Alexander Hamilton (40 page)

For ten years, the Hamiltons had a home at 57 (then 58) Wall Street. A sketch of this bygone Wall Street shows a prosperous thoroughfare lined with three-story brick buildings. Well-dressed people saunter down brick sidewalks and roll in carriages over cobblestones at a time when many lanes were still unpaved. The young couple lived comfortably enough and entertained often, although Hamilton’s business records reveal numerous small loans from friends to tide them over. One of his first purchases after leaving the army bespoke the convivial host: he bought decanters, two ale glasses, and a dozen wineglasses. The vivacious Hamiltons stood high on the “supper and dinner list” compiled by Sarah and John Jay when they settled at 8 Broadway after returning from France in 1784. Very fond of drama, Alexander and Eliza were also frequently habitués of the Park Theater on lower Broadway.

Like her husband, Eliza was frugal and industrious, even if often appareled in the rich clothes of a society lady. Skilled in many domestic arts, she made handbags and pot holders, arranged flowers and wove table mats, designed patterns for furniture, cooked sweetmeats and pastry, and sewed undergarments for the children. She served plentiful meals of mutton, fowl, and veal, garnished with generous portions of potatoes and turnips and topped off with fresh apples and pears. The Hamiltons were treated to fresh produce shipped regularly from Albany by the Schuylers, and there were always demijohns of good wine on hand.

An acute disappointment of the Hamiltons’ early married life was their constant separation from Angelica by the Atlantic Ocean. From 1783 to 1785, John Barker Church lingered in Paris while winding up his business affairs with the French government. Angelica never met a famous, intelligent man she didn’t enchant, and she had soon befriended Benjamin Franklin. She prayed that Hamilton might someday sail to Europe and succeed him as American minister. Angelica was chagrined when her husband bought a town house on Sackville Street in London, then a regal country house near Windsor. During the summer of 1785, the Churches returned briefly to America and visited Hamilton, who was in Philadelphia on business, before returning to live in England. Afterward, Hamilton wrote forlornly to Angelica:

You have, I fear, taken a final leave of America and of those that love you here. I saw you depart from Philadelphia with peculiar uneasiness, as if foreboding you were not to return. My apprehensions are confirmed and, unless I see you in Europe, I expect not to see you again. This is the impression we all have. Judge the bitterness it gives to those who love you with the
love of nature
and to me who feel an attachment for you not less lively....Your good and affectionate sister Betsey feels more than I can say on this subject.
³

Outwardly, Angelica thrived in the tony salons of London and Paris and seemed a natural denizen of that risqué, rarefied world, yet she never overcame a certain homesick longing to get back to Eliza, Alexander, and her American roots.

With a perpetually busy husband, Eliza ran the household and supervised the education of the children when they were small. James Hamilton left a delightful vignette of how she taught them each morning. He remembered her “seated, as was her wont, at the head of the table with a napkin in her lap, cutting slices of bread and spreading them with butter for the younger boys, who, standing at her side, read in turn a chapter in the Bible or a portion of Goldsmith’s
Rome.
When the lessons were finished, the father and the elder children were called to breakfast, after which the boys were packed off to school.”
⁴
Like Martha Washington, Eliza was never politically outspoken and did not spur her husband’s ambitions. At the same time, she never deviated from his beliefs, identified implicitly with his causes, and came to regard his political enemies as her own.

As a woman of deep spirituality, Eliza believed firmly in religious instruction for her children. On October 12, 1788, she and Alexander strolled with their children to the west end of Wall Street and had the three eldest—Philip, Angelica, and Alexander—baptized simultaneously at Trinity Church in the presence of the Schuylers, Baron von Steuben, and Angelica Church, who was visiting. After 1790, the Hamiltons rented pew ninety-two, and Alexander performed free legal work for the church, then the meeting ground for the city’s Episcopalian blue bloods. He was now quite changed from the young man who had knelt twice daily in fervent prayer at King’s College. Nominally Episcopalian, he was not clearly affiliated with the denomination and did not seem to attend church regularly or take communion. Like Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson, Hamilton had probably fallen under the sway of deism, which sought to substitute reason for revelation and dropped the notion of an active God who intervened in human affairs. At the same time, he never doubted God’s existence, embracing Christianity as a system of morality and cosmic justice.

Hamilton’s dark view of human nature never dampened his home life but only enhanced it. His eight children never appeared to utter a single unkind word about their father. Admittedly, his early death made such carping distasteful, but complaints don’t even surface in private letters. The second he got home, he shed his office cares and entered into his children’s imaginative world. Son James said, “His gentle nature rendered his house a most joyous one to his children and friends. He accompanied his daughter Angelica when she played and sang at the piano. His intercourse with his children was always affectionate and confiding, which excited in them a corresponding confidence and devotion.”
⁵

Hamilton read widely and accumulated books insatiably. The self-education of this autodidact never stopped. He preferred wits, satirists, philosophers, historians, and novelists from the British Isles: Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Oliver Goldsmith, Edward Gibbon, Lord Chesterfield, Sir Thomas Browne, Thomas Hobbes, Horace Walpole, and David Hume. Among his most prized possessions was an eight-volume set of
The Spectator
by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele; he frequently recommended these essays to young people to purify their writing style and inculcate virtue. He never stopped pondering the ancients, from Pliny to Cicero to his beloved Plutarch, and always had lots of literature in French on his creaking shelves: Voltaire and Montaigne’s essays, Diderot’s
Encyclopedia,
and Molière’s plays. The politician who provoked a national furor with his firebreathing denunciations of the French Revolution paid tutors so that all his children could speak French.

From the outset of his New York residence, Hamilton contributed to many local institutions. In a quest to improve education in the state, he worked to create the Board of Regents and served on it from 1784 to 1787. In this capacity, he was also a trustee of his alma mater, now renamed Columbia College to banish any royal remnants, and received from it an honorary master-of-arts degree. He was involved in countless neighborhood projects, petitioning the Common Council to relocate a statue of William Pitt that obstructed Wall Street traffic or working to improve sanitation on the street by asking the council to raise “the pavements of the said street in the middle thereof so as to throw the water on each side of the street.”
⁶

Hamilton also performed innumerable small acts of benevolence for friends. One special recipient was Baron von Steuben, who had received a verbal pledge from Congress that he would be paid if the patriots won the Revolution. When Congress reneged on this promise, Hamilton took Steuben into his home and helped him to craft petitions to the legislature; Hamilton’s papers are replete with entries for unpaid loans to the spendthrift baron, who was finally granted sixteen thousand acres in upstate New York. Alexander and Eliza also rescued a thirty-fiveyear-old painter, Ralph Earl, who had painted battle scenes of the Revolution and studied under Benjamin West in London. Upon returning to New York in 1786, Earl lost his money in dissolute habits and was tossed into debtors’ prison. Moved by his plight, Hamilton induced Eliza “to go to the debtors’ jail to sit for her portrait and she induced other ladies to do the same,” wrote James Hamilton. “By this means, the artist made a sufficient sum to pay his debts.”
⁷
To this thoughtful patronage we owe Earl’s lifelike portrait of Eliza in a cushioned chair with gilded arms, which superbly captures the “earnest, energetic, and intelligent woman” that her son James evoked in his memoirs.
⁸

By age thirty, Alexander Hamilton was a New York luminary and a stalwart member of the continental elite. He had traveled an almost inconceivable distance from his West Indian youth. Occasionally, his troubled past burst in upon him unexpectedly. After Yorktown, Hamilton was informed that his half brother Peter Lavien had died in South Carolina, leaving token bequests of one hundred pounds apiece to Hamilton and his brother, James. Lavien had been so estranged from his two illegitimate half brothers that in his will he referred to them as “Alexander & Robert [
sic
] Hamilton ...now or late residents of the island of Santa Cruz in the West Indies.”
⁹
Had Hamilton simply been the more vivid brother or had Lavien’s memory been refreshed by reports that his bastard half brother was, miraculously, aide-decamp to George Washington? Instead of being touched by this belated penance, such as it was, Hamilton noted scornfully that Peter Lavien had left the bulk of his assets—properties in South Carolina, Georgia, and St. Croix—to three close friends. From the way Hamilton broke the news to Eliza, we can see that she had long known the story of his being cheated of his inheritance. “You know the circumstances that abate my distress,” he told her, “yet my heart acknowledges the rights of a brother. He dies rich, but has disposed of the bulk of his fortune to strangers. I am told he has left me a legacy. I did not inquire how much.”
¹⁰
We can also learn much about Hamilton’s attitude toward this bequest by legal work he performed on the will of Sir William Johnson, who, by coincidence, had a legitimate son named Peter and eight illegitimate children. Hamilton turned in an unsparing verdict: “I am of opinion that the survivors of the eight children were entitled” as well to the inheritance originally given to Peter alone.
¹¹

It must have distressed Hamilton to gaze backward, and he retained few acquaintances from his past. During the war, he had corresponded with his old St. Croix mentor, Hugh Knox, who doted proudly on his success, marveled at his proximity to Washington, and implored him to draft a history of the American Revolution. Then, in 1783, Knox sent Hamilton a plaintive letter, complaining that his former disciple had greeted his letters with silence for three years. He admitted to bruised feelings: “When you were covered with the dust of the camp and had cannonballs whistling thick about your ears, you used to steal an hour’s converse with an old friend every 5 or 6 months; and now in a time of profound peace and tranquillity you cannot, it seems, find
two minutes
for this kind of office.... [A]re you grown too rich and proud to have a good memory?...Pray make haste to explain this strange mystery!”
¹²

Hamilton rushed to mollify Knox, explaining that he had never received the letters. Knox then replied in ecstatic tones that “you have not only
answered,
but even far
exceeded
our most sanguine hopes and expectations.”
¹³
He conjured up the frail but persistent adolescent he had befriended and beseeched Hamilton not to exhaust himself through overwork. Though Hamilton patched things up with Knox, the anomaly remains that he had not sent him a letter in three years. He displayed not the slightest interest in revisiting St. Croix or showing Eliza the scenes of his upbringing. Did he need some psychic distance from the West Indies to reinvent himself in America? When Knox died seven years later, Hamilton must have regretted that he had not seen his fond old mentor again. Knox was eulogized as a “universal lover of mankind” in Hamilton’s old paper, the
Royal Danish American Gazette.
¹⁴
He certainly had shown a special and abiding love for Hamilton.

In May 1785, Hamilton’s brother, James, resurfaced with a letter begging for money. The envelope that Hamilton sent in reply shows that James had migrated to St. Thomas. (He probably died there the following year, from causes unknown.) Hamilton’s reply is a shocking revelation of just how estranged he had grown from his carpenter brother and their father, notwithstanding his earlier efforts to stay in touch with them. Hamilton expressed surprise that James had not received a letter he sent him six months before and reproached him gently, saying this was only the second letter he had gotten from him in many years. We do not know what James thought of his wondrous brother, but how could he not have been envious? Forgiving his brother’s failure to write, Hamilton addressed him with an affecting eagerness to help: “The situation you describe yourself to be in gives me much pain and nothing will make me happier than, as far as may be in my power, to contribute to your relief.”
¹⁵
While Hamilton said that his own prospects were “flattering”—his sole, discreet reference to his own spectacular good fortune—he also said that he could not afford to lend him more at the moment, though he wanted in time to help settle him on a farm in America.

My affection for you, however, will not permit me to be inattentive to your welfare and I hope time will prove to you that I feel all the sentiment of a brother. Let me only request of you to exert your industry for a year or two more where you are and at the end of that time, I promise myself to be able to invite you to a more comfortable settlement in this country. Allow me only to give you one caution, which is to avoid if possible getting in debt. Are you
married
or
single
? If the
latter,
it is my wish for many reasons it may be agreeable to you to continue in that state.
¹⁶
That Hamilton didn’t have the slightest notion of whether his brother was married or not and didn’t assume that he would have been invited to any wedding suggests the wide gulf separating the two brothers. When Hamilton turned to the subject of their feckless father, his poignant letter grew more heartbreaking: