Almost as a rebuke, a quick, spontaneous vote determined that Livingston should speak first. But I stood agape as the rest of the crowd began to heckle. There, on the same hallowed ground where we’d once gathered to watch George Washington take his solemn oath of office, erstwhile respectable members of the business community shouted down the hapless Mr. Livingston, who, now red-faced, suggested a new meeting place where he could be heard. “Come then, all foes of this cowardly treaty, away to Trinity Church.”
It seemed to me a very wise idea to break up what was swiftly becoming a mob, and I myself searched for some avenue of retreat, prodding my boy up onto the sidewalk in the shade of a buttonwood tree. All the while, my husband was shouting, “There is the necessity of a full discussion before citizens should make up their minds about this treaty!”
As the former secretary of the treasury, he was used to being obeyed. But this time, he was treated to a chorus of hoots and hisses. My husband’s Federalists had shouted down Livingston, but now the Republicans, slowly but surely coalescing into a party of their own thanks to this treaty, returned the favor, insensible to my husband’s demand to be heard.
My son was appalled. “The rascals!”
A gentleman in riding boots clapped Philip on the back, perhaps recognizing him as his father’s son. Meanwhile, to my right, a bearded man in a beaver cap stooped to pull a loose cobble from the street.
Not again, I thought, prodding Philip toward the fence encircling the nearest yard. I’d been witness to too much disorder in my life not to recognize the danger. “We’re going.”
I’d learned, after hard experience, to head for the edges, moving diagonally against the crowd. But I didn’t get very far before the man with the cobblestone pulled his arm back and launched it. After that was pandemonium.
“Angloman! Corrupt Tory!” they shouted at my husband.
Alexander shouted back, with pugnacious bombast, calling them wicked Jacobins. “Liberté, égalité, fraternité say the French you admire. But what patriot could ally with those who executed the kinswomen of our own imprisoned General Lafayette?”
To those words he was greeted with a hailstorm of bricks and stones, and I watched, in horror, as my husband staggered, fell, and disappeared into the crowd. I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t see anything over the blur of heads and shoulders.
Philip broke away from me, rushing to his father’s defense, elbowing his way into a knot of red-faced, meat-fisted men.
“Philip!” I cried, trying to stop him, pushing forward past a brine-scented sailor and shoving a carpenter with sawdust on his apron. “Philip!”
I couldn’t have been more than twenty feet from the furious men. Close enough to see Alexander pop up out of the sea of people, holding his head with one hand even as he spat contemptuous laughter. “Well, if you use such knock-about arguments, I must retire!”
Almost comically, my husband bowed and ducked away while the crowd broke apart. Some following the Livingstons to Trinity Church. Some marching to the battery, where they promised to burn the treaty and, presumably, another effigy of Jay.
“Dear God,” I said, reaching my husband’s side, not knowing whether I should tend his head or give it another thump. “What, in the name of prudence, could you—”
“It only grazed me,” my husband said, wiping blood away with his now-torn sleeve.
Meanwhile, my son shouted after the retreating assailants, “No doubt you want to knock out my father’s brains! It’s the only way you blockheads could ever win an argument with him.”
“Philip.” Having barked his name in a fashion so like my mother that I was secretly appalled, I then rounded on my husband, hissing, “Fine things you teach your son.”
Hamilton had no reply to that. Fetching his now dusty black hat from the ground and straightening his coat, he made ready to walk us home, a number of his friends following us down the block, making me feel less that he was the head of a political party and more that he led a street gang.
More and more, I wondered if there was much difference between the two.
We’d only gone a little way before coming upon some lawyers in an altercation on Wall Street. “Gentlemen,” Alexander said, stepping between them. “Why don’t we resolve this matter between us at Fraunces over some glasses of brandy?” Now this suggestion was more in keeping with the conduct I expected, but Alexander said, “Philip, I bid you escort your mother home.”
As I was in high dudgeon with the both of them, I exclaimed, “By no means! Stay with your father and make no more mischief.” Either of you, my eyes said.
And with that, I returned home, grateful that my husband had escaped his latest brush with the mob with no more than a scrape on the head. That evening, he said he counted it a price worth paying for having disrupted the protest, but four days later, I was to learn just how high a price he’d been willing to pay . . .
“Kitty,” I said, startled to find my one-time companion upon my doorstep wearing a broad-brimmed black hat and clutching a black lace parasol. We’d not spoken a word in the six years since the inaugural ball, and the feud between the Livingston family and mine had only worsened since then. Still, I found myself glad to see her, especially since I knew she’d recently been widowed. “Please, come in.”
She gave a delicate shake of her head. “I should rather—well, I would prefer if we spoke in your garden.”
This was becoming curiouser by the moment. Nodding, I led her to my herb garden. “I was so sorry to learn of your husband’s passing.”
She
