It wasn’t until the morning that we were reminded of how much there was still to be done. In my childhood visits to the city, I remembered the bustling wharf, the grand buildings, and the broad tree-lined avenues. What we found in the wake of the long British occupation was a shelled city of scorched and burned-out edifices now unrecognizable. Livestock roamed freely amidst trash and weeds, fences long gone, and nary a stick in sight. In addition to the looting and the burning, the British had cut down trees and stripped manor houses of wood, burning nearly anything they could find for fuel. And the stench from the mud-choked wharfs and excrement in the streets . . . I couldn’t describe it if I tried.
“It should all be torn down and replaced,” Hamilton said of the hovels that remained.
Of course, Alexander saw possibility in all this destruction. He thought much opportunity was to be had in engineers who would make stately homes for the city’s new residents. He was already making plans to rebuild the city to its former glory, but for the time being, my husband rented a three-story house on Wall Street, where the best merchants made their homes, though we could only afford to live at the eastern end, where houses with crumbling mortar, fading paint, and sagging roofs huddled amongst shops and taverns. In fact, our new home was quite near the Queen’s Head Tavern, run by a West Indian tavern keeper named Samuel Fraunces. And it was that very tavern that became the epicenter of our first marital quarrel.
We quarreled not because my husband stayed there drinking all hours of the night, as so many wives were apt to complain. But instead because, when the occasion called for it, my husband simply refused to go to the tavern at all.
“General Washington is leaving the army,” I said, broaching the subject for the third time in as many days. But since the invitation had arrived, Alexander’s mood had turned dark. “He’s saying farewell to his officers at the tavern, and were you not first and foremost amongst them?”
Though I believed right down to the marrow of my bones that my husband had been the best and brightest of Washington’s officers, I still expected him to modestly protest that generals like my father, Nathanael Greene, Lafayette, or Henry Knox had been more instrumental to the victory. But modesty was never one of Alexander’s virtues. Instead, he complained, “Congress has not seen fit to recognize me as such.”
“Alexander—”
“I’m not going.”
Something had changed in him, I thought.
Something ate at him, night and day, and I didn’t think it was Congress.
I wished I understood it.
“But Washington is laying down his sword,” I said. “Such a moment will surely be recorded in the annals of history, Alexander. Shouldn’t your name be noted as one of those in attendance?”
It was then, for the first time, that I learned what it was like to truly stand in opposition to Alexander Hamilton. For what followed was not an indulgent remonstration. Nor even a small lecture on all the reasons he should not—would not—attend.
It was, instead, an onslaught of arguments, stinging in tone as if I were not merely a nagging wife but also an enemy to be destroyed. Raising every objection I had made or might make as a target, Alexander fired off ten, twelve, twenty points in rapid succession. Not just vanquishing my opinion, but also snapping even at the fly-wisp ideas that might have still buzzed around its corpse in my brain.
When, stunned, I finally opened my mouth to reply, he snapped his paper open. “No more, Betsy.”
I cannot decide whether my rebelliousness was stoked by the lawyerly tenaciousness with which he harangued me, or the high temper with which he did it, or simply the knowledge that my own mother would never have allowed such an episode to pass in her parlor without exacting a heavy price from my father’s peace of mind.
The truth was that in refusing to say farewell to Washington, I believed my husband to be doing something enormously foolish that he might one day regret. Sitting there beside him, Mrs. Washington’s advice came suddenly to mind. “Sometimes we encourage, sometimes we challenge, and sometimes we manage . . .”
And so, instead of staying silent, I challenged him with the one thing I knew to be unutterably true. “George Washington is a great man.”
My husband’s intense eyes fixed on me with dark, stormy disapproval. An edge of contempt and enmity I’d never before imagined could come from the expression of a man as dear to me as life. “I told you, ‘No more.’ A certain indulgence must be afforded a Dutchman’s daughter in matters of hearth and home, but I’ll teach you the absolute necessity of implicit obedience if I must.”