And above all, how would it conduct itself? Though the colonies had won their liberation from England, they had never been a purely English society. There were Irish, Welsh, and Scottish strains, for one thing—Alex’s father was born in Scotland, and though Alex knew little about him, he knew his father would raise his fists against any man who dared accuse him of being English. The Dutch legacy persevered in New York as well (both General and Mrs. Schuyler had been raised speaking Dutch as well as English, and still used the former language when they wanted to keep secrets from their children). The French influence was strong in the northeast, along the border with Canada, and west of the Mississippi, in the Louisiana Territory. The Spanish presence was strong in the deep south in Florida, where they supported the British cause during the Revolution, and along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. There were German and Swedish enclaves, and of course the large African population, consisting of 40 percent of the thirteen colonies’ people. The vast majority—but not all—had been brought to the New World as enslaved people. Regardless of their station, they made profound contributions to the new country through their labor, art, music, and tenacity, even though slavery would not be eradicated for nearly a century more—a profound injustice in the history of the new nation that just fought for its own freedom.
Then there were the Native populations that had been here when the Europeans arrived, hundreds of different tribes and confederacies and nations, some numbered only a few thousand, others had hundreds of thousands of members and commanded great swathes of land that dwarfed most of their European counterparts. As the annual Thanksgiving celebration reminded them, without Native American instruction and aid, most of the early European settlements would have perished. New World foodstuffs had made significant changes to the European diet, from potatoes to squash to tomatoes to corn, and of course tobacco—and chocolate!—and had changed the way Europeans conceived of creature comforts. Hundreds of words now peppered the language, from chili to chipmunk, from hurricane to hammock, from piranha to poncho to peyote, and with those words came ideas about how to relate to this land that Europeans had forcibly taken as their own, and christened “America.” Liberty and justice for all?
And so the myth of American exceptionalism was born, even as it managed to skirt the troubling history of its founding, that a nation dedicated to the ideals of freedom and justice was also established by the twin foundations of slavery and theft.
In any case, all these different cultures had unique strengths of character and industry, and no doubt many people would have been content to separate themselves according to culture and language and replicate Old World divisions in the New, state lines replacing national borders and people pushing ever westward when their neighbors grew too close. But more and more people realized that if the United States of America were to be truly united, they were going to have to forge a common national identity.
Chief among these visionaries was Alexander Hamilton, whose accomplishments during the Revolutionary War would soon be overshadowed by the work he did for the budding republic. Alex knew that the differences between people and points of view couldn’t be eliminated or ignored. Those differences had to be celebrated, and put to work for the good of the nation. As with most political ideals, such lofty sentiments were easier said than done. Fortunately, it had two tireless champions in Alexander and Elizabeth Hamilton—assuming, that is, they could harness their unique gifts to a single yoke, and finally learn to work as a team.
Part Two
Tearing Up Wall Street
12
American Honeymoon
The Hamilton Town House
New York, New York
December 1783
At last, after three years of marriage, winning the war for Independence, surviving the Battle of Yorktown, and finally leaving the comforts of the Pastures, Alexander and Elizabeth Hamilton stood in front of a handsome three-story brick-and-brownstone town house located at 57 Wall Street, in New York City. With a little help from Eliza’s dowry, well-informed family connections whispering about a fantastic deal on a pretty little piece of well-located property, and Alex’s quick decision-making to snap it up before someone else did, it was theirs. The young husband’s hands shook as he unlocked the front door with the key. His wife stood behind him, eager and impatient to see their new abode. With a flourish, he opened both doors and turned to his bride with a smile. “Voilà!”
Eliza clasped her hands in delight, and Alex’s eyes softened to see how sweet she looked in the late afternoon sunlight, the golden rays shining on the chestnut tendrils of her hair. This was home now, their home, his home. After years of living as a student and a soldier, and a guest at his in-laws’ sumptuous residence, he finally had a place to call his own. “Hold on,” he said, before Eliza could take another step.
With a huge grin, Alex literally swept her off her feet and carried her over the threshold. Eliza giggled in his arms, giddy to think that they were all alone at last—with no servants, sisters, little brothers, or parents in sight. So what if the house was practically empty! The lack of tables and chairs, china and silver, candles and ale and compote and even such banal necessities as salt and pepper were more than made up for by the blessed privacy she and Alex finally shared, not to mention that the one piece of furniture they did own was an enormous, overstuffed feather bed.
It was on this bed that he laid her down now, and Eliza felt almost coquettish, gazing up at Alex from her dark lashes as she slowly divested herself of all her layers, enjoying the ragged breathing coming from him as he quickly stripped down and joined her under the covers. His blue eyes glittered in the dim twilight, as he held his body above hers.
“Two years ago, when you were in Virginia, I was so worried,” she whispered, craning her neck upward to kiss him on his. “Part of me wondered if you would ever come back. I don’t think I ever told you that.”
“My dearest, bravest girl,” he murmured, bending down to kiss her on the soft spot near her ear. “I am home now. You are my home.”
“Yes,” she said, closing her eyes as he covered her mouth with his.
And then there was no more time or desire for conversation, as even the most articulate statesman in America found words paled in comparison to the sublime experience of being with his beloved.
* * *
THE MARRIED COUPLE spent the first two days strolling the frigid streets of New York, hand in hand, oblivious to the cold and marveling as the abandoned storefronts and town houses filled overnight with newly-minted Americans, some of them returning to a city they had thought lost forever, others taking advantage of the hundreds of empty houses and shops to establish a toehold in a major metropolitan area at prices that would never come around again.
By night they dined at the beautiful walnut table that had at last arrived from Albany, covered with a gorgeous muslin tablecloth whose delicate blue-and-gold tracery Eliza’s great-grandmother Rensselaer had embroidered more than half a century ago, set with the Crown Derby china dinnerware they had found at a local shop, along with a lovely set of silver that Stephen Van Rensselaer had given them as a wedding present, and that had slept in its velvet-lined case for the past three years.
For the first few days they drank from a pair of mismatched, battered pewter steins Alex had brought home with him from Yorktown (“That dent was caused by a bullet aimed at my heart,” he said with a twinkle in his eye), but on their third day of New York residence, he returned home with a pair of truly exquisite crystal goblets. The taller one was etched with a brilliantly lifelike depiction of Zeus visiting Danaë in the form of a shower of gold, while the shorter showed the hapless nymph Echo spying on Narcissus, who was too busy staring at his own reflection in a pool of water to notice her. They were the finest glasses Eliza had ever seen, let alone held in her hands—and she had taken many a meal in the Van Rensselaers’ magnificent manor house—and, though Alex could tell she didn’
t want to seem ungrateful, she was unable to prevent herself from asking how much they had cost. Alex blushed, then pulled a potato out of his pocket and said, “Let’s just say we’ll be eating a lot of these for the next few weeks.” Fortunately, he had had a bottle of wine in another pocket, and Eliza’s momentary start of alarm was quickly ameliorated.
In fact, the goblets, like everything else they bought for the house, had been a steal. But when you had six large rooms to furnish, and food to be purchased at black market prices, plus rent on top of that—and no income coming in!—the debts were starting to pile up. Alex’s valise was stuffed with bills of sale and IOUs and promissory notes for dozens of different vendors. Fortunately, conditions were tough all over the island, so that pretty much everyone was living on credit and willing to be generous in their terms. Even so, Alex knew he needed to find clients soon, or their first stab at independence would be over before it had ever really begun.
Eliza decided not to chide Alex for his expenses. He would set up his law practice soon enough, and soon everyone would want him as their counselor. She had great faith in her husband, and her frugal nature would serve them well until he was established.
As their habit, in the morning of the second week of their residence, they headed out for their daily walk, arm in arm. The air was cold but crisp, and pleasantly tinged with the smell of wood smoke and, faintly, the salt of the sea. Just a few doors up from their new house they came to a much larger building, a handsome Palladian edifice with a four-columned portico jutting out from the second floor. The street was relatively quiet, and what traffic there was centered around the building, where official-looking men marched determinedly in and out, trailed by retinues of assistants and clerks. A simple plaque affixed to the building’s white stone front told the reason for so much activity:
CITY HALL
Eliza stared across the street at the building, which was on a par with the Van Rensselaers’ manor house in size and grandeur. Yet, unlike the country mansion on its wide lawns and manicured gardens, this was surrounded by other buildings, from the two-hundred-foot-tall spire of Trinity Church up the street, to the upright elegance of town houses like the one she now occupied with her husband.
“It is strange to me, who grew up surrounded by acres and acres of garden and field,” she said, “to live in a house that is located not just on the same street but the same block as a municipal building, let alone City Hall.”
Their talk was interrupted by the squeal of a pig dashing down the street. “That is municipal life,” Alex said, laughing. “It has everything the country has, only it’s all smaller, and on top of each other.”
Indeed, after a lifetime spent on the outskirts of a modest enclave like Albany, Eliza had been nervous about moving to a city as large and cosmopolitan as New York. She had been surprised to find a landscape that reminded her a lot of her native village. The southern tip of Manhattan was crisscrossed with a few dozen streets of three- and four-story brick town houses, not unlike the streets that crowded Albany’s riverfront. Their dense, truncated perspectives felt a little mazelike to someone raised with the vistas from the top of a hill in a mansion surrounded by gardens and orchards. But the houses themselves were handsome and generously proportioned, and within a few blocks gave way to more familiar, shingled houses with Dutch gables enclosed by white pickets or rustic zigzagged logs containing well-tended kitchen gardens and chicken coops and rabbit hutches (and, it must be admitted, the occasional pigsty).
About a mile north of the Battery, these close-knit plots surrendered to open farmland. Here, Bayard’s Hill, with its small fort atop it, overlooked the sprawling calm waters of the meandering bays and inlets of Collect Pond, which, she was told, would be covered with ice skaters as soon as its forty-six acres of becalmed water had frozen fully through. To the west was the same Hudson River that bordered Albany 150 miles north. It was wider here, and choppier, thanks to the Atlantic tides. Mirrored on the opposite side of Manhattan was the so-called East River (which Alex had explained to her was not a river at all, but rather something called an estuary, a channel connecting two bodies of salt water, in this case Long Island Sound and New York Harbor). But whatever it actually was, it looked just like a river to her.
And then, of course, there was the ocean itself. Eliza had been as far south as Morristown, New Jersey (where Alex proposed to her), but had not made the trek to the coast because marauding British troops had made the area too dangerous. (She still shuddered to recall how close Alex had come to death when he rode north to persuade her parents to let her marry him rather than the odious Henry Livingston.)
And now they were walking down Pearl Street—so-named for the nacreous shells of the oysters that thrived in the waters surrounding Manhattan. Eliza had seen no sign of their shells, let alone pearls (though a slight odor of fish was discernible in the stiff breeze that blew off the water). In truth, she had turned her gaze out to the vast gray horizon, dotted here and there by anchored ships, a combination of trading vessels waiting for normal commerce to renew so they could fill up their holds before heading back across the Atlantic to the new nation’s trading partners. And, here and there, an American military frigate kept watch for British ships whose captains might not have learned of the peace during the four weeks it had taken them to cross the Atlantic.
Eliza found the endless expanse of water both soothing and alarming. It was the first time she had ever contemplated just how large the world was. It was difficult to conceive that there was land on the other side of all this water—not one continent but three—Europe, Asia, and Africa, whose vastness, she had seen on maps, was far greater than both North and South Americas. Her whole life had been spent in a single town of a few thousand souls, with just a couple of journeys of a few hundred miles to broaden her knowledge of the world. One of those trips—the journey to Morristown in 1777—had resulted in her marriage to Alex, which only underscored that the strangeness of the world wasn’t to be avoided, let alone feared, but to be sought out for the treasures it could bring. She stared out at the white-frothed swells for several minutes, contemplating the journeys that were ahead of her, some physical, some emotional, and then she took Alex’s arm in hers and said, “Come. We have work to do.”
Their path today led away from the water, but they were still close enough that Eliza could feel its wind at her back, the dampness, the omnipresent smell of salt that she was coming to associate with her new home. A coastal winter could be harsher than one farther inland, but Mrs. Schuyler had seen that Eliza went off with two quilted petticoats and a new wool coat with a sable collar, so she was more than warm enough.
As she and Alex strolled farther up the street, she nodded at another town house, nearly identical to theirs (though she couldn’t help noticing that its parlor windows were already adorned by lovely curtains in a rich blue brocade).
“Have I told you about our new neighbors?” she asked her husband.
“You have not,” Alex answered. “How is it that you have made their acquaintance already? We have only been in the city for a week, and all that time was spent interviewing servants and buying necessaries. How have you possibly managed to meet anyone?”
Eliza petted his arm in hers. “Never discount a lady’s network for efficiency of communication.”
“So who are our new neighbors?”
“I suppose it is proper to say that we are their new neighbors, since they have been here for some months, as the sumptuousness of their draperies suggest. It is Mr. Aaron Burr that was colonel, and his new wife, Theodosia, the former Mrs. Prevost.”
She felt Alex start. “You do not mean the wife of General Augustine Prevost, the British officer?” he asked, astonished. Prevost was well-known to Alex as the man who had led British forces during the Siege of Savannah in 1779, when American forces had been decimated when they tried—and failed—to retake the great Georgia city. “I did not realize he had die
d, or divorced.”
“No, not Augustine, but his brother, Jacques Marcus, who was a colonel, and died in the Indies. You met her, you know,” Eliza continued. “You told me that you dined at her estate, the Hermitage, in New Jersey.”
Alex’s face lit up with the memory. “So I did! With them both, in fact. Colonel—I mean, Mr. Burr was quite flirtatious, as I recall. And she married at the time! And a decade older! And a passel of children besides!”
Eliza didn’t know if her husband was scandalized or amused. On the one hand, Alex had been so ardent about putting aside the differences between patriots and loyalists. On the other, Burr had been, like Alex, a colonel in the Continental army, and was, if anything, even more keen to assume a leadership role in the new government than Alex was. Women may not have been allowed to vote or serve in government, but everyone knew that a society wife controlled her husband’s social calendar, and thus his social circle. A somewhat disgraced loyalist wife did not seem like the kind of choice that played well for an ambitious patriot like Burr.
But then, she told herself, since there were no more Schuyler daughters for Mr. Burr to marry, I guess he had to make do.
“Five,” Eliza said out loud, “to which they added a daughter of their own this spring, also called Theodosia.”
“Well, who would have guessed! The great patriot Aaron Burr, marrying a loyalist!”
“Are you shocked?” Eliza asked. She didn’t bother to keep her voice down. By now they were well past the house, and she had no fears of being overheard, if Mr. and Mrs. Burr were, in fact, at home.