I hated to see him in surrender. I’d married, after all, a soldier. A hero. Not a sad, fatalistic man, but a fractious firebrand. And I wanted him back.
I wanted the Alexander I’d always known and loved.
Later, when my sister went inside to fetch us cider, I told him, “You must engage the world again.”
“I never stopped,” he protested, reminding me of the near-daily eighteen-mile round-trips he made to his new office on Garden Street in town. “My practice of law remains a vigorous undertaking.”
But the cases he handled now were only of the mundane variety and of no great import. The kind that didn’t tax his talents or set precedents. He had, of course, almost as if in a compulsion, never stopped writing essays. Amongst them, the Examination, which tore apart all President Jefferson’s policies. And he had, at my repeated urging, finally assisted with the publication of a newly bound collection of The Federalist. But when our peg-legged friend, Mr. Morris, pleaded with Alexander to take a more active role—perhaps even to run for political office—my husband refused. And I’d been glad.
But now I thought I’d been wrong. For all the years I’d complained of it, the squalid brawling of the public arena was part of Hamilton’s makeup, like hair, teeth, or bones. So I said, “I think you should defend the Federalist newspaperman Jefferson is now trying to imprison under the sedition laws he claimed to hate. And Papa agrees.” Out of a desire to shield my husband’s vulnerabilities from other eyes—any other eyes—I’d waited for Angelica’s departure to lobby for this idea, but I’d set my sister on him, too, if need be.
Alexander laughed. “You want me to battle President Jefferson. In a courtroom.”
I glared at him for laughing. “Someone has to.” When I was younger, I often asked why it couldn’t be someone else. Why did it always have to be Alexander Hamilton to jump into the fray? And I’d complained, on more than one occasion, of his obsessive need to be at the center of history in the making.
I resolved now to never complain of it again.
At my insistence, Alexander relented and took the case against the newspaperman who’d been brave enough to reveal that Jefferson had paid James Callender to print slanders against all manner of public and private men. The case hinged on two constitutional issues: freedom of the press and trial by jury.
Alexander also, to my chagrin, waived the fee.
But I didn’t mind so much when I saw our older boys gathered around their father as he explained his plan to establish a constitutional principle that truth must always be a defense against charges of slander and libel. And I could see that our boys all adored their father and wished to follow in his footsteps. Especially when he confided in them his intention to subpoena President Jefferson himself and confront him with testimony by the infamous James Callender . . .
But on the morning I lined up our boys outside the courtroom in their Sunday best to listen to their father argue the case, Alexander whispered with a colleague, then sat down hard on the steps where I knelt, tying Johnny’s cravat, which he’d pulled loose again. “He’s dead,” Hamilton said, removing his top hat and holding it as if he’d never seen it before.
“Who?” I asked, alarmed by my husband’s sudden gray pallor.
“Callender,” he said. “Drowned, they say.”
Before Alexander could transport Callender to the courtroom to give testimony that would have harmed the president, the scoundrel was found dead, floating in the James River near Richmond. Some said a victim of his own drunken excesses. Others said he’d been murdered to keep him quiet.
And it was as sobering a reminder of how deadly politics could be.
Alexander wasn’t permitted to subpoena the president. And he lost the trial. Regardless, my husband made an argument that moved men to tears—his voice thundering in the courtroom while he paced like the revolutionary lion he had once been, the spark of a young firebrand still flashing in his eyes and setting my heart aflame.
Later, all the city’s leaders praised it as one of his greatest speeches. Perhaps his greatest. And I was so glad my boys were in attendance when Hamilton concluded his remarks by saying, “I never did think the truth was a crime. I’m glad the day has come in which it is to be decided. For my soul has ever abhorred the thought that a free man dare not speak the truth.”
And that, I thought with inordinate pride, is Alexander Hamilton.
That was who the history books should remember.
Yet, now I think, in the end, it wasn’t my pride in him, or the trial, or his opposition to Jefferson’s presidency that brought him back to himself.