Eliza Hamilton Page 4

  It was still early when Eliza set off along the river path toward the town house of another cousin, Abraham Cuyler, where they would depart in carriages. But, despite her good start, Eliza arrived just in time to see Tench handing Miss Lynch into his fast, two-seater phaeton. Miss Lynch smiled down at Eliza innocently. Cousin Abraham gave a hallo and patted the seat beside him in a solid, heavy coach. One look was all it took to tell Eliza that she would spend the next hours of their journey crushed between Cousin Abraham and a portly military matron. The sun seemed to shine a bit less brightly. Eliza was far too polite to let on how bitterly she was disappointed.

  Cousin Abraham’s coach lurched into motion, and the matron swayed heavily toward Eliza. Ahead, Eliza could see the cloud of dust kicked up by Tench’s sleek horses, and sometimes there was a glimpse of Miss Lynch’s bobbing bonnet disappearing around the bend in the roadway.

  Miss Lynch’s dramatic femininity piqued Eliza. At the picnic grounds, the rocky terrain was too uneven for Miss Lynch to walk alone. She fretted with her charming drawl that she feared to turn an ankle. Tench gallantly held her elbow every minute. With Captain Tilghman’s help, she thought she just might be able to manage. The carriage was so high. Tench would have to help her mount it. Miss Lynch desired some berries. Captain Tilghman would fetch them. It was an art of flirtation incomprehensible to Eliza, who could only wonder how anyone could be so hopeless. Miss Lynch’s innocent smiles weren’t entirely innocent either, she thought irritably.

  Eliza didn’t know afterward what had come over her. By the time the party set out for a stroll to the falls after their picnic, she was out of patience. Miss Lynch brought out her contrary streak—Eliza was made of sterner stuff, and why not flaunt it? Her romance was not turning out as she and Angelica had planned. Tench had hardly given her a second glance, so absorbed was he with this southern belle.

  Ahead were steep rocks leading off the path, heading directly up toward the waterfall. That was where the best views were, so Eliza lifted her skirts and set off on a scramble. The recklessness of Miss Schuyler! exclaimed the southern ladies. As the cries reached her, Eliza laughed at them and scrambled higher. Eliza “made herself merry at the distress of the other Ladies,” as Tench told the story later. And he did admire Miss Schuyler’s courage and spunk. But he wasn’t looking to find a wife, and his pleasure was in flirting with the more coquettish ladies.

  High bonfires were crackling and throwing sparks in the middle of the streets when the party rolled back into Albany that evening. Miss Lynch rode home beside Tench Tilghman. An Iroquois feast and dance was beginning. As the sun set, the Iroquois opened the council ceremonies, Tench wrote in his diary, by “beating their drum, striking sticks together in Exact time and yelling after Their Manner. They were almost intirely naked.” Miss Lynch, who had never encountered something so savage and shocking, relied utterly upon Captain Tilghman. Eliza was exasperated. She had had enough of batting eyelashes. Surely there were Indians as well in South Carolina.

  Eliza was not shocked at the sight of half-naked Iroquois men dancing at council. She had seen it all before, every summer council of her childhood. She was not shocked either the next day when the chief of the Onondaga initiated Tench into the native family by bestowing on him an Indian name. She still wore her string of initiation beads when the Iroquois came for council. Eliza understood, too, that Tench would be offered a native “wife” as part of the bargain, and no girl who had grown up on an agricultural estate could miss the basics of sexual relations. The sachem, who took the measure of Tench Tilghman quickly, promised that Tench’s Iroquois wife would “be one of the handsomest they could find.” As Tench recorded in his diary, “I accepted the proposal with thanks. Miss Lynch and Miss Betsy Schuyler have promised to stand bridesmaids.”

  Eliza made a joke of being bridesmaid, but among the young women marriage was a serious business. Miss Lynch, Eliza, and Angelica were all at the age where marriage was their primary object. Tench, a large landowner and a decade older, was a highly eligible bachelor. He enjoyed the young ladies competing for his affection, but he had no intention of proposing marriage that summer. That didn’t stop the ladies, though, from trying.

  Tench wasn’t joking when he accepted the sachem’s offer of an Indian “bride” either. Tench confided to his diary that, just as soon as the young American ladies were out of the way, he planned to bed some of the Indian girls. They “are pretty and extremely cleanly they speak tolerable English too,” Tench wrote, “so that I believe I must make an Acquaintance among them when my fair Country women are all gone, for I think they are superior to any of the Albanians.”

  He hoped to bed some of the English and Dutch girls, too, given half a chance. He was keeping a little black book of conquests. Tench rated the Indian girls prettier than Miss Lynch, Eliza, or any of her sisters, but he did make one exception: “Miss Ransolaer.” She “is the Belle of the Town and therefore a little of the Coquette,” Tench confided. “I will have a Tete a Tete with her before I go. And give her a place in my Journal.” “Miss Ransolaer” was Eliza’s younger cousin, fifteen-year-old Maria Van Rensselaer, a girl of great beauty and vast wealth, who was, despite her youth, rumored to be of a free inclination.

  Eliza had had her chance at catching a beau, and by the next week it was too late. Her father’s plans were for the entire family to decamp to Saratoga, and that would be the last she would see of Tench Tilghman. The young captain would soon be leaving the Hudson Valley.

  They would set off, her father reminded her, on the morning of August 29, and the family would need to be ready. On the morning of their departure, Tench joined them for breakfast, and his affection was genuine. “I sat among them like an old Acquaintance, tho’ this is only the seventh day since my introduction,” Tench wrote. “It would be seven years before I could be as intimate with half the World. But there is so much frankness & freeness in this Family that a man must be dead to every feeling of Familiarity who is not familiarized the first hour of his being among them.” Tench liked Eliza especially, and there was enough of a spark between them that it wasn’t unreasonable to hope that romance might blossom. But now it was too late for this summer. Tench waved goodbye as the coach set off and turned back toward his quarters. He had one week left in Albany before his return voyage south. His laddish thoughts were on Maria Van Rensselaer and fair Indian maidens.

  Eliza’s feelings were more complicated. No one ever recorded precisely what occurred next inside the Schuyler family carriage as it departed, but whatever it was must have been dramatic and impassioned. It is not hard to guess that there were tears and some heartbreak. The Schuyler sisters stuck together, and poor General Schuyler is likely to have found himself cast by Angelica and Peggy as the cruel father, whisking Eliza away from a romantic precipice. Eliza would never have said so, but her sisters would not have hesitated. By the end of a long day on the road with three boy-crazy daughters, Philip and Kitty were beaten down sufficiently for General Schuyler to let his daughter do something absolutely extraordinary.

  Sometime on the second day of their journey, just as they were nearing Saratoga, Eliza was allowed to turn around. She would travel alone, in the midst of a war, through open country, with just one of the servants as a guard, back to Tench and Albany. Whether by design or by chance, Eliza asked for permission to stay in Albany at the home of her cousin Maria Van Rensselaer.

  Back in Albany alone, Eliza wasted no time in letting Tench know she was in town. “Who should bless my eye sight this evening,” Tench wondered, “but good natured agreeable Betsy Schuyler just returned from Saratogha.” Miss Lynch and her party had departed for the south. The field should have been open.

  But when Tench called on Eliza and her cousin the next day, all his attention was on Maria. “Miss Ransolaer,” he recorded in his journal, “is pretty, quite young and fond of jokes about her humble servants. As I had made myself master of a good deal of her private history, I could touch upon such matters as I knew
would be agreeable to her.” It was all rather less agreeable for Eliza.

  Had Eliza and Tench had more time together, perhaps something might have blossomed between them. Tench was fond of Eliza. As the evening came to an end, “I lamented that my short stay in Albany would so soon deprive me of so agreeable an Acquaintance and a deal more of such common place stuff,” Tench wrote. “This was a mere Compliment to her [i.e., Miss Rensselaer], but I told Miss Schuyler so with truth.” Whatever Tench’s feelings, Eliza was smitten. But, then, being smitten was the primary occupation of the young women.

  Tench departed, and whatever else was the case he set off without proposing marriage to Eliza. Any romance would have to bloom on another occasion, but, now that her parents knew of her feelings, it was not impossible that there would be other occasions to meet Tench Tilghman.

  Soon there were other gallant distractions, too. Handsome visitors came and went from General Schuyler’s home, and Eliza was in the mood to have a romance. A few weeks later, the captured British officer John André stayed briefly in the Schuyler family as a prisoner of war while being transferred farther from the front. He passed several days in polite captivity, doing sketches of her cousin Abraham Cuyler and his wife, Janet, and flirting with the general’s second daughter. Eliza promptly fell in love with John André as well. Mooning about him, however, was something Eliza knew would not meet with a patient response from her father. A general’s daughter could not expect to fall in love with a captured enemy officer and have her father permit it, not during the War of Independence. The Schuyler sisters knew many of the British officers from the days before the war, and their father liked many of them as gentlemen and soldiers. But any of his daughters marrying a Loyalist was out of the question. So Eliza and her sisters swooned over John André and Eliza’s star-crossed romance in hushed late-night whispers.

  Tench Tilghman and John André were not the only gentlemen visitors, that year or the next. One of the gentlemen to visit the family in April of 1776 was charming and a favorite of the Schuyler girls, especially Eliza, but he was neither young nor eligible nor a bachelor. This visitor was Benjamin Franklin, who came with a delegation to see Eliza’s father and travel to Ticonderoga.

  The long river journey from New York City up to Saratoga exhausted the elderly Franklin, who stopped for a week to rest and recover. There, in the sunny front parlor, he taught Eliza how to play backgammon. “The lively behavior of the young ladies makes Saratoga,” noted one of the other guests, “a most pleasing sejour,” and Benjamin Franklin could not have agreed more wholeheartedly.

  The old gentleman set off with the other men for a hunting trip to Johnson Hall the following week, but it didn’t take long on the trail to persuade Benjamin Franklin that he wasn’t cut out for wilderness travel and carousing. He preferred the company of cheerful young ladies and backgammon. Pleading old age and failing health, he turned back and spent another week instead with Eliza, Peggy, and their mother.

  One of the other visitors in 1776 was far less welcome by either the general or Kitty. That year, the Schuyler girls first encountered at their father’s house a mysterious, flirtatious, and secretive young officer in the American army named John Carter. John Carter, a notably short and slight man, with bright, pale eyes and delicate features, arrived at the Pastures one day with a letter of introduction from Philip Schuyler’s neighbor and sometime business partner, a fast-dealing British-born commercial agent named William Duer. In time, Eliza would come to despise Duer and his penchant for crooked dealing. Without a letter from Duer now, Carter would never have gained admission to the mansion or to the Schuyler daughters so readily, and Philip Schuyler would later rue the day he let Mr. Carter cross the threshold.

  What happened at that first meeting of John Carter and the Schuyler sisters? The girls never left an account of that drawing-room visit. But Mr. Carter would have bowed, the young ladies would have nodded, and it seems that John may have reminded Angelica that they’d danced together once at an assembly ball the previous winter in Philadelphia. Not that Angelica needed any reminder. Dancing with a gentleman with whom one was barely acquainted at a public ball was not proper, but the recollection certainly added a frisson of excitement to this introduction, and by November 1776, John Carter was a regular visitor, dashing off cordial notes of thanks to the Schuyler girls’ mother and sending his “compliments” to “the young ladies”—especially to Miss Angelica.

  Where John Carter came from or what his family connections were no one knew, except that he was British and had been appointed in July as a commissioner to the Continental Congress, charged with auditing the accounts of the northern army in Albany, an army that General Schuyler headed. The rest was murky. Eliza wondered, how had he come to America and why had he said so little about his family? The sisters had read in romance novels about young men forced to flee cruel parents and orphans stripped of their rightful fortunes by unscrupulous guardians. Poor Mr. Carter. There must be, Angelica assured her sisters, some wildly romantic story.

  The more he saw of the young man, the more Philip Schuyler sensed something was amiss. Philip was deeply suspicious and doubted very much that this young man was what he represented. That he was a British agent sent to infiltrate the general’s home was certainly not impossible.

  General Schuyler was the patriot spymaster in the Hudson, and sensitive information came and went from the household constantly. The Schuyler sisters were already part of that network. There was a fine line between local gossip and military intelligence. When Eliza heard a bit of news about the movements here or there, when someone or another suspected of Loyalist sympathies departed town suddenly, she made a note to tell Angelica, who gathered up these bits of information and shared them with their father.

  The sisters passed along especially any news about their cousin Lady Mary and her sister Margaret, who were being held captive by Aunt Judith on the orders of General Schuyler and General Washington. Cousin Mary’s husband, Sir John Johnson, had fled through the wilderness to Canada, pursued by the rebels. Heavily pregnant, with two small children in tow, Lady Mary was forced to remain behind and was promptly incarcerated. Philip Schuyler already suspected that, despite her house arrest, she was somehow leaking intelligence back to the British. Lady Mary for her part now hated Philip Schuyler. The revolution divided families, and on the New York frontier, where communities were small and tightly knit, the pain was disproportionately heightened.

  One had to ask the same question of John Carter and his allegiances. Was he a true patriot or a covert loyalist? His British birth and recent arrival in America tolled against him. But no one knew what was in the heart of another man, no matter what uniform he wore in battle. The war for independence was only beginning, and in 1776 there had already been unpleasant surprises. There were more to come. General Schuyler knew it. And something just didn’t add up when it came to John Carter.

  While General Schuyler cautioned his daughters that the history of Mr. Carter would bear some looking into, the girls knew that was only to be expected. In the novels of Mrs. Brooke and Mr. Goldsmith, which arrived from London, drowning heroines were always being plucked from rivers by gallant suitors only to find their love thwarted by a stern papa. When their father declared not long after that the gentleman was not welcome any longer and ordered that his daughters break off contact, Angelica felt just like a heroine in a story.

  But Philip Schuyler was right to worry about this mysterious gentleman. John Carter was not his name, and he definitely had designs on the general’s daughter.

  Philip Schuyler was a man accustomed to having his orders followed and assumed that this would be the end of any thoughts of romance with Mr. Carter. For Eliza, it would have been. Eliza had good sense and a head on her shoulders. Anyhow, it wasn’t her romance. She had thoughts of Tench Tilghman and John André to occupy her. Angelica, however, declared herself now madly in love with John Carter, and her father’s command only fueled the flames of passion. Angelic
a thrilled to the forbidden allure. When a secret letter arrived, Angelica swore her sisters to secrecy, and Eliza’s heart sank when she read it. John begged Angelica to meet him. She could not deny him a farewell, not when he so fervently admired Miss Angelica Schuyler. Eliza begged her not to go. But any warning was futile. Angelica was determined to carry on seeing John Carter.

  From their mother’s perspective, there should have been dangers enough to keep Angelica, Eliza, and Peggy busy, and she should have been able to count on the girls obeying their father. The Revolutionary War was unfolding around them, and their father was a general. The countryside was alive with danger. Philip Schuyler—and, by extension, his family and home—was a target on a number of fronts, and the Schuylers’ home at the Pastures was an armed fortress for good reason.

  Kitty and the girls were not at the front, but the front was all around them. They were in constant danger, not only from the troops of the British general John Burgoyne from the north but, more important, from the Indian attacks that were increasingly frequent and violent. The Mohawks were firmly aligned with the British and with the Johnson family Loyalists, who continued to fight against the Americans from Sir John’s outpost in Canada, with the help of intelligence that, just as Philip Schuyler feared, was smuggled out by cousin Lady Mary.

  Stationed outside the doors of the Schuyler family mansion in Albany now and at the estate in Saratoga were a half-dozen guards and soldiers. Philip Schuyler was taking no chances. Eliza and her sisters were friendly with a young woman named Jane McCrea who lived with her brother in Saratoga and was nearly the same age as Angelica. Miss McCrea’s brother, Colonel John McCrea, fought in the Albany militia with their father. Word of Jane’s murder and scalping in the spring ignited passions against the natives and General Burgoyne in the countryside. Eliza and her mother were in Saratoga when the word of the scalping spread through the Hudson, and Eliza remembered afterward that her “father was so alarmed by the killing of Miss McCrea” that he sent an armed escort to fetch his wife and daughter back to Albany. The accounts of the murder quickly took on fantastic and exaggerated elements in the retelling, but the risk of attacks from the natives was real. A plot to have the Schuyler family murdered in their home by an Indian brave was averted at the final moment only because the Iroquois man said that he could not finally kill a man at whose table he had eaten.