Alexander Hamilton (150 page)

A painting of Eliza from later years shows a woman with a strong but kindly face and a firm, determined mouth. Her silver hair was parted down the middle under her widow’s cap, and her dark eyes were still large and girlishly bright. “Her face is delicate but full of nerve and spirit. The eyes are very dark and hold the life and energy of the restraining face,” said Jessie Benton Frémont, who marveled at Eliza’s unabated vigor.
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“When I first lived on the Hudson River, quite near her son’s home, it was still remembered how the old lady, past eighty, would leave the train at a way station and climb two fences in her shortcut across meadows, rather than go on to the town where the carriage could meet her.”
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Her willpower and spunk surprised people. At one anniversary celebration of the Orphan Asylum Society, Eliza, then in her nineties, materialized, to everyone’s amazement—“a very small, upright little figure in deep black, never altered from the time her dark hair was first framed by the widow’s cap, until now the hair was white as the cap.”
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Frémont noted how she “retains in an astonishing degree her faculties and converses with much of that ease and brilliancy which lent so peculiar a charm to her younger days.”
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In 1848, the ninety-one-year-old Eliza moved to Washington, D.C., to live with her younger daughter, Eliza, who was now widowed after the death of her husband, Sidney Augustus Holly. At their H Street residence near the White House, Eliza Hamilton cherished her status as a relic of the American Revolution. Like her husband, she was a committed abolitionist who delighted in entertaining slave children from the neighborhood, and she referred derisively to the slaveholding states as the “African States.” Always busy knitting or making mats, she was an irresistible curiosity to visitors and a coveted ornament at White House dinners. “Mrs. General Hamilton, upon whom I waited at table, is a very remarkable person,” President James K. Polk reported in his diary after one such dinner in February 1846. “She retains her intellect and memory perfectly, and my conversation with her was highly interesting.”
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Eliza aided her friend Dolley Madison in raising money to construct the Washington Monument and remained sharp and alert until the end. When historian Benson J. Lossing interviewed her when she was ninety-one, he found her anything but tearful or morose: “The sunny cheerfulness of her temper and quiet humor…still made her deportment genial and attractive.”
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During the winter of 1852–1853, Eliza and her daughter enjoyed the company of a young relative named Elizabeth Hawley, who was startled by the constant stream of visitors who showed up at their doorstep. On the morning of New Year’s Day 1853, the young woman was disheartened by the gray skies and the apparent paucity of gentleman callers. But before noon, “the sky cleared and the tide of visitors flowed in,” she wrote to her aunt. “The rooms were crowded all day and we received several hundred call[er]s…. Gentlemen brought their children to see Mrs. Hamilton, many called who went to no other place, and as you are fond of hearing all, I wish I had room to tell you the names of the most distinguished senators, members, etc.” General Winfield Scott showed up, looking dashing in his uniform, followed by New York senator William H. Seward. Then the dense throng parted, and, to the young woman’s amazement, President Millard Fillmore advanced across the room toward Eliza. “I had heard he was thinner than when I saw him, but I never saw him looking stouter or handsomer. He sat with Mrs. Hamilton some time and asked her to appoint some time to dine with him.”
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When the ninety-five-year-old Eliza dined at the White House a month later, she made a grand entrance with her daughter. President Fillmore fussed over her, and the first lady gave up her chair to her. Everybody was eager to touch a living piece of American history.

A devout woman, Eliza never lost her faith that she and Hamilton would be gloriously reunited in the afterlife. She prized a small envelope that Hamilton had once sent her, with a romantic inscription emblazoned across the back: “I heal all wounds but those which love hath made.”
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For Eliza, those wounds had never healed. On November 9, 1854—a turbulent year in which the Kansas-Nebraska Act was enacted and the union that Hamilton had done so much to forge stood gravely threatened—Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton died at age ninety-seven. Her widowhood had lasted fifty years, or slightly longer than her life before the duel. She was buried where she had always longed to be: right beside her Hamilton in the Trinity Churchyard.

A
cknowledgments

Any biographer foolhardy enough to attempt an authoritative life of Alexander Hamilton must tread a daunting maze of detail. Matters that at first seem susceptible to easy solution prove slippery indeed. Hence, my special gratitude to the generous people who provided guidance. During the early stages of my research, I had a part-time assistant, Daniel Wein, who extracted countless articles and book excerpts and was a delightful, stimulating luncheon companion. After that period, I enlisted research assistants only for isolated projects that would have required extensive travel.

The most opaque portion of Hamilton’s life is obviously his myth-shrouded boyhood on Nevis and St. Croix, where the intrepid biographer must cope with brown, brittle documents and ledgers devoured by illiterate insects. Many pertinent eighteenth-century documents have also been obliterated by hurricanes, war, neglect, and other mishaps.

To track down those elusive phantoms James Hamilton and Rachel Faucette Lavien, I drew on the help of many people. In St. Croix, I am especially indebted to William Cissel, a first-class historian and park ranger at the Christiansvaern fort, who identified the prison cell that had held Hamilton’s mother and also served up a graphic account of her misery. My thanks as well to Carol Wakefield and Barbara Hagan-Smith at the Whim Library of the St. Croix Landmarks Society. It was there that I stumbled upon Hamilton’s prolific freelance journalism for the
Royal Danish American Gazette.
Patricia Ramirez assisted me at the Florence A. S. Williams Library in Christiansted, while Edgar Lake and William Wallace jogged my imagination as to the lasting impact upon Hamilton of his Caribbean origins. Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Barbara Armstrong Jamieson supplied me with some island history.

In Nevis, I enjoyed the hospitality of Joan Robinson of the Museum of Nevis History (the re-created Alexander Hamilton house), Lornette Hanley of the Nevis Historical and Conservation Society, and Mova David in the local registrar’s office. On neighboring St. Kitts, I was able to search the government archives thanks to Victoria Borg O’Flaherty and her daughter, Tamara. Beverly Smith helped at the Von Scholten Collection of the Enid M. Baa Library and Archives on St. Thomas. My friend and special emissary Emily Altman volunteered for research duty on Trinidad and Tobago, where Nadia Gajadhar also rendered assistance.

Perhaps the most surprising finds came in a distant corner of the Caribbean: St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Through the courteous cooperation of Eldon Millington and Dr. Earl Kirby on St. Vincent, I was able to locate the deed that documented the impoverished existence of James Hamilton on Bequia. The Bequia Tourism Association steered me to two local historians, Rodger Durham and Nolbert Simmons, who alerted me to the 1776 map in the Library of Congress that pinpointed the exact location of James Hamilton’s property.

To extend my Caribbean research, I hired Tim Guest, a young English writer, who reviewed numerous colonial papers at the Public Record Office at Kew, while Rikke Vindberg, a history student at the University of Copenhagen, pored over papers related to St. Croix in the Danish national archives. (Judith Goldstein and Bo Lidegaard provided entrée in Denmark.) Paul Jenkins and M. H. Kaufman of the Royal Medical Society in Edinburgh contributed information about Hamilton’s childhood friend Edward Stevens. Thanks to the combined efforts of three people in South Carolina—Liz Newcombe of the Charleston County Public Library, Carey Lucas Nikonchuk of the South Carolina Historical Society, and Judge Kenneth Fulp of the Beaufort County Probate Court—I was able to locate the will of Hamilton’s half brother, Peter Lavien. Carol Kahn Strauss and Dana Ledger at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York helped me ponder the intriguing question of whether Johann Michael Lavien was of Jewish ancestry.

To probe the Scottish background of James Hamilton, I traveled to Glasgow and was able to verify his early trade apprenticeship in the Division of Business Records and Family History at the splendid Mitchell Library. At the North Ayrshire Archives in Ardrossan, Jill McColl, Elizabeth Bell, Peggy O’Brien, and John Millar plied me with local lore and directed me to the ruins of Kerelaw Castle, where James Hamilton grew up.

It is impossible to discuss Hamilton’s West Indian boyhood without encountering the subject of his racial identity. Despite an absence of evidence, the presumption remains widespread among many in the Caribbean and the African-American community that Hamilton, as an illegitimate West Indian orphan, must have been partly black. So formidable a black scholar as W. E. B. DuBois referred to him proudly as “our own Hamilton.” Far from resisting this thesis, I was eager to test it and either confirm it or lay it to rest. I consulted two of the world’s top geneticists—Dr. Victor McKusick of The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Sir Alec J. Jeffreys of the University of Leicester—to determine whether a surviving lock of Hamilton’s hair might yield up secrets about his racial ancestry. They persuaded me that genetic testing wouldn’t furnish conclusive answers, and I decided it might only confuse the issue. I then discovered that a retired professor at Pennsylvania State University, Gordon Hamilton (no descendant of Alexander), was coordinating a Hamilton DNA Project intended to trace genetic linkages among the extended Hamilton family. Hoping that such a project might provide answers about Hamilton’s paternity—specifically, whether he was the son of James Hamilton or of Thomas Stevens—I offered to pay for the genetic testing of any direct Hamilton descendants. The results are pending.

Another will-o’-the-wisp during my research was whether Hamilton had fathered an illegitimate mulatto child. This extraordinary tale was first brought to my attention by Donald Yacovone, an assistant editor of
The Black Abolitionist Papers,
who pointed out that William Hamilton (1773–1836), a free black carpenter and a noted journalist and abolitionist before the Civil War, claimed to be Hamilton’s son. I explored this prospect with several well-qualified parties—Roy Finkenbine, director of the Black Abolitionist Archives of the University of Detroit Mercy; Robert F. Gibson of the New York Genealogical and Biological Society; W. E. B. DuBois biographer David Levering Lewis; Christopher Moore and Howard Dodson of the Schomburg Center in Harlem; and Brent Staples of
The New York Times,
who has written on racial identity in American history. While I remain dubious about William Hamilton’s claim—he was born in 1773, the hectic year that Hamilton escaped from St. Croix and began intense preparation for college in Elizabeth-town, New Jersey—the paucity of evidence makes it impossible to deliver a final verdict. The matter seemed too tenuous to merit inclusion in the text.

As a New York resident, I found myself in fertile territory for Hamilton research. The Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the Butler Library at Columbia University holds massive Hamilton resources. While compiling the collected papers for Columbia University Press, Harold Syrett and his team gathered a vast trove of Hamilton-related documents. In addition, many Hamilton family members deposited papers there, permitting discoveries in private letters and on old scraps of paper. My thanks to Jean Ashton and the library’s pleasant, efficient staff. Marilyn Pettit, the director of University Archives at the Columbiana Library, alerted me to her useful doctoral dissertation, which situates Eliza Hamilton in the milieu of evangelical women activists in early-nineteenth-century New York. Poul Jensen, president of Graham Windham Services, the successor organization to the Orphan Asylum Society cofounded by Eliza, allowed me to delve into the organization’s early records, with the assistance of Susan Gunn of the Graham School.

The highly professional staffs of the New-York Historical Society and the New York Public Library shepherded me through numerous manuscript collections, including those relating to the duel. The New-York Historical Society houses the papers of both Hamilton’s second, Nathaniel Pendleton, and Burr’s second, William P. Van Ness, permitting a fully rounded view of events from firsthand sources. The society’s superb collection of historical newspapers permitted my discovery of Hamilton’s undergraduate “Monitor” essays as well as his 1796 “Phocion” essays with their eye-opening comments on Adams, Jefferson, and slavery. Valerie Komor provided much-appreciated help in tracking down historical images. Besides Hamilton and Schuyler family papers, the New York Public Library has abundant pamphlets showing the ample stock of slurs made against Burr in the 1804 election and revealing just how many “despicable opinions” Hamilton could have drawn upon. I also want to thank the staffs of the Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site in Albany and the Schuyler House in Schuylerville, New York.

In pursuit of fresh materials about the duel, I approached J. P. Morgan Chase, which owns the brace of dueling pistols with the best claim to authenticity. Jean Elliott and Shelley M. Diamond allowed me to sift through bank documents pertaining to the purchase of the pistols and also arranged for me to lift and aim them. (Nobody, luckily, was killed.) An unexpectedly good source on the duel was the Weehawken Free Public Library, where Eric Negron supplied me with two fascinating folders of articles on the history of the local dueling ground.