Alexander Hamilton (29 page)

John Trumbull’s portrait of Angelica shows a fetching woman with a long, pale face, dark eyes, and a pretty, full-lipped mouth who is voguishly dressed and looks more sophisticated than Eliza. Angelica had a more mysterious femininity than her sister, the kind that often exerts a powerful hold on the male imagination. A playful seductress, she loved to engage in repartee, discuss books, strum the guitar, and talk about current affairs. She was to serve as muse to some of the smartest politicians of her day, including Thomas Jefferson, Robert R. Livingston, and, most of all, Hamilton. Angelica was one of the few American women of her generation as comfortable in a European drawing room as in a Hudson River parlor, and there was a gossipy irreverence about her that seemed very European. Unlike Eliza, she learned to speak perfect French. Where Eliza bowed reluctantly to the social demands of Hamilton’s career, Angelica applauded his ambitions and was always famished for news of his latest political exploits.

For the next twenty-four years, Angelica expressed open fondness for Hamilton in virtually every letter that she sent to her sister or to Hamilton himself. Hamilton always wrote to her in a buoyant, flirtatious tone. Especially as his mind grew burdened with affairs of state, Angelica provided an outlet for his boyish side. To Eliza he wrote tenderly and lovingly, but seldom in the arch voice of gallantry. It is hard to escape the impression that Hamilton’s married life was sometimes a curious ménage à trois with two sisters who were only one year apart. Angelica must have sensed that her incessant adoration of Hamilton, far from annoying or threatening her beloved younger sister, filled her with ecstatic pride. Their shared love for Hamilton seemed to deepen their sisterly bond. Ironically, Eliza’s special attachment to Angelica gave Hamilton a cover for expressing affection for Angelica that would certainly have been forbidden with other women.

For a daring woman drawn to intellectual men, Angelica made a strange choice in marrying John Barker Church, a short man with shining eyes and thick lips who only grew fatter with the years. In 1776, he had been sent to Albany by Congress to audit the books of the army’s Northern Department, then commanded by General Schuyler. While there, he managed both to woo Angelica and antagonize her father. John B. Church was then using the pseudonym of John B. Carter, and Schuyler scented something suspicious. Schuyler’s instincts proved correct: Church had changed his name and fled to America, possibly after a duel with a Tory politician in London; some accounts have him on the lam from creditors after a bankruptcy brought on by gambling and stock speculation. Knowing that he would be denied parental consent, Church eloped with Angelica in 1777, and the Schuylers were predictably incensed.

Church amassed fantastic wealth during the Revolution. “Mr. Carter is the mere man of business,” James McHenry told Hamilton, “and I am informed has riches enough, with common management, to make the longest life comfortable.”
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He and his business partner, Jeremiah Wadsworth, negotiated lucrative contracts to sell supplies to the French and American forces. Hamilton spoke highly of Church as “a man of fortune and integrity, of strong mind, very exact, very active, and very much a man of business.”
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Yet Church’s letters present a cold businessman, devoid of warmth or humor. Very involved in politics, he could be tactless in expressing his opinions. One observer remembered him as “revengeful and false” after General Howe burned several American villages and towns. Church said he wanted to cut off the heads of the British generals and to “pickle them and to put them in small barrels, and as often as the English should again burn a village, to send them one [of] these barrels.”
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He lacked the intellectual breadth and civic commitment that made Hamilton so compelling to Angelica. On the other hand, he provided Angelica with the opulent, high-society life that she apparently craved.

Hamilton’s relationship with his father-in-law was to be an especially happy part of his marriage to Eliza Schuyler. Tall and slim, with a raspy voice and bulbous nose, Philip Schuyler, forty-six, was already hobbled by rheumatic gout when he arrived in Morristown that April to investigate army reform as chairman of a congressional committee. It is testimony to Hamilton’s gifts that he was readily embraced by someone with Schuyler’s rigid sense of social hierarchy. “Be indulgent, my child, to your inferiors,” Schuyler once advised his son John, “affable and courteous to your equals, respectful not cringing to your superiors, whether they are so by superior mental abilities or those necessary distinctions which society has established.”
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Yet this same status-conscious man enjoyed an instant rapport with the illegitimate young West Indian. Both Hamilton and Schuyler spoke French, were well-read, appreciated military discipline, and had a common interest in business and internal-development schemes, such as canals. They also shared a common loyalty to Washington and impatience with congressional incompetence, even though Schuyler was a member of the Continental Congress.

Descended from an early Dutch settler who arrived in New York in 1650 (the surname may have been German), Schuyler was counted among those Hudson River squires who presided over huge tracts of land and ruled state politics. The Schuylers had intermarried with the families of many patroons or manor lords. Philip Schuyler’s mother was a Van Cortlandt. His elegant Georgian brick mansion, the Pastures, sat on an Albany hilltop, surrounded by eighty acres dotted with barns, slave quarters, and a smokehouse. The enterprising Schuyler also built a two-story house on the fringe of the Saratoga wilderness, where he created an industrial village with four water-power mills, a smithy, and storehouses that employed hundreds of people. (It evolved into the village of Schuylerville.) In all, this Schuyler estate extended for three miles along the Hudson, encompassing somewhere between ten and twenty thousand acres. As if this were not enough, Philip Schuyler had married Catherine Van Rensselaer, an heiress to the 120,000-acre Claverack estate in Columbia County.

The image of Philip Schuyler varied drastically depending upon the observer. His enemies viewed him as cold, arrogant, and petulant when people crossed him or when his pride was offended. Alexander Graydon left this unpleasant vignette of a Schuyler dinner during the Revolution: “A New England captain came in upon some business with that abject servility of manner which belongs to persons of the meanest rank. He was neither asked to sit or take a glass of wine, and after announcing his wants, was dismissed with that peevishness of tone we apply to a low and vexatious intruder.”
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Graydon admitted, however, that the man might have forced his way into Schuyler’s presence.

Schuyler’s friends, in contrast, found him courteous and debonair, a model of etiquette, and very amiable in mixed company. He could behave magnanimously toward his social peers. During the battle of Saratoga, General Burgoyne burned Schuyler’s house and most other buildings on his property for military reasons. When, after the surrender, Burgoyne apologized, Schuyler replied graciously that his conduct had been justified by the rules of war and that he would have done the same in his place. Baroness Riedesel, the wife of the Hessian commander Major General Friedrich von Riedesel, also recalled Schuyler’s chivalry after the Saratoga debacle: “When I drew near the tents, a good looking man advanced towards me and helped the children from the calash and kissed and caressed them. He then offered me his arm and tears trembled in his eyes.”
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Schuyler invited the baroness, the defeated Burgoyne, and his twenty-member entourage to stay in his Albany mansion and furnished them with excellent dinners for days. At the time, Schuyler did not yet realize that Burgoyne’s destruction of his Saratoga estate had dealt a crippling blow to his finances.

Hamilton knew that Schuyler could be a strict father to his sometimes rambunctious daughters and that John Barker Church had been ostracized for not obeying protocol in marrying Angelica. So while Hamilton negotiated a prisoner exchange, he patiently awaited the Schuylers’ consent for their daughter’s hand. In the meantime, he relished Eliza’s letters. “I cannot tell you what ecstasy I felt in casting my eye over the sweet effusions of tenderness it contains,” he said of one mid-March letter. “My Betsey’s soul speaks in every line and bids me be the happiest of mortals. I am so and will be so.”
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On April 8, 1780, Philip Schuyler sent Hamilton a businesslike letter, saying he had discussed the marriage proposal with Mrs. Schuyler, and they had accepted it. Hamilton was overjoyed. A few days later, he wrote to Mrs. Schuyler and thanked her for accepting his proposal, making sure to lay on the flattery with a trowel: “May I hope, madam, you will not consider it as a mere profession when I add that, though I have not the happiness of a personal acquaintance with you, I am no stranger to the qualities which distinguish your character and these make the relation in which I stand to you not one of the least pleasing circumstances of my union with your daughter.”
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General Schuyler had taken a temporary house in Morristown and brought down Mrs. Schuyler from Albany. They stayed until the Continental Army decamped in June. Hamilton visited the Schuylers each evening, and the mutual affection between him and the family waxed steadily. In the end, the Schuylers felt flattered that the ex-clerk from the West Indies had chosen
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Two years later, Philip Schuyler sent Eliza a delighted report on her amazing husband:

Participate afresh in the satisfaction I experience from the connection you have made with my beloved Hamilton. He affords me happiness too exquisite for expression. I daily experience the pleasure of hearing encomiums on his virtue and abilities from those who are capable of distinguishing between real and pretended merit. He is considered, as he certainly is, the ornament of his country.
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The marriage to Eliza Schuyler was another dreamlike turn in the improbable odyssey of Alexander Hamilton, giving him the political support of one of New York’s blue-ribbon families.

Thoughts of both love and money coursed through Hamilton’s brain during that arctic winter in Morristown. The paper currency issued by the Continental Congress continued to sink precipitously in value, as inflation undercut the patriotic cause. During one ghastly period in 1779, the continental dollar shed half its value in three weeks. Silver coins disappeared, driven out by nearly worthless paper money, and state governments were also going broke. In March 1780, Congress tried to restore monetary order by issuing one new dollar in exchange for forty old ones, a move that wiped out the savings of many Americans. The need for financial reform had grown urgent. James Madison worried in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, “Believe me, sir, as things now stand, if the states do not vigorously proceed in collecting the old money and establishing funds for the credit of the new…we are undone.”
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In his spare time, Hamilton pored over financial treatises. As Washington’s aide, he was not at liberty to issue controversial plans that might jeopardize congressional relations, so he drafted a clandestine letter to an unidentified congressman and outlined a new currency regime. “The present plan,” he started humbly, “is the product of some reading on the subjects of commerce and finance[,]…but a want of leisure has prevented its being examined in so many lights and digested so maturely as its importance requires.”
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If the recipient wished further explanation, Hamilton indicated that “a letter directed to James Montague Esqr., lodged in the post office at Morristown, will be a safe channel for any communications you may think proper to make and an immediate answer will be given.”
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“James Montague” may have been a name devised by Hamilton to cloak his own identity.

Hamilton’s six-thousand-word letter attests to staggering precocity. He saw that inflation had originated with wartime shortages, which had led, in turn, to the waning value of money. Over time, the inflation had acquired a self-reinforcing momentum. Economic fundamentals alone could not account for this inflation, Hamilton noted, detecting a critical psychological factor at work. People were “governed more by passion and prejudice than by an enlightened sense of their interests,” he wrote. “The quantity of money in circulation is certainly a chief cause of its decline. But we find it is depreciated more than five times as much as it ought to be…. The excess is derived from opinion, a want of confidence.”
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How to remedy this want of confidence? Hamilton submitted a twelve-point program, a fully realized vision of a financial system that reflected sustained thinking. Congress should create a central bank, owned half by the government and half by private individuals, that could issue money and make public and private loans. Drawing on European precedents, Hamilton cited the Bank of England and the French Council of Commerce as possible models. Taxes and domestic loans could not finance the war alone, he argued, and he pressed for a foreign loan of two million pounds as the centerpiece of his program: “The necessity of a foreign loan is now greater than ever. Nothing else will retrieve our affairs.”
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He recognized that French and British political power stemmed from those countries’ ability to raise foreign loans in wartime, and this inextricable linkage between military and financial strength informed all of his subsequent thinking.

For Hamilton the American Revolution was a practical workshop of economic and political theory, providing critical object lessons and cautionary tales that charted the course for his career. In May 1780, he had fresh cause to meditate on the failings of Congress when news came of a calamitous defeat: the British had taken Charleston, capturing an American garrison of 5,400 soldiers, including John Laurens. The year 1780 was to be a dismal one for the patriots. In August, Cornwallis inflicted a stinging loss on General Horatio Gates in Camden, South Carolina, killing nine hundred Americans and taking one thousand prisoners. For Hamilton, the terrible drubbings at Charleston and Camden drove home the need for longer enlistment periods and an end to reliance on state militias. He found some consolation in the fact that Gates had fled from Camden in terror, barely containing his glee at this sign of cowardice. “Was there ever an instance of a general running away, as Gates has done, from his whole army?” he gloated to New York congressman James Duane. “One hundred and eighty miles in three days and a half. It does admirable credit to the activity of a man at his time of life.”
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By October, General Nathanael Greene had replaced the disgraced Gates as commander of the Southern Army.