Arnold had gotten away. But they’d captured his British spymaster instead.
John André.
The injustice of it! That good, honorable officer—even if he was an enemy—would now hang for Arnold’s crime. And his death would be brought about, in some part, by the man I was to marry . . .
Alexander was bitterly sorry for it; so much so that when I pleaded with him to use his influence to allow André to be shot like a gentleman, not hanged as a spy, he did as I asked. Though Washington would not hear of it.
“It isn’t just,” I’d fumed to my father.
But Papa blamed Benedict Arnold. “Very little is just in war, my child.”
In his letters, Hamilton blamed Arnold, too, expressing sympathy only for the wife he’d abandoned.
Her horror at the traitor is lost in her love of the man. But a virtuous mind cannot long esteem a base one, and time will make her despise him, if it cannot make her hate. My angelic Betsy, I would not for the world do anything that would hazard your esteem. ’Tis to me a jewel of inestimable price and I think you may rely I shall never make you blush.
I believed him, though I shouldn’t have, because in time, he did make me blush. Worse than that, he made me despair of the traitor in him, too. For though Alexander Hamilton did not betray his country, he did betray me. And now, I struggle with whether love or hate burns more intensely inside me.
But then, as a young woman contemplating marriage, the Arnold situation was a stark reminder that to marry a man was to share his fate and be vulnerable to all his decisions and mistakes. The traitor’s wife and child would forever bear the brand of his treason; and I wondered, did Mrs. Arnold have an inkling of the darkness that dwelt within her husband, or was she now bewildered at the stranger she had married?
Still, Arnold’s treason wasn’t the only thing to fill me with doubts.
When I agreed to marry Hamilton, I’d worried that my father would not give his consent for our marriage. Especially when Alexander insisted upon confessing his sordid origins to Papa. My parents—both of proud lineages—had objected to my brother-in-law, Jack Carter, because they knew nothing of his family. And yet, my father told Alexander, “Your eloquence and George Washington’s recommendation make me glad to welcome you to our family.”
That, and perhaps Papa’s sense that if he did not give his permission, I would elope, too. I suspected as much because Papa also told Alexander, “It gave Betsy’s mother great pain to miss her daughter’s wedding, and me as well. I should not like to suffer it a second time.”
“We’ll see you married properly, Betsy,” Mama said under her breath before she embraced Hamilton when my family came to Morristown. “Don’t you dare follow in your sister’s footsteps.”
But we’d long since left that winter camp and six months had now passed in waiting because Alexander feared to neglect his duties in such a perilous time, and he’d therefore refused to take a leave of absence for our nuptials. He’d even considered delaying in order to pay a visit to his friend John Laurens who, having been captured and paroled by the enemy, was not permitted to leave Philadelphia until a prisoner exchange could be arranged.
Worse, the many beautiful love letters Hamilton sent while we were apart were so filled with misgivings that they’d begun to stir my own. Though he wrote that I was his charmer, his angel, and his little nut-brown maid, he also wondered whether our feelings would change while we were separated. He wrote of his friendship and his love, his affection and his desire, but also kept an accounting of who wrote more letters, fearing his greater frequency was a sign of my lesser affections.
I wrote. Of course, I did. It was only that I couldn’t keep up with the pace of his correspondence!
He still asked again and again if I wanted him, and entreated me not to deceive myself if I couldn’t truly be happy as the wife of a man without means. He even teased gently about a dream he’d had in which he arrived to Albany to find me asleep in the grass holding the hand of another man who had a prior claim.
If I’d asked the name of this man with a supposed prior claim, he’d have dismissed the matter artfully. Or teased that he meant Tench Tilghman. But I knew better. It was André he meant.
He feared that I blamed him for the death of a man I’d known first. A man Hamilton himself admired. A man I grieved for, in truth. But fearing it might come between us, I answered playfully,
Sir, your dreams malign me. For there is not now, nor ever has been, a man with prior claim.