What would perhaps have been most galling to Burr is that he is remembered today primarily as the man who killed Hamilton. The majority of his personal papers were lost at sea with Theodosia, and with them vanished much of his legacy. There are many modern, scholarly volumes devoted to the collected writings of other men of his generation. Jefferson’s work requires thirty-three volumes, while Hamilton’s papers fill twenty-seven. The entirety of Burr’s surviving writings are contained in just two. The man who believed in keeping his thoughts to himself has ironically done exactly that.
In the capital city of Washington, Hamilton’s death was met with shock, and perhaps less than genuine sorrow. His old adversaries—Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, James Monroe—began almost at once to polish their own legacies at the expense of Hamilton’s. Finally free from any retribution from Hamilton’s razor-sharp pen, they made him a convenient scapegoat for their own mistakes and errors in judgments.
Jefferson served two terms as president, and died at Monticello on the Fourth of July, 1826; except for his contradictory and often despicable views on slavery, he has over time become one of the best-known and most important of the Founders. John Adams famously died on the same day as Jefferson, July 4, 1826, and he, too, has been treated well by posterity. James Madison also served two terms as president, steering the country through the War of 1812, and died in 1836 at his Virginia plantation Montpelier; he is remembered today as the framer of the Constitution, and the husband of the much more personable Dolley Madison. In one of those inexplicable quirks of history, James Monroe also died on the Fourth of July, in 1831, after serving two terms as president; he was the last of the Founders to occupy the White House, and the last veteran of the Revolution.
But none of them counted on Eliza, who outlived them all, and refused to fade away as widows were supposed to do. She fought for, and eventually received in 1809, the military pension and bounty lands owed to her husband for his lengthy service as an officer during the Revolution—the pension that he had long before so nobly renounced so that he might be perceived as a completely impartial member of the government. Quite simply, she and her children needed the money—around $10,000—to survive.
For the rest of her life, she dedicated herself to organizing Alexander’s voluminous papers and correspondence, determined to see them fashioned into a lasting testament to her husband. A woman who’d never enjoyed writing letters now wrote them constantly, seeking reminiscences from anyone who’d known Alexander and appealing to old friend and acquaintances from the earliest days of the Revolution onward. For the rest of her life, she worked relentlessly to create a truthful portrait of the man she had loved so well. She enlisted her sons in her efforts, and it was John Church Hamilton who finally completed the monumental biography she’d envisioned—seven years after her death.
Eliza was a vocal advocate for Hamilton in person, too. In 1848, she and her daughter Eliza moved from New York to Washington, D.C. At the age of ninety-one, she became both a political celebrity and a venerable connection to a glorious era of the country’s past, a tiny woman clad in the same old-fashioned style of mourning clothes that she’d worn since 1804. Still sharp-witted and clear, she received countless visitors including President Millard Fillmore. They came to hear her stories of the early republic, to drink a “merry glass” from George Washington’s punchbowl, and most of all to hear her speak about her husband. The marble portrait bust carved by Giuseppe Ceracchi stood near to her chair, and she’d often address it directly, as if it truly were her husband.
One visitor who was not welcome in her parlor was James Monroe. In 1820, during an earlier visit to Washington, D.C., Eliza was stunned to learn that Monroe had come to call upon her to make amends. Eliza wanted none of it. Three decades after the Reynolds affair, she still blamed Monroe for his part in the scandal. Finally, she decided to receive him, but refused to make him welcome, standing the entire time of his visit so that he, too, was forced to stand. When he tried to make a conciliatory speech about how the past should be forgotten and forgiven, she tartly rebuffed him. Her nephew, who witnessed the encounter, preserved her words as family lore:
“Mr. Monroe, if you have come to tell me that you repent, that you are sorry, very sorry, for the misrepresentations and the slanders, and the stories you circulated against my dear husband, if you have come to say this, I understand it. But, otherwise, no lapse of time, no nearness to the grave, makes any difference.”
That was apparently too much for Monroe, who took up his hat and left without another word.
Throughout her long life, Eliza continued her own charitable work. It didn’t matter that she herself was often on the brink of insolvency. She never forgot her husband’s grim childhood, and devoted herself to helping orphans and other helpless children. She was one of the women who founded the New York Orphan Asylum Society in 1806, and sat on their board for many years. Beginning in 1821, when her own children were grown, she served as the asylum’s first directress, and for twenty-seven years she oversaw every aspect of the children’s care as well as assuming many of the financial and administrative aspects of running the asylum. If she was proud of everything that Alexander had done in his life, then he would have been equally proud of what she achieved on behalf of her orphans.
Yet although Eliza was married to Alexander for only twenty-four of her ninety-seven years, he remained the shining centerpiece of her life. In an era when most widows and widowers remarried for security and companionship, she stayed constant to his memory, and his love. There could, quite simply, never be any other man after her Hamilton. At the time of her death, she was still wearing a tiny cloth packet on a ribbon around her neck, and close to her heart. Inside the packet was the sonnet he’d written for her long before in Morristown, the paper so worn from unfolding and rereading that she’d been forced to carefully stitch the fragments together with sewing thread.
As she wrote forlornly to a friend soon after Alexander’s death:
I have had a double share of blessings and I must now look forward to Grief. . . . for such a husband, his spirit is in heaven and his form is in the Earth, and I am nowhere any part of him.
They were at last reunited with Eliza’s death in November 1854, when she was buried beside him in Trinity Churchyard in New York City.
I’ve enjoyed the time I’ve spent in Eliza’s company, and I feel privileged to have told her story. I can only hope that she—and Alexander—would approve.
Susan Holloway Scott
March 2017