Quite against the idea, I said, “Your father isn’t likely to say anything that you haven’t already heard at the supper table. And I dislike for you to be by yourself in a crowd.”
Philip made a sound of exasperation. “At my age, my father was his own man, in command of a trading firm.”
Your father was an abandoned boy trying to make his way in the world with any job he could get. This is what I wanted to say. But Alexander never wanted his children to know the scars of his youth; he only ever wanted them to see him as heroic. And I wanted them to see him that way too. Especially Philip.
So, if my son wanted to see his father give a speech, I could scarcely deny him. Besides, it was only a five-minute walk to Federal Hall from our new lodgings. “We’ll go together. There’s a new shoemaker near Wall Street,” I said, giving up on mending the old leather. “If we leave now, we’ll be in time to see your father’s speech on the way back.” When Philip grinned beneath the down of a burgeoning mustache upon his lip, I added, “Now change clothes so you look like the fine young gentleman you’re becoming instead of an urchin.”
While my eldest donned his best shirt, I found my straw bonnet with its white ribbon, and, leaving the younger children with our newly hired governess, we were off.
It was a fine, clear, summer day and I was astonished at the size of the crowd. Thousands packed into the square. Not just dockworkers in knit caps and young toughs in homespun jackets, but the better sort of people, too, including ladies with colorful lace parasols and gentlemen in top hats from the finest families. There, too, upon a stoop near our old house, stood my husband, surrounded by half-a-dozen impeccably dressed Federalist lawyers like Robert Troup and Nicholas Fish.
It was nearly impossible to push closer, given the throng. But at the toll of the clock bell, my husband’s voice boomed out to ask who had convened the assembly. And that’s when I first realized that Alexander hadn’t so much as come to give a speech as to stop one. The gathering was for the apparent purpose of condemning the Jay Treaty, and my husband wasn’t about to let it happen. “By what right does Livingston speak before me?”
Almost as a rebuke, a quick, spontaneous vote determined that Livingston should speak first. But I stood agape as the rest of the crowd began to heckle. There, on the same hallowed ground where we’d once gathered to watch George Washington take his solemn oath of office, erstwhile respectable members of the business community shouted down the hapless Mr. Livingston, who, now red-faced, suggested a new meeting place where he could be heard. “Come then, all foes of this cowardly treaty, away to Trinity Church.”
It seemed to me a very wise idea to break up what was swiftly becoming a mob, and I myself searched for some avenue of retreat, prodding my boy up onto the sidewalk in the shade of a buttonwood tree. All the while, my husband was shouting, “There is the necessity of a full discussion before citizens should make up their minds about this treaty!”
As the former secretary of the treasury, he was used to being obeyed. But this time, he was treated to a chorus of hoots and hisses. My husband’s Federalists had shouted down Livingston, but now the Republicans, slowly but surely coalescing into a party of their own thanks to this treaty, returned the favor, insensible to my husband’s demand to be heard.
My son was appalled. “The rascals!”
A gentleman in riding boots clapped Philip on the back, perhaps recognizing him as his father’s son. Meanwhile, to my right, a bearded man in a beaver cap stooped to pull a loose cobble from the street.
Not again, I thought, prodding Philip toward the fence encircling the nearest yard. I’d been witness to too much disorder in my life not to recognize the danger. “We’re going.”
I’d learned, after hard experience, to head for the edges, moving diagonally against the crowd. But I didn’t get very far before the man with the cobblestone pulled his arm back and launched it. After that was pandemonium.
“Angloman! Corrupt Tory!” they shouted at my husband.
Alexander shouted back, with pugnacious bombast, calling them wicked Jacobins. “Liberté, égalité, fraternité say the French you admire. But what patriot could ally with those who executed the kinswomen of our own imprisoned General Lafayette?”
To those words he was greeted with a hailstorm of bricks and stones, and I watched, in horror, as my husband staggered, fell, and disappeared into the crowd. I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t see anything over the blur of heads and shoulders.