And love does not obliterate cruelty.
Slavery was cruel. A sin against God and a betrayal of the principles of our revolution besides. And if we were ever to end it, the effort would have to begin with families like ours. When I said as much, Angelica sat back in her gilded armchair and closed her eyes. “I suppose that if it were to be publicly known your husband purchased slaves, it would be another hypocrisy for the newspapers to complain about.”
“More importantly, it would impede his efforts to abolish slavery in New York.”
Angelica finally lifted her long lashes to slant me a glance. “I don’t know how you stand it.”
“How I stand what?”
“Hamilton,” she replied. “His vanity. His outrageous zeal. He never stops.”
This from the same woman who complained her husband had nothing to do. Though she still treated Alexander with affection and remained politically loyal to him, she was much more apt now to take my side in any disagreement.
She plainly believed that I’d been sent on another mission to protect my husband’s reputation and resented him for it. But Alexander hadn’t sent me. My responsibility as the general’s wife was not, I knew, just to the general. It was also to set a moral example for the country he meant to defend. And even if I had no standing to do that in the matter of adultery, slavery was a more guilty sin by far. “I’m not asking you to emancipate Sarah for my husband. Nor for me. I ask you to free her—and all your slaves—because slavery violates the rights endowed to us by our creator.”
I used Mr. Jefferson’s words to make an impression. And at this little bit of manipulation, she apprehended me, almost as if for the first time, giving me the strangest feeling of a shift in our relationship, in which she’d always been, hitherto, of superior rank. I was sure that she would do as I asked. But she wasn’t happy about it. “Why, Mrs. General Hamilton, they say two people married long enough to one another might slowly become more alike, but I never did predict it. You are becoming him.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Autumn 1799
Harlem, New York
THERE WAS SOMETHING mesmerizing about the dueling pistols, with their gleaming dark walnut stocks, and the glint of the brass barrels, and the hair trigger that an expert duelist could use to gain an advantage over his opponent. Perhaps the allure was in the fact that something so beautiful could be so deadly . . .
“See how the hair trigger is disguised?” my brother-in-law asked as he showed them to my admiring sons, who all strained to get a closer look. “Try for yourself.”
Grinning, seventeen-year-old Philip took the weapon into his hands, clearly fascinated despite having handled his father’s own weapons many times before. “Did you have the hair trigger set in your duel, Uncle Church?”
Church settled back onto a divan beside my sister in the cottage we’d all rented together in the wilds of Harlem so that Peggy, Angelica, and I could share the season. Now our children and husbands crowded the place, making the perfect audience for Church to brag about his exploits. “I wanted Aaron Burr to know that I could kill him without any advantage if I so chose,” he said, coolly straightening his white lace cravat. “And perhaps I should have.”
Alexander cut in with a reproachful glance at his brother-in-law. My husband was, after all, no longer the same man who became embroiled in two affairs of honor in a single day. As a general, he’d been working to eradicate the antiquated practice from the ranks of the army. “I’ve been persuaded that dueling is a horrid custom, one the legislature must see fit to curb.”
I wish, now, he’d said so much more. For the memory of our son Philip holding that pistol even all these decades later retains the power to make me want to retch.
Alexander held out his hand for the pistol and returned the pair to their portmanteau, though that didn’t effect a change of subject because the men in my family were in a belligerent humor about Burr.
When it looked certain that we’d go to war with France, Burr had volunteered to help defend the harbor, despite his earlier support of the French Revolution. Burr had also abandoned his fellow Republicans to support the antislavery measure in New York’s legislature. He’d even proposed a new project to bring clean water to the city so as to prevent yellow fever. Alexander had been thrilled to see Burr’s political changes, and he’d championed them.
But it’d been a scheme. My harried husband, busy arranging for military supplies and organizing the army, had missed a few legal clauses belatedly added to the paperwork for the water utility—clauses that enabled Burr to transform the supposedly charitable corporation he started with my husband’s help into a bank.