“Oh, yes, imagine me striding down Broadway on my way to the Forum,” he said, waving his arm in a grand oratorial style, “frightening every horse and chicken in my path!”
We both laughed heartily at that. However, when at last the carving was done and delivered to our house some months later for safekeeping (Mr. Ceracchi’s original scheme of a collection of similar busts to be displayed to the public remaining as yet an unformed dream), I didn’t laugh, but was instead moved to tears.
Mr. Ceracchi had in fact shown my husband as an ancient statesman, in a head-and-shoulders portrayal that Alexander said was called a bust. His hair was shown cropped short, a style I’d never seen him wear, but looked very noble and Roman, and which served to set off my husband’s forthright profile to perfection. He looked steadfast and determined and confident, with the merest smile playing across his lips, exactly as I thought of him. Despite the blankness of the white marble, I judged it to be one of the best likenesses of my husband, and the most lifelike, too. Mounted on the column that Mr. Ceracchi had thoughtfully supplied, the bust had a prominent place in our parlor, and over time it became one of my most treasured possessions.
It was a good thing we were so pleased by the finished work, too, for our happiness helped ease the shock of Mr. Ceracchi’s next delivery, a month later.
“My God, Betsey,” Alexander exclaimed, coming to find me with a newly opened letter in his hands. “The audacity of the rascal!”
“Which rascal, my dear?” I asked, a reasonable question where my husband was concerned.
“Ceracchi,” he said, his face flushed. “He has presented me with a bill for his services for making the bust, as a ‘favor to me.’ I ask you, what manner of favor costs six hundred and twenty dollars?”
I gasped with dismay, for that was a very significant sum to our little household. “Six hundred and twenty dollars! Will you pay it?”
“I fear I have no choice,” he said, shaking his head. “There’s no doubt that we accepted the bust, and that we were pleased by his workmanship, for we’ve shown it to every single person who’s entered our house. No, I must pay him, though I shall consider it a lesson to myself to be less susceptible to Roman flattery, and to arrange all terms beforehand, especially with artists.”
Most of our days, however, didn’t include marble busts or audacious foreign sculptors. Instead we settled into a quiet routine that pleased me well. Each morning I’d be first at the dining table in our front room—my chair pulled back to accommodate my growing belly and the child within it—whilst Alexander finished dressing and preparing his papers for his day either in court at his office.
Our younger sons James and John, washed and dressed for the day, would join me, and while I cut and buttered neat slices of bread for their breakfast, they’d take turns reading aloud, a kind of informal lesson that Alexander had devised to begin their days in an educational manner. For John, who was still learning to read, a chapter from the Bible would be challenge enough, while James, who before long would be following his older brothers into Reverend Frazer’s tutelage, would read a selection from Dr. Oliver Goldsmith’s History of Rome. Angelica and Fanny would often appear then, too, and Alexander himself would soon join us to drink his coffee. Then everyone would be off to school and employment, and the day would begin in earnest.
Alexander and I were especially proud of our oldest son, Philip, who was to enter Columbia College in the autumn as a student, the same college that Alexander himself had attended when it had been known as King’s College before the Revolution. I do not know who was made the happier, father or son, by this significant achievement, and Alexander was eagerly offering every kind of advice to Philip about how and what to study.
But despite this domestic contentment, and even though Alexander’s role in the Federalist government had diminished, the Democratic-Republicans refused to believe it, and leave my husband in peace. They still considered him a dangerous adversary, one who needed to be destroyed, and that summer he and I both learned the depths to which his enemies would sink.
It began innocently enough. A small advertisement in the newspaper for a series of pamphlets caught Alexander’s eye. It wasn’t the title—The History of the United States for 1796—that attracted his notice, but the eager promise from the author that the pamphlet would include fresh revelations about the tenure of the last treasury secretary.
“I wish you would ignore it, Alexander,” I said when he showed it to me. “You know as well as I that it’s only going to be yet another version of the same old lies.”
He’d continued to scowl at the page, as determined as any terrier.
“Most likely, yes,” he did admit. “But ignoring the lies can also be perceived as being unable or unwilling to refute them, and therefore they become accepted as truth.”
I handed the paper back to him. “You were investigated twice by Congress, and nothing untoward was found,” I said. “I do not believe the efforts of this James Thomson Callender, whomever he may be, can rival those of a Congress filled with Democratic-Republicans.”
“Callender is one of Jefferson’s lesser pawns,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if Jefferson sponsored the entire series of pamphlets.”
“Please, Alexander,” I said. “You’re no longer in office. They can’t hurt you now.”
“It’s better to be certain,” he said doggedly. “I’ll send a clerk to buy them tomorrow so that the publisher won’t know of my interest. Most likely the pamphlets will be exactly as you say, nothing new, but I cannot in good conscience make that assumption.”
The pamphlets were duly purchased the next day, and duly read by my husband, who studied them with far more care than they merited. There was in fact nothing new: the same old empty accusations of misconduct by the same men—James Reynolds and Jacob Clingman—that had led to the investigations by Congress. He was accused of financial speculation, of using his position to fill his own pockets, of taking bribes to fill that non-existent account in the London bank. There were also the equally tired hints of licentious behavior, doubtless added to titillate readers and beguile them into their purchase.
Despite my pleas for common sense, Alexander was unable to ignore this, and insisted on defending himself in a letter published in the Gazette of the United States. Nor could he resist adding a few lines to discredit the two men who were the sources of the inaccurate reports as being in the pay of the Democratic-Republicans.