We remained with him until he died early the following morning. I knew the moment his soul left this life, and he belonged no more to us, but to his Savior, yet this knowledge brought no comfort to me.
My grief was so black and consuming that I remember nothing more beyond that: not who else was with us in that little room, nor how I was conveyed home, nor how the awful news was delivered to our other children. I was too bereft to attend my son’s burial, and there was considerable fear that I would miscarry the child within my womb. It was the most terrible time of my life, and my only comfort came from Alexander, whose bottomless sorrow equaled my own. No one else could understand the depth of our sorrow, or comprehend the pain of our loss.
But there was another.
When told of her brother’s death, our daughter Angelica fell senseless to the floor with shock. All attempts to revive her failed, and instead she lay on her bed in a kind of twilight, neither awake nor asleep. When at last I was myself recovered enough to learn her plight, I crept to her side and did my best to rouse her, but failed, and I wept more bitter tears over her as well.
In time she improved so that she could sit and stand and be led about, and on her best days she would play her brother’s favorite songs on her piano as if he were still in the room. But the bright and cheerful young woman she’d been before her brother’s death had vanished forever. Like an inanimate doll, her lovely dark eyes remained wide and staring, her voice mostly mute, and her beautiful face without emotion. She had left us with Philip, and she never returned.
My husband was never the same again, either. In time he returned to his practice, but all his friends were shocked by the change that grief had wrought. He could now have been a man twenty years older than his true age, the change was that precipitous. He withdrew further from the wickedness of the political world, and turned to the Bible with a devotion that both surprised and pleased me.
Most of all, we turned to each other. No one else could comprehend our loss; no one else could share the depths of our despair, or feel the harrowing pain that had come from our son’s senseless death. With Alexander, I didn’t have to explain, or struggle for words that didn’t exist. He felt the same, and shared the same unending sorrow and sadness.
Nothing would again be as it had been. We both knew that. But together we would continue for the sake of our other children. As each day somehow followed the next, we drew comfort from one another, and from the love we shared.
*
By the spring of 1801, our new house was completed, and we closed up the Broadway house and moved to Haarlem. Early each morning, Alexander would drive the chaise down Bloomingdale Road to his office on Garden Street, and each evening he would return to us at The Grange. We both found a melancholy peace there that was lacking in the city, and I’m sure that Alexander’s old associates from the Treasury would have been stunned to see the interest he now took in planting trees and arranging gardens, his days of taxes and foreign tariffs forgotten.
Soon after we moved, in July, I gave birth to my final child, a boy. We named him Philip, and though he became Little Phil to set him apart, his older brother was never far from our thoughts.
And yet there was fresh grief in the years ahead. In early 1802, my younger sister Peggy sickened and died with little warning. My only solace was that Alexander, who had been in Albany on business, was able to see her in her final days.
In May of 1803, my dear mother was taken all of a sudden by a stroke, and her death left an emptiness at The Pastures that would never again be filled. Now that my father was alone, his health deteriorated rapidly. I spent as much time with him in Albany as I could, while Alexander remained at The Grange with our children.
Yet amidst all this, Alexander had still retained an interest in New York City politics, the only place where he felt he’d still be welcome. He’d also watched from afar—and with considerable satisfaction—as his old nemesis Colonel Burr had failed to find favor with President Jefferson and the other Democratic-Republicans in the new capital city of Washington.
To Alexander, it was a rare kind of justice, that a man who had turned his back on one party to join another for a better chance at victory had now been shunned by both. He would, I think, have respected Colonel Burr far more if he’d lost as a Federalist, than won, as he had, as a Democratic-Republican. For a man who prized truth and trust as much as my husband did, a perpetual turncoat like the colonel was a vile and loathsome anathema to him. It was difficult to recall how, at one time, the two had been friends, and how the colonel’s daughter Theodosia had attended dancing lessons with our daughter Angelica.
With the possibility for another national post effectively blocked by the Democratic-Republicans, Colonel Burr announced that he would run for governor of New York, Alexander was livid, and all his old outrage at political indignities gathered again with fresh force. I urged him to ignore it, and reminded him that old quarrels were best left in the past. Yet at dinners with friends, and especially at the end of the meal when the bottle was passed around, he would launch into scandal-laden denouncements of Colonel Burr that often shocked others not with their detail, but with their vehemence.
Both behind the scenes and in the newspapers, Alexander worked relentlessly to make sure that the world remained aware of Colonel Burr’s numerous faults and duplicities, of his lack of character and conviction, and of his deceitful part in the creation of the Manhattan Company.
“Burr must not win, Betsey,” he argued when I found him at his desk late one night, composing yet another polemic against the colonel. “You know as well as I what an evil, ruinous man he is.”
“But he cannot hurt you any longer, dearest,” I urged. “Plotting another man’s ruin, no matter how deserving, is never a wise course. You’ll make yourself ill, and to what end?”
“I’d gladly suffer any illness in exchange for keeping Burr permanently from office and from influence,” he said with fresh vehemence. “A man with as few scruples as Burr has no place determining the course of any government, large or small.”
I sighed, placing my hands on his shoulders; I could feel the tension in his muscles, bundled tight beneath my palms.
“Why can you not trust to the will of the people in regards to the colonel?” I asked. “Surely the voters by now will recognize him for what he is.”
“They will,” he agreed, dipping his pen once again into the well. “Especially once they have been provided with a few more judicious facts.”