Alexander Hamilton (65 page)

As the main architect of the new American government, Hamilton was usually in harness to his work. A recurring theme among the Schuylers was that Eliza should coax her husband into getting some fresh air and exercise to relieve his overtaxed brain. In 1791, Henry Lee sent Hamilton a horse from Virginia so that, for health reasons, he could take “daily airings and short rides.”
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An excellent horseman who had ridden a great deal in the Revolution, Hamilton had asked Lee to send him an especially gentle horse. Hamilton still suffered from a recurring kidney ailment that one friend described as his “old nephritic complaint” and that made jolting carriage rides an agonizing experience.
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Midway through Washington’s first term, Angelica Church heard reports of Hamilton growing puffy from overwork. “Colonel Beckwith tells me that our dear Hamilton writes too much and takes no exercise and grows too fat,” she complained to Eliza. “I hate both the word and the thing and you will take care of his health and good looks. Why, I shall find him on my return a dull, heavy fellow!”
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This man who worked with feverish, all-consuming energy could be the soul of conviviality after hours. William Sullivan left a verbal sketch of Hamilton that points up his incongruous blend of manly toughness and nearly feminine delicacy:

He was under middle size, thin in person, but remarkably erect and dignified in his deportment....His hair was turned back from his forehead, powdered, and collected in a club behind. His complexion was exceedingly fair and varying from this only by the almost feminine rosiness of his cheeks. His might be considered, as to figure and color, an uncommonly handsome face.
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In describing one social gathering they attended, Sullivan said that Hamilton made a dramatic late entrance and was alternately the deep thinker and the witty conversationalist, especially when the ladies watched him adoringly: When he entered the room, it was apparent from the respectful attention of the company that he was a distinguished individual. He was dressed in a blue coat with bright buttons; the skirts of his coat were unusually long. He wore a white waistcoat, black silk small clothes, white silk stockings. The gentleman who received him as a guest introduced him to such of the company as were strangers to him. To each he made a formal bow, bending very low, the ceremony of shaking hands not being observed....At dinner, whenever he engaged in conversation, everyone listened attentively. His mode of speaking was deliberate and serious and his voice engagingly pleasant. In the evening of the same day, he was in a mixed assembly of both sexes and the tranquil reserve, noticed at the dinner table, had given place to a social and playful manner, as though in this he was alone ambitious to excel.
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Most people found Hamilton highly agreeable. Sullivan wrote, “Those who could speak of his manner from the best opportunities to observe him in public and private concurred in pronouncing him to be a frank, amiable, high-minded, open-hearted gentleman....In private and friendly intercourse, he is said to have been exceedingly amiable and to have been affectionately beloved.”
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The few unflattering portraits of Hamilton’s personality tend to stem, not surprisingly, from political enemies. Hamilton was a man of daunting intellect and emphatic opinions, and John Quincy Adams contended that it was hard to get along with him if you disagreed with him. Hamilton knew he had a dogmatic streak and once joked, writing about himself in the third person, “Whatever may be the good or ill qualities of that officer, much flexibility of character is not of the number.”
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John Adams perhaps saw in Hamilton the mirror of his own vanity, later telling Jefferson that he was an “insolent coxcomb who rarely dined in good company where there was good wine without getting silly and vaporing about his administration, like a young girl about her brilliants and trinkets.”
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On the other hand, Hamilton had scores of faithful friends: Gouverneur Morris, Rufus King, Nicholas Fish, Egbert Benson, Robert Troup, William Duer, Richard Varick, Oliver Wolcott, Jr., Elias Boudinot, William Bayard, Timothy Pickering, and James Kent, to name but a few. Throughout his career, he accumulated companions “drawn to him by his humorous and almost feminine traits,” his grandson observed.
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James Wilkinson, who patched things up with Hamilton after their wartime clash, once told Hamilton that he missed his company because “I have never discovered in another [so much] matter to captivate the understanding and manner to charm the heart.”
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In view of the heartless image of Hamilton propagated by political opponents, it is worth noting the numerous acts of generosity strewn throughout his correspondence. Thanking him for an unspecified act of “disinterested friendship,” Morgan Lewis told Hamilton, “Indeed, if my memory does not fail me, I may with truth assert the present [instance as] the only one I ever experienced.”
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After Hamilton bailed out James Tillary with a loan, the New York physician tipped his hat: “You lent me some money to serve me at a time when an act of friendship had embarrassed me, and I now return it to you with a thousand thanks.”
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Hamilton also did favors for humble people, as when he drolly recommended his barber, John Wood, to George Washington’s secretary: “He desires to have the honor of dealing with the heads and chins of some of your family and I give him this line...to make him known to you.”
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Given his imposing responsibilities, it is hard to imagine that Hamilton could have enjoyed a warm, happy social life without Eliza’s support. They created an elegant but unostentatious home filled with lovely furniture, including chairs in Louis XVI style and a Federal mahogany sofa. Among other ornaments, they had a china snuffbox from Frederick the Great (courtesy of Baron von Steuben), a portrait of Louis XVI (a gift from the French ambassador), and, later on, a stately Gilbert Stuart painting of George Washington. From London, Angelica Church showered them with exquisite items, including gold-embossed porcelain tableware and blue-and-gold French flowerpots. Eliza would gladly have devoted herself to private life alone, but she submitted good-naturedly to the demands of her husband’s career. She was always a sprightly presence at tea parties given by Martha Washington. She reminisced in old age:

I had little of private life in those days. Mrs. Washington who, like myself, had a passionate love of home and domestic life, often complained of the “waste of time” she was compelled to endure. “They call me the first lady in the land and I think I must be extremely happy,” she would say almost bitterly at times and add, “They might more properly call me the chief state prisoner.” As I was younger than she, I mingled more in the gaieties of the day.
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Martha Washington’s style of entertaining struck Eliza as possessing just the right amalgam of beauty, taste, and modesty. One of Eliza’s few surviving personal effects is a pair of pink satin slippers that Martha Washington left at the Schuyler mansion and that Eliza gratefully inherited.

As energetic as her husband, Eliza never complained about family demands. By the time Hamilton became treasury secretary, she had already given birth to four of their eight children. Eliza was an excellent housekeeper who ably governed a large household. James McHenry once teased Hamilton about reports that Eliza “has as much merit as your treasurer as you have as treasurer of the wealth of the United States.”
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Hamilton appreciated her steady contributions to his life. In frequent letters to her, he constantly inquired about her in solicitous, protective tones. He seldom mentioned his work, as if wishing to shield her from the rough-and-tumble of politics.

The bulk of the child rearing fell to Eliza, a strict but loving mother. On one occasion, she told a family friend that there is a “hazard in young people having their evenings to themselves until they know there is a friend that will observe and advise them.”
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But even with his time-consuming career, Hamilton did not fob off all the parenting duties on Eliza. When they were in separate cities, he often kept one or two of the older boys with him, allowing them to share his bed at night, while the younger children remained with their mother. Hamilton was a chronic worrier about his family, an emotion perhaps held over from his childhood. Angelica once commented to Eliza about her brother-in-law, “His sensibility suffers from the least anxiety to you or your babies.”
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Hamilton enjoyed tutoring his children. He had high expectations and wanted them to excel—he was, by nature, an exacting, ambitious person—but his handful of surviving letters to them also show patient affection. After his eldest son, Philip, went off at age nine to boarding school in Trenton in 1791, accompanied by Alexander, Jr., Hamilton received a letter from him, saying how contented he was. Hamilton replied:

Your teacher also informs me that you recited a lesson the first day you began, very much to his satisfaction. I expect every letter from him will give me a fresh proof of your progress, for I know you can do a great deal if you please. And I am sure you have too much spirit not to exert yourself that you may make us every day more and more proud of you.
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Hamilton did not assume that his children would emulate his outsize accomplishments and tailored his demands to their native endowments, gently molding their characters. When his daughter Angelica was nine and staying with Grandfather Schuyler in Albany, Hamilton took time from his duties to write this mildly didactic note:

I was very glad to learn, my dear daughter, that you were going to begin the study of the French language. We hope you will in every respect behave in such a manner as will secure to you the goodwill and regard of all those with whom you are. If you happen to displease any of them, be always ready to make a frank apology. But the best way is to act with so much politeness, good manners, and circumspection as never to have an occasion to make any apology. Your mother joins in best love to you. Adieu, my very dear daughter.
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The sensitivity and tact that Hamilton revealed as a father are the more remarkable considering the troubled circumstances of his own childhood, and he made it a point of honor never to break promises to his children.

Hamilton loved the arts and shared this interest with his children. Very musically inclined, he had Angelica Church search London for the best piano she could find for his daughter Angelica. Singing duets became their favorite pastime. Hamilton also had an appreciative eye for art. “I know Hamilton likes the beautiful in every way,” Angelica Church once told Eliza. “The beauties of nature and of art are not lost on him.”
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Hamilton counseled Martha Washington on purchases of paintings and assembled his own collection of woodcuts and copper engravings, including works by Mantegna and Dürer. Just as he and Eliza had rescued Ralph Earl from debtors’ prison in the 1780s, so they later scouted out work for William Winstanley, a British painter specializing in Hudson River scenes. Hamilton loaned money to the young artist and may have been responsible for two of his paintings that graced Martha Washington’s drawing room.

Another leitmotif of Hamilton’s private life was his constant support of educational and scholarly pursuits. On January 21, 1791, he was admitted to the American Philosophical Society, the country’s oldest learned organization. Academic honors tumbled in on this man who had never officially finished college. Already a trustee of Columbia College, he now harvested a succession of honorary doctorates from Columbia, Dartmouth, Princeton, Harvard, and Brown, all before the tender age of forty.

Through his interest in educating native Americans, Hamilton’s name came to adorn a college. During the Revolution, Philip Schuyler had negotiated with Indian tribes around Albany to guarantee their neutrality. For his translator and emissary, he often enlisted the cooperation of the Reverend Samuel Kirkland, a missionary to the six-nation Iroquois League. Especially close to the Oneida, Kirkland wooed them to the patriotic side. Hamilton had championed a humane, enlightened policy toward the Indians. When real-estate speculators had wanted to banish them from western New York, he warned Governor Clinton that the Indians’ friendship “alone can keep our frontiers in peace.... The attempt at the total expulsion of so desultory a people is as chimerical as it would be pernicious.”
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He was often outraged by depredations perpetrated by frontier settlers against the Indians; in one later speech drafted for Washington, he wrote that government policy had been “inadequate to protect the Indians from the violences of the irregular and lawless part of the frontier inhabitants.”
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When problems with the Indians arose, he always favored reconciliation before any resort to force.

With such sympathy for the Indians’ plight, Hamilton was receptive when Kirkland approached him in January 1793 to join the board of trustees of a new school in upstate New York to educate white and native American students. The latter would be taught both English and Indian languages. Kirkland wrote in his journal, “Mr. Hamilton cheerfully consents to be a trustee of the said seminary and will afford it all the aid in his power.”
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That same month, the New York legislature granted a charter for the Hamilton-Oneida Academy. The following year, Baron von Steuben, acting as Hamilton’s ambassador, laid the school’s cornerstone. Hamilton never actually visited the school, but his sponsorship was significant enough that the school was christened Hamilton College when it received a broad new charter in 1812.

The residence law that passed Congress in July 1790, establishing Philadelphia as the interim capital, dictated that all government offices relocate there by early December. The federal government did not decamp all at once but straggled off to Pennsylvania in a disorderly exodus. On August 12, 1790, Congress held its farewell session in Federal Hall; by the end of the month, President Washington had boarded a barge and waved his farewell to Manhattan. On September 1, surely with an audible sigh of relief, Jefferson and Madison fled the sinful haunts of Manhattan and began to roll south across New Jersey in a four-wheeled carriage. Abigail Adams, who did not set sail until November, seemed miffed by the enforced southward shift, swearing that she would try to enjoy Philadelphia but that “when all is done it will not be Broadway.”
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