peggy, their little sister. Was she also only to be an appendage of her father’s, her attractiveness to potential suitors defined by what her papa’s wealth and sphere of influence could bring her eventual husband? Clearly, if she were honest about it, such benefits must have occurred to both her brothers-in-law.

No, Peggy certainly would not be “matrimony-mad,” as Hamilton put it!

Peggy had laughed outright at his warning her to avoid a man ugly enough to be pointed at! She wondered if Hamilton had written the humor into that line purposefully, suspecting she needed a good giggle.

Several things were quite obvious in the letter, however. Given their messages, both Hamilton and Eliza were happy together. Perhaps now Eliza could shed her worries that she might prove inadequate for the intensity of her new husband’s intellectual prowess and poetic passion. Peggy could also tell that Hamilton had not shared with Eliza what he knew about Fleury, or how he had saved Peggy from humiliating herself by rushing to the wharf to meet a lover who had not come. She was grateful for his discretion—especially with her papa.

Schuyler was so busy right now, the last thing he needed was to hear that one of his daughters had been jilted. And by a Frenchman. As much as he loved the language, her papa couldn’t quite shed a distrust of the onetime enemy he’d fought in the French and Indian War. And surely he might think less of Peggy if he knew she had thrown herself—literally—at one of them.

Right now Schuyler was serving in the New York legislature and trying to quell a mutiny by troops guarding Albany. The soldiers were threatening to march to Washington’s headquarters to demand back pay, which would leave the city naked to attack. Schuyler was extending his own credit to raise subscriptions of grain, meat, flour, and wages to pacify the soldiers.

Congress was also ignoring his plea for clothing and food for the Oneidas and Tuscaroras. He had been horrified when the Iroquois delegates told him of their living conditions. Appealing to Congress’s sense of humanity hadn’t worked, so Schuyler tried explaining that starving and freezing might drive their loyal Iroquois allies to join the enemy. He was still waiting impatiently for their response. If Congress offered no help, he would somehow have to find funds to supply the Oneidas and Tuscaroras as well as Albany’s soldiers.

Peggy worried her papa was working himself into the gout that was crippling him that winter. He was also tense and anxious about Catharine, who was bedridden, due to give birth any minute.

Peggy reread Hamilton’s PS one last time. It would require a good deal of decision to keep you in order; for that I foresee will be no easy task. There were two ways to read that sentence. First, that Hamilton disapproved of her high spirits. She knew that was false. The second was that he was teasing, in that slightly flirty way of his, to prod her out of her melancholy. To remind her of her pluck.

Peggy chose the second interpretation, knowing that while many damned her tendency to speak her mind as being unattractive or intimidating—that cad McHenry, for instance—Hamilton applauded it. Peggy felt a hint of spring, a reblooming of her rebellious nature.

Hamilton was encouraging her to move on. To not let the world know of her broken heart. That way the fissure line in her steel could be reforged in a way any future opponents would not know where to find the weak point.

Keep her in order? Ha! This was the Revolution.

Peggy folded the letter, kissed it, and tucked it in a drawer. She had been acting like one of those foolish females in Pamela. Enough of moping about in her room.

Peggy marched herself downstairs to see how she could help her papa. For right now, her focus would be on the Patriot cause. She was lucky. History was being made all around her, and her papa’s study was a hotbed of Revolutionary stratagem and news.