I took some petty satisfaction that Jefferson might suffer for this, but it was all very unseemly and uncomfortable to see anyone’s intimate life splashed across the papers again. When I said as much, Angelica shook her head. “Keep reading. Where is Hamilton?” She went to the tall windows overlooking the veranda and squinted. “What the devil is he doing out there in the dirt?”
“He was planting thirteen sweet gum trees this morning—one for each of the original colonies. I’m not sure what he’s doing now.”
“A garden is a very usual refuge of a disappointed politician,” he explained a few minutes later when we went outside to show him the news.
For Angelica had been right. There was something we didn’t already know.
That indecent creature, that reptile Callender, had been paid to destroy us.
“Thirteen years ago, Jefferson hired him to print seditious libels,” I said, indignantly shaking the page before Alexander’s eyes. I wasn’t sure if we should frame it, set it afire, or bury it as fertilizer in the garden. But what I was sure of was that we’d been vindicated. “All those years ago, Jefferson paid Callender to write that Washington was a traitor, a robber, and a perjurer. Paid him to print foul slanders against President Adams and against you.”
Dark eyes flashing, Angelica added, “And now that Jefferson is president, and won’t pay anymore, the serpent turns and bites the hand that fed him.”
Alexander had always suspected as much but now seemed taken aback by our vehemence and heaved a great sigh. “We live in a world full of evil.”
I blinked. That was all he had to say about it? The man who’d once designed governments had set his mind on our farm, deciding the ground of our orchard was too wet, that we must have grass, that we must plant watermelons, and that our cows must not be allowed to range.
We’d kept our heads ducked since Jefferson took the presidency, and what had our reward been? A dead son. Our fears of guillotines in the streets were not realized—my husband had, perhaps, been right to believe Jefferson a more cautious man than I had supposed—but if we were going to live in this country, if we were going to remain vulnerable to his rabid followers, then I did not think we should passively endure it.
And, truthfully, anger felt so much better than grief. “Alexander, you gave Jefferson the presidency. You and that horrific clause in the Constitution that allows slaves to be counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation. Jefferson would have never been elected otherwise, and now he disgraces the place he unjustly fills and produces immorality by his example. If this bit about the scandalmonger is true, Jefferson must be abominably wicked and weak. I think you have a duty to the Constitution—”
“Perhaps no man has sacrificed or done more for the present Constitution than myself,” Alexander said, bracing his hands upon the shovel’s pole. “I’ve labored to prop the frail and worthless fabric in spite of all my predictions that it will fail. Yet I have the murmurs of its friends no less than the curses of its foes for reward. Every day proves to me more and more that this American world was not made for me. What can I do better than withdraw?”
I hated to see him in surrender. I’d married, after all, a soldier. A hero. Not a sad, fatalistic man, but a fractious firebrand. And I wanted him back.
I wanted the Alexander I’d always known and loved.
Later, when my sister went inside to fetch us cider, I told him, “You must engage the world again.”
“I never stopped,” he protested, reminding me of the near-daily eighteen-mile round-trips he made to his new office on Garden Street in town. “My practice of law remains a vigorous undertaking.”
But the cases he handled now were only of the mundane variety and of no great import. The kind that didn’t tax his talents or set precedents. He had, of course, almost as if in a compulsion, never stopped writing essays. Amongst them, the Examination, which tore apart all President Jefferson’s policies. And he had, at my repeated urging, finally assisted with the publication of a newly bound collection of The Federalist. But when our peg-legged friend, Mr. Morris, pleaded with Alexander to take a more active role—perhaps even to run for political office—my husband refused. And I’d been glad.
But now I thought I’d been wrong. For all the years I’d complained of it, the squalid brawling of the public arena was part of Hamilton’s makeup, like hair, teeth, or bones. So I said, “I think you should defend the Federalist newspaperman Jefferson is now trying to imprison under the sedition laws he claimed to hate. And Papa agrees.” Out of a desire to shield my husband’s vulnerabilities from other eyes—any other eyes—I’d waited for Angelica’s departure to lobby for this idea, but I’d set my sister on him, too, if need be.
Alexander laughed. “You want me to battle President Jefferson. In a courtroom.”
I glared at him for laughing. “Someone has to.” When I was younger, I often asked why it couldn’t be someone else. Why did it always have to be Alexander Hamilton to jump into the fray? And I’d complained, on more than one occasion, of his obsessive need to be at the center of history in the making.
I resolved now to never complain of it again.
At my insistence, Alexander relented and took the case against the newspaperman who’d been brave enough to reveal that Jefferson had paid James Callender to print slanders against all manner of public and private men. The case hinged on two constitutional issues: freedom of the press and trial by jury.
Alexander also, to my chagrin, waived the fee.
But I didn’t mind so much when I saw our older boys gathered
