Hamilton grinned. “Oh, but I would not hazard a guess as to which of you was Charm, Grace, or Beauty. After all, the last time a mortal man awarded a golden apple to the fairest, he caused a dreadful war.”
“Is that how this got started?” Angelica asked.
He laughed in a way that told me he admired my sister’s wit as well as her beauty. And, quite unfortunately, that made me like him all the better.
Because the churches of Morristown had been converted to hospitals, religious service was to take place in the home of the reverend. We’d attended both Dutch and Anglican services as children, but not Presbyterian. So as I fetched my coat I asked, “You’re certain we’ll be welcome though we aren’t of the denomination?”
“The very same question His Excellency asked,” Hamilton replied. “The reverend replied it was not the Presbyterian table but the Lord’s table.”
Thus, in our best church dresses, coats, hats, and scarves, Angelica, Kitty, and I took our communion. But Hamilton did not. Surely he’s a Christian, I thought, but I couldn’t muster the courage to ask.
On the way back, we strolled by a frozen pond, where Colonel Tilghman was most solicitous of me. Hamilton had the idea of a sledding party for the week next, which occasioned McHenry to taunt him in his Irish brogue. “He might be a silver-tongued courtier in a ballroom, ladies, but you’ve never seen a lad less made for winter sport.”
“Allow me to put that to the lie,” Hamilton said, launching a snowball at McHenry, who, like a naughty laughing leprechaun, ducked behind the taller Tilghman as cover to return the volley.
Then ensued the most delightful mayhem.
Slipping and sliding and thrashing one another as they ran, Washington’s aides acted like brothers, I thought. Even in their horseplay, the strapping officers who rode into nearly every battle with our general were all athletic grace.
But when a shower of snow came our way, Angelica asked, with feigned sternness, “Must we negotiate a truce, gentlemen?”
From behind a fortress he’d made of a tree, Hamilton replied, “I’m afraid it’s victory or death for me.”
“Don’t believe it, ladies.” McHenry quipped with bawdy mischief, “He’ll surrender his sword to any pretty girl who wants it. Three by my count in the last month alone.”
“Have a care, Mac,” Colonel Tilghman scolded, as if worried to offend my maiden ears. But everyone else laughed. And in truth, I knew not what to make of Hamilton’s rakish reputation.
“Make way!” came a command from down the narrow, frozen lane where we stood watching the men’s antics. Clutching hands to keep our balance, we trudged into a deeper drift of untrodden snow as a war-weary company of men paraded by. Their threadbare uniforms were familiar, of course, as were the abused muskets upon their shoulders and the malnourished gaunt upon their frostbitten faces. But one thing was strikingly different about these soldiers.
They were black.
A thing that perhaps shouldn’t have so surprised me, for I’d heard Papa talk about the black troops who served at Saratoga. But a few of these men wore the gold epaulets of an officer, a thing that I’d never before heard about or seen.
Our escorts saluted the white colonel at the head of the column, who returned the gesture and shouted out more commands to his men.
“The First Rhode Island,” Hamilton said to me as they passed, perhaps sensing my surprise. “Our first black regiment.”
McHenry nodded and spoke in his thick brogue. “And we’ll need ’em, too. We lose too many men to disease and desertion to refuse blacks in the army now, and those with reservations voice their concerns no longer.”
“The British recruitment of slaves has convinced most Americans that we should do the same,” Tilghman said, glancing amongst us ladies, as if he wished to make sure we knew his sentiments on the matter. “As if the standard of humanity did not make them deserving of freedom enough.”
“And the other men don’t mind serving with them?” Angelica asked, and I knew precisely why, for our father had complained that black troops disgraced our arms.
But I was glad that Angelica had asked, instead of me, because Hamilton actually frowned at her. “The contempt we’ve been taught to entertain for Negroes makes us fancy many things that are founded neither in reason nor experience. As my dear Laurens’s project in South Carolina is sure to prove.”
This was the second time I’d heard him mention John Laurens, and I’d since learned that the southerner was another of Washington’s aides, now away on different business, and an officer, like Hamilton, with an unfailing ability to work his way into the gazettes. Laurens’s most recent fame came as a result of suggesting we give freedom to slaves willing to fight in the army.