I said it only to twit him, but it wasn’t far from the truth in the months that followed, where our lovely new house became little more than the place Alexander Hamilton slept—when he slept at all. My husband’s mind was filled with the details of establishing American commerce. At breakfast he muttered about lighthouses, beacons, and buoys. At lunch—if he came home for lunch—it was talk of coins, candlewicks, wool, and manufactures. And before bed, it was banks and paper instruments and international trade.
Yet, despite the demands of his position, the gay social life of Philadelphia seemed poised to bring us happiness, especially when we were joined in the new capital, just in time for the holiday, by James Monroe, who now served as a senator from Virginia.
I ran into Monroe, almost quite literally, at a coffeehouse, which made us both laugh.
With the rich scent of beans making our mouths water, he gave me a flourishing bow. “Can it really be you, Miss Schuyler, still bundled up against the cold, pink-cheeked and bright-eyed as you were all those years ago when I served you swill in a military camp?”
Grinning, I nodded. “Yes, but I remind you that I’m Mrs. Hamilton now, as you well know, and as a mother of five I fear I am very much changed from those days.”
Monroe kissed my hand in courtly and proper fashion. “Well, I do declare, you are as lovely as ever. Second only to my own Elizabeth.”
A moment later, the beautiful Elizabeth Kortright Monroe emerged from a circle of ladies to join us at a table decorated with candles, holly bush, and pine. Together we watched the snow fall and shared gossip. “The fashions in Philadelphia are so daring,” Mrs. Monroe said, a little bit scandalized and a little bit delighted. “It’s all bare arms and bare bosoms—I hesitate to guess what will be bared next!”
I laughed. I liked the Monroes. I liked them very much. Together we visited Philadelphia’s famed statehouse bell in the tower over Independence Hall. We shopped for baubles at the arcaded market on High Street. We admired the architecture of the new courthouse. We took our children to the circus together, where acrobats tumbled and clowns made us laugh.
And I insisted on having them to the house for dinner, even though my husband grumbled that Monroe had fallen in with the antifederalists. That was true. He’d led them in Virginia, arguing that the Constitution ought not be ratified without a bill of rights. But now we had a Constitution and a Bill of Rights, and none of it changed the fact that Monroe was our longtime friend.
Besides, I held fast to my policy that no man’s politics should be held against him at our dinner table. Or I tried to. But circumstances in the months that followed made that increasingly difficult as the antifederalists coalesced into a political party intent on opposing my husband.
But Hamilton was, in those days, an unstoppable force of nature. Some said the most powerful man in the government, with Washington as a mere figurehead, just as my sister had predicted. It wasn’t true, but my husband did seem invincible. He’d bargained with Madison and Jefferson to bring his financial system into being. And now there was nothing anyone could do about it, except look for vulnerabilities and petty ways to undermine him.
They found this in my father, Senator Philip Schuyler.
“The antifederalists found a way to get their revenge,” Papa said quietly.
Having moved with us to Philadelphia, quite confident in his reelection to the Senate, Papa now learned of the surprise upset. In the same election that brought James Monroe back into my life as a United States senator, my father had been defeated, and by, of all people, Aaron Burr.
Between our move to Philadelphia, my husband’s ascendance in the government, and the colonel’s antifederalist leanings, we’d grown apart from the Burrs, but that didn’t make his opportunism at Papa’s expense any less cutting. And to think, my father had given Burr his start!
“Another betrayal,” my husband raged, his temper as warm as my father’s was cool.
And I could not soothe him because it had begun to feel, even to me, as if we were being abandoned by our friends. Monroe going over to the antifederalists. Madison’s reluctant support and increasing preference for Jefferson. Burr’s disloyalty.
Alexander was not wrong to think this was a strike against him, a shot aimed to remove a solid ally in the Senate and wound him personally besides. But it was my father who was the casualty. Poor Papa, who’d already suffered so much indignity in his public career, was now to be discarded by his nation in the wreath of his venerable age. I was mortified that my father should have to suffer for my husband’s ambitions—and at the hands of Colonel Burr, whose wife I’d once counted as my friend and whose family I’d fed at my own table.