Namely, that George Washington couldn’t look out his window without seeing us there.
Day in. Day out. Our presence—in plain sight—was to remind the general that Alexander Hamilton was available for a promotion, but until he got one, he would remain just out of reach.
For my part, I’d promised that I would live anywhere with Hamilton, and I took genuine pleasure in transforming the shack into our home. This was not, after all, a boardinghouse where we must be careful not to move anything. No, this was the first place I might decide for myself how to arrange our few sticks of furniture, where to store silver, where to hang linens, and what to store in the larder—for we had no servant with us to do it for me.
And not even Mama would swoop in and dictate how everything should be.
So, armed with bucket, a brush, and some precious lye soap acquired at far too great a price, I cheerfully scrubbed our new home from floor to ceiling. I made countless trips to the river to get wash water. And when I hung my petticoats on the line, I’d wave, quite ruefully, to Martha Washington across the way, imagining she was doing the same.
It was all a great deal more challenging than I expected. The fire needed to be tended all day if we were to have anything to eat. And having never managed a household by myself, much less attended to all the chores, there were a few mishaps. My first attempt at cooking fish resulted in a charred mess and a burned hand.
“This is no place for my gently bred bride.” My husband said this while kissing my blistered fingers, as if to make them all better. Then his eyes fell upon the wash bucket where I’d been on my hands and knees scrubbing mud from the floor. And later that night, when I collapsed in an exhausted heap beside him in bed, he asked, “Why don’t you return to your father’s house in Albany before he sees what I’ve reduced you to?”
Because you aren’t the only one with too much pride, I thought.
My aunt Gertrude had said I was no milk-and-water miss. Well, I wasn’t about to be a milk-and-water wife, either. “Others make do with less. So can I. I don’t want to leave. My place is at your side in service of the cause.”
Besides, I could hardly make him see reason if I was far away.
“So you are a Roman wife,” he said, more than a little pleased. “But I’m not entirely without hopes we’ll soon have peace. Then you must submit to the mortification of enjoying mere domestic happiness. This I know you will not like, but we cannot always have things as we wish.”
I laughed at his optimistic teasing, then said, “Martha Washington stays with her husband through hardship and I intend to stay with mine.”
By mentioning Mrs. Washington, I also hoped to remind him of all the people who sacrificed their comfort and personal desires to remain at Washington’s side. But what he seemed to take from it was a reminder that Martha Washington had servants and I did not. A thing remedied the next day in the form of a young enslaved Negro woman Alexander hired from her master. Though I was happy for the help, I didn’t know if we could truly afford a servant and was surprised to feel discomfited at being entirely in charge of supervising one. I’d grown up in a house run using the labor of slaves, but they’d always been Papa’s slaves. Certainly, they’d tended to me, but as a child living under my father’s roof I’d not been given a choice in that.
Now, I had a choice. Though she’d only been temporarily hired out to us by her owner, this was the closest I’d ever come to being a slaveholder in my own right.
And I found that I did not like it.
I did not like it at all.
Not when I thought about the black soldiers at Morristown. Not when surrounded by soldiers preparing to die for the cause of liberty and independence. In any case, I didn’t share my misgivings with my husband because he’d done me the kindness of giving me exactly what he’d thought I’d wanted and needed, likely against the pangs of his own conscience.
I was only just beginning to see the inherent contradiction between the ideals we said we were fighting for, and the reality of slavery in our daily lives. Hamilton had opened my eyes to it.
But I wasn’t sure what to do about it.
We were, I suppose, both of us, still a ways from a full awakening.
*
IT MUST NOT be thought that Hamilton was idle at De Peyster’s Point.
Quite the opposite. While my servant and I cooked and cleaned and caught fish in the cold brackish water, Hamilton cast about for any sort of opportunity fortune might cast up. Not only pestering Washington near daily to give him command of troops, but also writing other generals, too, in the hopes they had some leadership role for him in the forthcoming campaign. He even wrote to my brother-in-law, who apparently informed Angelica of his ambitions such that she became anxious to exert her own influence on his behalf.