It wasn’t the first time that proprietress had accosted him. She’d done it months before in a courtroom where Alexander had defended the man accused of murdering her cousin. The trial had created a sensation, especially when Alexander exposed the proprietress as running a bit of a bawdy house. So it didn’t surprise me to hear the woman shriek and rave.
Outraged, my husband tugged his military coat straight. “Hear now—”
The growing crowd drowned him out with a raucous cheer of support for the proprietress, one that made me anxious. “Alexander,” I said, finally forcing my way through to him.
“Oh, dear Eliza, it’s too rowdy out here today for you.” He took my basket and sheltered me away from the unruly mob with an arm around my shoulders. But frustration rolled off him. “Why does that lady not recall that Aaron Burr was the other defense attorney in that case? Why doesn’t she blame him, too?”
“Because Burr is slippery,” I replied when we finally found a bit of privacy in the doorway to a millinery shop. “The sort of fellow off the surface of whom can slide almost any resentment.” Whereas, when it came to Alexander, everything stuck.
Perhaps that was because Burr’s ancestry stretched back to Jonathan Edwards, one of the great New England theologians, whereas Hamilton was said to be a Creole bastard. Or perhaps it was because Burr never proclaimed any position on anything until he knew which way the wind was blowing, whereas Hamilton could never keep an opinion to himself.
Late that night, sinking in exhausted despondency beside his father in the parlor, Philip groaned. “Our state election is over. They’ve swept the slate. It’s all Republicans.”
New York would give twelve electoral college votes to Jefferson. Enough, quite possibly, to tip the balance of the presidency. And it was all accomplished by the wily Aaron Burr who had, in the late hours of the election, gotten every man who couldn’t vote to bring out wagonloads of those who could, even carrying the infirm and sitting them down on chairs in the middle of the cobblestone street to wait their turn.
We’d lost New York!
My general had been out-generaled. I suppose it had always seemed impossible to me that Alexander could fail at anything he set his mind to, and so I sank down, too, numbly.
But at the stroke of midnight, Alexander was already at his desk, drawing up new battle plans. Feverishly, he scratched out a letter to the governor, audaciously suggesting that presidential electors should be chosen by popular vote rather than by the incoming legislature.
“Such a measure would be seen as overturning the election,” I warned, hoping to dissuade him from sending it. “And would surely cause a civil war.”
“A civil war would be preferable to Jefferson,” Philip said, perhaps remembering the sermon we’d heard at church telling us that if Jefferson became president, we’d have to hide our Bibles.
“In times like these, it will not do to be overscrupulous,” Alexander said, still writing. “It’s easy to sacrifice the substantial interests of society by a strict adherence to ordinary rules. This is a matter of public safety.”
Remembering Jefferson’s admiration for, and encouragement of, the Francophile mobs in Philadelphia, I agreed with him. That our fright drove us to consider radical and unsavory ideas in the few terrifying days after the election—what some were already calling the revolution of 1800—I don’t deny. But our fever-induced proposals were never adopted, whereas the worst, panic-struck ideas of President Adams were immediately put into action.
Realizing he was likely to lose the election, the first thing Adams did was fire his entire cabinet—including the secretary of war.
“But the president blames you, more than anyone, for his probable defeat, Ham,” McHenry said, having come straight from Philadelphia to report the news. He glanced at me, apologetically, as he pushed away his dinner plate, having apparently lost his appetite. “Adams thinks you brought about the loss of the election in New York intentionally.”
The indignity of it, after all we’d done! My own appetite wavered.
Mac added, “Adams shouted that you’ve been trying to control the government while posing as a private man. That you’re a man devoid of every moral principle—a bastard and a foreigner besides.”
I flinched, because it was an insult designed to strike at my husband’s weakest points, and an unworthy and unbecoming thing for the president of the United States to stoop to say besides. But, worse, few men were more American than Alexander Hamilton, and yet the president proclaimed him a foreigner. The same president who had the power to deport foreigners he deemed dangerous to the peace . . .