Echoed by Mr. Madison’s simpler, If men were angels, no government would be necessary.
On and on, working late hours between courtroom trials and congressional committee meetings, and nearly killing themselves doing it, they wrote the most enduring explanation of government ever put to paper before or since.
As winter melted to spring, I witnessed their ideas grow like the child in my womb, day by day, and it made me bolder, as if I, too, were on the verge of becoming.
Which was why, one morning, looking over Hamilton’s cramped shoulder, I ventured to say, “Does that—does that not seem . . .”
My husband turned to eye me, his brow raised. “Yes?”
Fearing I was about to make quite a fool of myself, I bit my lip. “Well, it’s only that what you’ve written sounds quite identifiably like you.”
Hamilton’s brow rose higher. “How?”
It was dramatic. A little dark. And altogether too complicated.
But what I said was, “Well, in the first place, you’ve used a great many more words to express that thought than Mr. Madison would.”
For a moment, his mouth dropped open, as if he took great insult. As if he were about to say something—perhaps something extremely cross. But his mouth snapped shut again. And all at once, he crumpled what he’d been writing into a ball and threw it to the floor.
Crestfallen, I tried to retrieve it. “Oh, no! Alexander, I didn’t mean for—”
“Let it not be said I cannot see through a veil of vanity,” he said, grumbling as he started fresh.
Thereafter, I noticed their writing styles became much more similar, an achievement made easier by the fact that they were both so much in agreement about what remained to be written that it was no longer necessary to plan each morning. Anyway, there was no time to. As twenty-nine essays expanded into eighty-five, they burned through foolscap, parchments, quills, and slate pencils. Often one of them was still writing while the other’s essay was being fit for type at the printer. There were days Hamilton didn’t even have the chance to read over his own work before sending it off to press.
And I myself scarcely had time for childbirth. Two days after celebrating the delivery of a little boy we named James—after my husband’s father and the man at whose side Alexander was now doing battle—my happiness was profoundly disturbed by my six-year-old coming inside from a game of hopscotch with tears of rage streaking his cheeks.
“They’re calling me a quadroon,” Philip cried.
I knew precisely why. Once, it was the question of whether one was Patriot or Tory that divided families, ruined friendships, and made nearly every outing confrontational. Now it was the question of whether one was a federalist or an antifederalist—for or against a strong central government.
Despite our best efforts, the authors of the Federalist essays had become an open secret. And even if the public didn’t know which essays my husband wrote, they knew he was writing them. Which was why Governor Clinton sent his minions to retaliate in the papers, accusing Alexander of being a superficial, conceited, upstart coxcomb. They’d also called him Tom Shit—a reference to his illegitimate birth that implied he was a Creole bastard with Negro blood.
And now, as I tried to comfort my crying firstborn son—a child of such sunny temperament that he almost never cried—it became deeply personal. Hamilton had warned me. He’d warned me when he proposed marriage that our children might one day suffer for the ignoble circumstances of his birth. Just as I’d warned him not to pick a fight with the governor.
But now it was war, and I wanted nothing but the governor’s complete surrender.
To that end, I decided to take the latest essay to the print shop myself instead of waiting for the printer to come to the house to pick it up. I’d never been one to lay abed for long after childbirth, and I was convinced that activity was the only way to relieve cramps. Now, I wanted my little boy to walk the streets of this city with his head held high. And I needed to show him how to do it.
So after nursing my newborn, I left him in Jenny’s capable hands and took Philip for a short but painful stroll to the printer, then up Broadway past the hospital to the nearby apothecary shop. “Mrs. Hamilton,” the apothecary said in a scolding tone, his bushy brows knitted behind the counter. “You’re so soon out of childbed. I’d have come to you if you’d sent a servant or Colonel Hamilton to fetch me.”
“I just needed some fresh air, raspberry leaves for my cramps, and a little lavender oil for my aching head.”