“What I decided to do,” Papa explained, “was to name my first son, born after there could be any question of his parentage, John Bradstreet Schuyler.”
In defiance, I realized. My father had mustered the strength to defend his marriage with a thumb in the eye of anyone who would question it. Just as I would have to do now. And he was asking me if I had the stomach for it.
“In the matter of Hamilton,” Papa concluded, “your family’s view of this unfortunate episode will be guided by your calculation, Elizabeth. And only yours.”
I’d always admired his ability to swallow bitter injustices for the greater good. But could I follow his example? Whatever I’d told myself in coming here, I knew the real reason Hamilton had sent me to my father.
Eliza, if you stand beside me the public will eviscerate you.
Stand by him or renounce him. Hamilton wanted me to have that choice. But I’d already made it. And taking a deep breath, I determined to begin defending my own marriage right here in this moment. “Then forgive him, Papa. As I have done. Truly. The Bible tells us no man is without sin. No man is righteous, not even one.”
My father nodded. Then not another word was said about it. My family never behaved, in word or deed, with anything but devoted affection to my husband. And because of it—and because I was my father’s daughter—I found within myself the strength to face the storm.
Chapter Thirty
Art thou a wife? See him, whom thou has chosen for the partner of this life, lolling in the lap of a harlot!
—THE AURORA, A JEFFERSONIAN NEWSPAPER
August 1797
New York City
HOW COULD HE confess in such humiliating detail?” Angelica had come to my house, clutching my husband’s pamphlet with white knuckles, demanding we go out and buy up all the copies. “Fifty of the best pens in America could not have done more to put him in infamy!”
“You know why he did it,” I said, not wishing to go over it even once more. Ever since I’d confronted Monroe, I’d understood with a cutting clarity that Alexander would be forced to prove the affair to clear his name of worse charges. And, like a papist penitent, he’d done just that, donning a veritable hair shirt of irrefutable evidence and frank revelations, each more torturous than the next. My only regret was in refusing my husband’s offer to review his confession before he’d published it. It’d been the one time I’d had no interest in bearing witness to the inner workings of his mind, when I’d been too heartsick to persuade him to moderate his tone.
And the result? The Reynolds Pamphlet ran more than ninety pages, cataloging every possible aspect of the affair—as if he thought he could drown his opponents in words and wash himself clean.
“Hamilton’s pamphlet reads like one of Peggy’s tawdry novels.” Angelica groaned, as if she herself were the wronged wife instead of me. “Why, the letters his harlot sent him . . . children spell better! What could he have seen in her?”
His mother, I thought. It always came back to her. But I dared not say it, and I dared not fall back into the trap of dissecting the affair.
“Wine?” I asked instead, taking a bottle from an exquisite silver cooler. It was unlike me to drink in the middle of the day, but I took comfort where I could. Not only in the chilled wine against the August heat, but also in that the cooler was a gift from George Washington that had recently come with a note I treasured.
A token of my sincere regard and friendship. I pray you to present my best wishes, in which Mrs. Washington joins me, to Mrs. Hamilton and that you would be persuaded with every sentiment of the highest regard, I remain your sincere friend.
If the Washingtons stood with us in solidarity, how could I waver?
My sister took the proffered glass of wine and gulped it. “One word from you and Hamilton is ruined forever. I hope he knows it.”
She’d been his defender at first, but since reading his confession, she’d become mine. And I suppose that I needed one when the newspapers’ poisoned ink against him turned on me, too. I’d never been singled out for such public opprobrium before. Never bade to loathe the man I loved or be considered complicit in his sins. The insults from jeering Republicans didn’t wound me overmuch; I dismissed the lot of them as a knot of conspiring, godless scoundrels. Like my husband, I was even coming to take some perverse pride in being the object of their rancor and venom.
But the cruelty of our fellow Federalist friends did cut me.
It was confided to me that our new president’s lady, Abigail Adams, crowed to her friends that she’d always known my husband to be a lascivious debauchee, in whose wicked eyes she saw the very devil. As if I should’ve seen it, too, and made a better choice in husband. Society ladies I’d entertained on countless occasions crossed the street to avoid brushing skirts with me, lest scandal be contagious. For I was a wife who’d failed to inspire fidelity. And yet, my fidelity to him was now also to be counted against my virtue.