Alexander Hamilton (29 page)

Hamilton was totally credulous in the face of this designing woman. Instead of being wary in a wartime situation, he converted Peggy Arnold’s situation into a stage romance. His tenderness for an abandoned wife may have owed something to his boyhood sympathy for his mother, and this episode prefigured a still more damaging event in which he evinced misplaced compassion for a seemingly abandoned woman.

Washington issued a passport to Mrs. Arnold that allowed her to return home to Philadelphia. She made a stop in Paramus, New Jersey, where she stayed at the Hermitage, the home of Mrs. Theodosia Prevost, whose husband was a British colonel sent to the West Indies. Once the two women were alone, Mrs. Arnold told her friend how she had made fools of Washington, Hamilton, and the others and that she was tired of the theatrics she had been forced to affect. She expressed disgust with the patriotic cause and told of prodding her husband into the scheme to surrender West Point. The source of this story, printed many years later, was the man who was to be Theodosia Prevost’s next husband: Aaron Burr.

That Hamilton adhered to a code of gentlemanly honor was confirmed in yet another sideshow of the Benedict Arnold affair: the arrest of Major John André, adjutant general of the British Army and Arnold’s contact, traveling under the nom de guerre John Anderson. As he awaited a hearing to decide his fate, he was confined at a tavern in Tappan, New York. Though seven years younger than André, Hamilton developed a sympathy for the prisoner born of admiration and visited him several times. A letter that Hamilton later wrote to Laurens reveals his nearly worshipful attitude toward the elegant, cultured André, who was conversant with poetry, music, and painting. Hamilton identified with André’s misfortune in a personal manner, as if he saw his own worst nightmare embodied in his fate:

To an excellent understanding, well improved by education and travel, [André] united a peculiar elegance of mind and manners and the advantage of a pleasing person....By his merit, he had acquired the unlimited confidence of his general and was making a rapid progress in military rank and reputation. But in the height of his career, flushed with new hopes from the execution of a project the most beneficial to his party that could be devised, he was at once precipitated from the summit of prosperity and saw all the expectations of his ambition blasted and himself ruined.
⁵⁵

Did Hamilton think that he, too, having attained such eminence, would suddenly plunge headlong back to earth?

The fate of Major André became the subject of a heated dispute between Hamilton and Washington over whether he had acted as a spy or as a liaison officer between the British command and Arnold. This semantic debate had practical significance. If André was a spy, he would hang from the gallows like a common criminal; whereas if he was merely an unlucky officer, he would be shot like a gentleman. Such distinctions mattered both to André and to Hamilton. Hamilton argued that André wasn’t a spy, since he had planned to meet Arnold on neutral territory and was lured by Arnold behind patriotic lines against his intentions. A board of general officers convened by Washington disagreed, ruling that because André had come ashore secretly, assuming a fake name and civilian costume, he had functioned as a spy and should die like one. Washington certified the board’s decision. He was adamant that André’s mission could have doomed the patriotic cause and feared that anything less than summary execution would imply some lack of conviction about his guilt.

It may have been Hamilton who sent a secret letter to Sir Henry Clinton on September 30, proposing a swap of André for Arnold. The author tried to disguise his handwriting and signed the letter “A.B.” (coincidentally, Aaron Burr’s initials). But Clinton had no doubt of its provenance and scrawled across it, “Hamilton, W[ashington] aide de camp, received after A[ndré] death.”
⁵⁶
Clinton refused to consider a trade, which would have meant instant death for Arnold at the hands of vengeful patriots.

The decision to execute Major André was not the only time Hamilton regretted a choice by Washington, yet it was one time when he disagreed openly and consistently. “The death of André could not have been dispensed with,” Hamilton conceded to Major General Henry Knox nearly two years later, “but it must still be viewed at a distance as an act of
rigid justice.
”
⁵⁷
Hamilton’s dissent betrayed growing frustration with Washington’s inflexibility, frustration that was presently to flare into open rebellion.

Major André faced his end with grace and valor. At five o’clock in the afternoon on the day after the board’s decision, he was led to a hilltop gibbet outside of Tappan. When he saw the gallows, he reeled slightly. “I am reconciled to my death,” he said, “though I detest the mode.”
⁵⁸
Unaided, he mounted a coffin that lay in a wagon drawn up under the scaffold. With great dignity, he tightened the rope around his own neck and blindfolded himself with his own handkerchief. Then the wagon bolted away, leaving André swinging from the rope. He was buried on the spot. Hamilton left a moving if romanticized description of his death:

In going to the place of execution, he bowed familiarly as he went along to all those with whom he had been acquainted in his confinement. A smile of complacency expressed the serene fortitude of his mind....Upon being told the final moment was at hand and asked if he had anything to say, he answered, “Nothing but to request you will witness to the world that I die like a brave man.”
⁵⁹

Hamilton’s description shows his abiding fascination with a beautiful, noble death. “I am aware that a man of real merit is never seen in so favourable a light as seen through the medium of adversity,” he concluded in his letter to Laurens. “The clouds that surround him are shades that set off his good qualities.”
⁶⁰

Major John André represented some beau ideal for Hamilton. The reverse side of this adulation, however, was a lacerating sense of personal inadequacy that the world seldom saw. However loaded with superabundant talent, Hamilton was a mass of insecurities that he usually kept well hidden. He always had to fight the residual sadness of the driven man, the unspoken melancholy of the prodigy, the wounds left by his accursed boyhood. Only to John Laurens and Eliza Schuyler did he confide his fears. Right after André’s death, Hamilton wrote to Schuyler that he wished he had André’s accomplishments.
I do not, my love, affect modesty. I am conscious of [the] advantages I possess. I know I have talents and a good heart, but why am I not handsome? Why have I not every acquirement that can embellish human nature? Why have I not fortune, that I might hereafter have more leisure than I shall have to cultivate those improvements for which I am not entirely unfit?
⁶¹

It was a peculiar outburst: Hamilton was expressing envy for a man who had just been executed. Only in such passages do we see that Hamilton, for all his phenomenal success in the Continental Army, still felt unlucky and unlovely, still cursed by his past.

During the summer and fall preceding Hamilton’s wedding in December 1780, he sometimes mooned about in a romantic haze, very much the lovesick swain. “Love is a sort of insanity,” he told Schuyler, “and every thing I write savors strongly of it.”
⁶²
In frequent letters to “his saucy little charmer,” he reassured her that he thought about her constantly.
⁶³
“ ’Tis a pretty story indeed that I am to be thus monopolized by a little
nut brown maid
like you and [am] from a soldier metamorphosed into a puny lover.”
⁶⁴
He would steal away from crowds, he told her, and stroll down solitary lanes to swoon over her image. “You are certainly a little sorceress and have bewitched me, for you have made me disrelish everything that used to please me.”
⁶⁵

As the wedding approached, Hamilton succumbed to anxieties about the future, and he sent Schuyler the most candid letters of his life. He was now optimistic about the war and thought the Continental Army, backed by French naval power, might yet snatch victory by year’s end. Should the patriots lose, however, Hamilton suggested that they live in “some other clime more favourable to human rights” and suggested Geneva as a possibility. He then made a confession: “I was once determined to let my existence and American liberty end together. My Betsey has given me a motive to outlive my pride.”
⁶⁶
The sweet, retiring Schuyler would rescue him from the self-destructive fantasies that had long held sway over his imagination.

At the same time, the jittery Hamilton was beset by serious doubts about the wedding. All along, he had saluted Schuyler’s beauty, frankness, tender heart, and good sense. Now he wanted more. “I entreat you, my charmer, not to neglect the charges I gave you, particularly that of taking care of yourself and that of employing all your leisure in reading. Nature has been very kind to you. Do not neglect to cultivate her gifts and to enable yourself to make the distinguished figure in all respects to which you are entitled to aspire.”
⁶⁷
As he tutored Schuyler in selfimprovement, there was a Pygmalion dimension to his wishes, but he also worried that her love might cool and scuttle the wedding. In one letter, he related to her a dream he’d had of arriving in Albany and finding her asleep on the grass, with a strange gentleman holding her hand. “As you may imagine,” he wrote, “I reproached him with his presumption and asserted my claim.”
⁶⁸
To his relief, Schuyler in the dream awoke, flew into his arms, and allayed his fears with a convincing kiss.

Those who saw Hamilton as shrewdly marrying into a great fortune would have been surprised that he did not count on the Schuyler money and beseeched Eliza to consider whether she could endure a more austere life. Referring to the subscription fund set up by his St. Croix sponsors, he lamented the “knavery” of those managing his money. “They have already filed down what was in their hands more than one half, and I am told they go on diminishing it.” Thus, Schuyler should be prepared for anything: “Your future rank in life is a perfect lottery. You may move in an exalted, you may move in a very humble sphere. The last is most probable. Examine well your heart.” Pressing the matter further, he then asked her:

Tell me, my pretty damsel, have you made up your mind upon the subject of housekeeping? Do you soberly relish the pleasure of being a poor man’s wife? Have you learned to think a homespun preferable to a brocade and the rumbling of a wagon wheel to the musical rattling of a coach and six? Will you be able to see with perfect composure your old acquaintances, flaunting it in gay life, tripping it along in elegance and splendor, while you hold a humble station and have no other enjoyments than the sober comforts of a good wife?...If you cannot, my dear, we are playing a comedy of all in the wrong and you should correct the mistake before we begin to act the tragedy of the unhappy couple.
⁶⁹

There is no hint here that Eliza was the daughter of a man whom Hamilton described as a gentleman of “large fortune and no less personal and public consequences.”
⁷⁰
Hamilton was too proud to sponge off the Schuylers—who would turn out, in any event, to be less affluent than legend held.

Hamilton’s prenuptial letters to Schuyler hint at a young man exposed to deprivation at an early age. He had seen too much discontent to approach marriage optimistically. In one letter, he delivered a cynical view of both sexes and asked whether she could endure a hard life:

But be assured, my angel, it is not a diffidence of my Betsey’s heart but of a
female
heart that dictated the questions. I am ready to believe everything in favour of yours, but am restrained by the experience I have had of human nature and the softer part of it. Some of your sex possess every requisite to please, delight, and inspire esteem, friendship, and affection. But there are too few of this description. We are full of vices. They are full of weaknesses[,]... and though I am satisfied whenever I trust my senses and my judgment that you are one of the exceptions, I cannot forbear having moments when I feel a disposition to make a more perfect discovery of your temper and character....Do not, however, I entreat you, suppose that I entertain an ill opinion of all your sex. I have a much worse [opinion] of my own.
⁷¹

Throughout this correspondence, George Washington’s exacting presence hovered in the background. “I would go on, but the General summons me to ride,” Hamilton ended one letter.
⁷²
Since both he and Washington frowned on laxity during military campaigns, he refused to take a leave of absence to visit Schuyler. When Hamilton rode off to Albany in late November 1780 for the wedding, it was the first vacation he had taken in nearly five years of warfare.

Situated on a bluff above the Hudson River, Albany was still a rough-hewn town of four thousand inhabitants, about one-tenth of them slaves, and was enclosed by stands of virgin pine. Even as English influence overtook New York City, Albany retained its early Dutch character, reflected in the gabled houses. Dutch remained the chief language, and the Schuylers sat through long Dutch sermons at the Reformed Church every Sunday. In many respects, Eliza, who loved to sew and garden, was typical of the young Dutch women of her generation who were domestic and self-effacing, thrifty in managing households, and eager to raise large broods of children.

We have little sense of what Hamilton truly thought of his mother-in-law, Catherine Van Rensselaer Schuyler. Not long after marrying Philip Schuyler during the French and Indian War, she sat for a portrait that shows a striking, dark-eyed woman with a long, elegant neck and broad bosom. One contemporary described her as a “lady of great beauty, shape, and gentility.”
⁷³
By the time of Hamilton’s wedding, however, she had settled into being a stout Dutch housewife. When the marquis de Chastellux visited the Schuylers that snowy December, he left with an indelible impression of Mrs. Schuyler as a dragoness who governed the house, intimidating her husband. The wary Frenchman decided that it was “best not to treat her in too cavalier a fashion” and concluded that General Schuyler was “more amiable when he is absent from his wife.”
⁷⁴
If Mrs. Schuyler, forty-seven, was less than hospitable, it may have been because she was seven months pregnant with her youngest daughter, Catherine, the last of twelve times she endured childbirth. She was visibly pregnant at the time of her daughter’s wedding.