The Burr-Hamilton Duel ~ A few thoughts.

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We're approaching July 11, the anniversary date of the Burr-Hamilton duel. During the Revolution, these two men were much alike, young, brilliant, ambitious brothers in arms. It didn’t take long after 1792 for them to move to opposite sides of the playing field.

Aaron Burr was born into a leading Connecticut family. He was a descendant of Aaron Burr, Senior, a Presbyterian minister and second president of the College of New Jersey (Princeton). His mother, Esther Edwards, was the daughter of the famous theologian Jonathan Edwards. he like Hamilton was an orphan, but the young Burr was rigorously educated by his stern Connecticut relatives. He did not enter the College of New Jersey when he was 11, but passed the examination at the ripe old age of 13. 

Hamilton had a far more difficult time growing up. This “bastard brat of a Scot’s tinker” as John Adams would have it, was always jealous of his hard-won “honor” and of his status as "gentleman." Thin-skinned doesn’t begin to describe Alexander Hamilton. At eleven--the same age as young Aaron was applying for Princeton--he spent his days in a St. Croix warehouse, perched upon a high stool writing letters and balancing his master's accounts. He earned his daily bread and board in the sweat of his brow. 

About five o'clock Wednesday morning, July 11^th, 1804, Hamilton left town, probably from the area which is now Horatio Street in the Village and was rowed to the dueling ground. Weehawken is on the west bank of the Hudson directly across the river from the west end of what is now Forty-Second Street in Manhattan.  The passage across was near 3 miles. With a light breeze, and they arrived about 7. Burr and his second Van Ness were already on the ground and had cleared away some brush and branches to make “a fair opening.”  This was on the extreme southern point of the Palisades, 20 feet above the water, about 22 paces long and only 10 feet wide.

 On the way across the river, Hamilton told his second, Pendleton, that “he had made up his mind not to fire at Colonel Burr the first time, but to receive his fire and then fire into the air.” Pendleton argued with him, but Hamilton said “it is the effect of a religious scruple, and does not admit of reasoning. It is useless to say more on the subject, as my purpose is definitely fixed.”

The accounts of the seconds were at odds as to which man fired first. This is because the seconds had their backs to the duelists, in order to provide a certain level of deniability. Dueling was by this time illegal in both New York and New Jersey. If Hamilton threw away his shot by firing wide--as he'd proposed to do--he may have fired first. Logically, this would show Burr that he meant no harm, but, of course, it would also leave him at Burr's mercy. How Burr reacted would then be up to him. 

If Burr shot first, as Pendleton later declared, his shot would have hit Hamilton and caused him to spin about, clutch at his weapon, and discharge it harmlessly into a tree. The passage of a .54 caliber ball is not easily overlooked. Whoever shot first, we know the outcome.

“General Hamilton was this morning wounded by that wretch Burr, but we have every reason to hope he will recover.” Angelica Schuyler Church wrote to her brother, Phillip, In Albany.  It would be his duty to notify their father, the Old General Philip Schuyler, who was in failing health. Angelica went on to say:  “My sister bears with saintlike fortitude this affliction. The town is in consternation, and there exists only the expression of grief and indignation.”

Angelica Church with her eldest, Phillip

Oliver Wolcott, Jr., a close friend who attended  Hamilton's death bed at Bayard’s Mansion on the Hudson, also wrote to his own wife. "Hamilton suffers great pain – which he endures like a Hero.” He “has, of late years experienced his conviction of the truths of the Christian Religion and has desired to receive the Sacrament—but no one of the Clergy who have yet been consulted with administer it.” 

After the duel, Burr’s barge landed him and his second Van Ness at Canal Street, where, according to some sources, he simply went on to his law office as if nothing had happened. Others say he went instead to his home at Richmond Hill. This might have been wiser, because of the fame of both men, and because of the illegality of the morning's activities.

Richmond Hill

The Church’s dueling pistols—like many of the best in those days, contained hair-trigger mechanisms. Articles on the pistols have called these mechanisms “hidden” and “newly discovered,” although that speaks only to 20^th Century lack of understanding of the 18^th Century Code Duello and of the specialized weapons involved.   

In fact, Burr may have used these very pistols some years earlier in a duel with John Church, so he was more familiar with them than was Hamilton. On the narrow ledge at Weehawken, it would have been impossible to change a setting—the guns were always set up by the seconds “inspecting, setting triggers and loading”—without anyone noticing. Pendleton, Hamilton’s second, in fact, reports that he had asked whether Hamilton wished to have the hair trigger set. His friend had plainly answered “Not this time.”

The "hidden" hair trigger was made to seem like a big new discovery in a New York Magazine article, whose author insinuated that Hamilton had intended to secretly make use of it.  I will let Robert A. Hendrickson, one of Hamilton’s most passionate biographers (Author of The Rise and Fall of Alexander Hamilton) speak for his hero:

 

“Disenchanted as he was with himself, never able to rid himself of his sense of public accountability, if Hamilton had wished to survive (the duel) at all—a question ultimately unanswerable—the unlikeliest way he could have found to do so was by a secret trick that four men and all their friends, whatever their other differences, would agree was dishonorable. Worse than dishonorable.  Despicable. (And) "Honor was the subject of the morning’s exercise.”

Some years later, when questioned on the subject, Burr was quoted as saying that had his vision not been impaired by the morning mist, he would have "shot Hamilton in the heart." According to the account of the noted English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who met with Burr in England in 1808 (four years after the duel) Burr claimed to have been certain of his ability to kill Hamilton. Bentham concluded that Burr was "little better than a murderer."

But Burr had his reasons for rage. His career had been blighted by Hamilton, who had denounced Burr repeatedly, calling him an “embryo-Caesar” and “unprincipled both as a public and private man.”  

In the winter of 1800-01, during the disputed election between Jefferson and Burr, the Electors had deadlocked, throwing the election into the House of Representatives. Thirty House votes would be logged before this impasse was resolved. Hamilton worked tirelessly to block Burr from assuming the presidency by writing to his federalist friends in the House, saying that Burr “is bankrupt beyond redemption, except by the plunder of his country.  His public principles have no other spring or aim than his own aggrandizement.” 

 As we know, Jefferson was finally elected, after a group of Federalists elected to abstain from voting, sending in blank ballots. For Alexander Hamilton and many others, the choice between Jefferson and Burr must have been like choosing between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.

Thomas Jefferson

Of course, there is always acrimonious rhetoric—the self-interest games that all politicians-- both the principled and the unprincipled—play. Politicians have to do "whatever it takes to stay in the game." But unlike today’s short-sighted hacks-in-office, Hamilton wasn’t just thinking of the here and now. He had always had a vision of a mighty future for his adopted country. A top-notch administrator, he'd seen Burr party jumping and now fanning Secessionist fires in New England which he knew must be doused--by any means possible. "Indivisible" was the keystone of his dream of American greatness, and under no circumstances would he let it go.

Because Hamilton fancied himself a rationalist above all, the letters he left to be read in the event of his death show that he understood all implications of the upcoming duel. In the end, despite the claims on his heart of his wife and of his adored children and despite the creditors to whom he had become obligated while building his new home,  he would risk everything and hazard his life in order to destroy Burr and thus preserve the Union. 

That morning by the river at Weehawken, Alexander Hamilton threw his shot away and left himself at the mercy of his enemy. I'll have to quote Trelane, the super-being in the original Star Trek Squire of Gothos episode and end it here: "...your heroic Alexander Hamilton."

The Grange - and the elegant dining room 

~~Juliet Waldron

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Sources:

 Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow ISBN: 1594200092 Penguin, 2005 

The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 21 volumes, Harold C. Syrett, Ed., Columbia University, 

1987 

Founding Brothers by Joseph L. Ellis, ISBN: 9780375405440, Knopf, 2000 

The Rise & Fall of Alexander Hamilton, Vols. 1&2, by Robert A. Hendrickson, 9780884051398, Mason/Charter 1976 

The Founding Fathers, a biography of Alexander Hamilton in his own words, Vol. 1&2, ed. by Mary Jo Kline, Newsweek Publishers, 1973 

 Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, a Study in Character by Roger G. Kennedy, ISBN: 9780195140552, 2000 

Alexander Hamilton, Writings, ed. Joanne Freeman, ISBN: 9781931082044, Library of America 

The Treason Trial of Aaron Burr, by R. Kent Newmyer, ISBN: 978-1-107-60661-6. Cambridge University Press, 2012 

The Loaf Mass

Catherine Schuyler burning the wheat before General Burgoyne can feed it to the invading British army

Schuylerville, NY before the Battle of Saratoga

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We’re about to celebrate the first of the old harvest festivals--Lamas, or The Loaf Mass. Living in an area that still has a great deal of agriculture, I’m keenly aware of the seasons, though I’m also darn glad I don’t farm for a living. Mother Nature isn't always kind to the farmers who feed the rest of us. This year She started spring with a long stretch of uncharacteristic cold and rain, delaying planting.

Then just about the time corn and other temperature sensitive crops begin to grow, She''ll sometimes send a “a flash drought.” Not this year, though! This was generally a good year, and though things were late, there was plenty of water. When those waving green vistas turned gold, the harvest began well.

Now, in wide swatches to the east of us, where the six mule teams still pull threshers and barefoot women hoe kitchen gardens and hang clothes on lines, the corn stands high and tasseling. If we can just get a few more inches of rain into the ground, this year should provide a spectacular harvest of maize too.  

When I lived in England long ago, I was thrilled to enter my neighboring square stone Saxon church and see great loaves of bread, three and four feet high. Some had been baked in special lidded pans, but many others were carefully fashioned by hand. A stiff hard to hand-mix dough is necessary, with a nice egg wash at the end to make them shine. (It's more about keeping its shape and less about being good to eat.) Some of those loaves were shaped like sheaves of wheat and others like men. They were leaned against the altar rail among the more usual floral offerings.

When I asked who the men were, I was told that they were “John Barleycorn, the life of the fields.” This was in a pub where I sat decorously drinking a Baby Cham besides my glamorous mother--so perhaps that particular informant was thinking of the hearty, earthy local ales that were being drunk all around us. (I'd hear the phrase again, some years later, back in the States, sitting in an art house in Cambridge, MA, while watching an extremely disturbing British movie called The Wicker Man.)

Another gentlemen, of a more scholarly bent, protested. He said that these loaves were a living link to the past, to the powerful Celtic sun and smith god, Lugh. Yet another man, this one in a green tweed jacket, disagreed. He claimed the loaves represented an even more ancient Celtic divinity, a god of vegetation, one who was born, died, and resurrected again every spring, on and on, for more than a thousand years all across the British countryside. That divinity's name--since the genocide of the Roman occupation--had been forgotten.

St. Just in Roseland, Cornwall

Years later, and now baking my own bread, an Uncle who owned many, many farms presented me with a bucket of wheat that had come straight from his harvester. Cleaning out the residual dust and chaff and then grinding it into flour took time, but the bread I made from this had an extra dimension of taste, a nutty sweetness that apparently gets lost even from the finest brands of commercial flour.

 Now swaddled in a/c and so distanced from our original place in nature, enthralled by our gadgets, the Loaf Mass reminds me of a time when all humans grubbed dirt. They endured summer heat and desperately prayed for rain, hoping to raise enough food to get them and theirs through the next winter.

The impulse remains to say thank-you to the earth and the living gifts she bestows which sustain us. August always begins in my house with the baking of a few celebratory loaves, no matter how goll-durn hot it is outside.      


~~Juliet Waldron

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ANGELICA SCHUYLER ~ America's First Heart Throb

A Master Passion - A Founder's Marriage

Angelica, older sister to Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, was a piece of work. Perhaps you've met someone like her--enchanting, intelligent, daring, filled with boundless energy, bubbling over with wit. She was also a champagne tastes kind of gal who brought the party along with her, brightening any room she entered. Men and women alike adored her. She had admirers not only in America, but in France and in Britain, too, among them the leading lights of the time.  

The French Statesman Talleyrand, the Whig Leader, Charles Fox, the play-write Richard Brinsley Sheridan, as well as Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, and the Marquis de Lafayette were among the many luminaries who fell beneath her spell. 

We can no longer see the glamor in this picture of her and her first child, painted by Trumbull. Fashions in beauty change. In one letter to his father-in-law, Hamilton speaks of Angelica and his wife Elizabeth as "our brunettes." I'm not certain if Angelica had blue eyes or the melting black eyes of her younger sister.  Whichever, it was her animating high spirits, wit, and a killer sense of style which knocked 'em all dead. In her own time, she was known as "the thief of hearts."

While accompanying her husband to England, Angelica thrilled to visit the glamorous European capitols, to be introduced at the French Court and to meet the Prince of Wales et al, but she missed her warm extended family, too. Here's an excerpt from a letter she wrote to her brother-in-law, Alexander Hamilton:

“You are happy my dear friend to find consolation in words and thoughts. I cannot be so easily satisfied. I regret America. I regret the separation from my friends and I lament the loss of your society. I am so unreasonable as to prefer our charming family parties to all the gaieties of London…I shall send by the first ships every well written book that I can procure on the subject of finance…"

Good as her word, she sent our soon-to-be First Secretary of the Treasury a copy of Adam Smith’s seminal work on economics, The Wealth of Nations.

Angelica and Hamilton engaged in a life-long flirtation, evidence of which survives in any number of letters.

Hamilton playfully writes to her: "I seldom write to a lady without fancying the relation of lover and mistress. It has a very inspiring effect.”

Angelica writes: "Indeed, my dear, Sir if my path was strewed with as many roses as you have filled your letter with compliments, I should not now regret my absence from America.”

Note the odd placement of the comma. The romantic in Hamilton certainly did!

“...You ladies despise the pedantry of punctuation. There was a most critical comma in your last letter.  It is my interest it should have been designed; but I presume it was accidental…” and in return he signs: Adieu ma chere, Soeur.  A. Hamilton”

Though Hamilton's political enemies made a great deal of their public repartee, it seems highly doubtful that these two, for all their word-play round the subject, ever shared a bed.  For one thing, the Schuylers were a proud and tightly-knit family, all of whom, from beginning to end, whole-heartedly admired Hamilton. The sisters, Elizabeth and Angelica, loved and supported each other from the beginning of this triangular relationship to the end--and beyond.

Here is a letter Elizabeth wrote to her sister just after her departure to England: “My very dear beloved Angelica: I have seated myself to write to you, but my hearts is so saddened by your absence that it can scarcely dictate, my eyes so filled with tears that I shall not be able to write you much. Tell Mr. Church for me of the happiness he will give me in bringing you to me, not to me alone, but to fond parents, sisters, friends and to my Hamilton, who has for you all the affection of a fond own brother."

Speaking of Talleyrand and Chevalier Beaumetz, who had traveled to America to escape Madame Guillotine, Angelica call them: "Martyrs to the cause of moderate liberty…To your care, dear Eliza, I commit these interesting strangers. They are a loan I make you till I return to America, not to reclaim my friends entirely, but to share their society with you and dear Alexander the Amiable.

By my Amiable you know that I mean your husband, for I love him very much and, if you were as generous as the old Romans, you would lend him to me for a little while. But do not be jealous, my dear Eliza, since I am more solicitous to promote his laudable ambition than any person in the world and there is no summit of true glory which I do not desire he may attain, provided always that he pleases to give me a little chit-chat and sometimes to say I wish our dear Angelica was here…Ah! Bess! You were a lucky girl to get so clever and so good a companion.”

Thomas Jefferson by Mather, elegant at the French Court

Amusingly, Hamilton's chief political enemy, Thomas Jefferson, seems to have also fallen under the spell of the formidable Mrs. Church's, this during 1788, when he was America's ambassador in Paris. The Ancien Regime still ruled France at this time, although events were only an eye blink distant from the coming Revolution. Here is a graceful excerpt from a letter from Jefferson to Angelica: 

The morning you left us, all was wrong, even the sunshine was provoking, with which I never quarreled before. I took it into my head he shone only to throw light on our loss: to present a cheerfulness not at all in unison with my mind. I mounted my horse earlier than common. I took by instinct the road you had taken...

"I think I have discovered a method of preventing this dejection of mind on any future parting.
"It is this. When you come again I will employ myself in finding or fancying that you have some faults & I will draw a veil over all your good qualities if I can find one large enough."

Six months after, Jefferson begs Angelica to return to Paris and in August 1788 he seductively proposes that she accompany him on shipboard when they both return to America.

Think of it, my friend, and let us begin a negotiation on the subject. You shall find in me all the spirit of accommodation with which Yoric began his with the fair Piedmontese.


(The characters Jefferson refers to were in an erotically charged scene in Sentimental Journey, a best-selling novel of the day by English writer Laurence Sterne. Yoric is forced to share a room at a crowded Italian country inn with a lovely female stranger. These two characters will eventually have sex.)

"Let’s go back together then. You intend it a visit; so do I. While you are indulging with your friends on the Hudson, I will go to see if Monticello remains in the same place, or I will attend you to the falls of Niagara, if you will go with me to the passage of the Potowmac, the Natural Bridge, etc.,"

A decade later, Jefferson, then Vice President, is still trying: "... I shall entertain the hope that we may meet at this place, as on a middle ground. perhaps you may find it not unpleasant in winter to get this much nearer to the sun. but whether we meet or not, I shall for ever claim an esteem which continues to be very precious to me, and hope to be, at times, indulged with the mutual expression of it."

Lin-Manuel Miranda's hip-hop version of the Schuyler Sisters~

~Elizabeth, Angelica, Peggy~

But we're all overlooking Angelica's most important man--her husband. Biographers and armchair historians alike think of him as dull and boring. So apparently did Angelica after a decade of marriage.

In the beginning, however, John Barker Church was a handsome fast-talker, a down-on-his-luck aristocrat in America, fleeing the consequences of a duel and a host of unpaid debts. He courted his American princess under the cover of a war-time commissary business, using the alias 'Carter.'

After Major General Schuyler, her father, soon forbade the smooth-talking Englishman access to the house, but the damage was done. They eloped in classic style. One night, she climbed out the window and down a ladder into John's waiting arms.  Angelica's doubly patrician parents, (her mother was a van Rensselaer) were beyond furious. It took a year, stern interventions by Dutch grandparents, and a suitable offering in the shape of a son christened 'Philip', to reconcile them. 

It looks quiet today, but The Pastures, the Schuyler's home on the banks of the Hudson, was once the site of high romantic drama. Over the years, four thwarted and love-struck Schuyler daughters, one after the other, climbed out those upstairs windows into the arms of lovers.*

Once upon a time, before he became a successful insurance underwriter, (one who was by contemporary accounts was "fonder of premiums than payouts,") John Barker Church was a dashing rakehell with the scent of brimstone about him.  He seems to have been a type America loves--entrepreneur/con-artist. Once he reached America, his luck turned; all the cards went his way. He ended his Revolutionary War with a tidy fortune in his pocket. 

In the 18th Century it was more or less expected that graft would be a large part of the pay-off for a nimble supplier, so the tarnish--the unpaid soldiers of the Revolution and their blood-on-the-snow sufferings--didn't stick. From an aristocratic welcher, Church was, by the end of war, transformed into a man sufficiently wealthy to return to England with a colonial princess on his arm and with his pockets sufficiently full to "win" a seat in Parliament. 

In later years, letters sent by New Yorkers-in-the-know reported John Church's immense wealth as well as his appetite for underwriting all day and gambling all night. Both were occupations that, though fraught with risk, were also liable to bring immense rewards. For me, the picture that comes together is of a man of high intelligence and energy who had a positive delight in walking the edge--whether it was a bet laid upon the turn of a card or upon the successful return of a cargo of spices or a whaling ship.

Today, we call such people "thrill junkies," and perhaps this is the trait which brought Angelica and her husband together. From the number of passionate letters written to her that have survived, she thirsted for romance and was a mistress of leading on her admirers. Her looks, education, and brains ensured that she had but to crook a little finger and men came running. And why would we be surprised at her life-time of daring? She had, after all, climbed out that window, risking her honor and her future with a man whose real name she'd probably, even then, hadn't known.

~~Juliet Waldron

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*Elizabeth is the only daughter who was married (properly) at the house, because her sweetheart, Alexander Hamilton, was the only suitor for any of his girls of whom Philip Schuyler approved. 

TURKEY TALK, 1964



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After 51 years of marriage, I still wouldn't dare claim all-knowledge. I have stuck with my own for a long time, and it continues to present enough twists, turns and drama to satisfy the need of any writer.   

This holiday season, I look back on small events now half a century distant. They were not as exciting as the life the young Hamilton's lived, with a revolution still to be fought and won. However, like the Paul McCartney song, these days I often feel like a "relic of a distant age." So here's my little newlywed's story:

The first turkey I ever cooked was in 1964. I was a young married, an ex-student, as was my husband. We were living in a dismal basement apartment in NYC, whose front window looked out upon the back of the building’s garbage cans. Needless to say, we kept the blinds closed. We shared a bathroom with some elder ladies who we never saw, but who, no matter how loudly I scrubbed the place after using it, would arrive soon after I'd left and vigorously wash the entire bathroom all over again. I suppose I can’t blame them, for lots of old people in the city lived in fear of their neighbors.

We’d managed to buy the turkey, a small one, although it took some financial planning to get the cash together, as I didn’t have a job. Only my husband, Chris, did.  As a nineteen year old with zero skills, it didn’t pay much and rent took the lion's share. As for me, I’d left the hospital I’d been working in back in Philadelphia and come to NYC in order to be with him. At the time, I was violently morning sick—to the 9^th degree. I mean, Rosemary, in Rosemary’s Baby, had nothing on me! The only things I could reliably keep down were weird cravings: green pea soup, grapefruit, and sardines. Anything else—upchuck! Maybe that’s why the invisible ladies next door were so diligent about scrubbing our shared bathroom.

On the big day we cleaned up our turkey as I’d seen my parents do, slapped it in a big bakeware pan that we’d found in the kitchen, turned on the oven to 350 and then walked over to Broadway to see a little of the Thanksgiving Day parade. We were so far uptown that there wasn’t much to see, but there were bands and high school kids from out of town feeling really proud of themselves, and people wrestling with a couple of balloons—my favorite, Dino the dinosaur—being dragged about in the gusty wind. The other big event for me was seeing Fess Parker of Davy Crocket fame, waving and smiling from the back of an open car. Like a zillion children from my generation, he’d been my hero back in the fourth grade.  I’d wept while watching the Walt Disney show the night “Davy” died at the Alamo.

 

Now that little girl's life seemed incredibly distant. Chris and I looked at each other. We were married, pregnant and close to broke. Whether one or either of us would ever get back to college—and how the heck we would manage it--was still up in the air. Nobody’s parents were happy. With all this drama swirling, the parade, so very pointedly an event for kids, got boring fast. 

We turned and walked back through the wind and grimy uptown streets to our little pad. When we got there, the place was redolent with roast turkey and baked potatoes. The bird made snapping noises as the juice splattered about inside the oven, casting a smoky pall around the kitchen. We decided that this must mean it was cooked. Chris fetched it out, and lo and behold, it was done, all crispy, juices running clear. 

I was surprised because I was, for the first time in months and all of a sudden—genuinely hungry. It was quite a fine meal, our first Thanksgiving—meat, potatoes, squishy store bread and a freshly opened can of cranberry sauce. For a change, it went down and stayed there. 

Who knew I’d be remembering it fifty-one years later?

 ~~Juliet Waldron~~

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A MASTER PASSION, the story of

Alexander Hamilton & Betsy Schuyler

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NEVIS, A 1957 Visit

It was 1957 when Mom and I traveled to Nevis.  It was January, which is the best tourist weather in the Caribbean, with lots of sun. We flew up from Barbados to Antigua and then on to mountainous St. Kitts on the old British West Indian Airways in a DC 3. We boomed along slowly, carefully skirting majestic cumulus clouds.  Flying was a less exact process in those days, and deep in the innards of those big clouds rough weather could be hiding.

I was pretty excited, because we were going to see the place where my hero, Alexander Hamilton, had been born.  Mom said there probably wouldn’t be much to see but the island itself, however, she too was curious about this (then) rarely visited speck in the West Indian sea. Honoring Hamilton, I knew, was a kind of family tradition. My Grandfather Liddle always spoke highly of his great achievements as a Founding Father. So, after a foray into the musty interior of a used book store, my usually critical mother had been approving when I’d arrived at the cash register with Gertrude Atherton’s 1902 “dramatic biography” of Hamilton in hand.    

Mrs. Atherton had studied her subject with care. She, being an adventurous woman (and probably well-heeled), had traveled in the 1890’s to both Nevis and St. Croix, another island where Hamilton spent part of his youth, to do research.  All her skillful, ardent Edwardian prose went straight to my head. By the time I finished her book, I was convinced that Alexander Hamilton was the most romantic--as well as the smartest, hardest working man--among that crew of geniuses who’d shaped our early republic.

Mom and I stayed overnight in St. Kitts.  I remember that as one of the coldest I ever spent in the West Indies. There were shutters, and although we closed them tightly, the wind whistled through our room all night. Our plane was supposed to leave in the afternoon for Nevis—there were two ways to get there—on a ferry or in a small plane—but I was famously sea-sick. The plane would be small, completely full with four passengers and the pilot.  

We arrived at the airport –which was just a tin-sided, palm-frond-roofed shelter—and then waited and waited. The little plane (probably a modified Super Cub) was in parts in a shed next to the runway, because “somethin’ was not right”. My mother and I both grew anxious, as you might imagine. I sat on a wooden bench cradling Mrs. Atherton’s book.  I was by now well on the way to memorizing it.

Finally, we took off, even though the sun was going down. The adults, used to the vagaries of West Indies travel, made graveyard jokes, but falling out of the sky into the ocean didn’t really seem possible to me, not when I was on the verge of my Hamilton epiphany.  Half an hour later, we arrived—landing on an island which is little more than a mountain whose cloudy head juts from the sea. 

The runway was a grass field. Men holding poles with flaming, kerosene-soaked rags wrapped about their tops illuminated our landing area.  A couple of bounces later, we were down. Then another wait, until a couple of taxis appeared to take us all into Charlestown.  

At the guest house, lit by kerosene lanterns, the gray-haired proprietress, looking as if she’d stepped out of the 1920’s in her dowager’s ankle-length dress, took one look at me and said she didn’t allow children—“especially not American children” in her house. Looking around the room, with lots of antimacassar-backed chairs and delicate-legged side tables, every surface of which was covered with china figurines, I had a notion of what she was worried about.  Mom put on her most glacial demeanor and said that I was a perfectly well-behaved only child who spent all her time reading and who would certainly never enter the good parlor unless invited to do so.  “And besides,” she added, “I have brought her all this way from New York State to see where her hero, Alexander Hamilton, was born. Show her your book, Judy.”

I held out the beloved book for the old woman’s inspection.

“Ah,” she said, examining the cover. “Why, it’s Mrs. Atherton! Do you really like it?”

“Very much,” I said. “I can’t stop reading it. Hamilton goes with me everywhere.”

For the first time, the lady smiled. She extended her hand and said, “Come with me, my dear, and I’ll show you my very own copy of that book.” 

And sure enough she had one, the only other copy I’ve ever seen “in person.” Who could have predicted that this would be the thing that would convince her to let us stay?. Our hostess then explained the kerosene lamps.

“It’s after six o’clock now. From 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. we have electricity, after that we use these. It makes for early nights.”

On the very next day, we contemplated a heap of stones by the harbor which were said to be the remains of the Hamilton house. We did a lot of one-of-a-kind things there. We bathed in the hot springs in our swim suits, everything very informal. You just paid the man who hung around there, and he walked along with you to the hollows where the water steamed, warning you first about which pools that would scald you. These gravel-bottomed pools were shaded by a grove of towering palm trees. The tall ferns and delicate flowers clustered about the “baths” were the lushest and most beautiful I’d ever seen.

Another day, we traveled up the mountain to see the ruins of sugar mills. We particularly admired one that had been turned into a hotel where we met the owners and enjoyed lunch. There were always clouds gathering around the top of that mountain every afternoon. We were up so high that day that these gray clouds enveloped us, eventually bathing everything with a surprisingly cool tropical rain.

On other, more ordinary days, we swam from a beach of brown sugar sand, but it was often cloudy,  more so than the other islands we’d visited. We weren't keen to swim too far out into that mysterious gray-blue water, either, as there was often not another soul around for as far as the eye could see.  

It's been a good many years since that visit, but Alexander and his beloved Betsy are still with me, as well as so many treasured memories of that lovely, mysterious, cloudy-headed island. It was hard to let go of a story I've been writing off and on and for ever so long, but here, at last, Books We Love has published it.  

~~ Juliet Waldron

A Master Passion, a novel of Alexander Hamilton and Elizabeth Schuyler

Available at:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/search?query=A+Master+Passion%3A+The+story+of+Alexander+and+Elizabeth+Hamilton

 

https://store.kobobooks.com/en-CA/ebook/a-master-passion-the-story-of-alexander-and-elizabeth-hamilton-1

http://amzn.com/B014AY2YU0

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-master-passion-the-story-of-alexander-and-elizabeth-hamilton-juliet-waldron/1122329571?ean=9781771453851

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