Alexander Hamilton (32 page)

During the spring and early summer of 1781, Hamilton never slackened in his efforts to wrest a field command from Washington. And yet he refused to admit his bulldog tenacity. In May, he told Washington, with no apparent irony, “I am incapable of wishing to obtain any object by importunity.”
¹⁹
Eliza worried about his safety if he received a field command, while sister Angelica entered into Hamilton’s elaborate ambitions. When Angelica’s husband, John Barker Church, got wind of rumors that Hamilton might obtain an appointment, he coyly informed his brotherin-law that “a certain lady (who has not yet made her appearance this morning) is very anxious for your happiness and glory.”
²⁰

In early July, still panting for a combat role, Hamilton tempted fate by sending Washington a letter containing his commission, thus tacitly threatening to resign if he didn’t get his desired command. It says much about Washington’s high esteem for Hamilton that instead of bridling at this effrontery, he sent Tench Tilghman to him in an accommodating spirit. “This morning Tilghman came to me in his [Washington’s] name, pressed me to retain my commission, with an assurance that he would endeavor by all means to give me a command,” Hamilton told Eliza, who had gone to stay with her family in Albany. “Though I know my Betsey would be happy to hear I had rejected this proposal, it is a pleasure my reputation would not permit me to afford her.”
²¹
Finally, on July 31, Hamilton succeeded in his longstanding quest when he received command of a New York light-infantry battalion and chose Nicholas Fish, his King’s College classmate, as his second in command. With the war nearing its climax, Hamilton knew that Washington had vouchsafed one last coveted chance for battlefield laurels.

If Eliza brooded about her husband’s well-being, Hamilton returned the favor, especially after learning in late spring that Eliza was pregnant with their first child. The New York frontier around Albany had been plundered repeatedly by Tory and Indian raids—in one infamous massacre in 1778, they had mutilated and dismembered thirty-two patriots—and General Schuyler lamented to his son-in-law in May 1781 that the area was “one general scene of ruin and desolation.”
²²
Schuyler himself was especially vulnerable. He had overseen a spy network with such efficiency that the British were plotting to kidnap him at home, as he learned that spring, and he made special arrangements to have an Albany guard hasten to his aid in case of emergency.

On August 7, about twenty Tories and Indians barged into the Schuyler mansion, overpowered the sleeping guards, seized weapons in the cellar, and surrounded the house. (Angelica had removed some weapons to the cellar when she found her little boy playing with them.) General Schuyler retreated to an upstairs bedroom, where, using a prearranged signal, he fired his pistol out the window to summon help. Mrs. Schuyler and her daughters were so horrified—“some hanging on [General Schuyler’s] arms and others embracing his knees in the most distressing terror and uncertainty,” reported one eyewitness—that the general was trapped by his clinging family.
²³
Then the women remembered that Mrs. Schuyler’s infant daughter, Catherine, had been left in a cradle by the front door. Since both Eliza and Angelica were pregnant, sister Peggy crept downstairs to retrieve the endangered child. The leader of the raiding party barred her way with a musket.

“Wench, wench! Where is your master?” he demanded.
“Gone to alarm the town,” the coolheaded Peggy said.
²⁴
The intruder, fearing that Schuyler would return with troops, fled in alarm.
²⁵

Legend maintains that one Indian hurled a tomahawk at Peggy’s head as she trotted up the stairs with the baby in her arms; to this day the mahogany banister bears what are thought to be scars from the blade. Hamilton was shocked by the news: “I have received, my beloved Betsey, your letter informing me of the happy escape of your father. He showed an admirable presence of mind....My heart . . . has felt all the horror and anguish attached to the idea of your being yourself and seeing your father in the power of ruffians.”
²⁶

Until early August, Washington had been planning a siege of New York City, so Hamilton did not expect to be too distant from Eliza during her pregnancy. Then in mid-August, Washington learned that the comte de Grasse, admiral of the French fleet in the West Indies, planned to sail for Chesapeake Bay. This sensational piece of news dovetailed with another that promised a decisive military action: Lafayette informed him that General Cornwallis was now entrenched at Yorktown, surrounded by water on three sides. This made the spot, from one perspective, a perfect fortress—and from another a perfect trap. Washington had wanted to deal the coup de grâce to the British in New York and recoup his earlier losses by reclaiming Manhattan and Long Island. The comte de Rochambeau dashed this plan, citing problems posed by shallow waters outside New York harbor and the British fortifications on Manhattan. So with some reluctance, Washington agreed to hazard all by moving additional men to the Chesapeake to link up with Lafayette and de Grasse’s fleet in choking off Cornwallis’s army.

In late August, Hamilton informed Eliza indiscreetly that he and part of the army would be moving to Virginia. (The move was still a military secret.) He refused to quit his troops or request a leave to see his bride. “I must go without seeing you,” he wrote three days after the New York troops began to march south. “I must go without embracing you. Alas I must go.” He remained, however, the dreamy newlywed. “I am more greedy of your love” than a miser of his gold, he continued. “It is the food of my hopes, the object of my wishes, the only enjoyment of my life.”
²⁷
On September 6, he divulged to Eliza the army’s destination—“tomorrow we embark for Yorktown”—and sounded confident of victory. In a poetic conceit that he often played with but never acted upon, he toyed with abandoning worldly pursuits to luxuriate in her company: “Every day confirms me in the intention of renouncing public life and devoting myself wholly to you. Let others waste their time and their tranquillity in a vain pursuit of power and glory. Be it my object to be happy in a quiet retreat with my better angel.”
²⁸
Like other founders and Enlightenment politicians, Hamilton could never quite admit the depth of his ambition, lest it cast doubts on his revolutionary purity. In the midst of such rarefied goals as freedom and independence, who could admit to baser motives or any thoughts of personal gain?

Washington had also balked at the Yorktown plan because he wondered how he could move his hungry, bedraggled troops long distances along muddy roads without advertising his intentions to the British. He solved this dilemma ingeniously, marching foot soldiers southward in parallel lines, at staggered intervals, to mislead the enemy about his intentions. Washington knew that he had a singular chance to strike a mortal blow against the British if he could coordinate the massive movements of men and ships. With unerring precision, he guided his two thousand men and de Rochambeau’s four thousand so they would rendezvous in Virginia with twenty-nine large “ships of the line” and three thousand troops brought from the West Indies by Admiral de Grasse, supplemented by seven thousand Americans already in place under Lafayette. To Washington’s jubilation, Admiral de Grasse showed up even before he did, a fact that made the reserved Washington literally jump for joy. When Washington boarded the admiral’s flagship, the
Ville de Paris
— a resplendent triple decker with 120 guns—the Frenchman teased his towering American counterpart by calling him “Mon cher petit général!”
²⁹

In late September, Hamilton and his light infantry reached Williamsburg, the staging area for the Yorktown siege, where he enjoyed an exuberant reunion with a trio of old friends: Lafayette, then convalescing from malaria; John Laurens, just back from Paris with arms, ammunition, and a large French subsidy negotiated by Benjamin Franklin; and Lieutenant Colonel Francis Barber, his teacher from Elizabethtown days, who had been wounded at Monmouth and had fought valiantly throughout the war.

On September 28, Hamilton and his men trudged toward Yorktown, through deep woods that opened intermittently to reveal fields of corn and tobacco. When they arrived the next day, the siege had just commenced. Dug in on high ground, Cornwallis had been throwing up earthwork redoubts since early August, employing thousands of slaves who had defected to the British lines in expectation of earning their freedom. In all, he built ten outlying defensive strongholds; two would have caught the attention of Hamilton and his men at once: numbers nine and ten stood closer to allied troops than the others. It was here that Hamilton was finally to have his oft-postponed appointment with military glory.

By October 6, expert French engineers, aided by fine autumnal weather, began to carve out two deep, parallel trenches about six hundred yards from the British lines, to seal Cornwallis and his famished, fever-racked men inside a trap. Military custom dictated a small celebration when the first trench was completed. Hamilton and his men were drafted for this honor and had no sooner disappeared into the long ditch, amid swirling flags and thudding drums, than the British let loose cannon fire. With a bit of completely unnecessary bravado, Hamilton issued an outlandish order. Perhaps knowing his men were beyond the range of small-arms fire, he brought them out of the trench and onto exposed ground, where he put them through parade-ground drills before the flabbergasted British. Luckily, the British didn’t—or couldn’t—mow them down. Of this irresponsible performance, one subordinate, Captain James Duncan, wrote in his diary: “Colonel Hamilton gave these orders, and, although I esteem him one of the first officers in the American army, must beg in this instance to think he wantonly exposed the lives of his men.”
³⁰

By October 9, the allies began to bombard Cornwallis, with Washington himself touching off the first volley of cannon fire. Day and night, the cannonade exploded with such unrelenting fury that one lieutenant in the Royal Navy said, “It seemed as though the heavens should split.” As the din grew “almost unendurable,” this British officer saw “men lying nearly everywhere who were mortally wounded, whose heads, arms, and legs had been shot off. The distressing cries of the wounded and the lamentable suffering of the inhabitants whose dwellings were chiefly in flames” added to an omnipresent sense of danger.
³¹

By October 14, the second parallel trench had been nearly completed and only redoubts nine and ten needed to be overrun to complete it. These defenses bristled with sharpened trees poised to impale any invading troops. Addressing his men on horseback, Washington explained that the siege could not advance farther unless these two positions were taken by simultaneous bayonet attacks. Any delay would only enhance the likelihood that British rescue vessels might arrive in time to evacuate Cornwallis. Washington fraternally decided that one redoubt would be taken by a light-infantry brigade commanded by the French and the other by the Continental Army under Lafayette. Lafayette tapped his personal aide, Jean-Joseph Sourbader de Gimat, to spearhead the charge, a selection that scarcely produced the bipartisan Franco-American amity intended by Washington.

For Hamilton, who had envisioned this moment since his clerkship on St. Croix, Lafayette’s choice of Gimat threatened to rob him of his last great chance to fight. Mustering all his fire and eloquence, he pleaded again with Washington by letter, pointing out that he had seniority over Gimat and that, as officer of the day projected for the attack, he enjoyed priority. At this point, Washington decided either that Hamilton was an implacable force or that Gimat was too French to represent the Continental Army. Nicholas Fish shared a tent with Hamilton at Yorktown and remembered his friend bursting in gleefully after visiting Washington. “We have it!” Hamilton shouted. “We have it!”
³²
Hamilton was to command three battalions led by Gimat, Fish, and Laurens.

Hamilton’s appointment at Yorktown has been shadowed by scurrilous gossip, mostly peddled by John Adams. Years later, Adams told his friend Benjamin Rush that Hamilton blackmailed Washington to get the command: “Hamilton flew into a violent passion and demanded the command of the party for himself and declared, if he had it not, he would expose General Washington’s conduct in a pamphlet.”
³³
It is true that Hamilton sometimes spoke disparagingly about Washington’s military abilities, but only in private. It is inconceivable that Hamilton would have resorted to threats against Washington or that the latter would have yielded to them or that their relationship would have survived such extortion for another eighteen years of the most intimate collaboration.

A portrait by Alonzo Chappell of Hamilton at the Yorktown siege presents him in an unexpected pose. He stands by a cannon in a plumed hat, sunk in thought, his arms folded, and his eyes downcast. More the man of thought than of action, he gives no clue to the theatrics he was shortly to perform in the frenzy of battle. Two days before exposing himself to enemy fire, Hamilton wrote to Eliza, now five months pregnant, a lighthearted letter that attempted to assuage her worries. He chided her for not matching his output of twenty letters in seven weeks and said she could make amends only one way: “You shall engage shortly to present me with
a boy.
You will ask me if a girl will not answer the purpose. By no means. I fear, with all the mother’s charms, she may inherit the caprices of her father and then she will enslave, tantalize and plague one half [the] sex.”
³⁴

To expedite the siege, Washington decided to seize redoubts nine and ten with bayonets instead of pounding them slowly into submission with cannon. French soldiers were to overrun the redoubt on the left while Hamilton’s light infantry stormed the one on the right. After nightfall on October 14, the allies fired several consecutive shells in the air that brilliantly illuminated the sky. Hamilton and his men then rose from their trenches and raced with fixed bayonets toward redoubt ten, sprinting across a quarter-mile of landscape pocked and rutted from exploding shells. For the sake of silence, surprise, and soldierly pride, they had unloaded their guns to take the position with bayonets alone. Dodging heavy fire, they let out war whoops that startled their enemies. “They made such a terrible yell and loud cheering,” said one Hessian soldier, “that one believed the whole wild hunt had broken out.”
³⁵
Hamilton and his men ran so fast that they almost overtook the sappers, who were snapping off the edges of the sharpened tree branches and opening a breach through which the infantry rushed. Hamilton, hopping on the shoulder of a kneeling soldier, sprang onto the enemy parapet and summoned his men to follow. Their password was “Rochambeau”—“a good one,” said one American, because it “sounds like ‘Rush-on-boys’ when pronounced quick.”
³⁶