While I kept my curious boy from reaching for one of the many fascinating corked glass jars on the counter, the apothecary rummaged through the drawers and we chatted about the various states that had ratified the Constitution—six by my count, five by his.
“You forgot Massachusetts,” I said, just as the roar of angry voices reached our ears.
We both looked up toward the street to see a horde of angry men marching from the direction of the battery. A mob. I’d once seen a group of men like this armed with feathers and tar. This time, they had sticks and, as I was about to learn, a far more righteous rage. “Grave-robbing bastards!” someone shouted, just before a brick sailed through the glass window, sending a spray of shards at my feet. Instinctively, I grabbed my son and pulled him behind the counter. But from where I crouched, I saw the swarm move right past us on the street.
I could guess their destination.
The hospital. For the Constitution was not the only divisive thing in the newspapers that year. It had been reported that medical students, in need of cadavers to dissect, dug up bodies in the Negro Burial Ground outside the city. No one of prominence had seemed to care until the corpse of a white woman from Trinity Churchyard was also dug up and stolen.
Now the public was in an uproar.
I knew the importance of cadavers to the field of medical science, but I couldn’t help but shudder at the gross indignity of having anyone I loved violated and dissected in such a way.
As we heard the crash of more windows farther down the street, the apothecary rose to wrap a sheltering arm around my shoulder. “I’ll get you and the boy home,” he said, rushing us out the back. Across the way, furious citizens broke the hospital door to splinters and overran the hospital, sending young medical students running in every direction. Over my shoulder, I saw a young doctor climbing from a window. And my son stared as shouting men hauled cauldrons of dismembered body parts out of the hospital, the stench of it recalling the war immediately to my mind.
We saw a bloody foot, a swollen human head in a bottle, and some poor fellow’s pickled genitals hanging from a string before we fled up Broadway, only to come against hundreds more furious men blocking our way. The jostling crowd swept us up like a tidal wave, separating us from the apothecary and nearly tearing Philip’s hand from mine. Breathless and frightened, having quite forgotten about aches and pains, I realized the mob was descending upon the original nearby buildings of the old King’s College—which had been recently renamed the more republican Columbia College.
“Bring out the butchers!” someone in the mob cried, and I knew they were looking for medical students to punish.
“Keep walking,” I whispered to Philip. But my son made of himself a dead weight, pointing with one hand at something I couldn’t see. And then the crowd parted to reveal my husband on the college stairs, pleading with the mob to see reason.
Hamilton was a great orator, and his military voice could just be heard over the fray. “The mayor has already jailed the culprits. Allow the law—”
The mob pushed past him, breaking open the doors to the chapel, the library, and the dorms of the college he’d recently helped reopen.
Then he caught sight of us and dodged the rioters until we were all together, and he tugged us into his arms. “Dear God, Betsy, what the devil are you doing here?”
The chaos gave me no time to answer. Save to issue commands as he guided us through streets strewn with debris and damage—stop, wait here, run!—Alexander said no more until we’d made it into the safety of the Burrs’ entry hall. Was that how my husband had led men across the battlefield at Yorktown—fearless and relentless and cunning?
Escorted by Colonel Burr, we finally made it the rest of the way home. Having no concern for our audience, Alexander took me into his arms so tightly that I could barely breathe. “When I saw the two of you, there, amongst the rioters . . .”
“God willing, it’s over now,” I said, returning his embrace. But by morning, the mob had swollen to five thousand—a veritable army. Double the number of men Washington had with him at the Battle of Trenton. Not that it kept Alexander nor John Jay—who’d just recovered enough to start writing Federalist essays again—from trying to reason with the mob. Jay got his skull cracked with a brick for his trouble. Likewise, the Baron von Steuben had been trying to persuade the militia not to fire at the rioters when he was struck by a stone and promptly changed his mind. “Fire! Fire!”
I learned all of this when the baron returned to our house bleeding through a bandage hastily fastened upon him. “Mein Gott. Twenty dead!” the baron roared, almost as angry about that as he seemed to be about the ruined lace of his shirt. My newborn was just as angry in his cradle, crying for the milk only I could give him while the baron’s greyhound licked my baby’s face. “How many more wounded no one can guess. This chaos. This anarchy.”