“If President Madison loses this war, we lose the country,” James said.
And I bit back a bitter laugh.
Hamilton had warned that the country needed a standing army and had been vilified for it. Even by Madison. Now the fate of the nation was left largely to a gutted navy and militias who had, under the direction of Secretary Monroe, already run from the fight.
“So they’ve finally done it,” I said, startling my sons with my venomous tone as I stabbed my needle into the cloth. “The Republicans have finally wrecked it all.”
The Federal City that Hamilton had negotiated to bring into existence was now burned to the ground. It was quite possibly the end. The end of the Republic. The end of our American experiment. The end of the United States of America.
What had been the point of any of it, I wondered.
The Revolution. The Federalist. The Constitution. The Farewell Address. The bank charters. The legal precedents . . . all Hamilton’s accomplishments worthless and dismantled and soon to be forgotten. Perhaps I should, with diabolical glee, burn his papers to save the King of England the trouble!
Except those weren’t only Alexander Hamilton’s accomplishments. Other people had sacrificed to see those things brought about. They were our accomplishments, too.
Perhaps alarmed at the bleakness of my words, Alex folded his arms over his uniformed chest—a uniform his father had designed with my help—and said, “The war isn’t over yet, Mother.”
But it is for me, I thought. Because as everything turned to ashes in my mouth, I was too tired to fight anymore. Tired of fighting Jefferson and Burr and Monroe, fighting the Republicans and the Federalists, fighting grief and loneliness and bitterness and the British besides.
Fortunately, a new generation took up the call in defense of their country.
While my old friend Mac lay paralyzed upon a sickbed from which he would never again rise, the soldiers at his Fort McHenry fended off a stunning bombardment of rockets and mortar shells in Baltimore Harbor, giving the British just enough time to reconsider whether subduing America was really worth the fight.
And so, the three-year-long War of 1812 ended in a stalemate that allowed Republicans to pretend to have achieved something other than bankrupting the nation and destroying the Federalist Party.
Though perhaps it could be more properly said that my husband’s Federalist Party killed itself as ingloriously as its founder had. My husband had thrown away his life, whether he’d intended to or not. A question that kept me up many nights. And his party dashed itself to pieces with a failed and potentially treasonous attempt at secession in the midst of a war.
If they break this Union, they will break my heart, Alexander had said upon his deathbed.
But I couldn’t seem to care, because when he broke our union, he’d broken my heart, too. He’d promised that he was mine forever, that he’d never leave me alone or desperate. But then he’d rowed across the Hudson River at dawn to meet an empty vessel of a man who wasn’t worth his spit, let alone his life. He’d gone knowing he might never return. He’d planned it. And he’d kept it from me. How could I ever forgive him?
All that mattered now was that my sons had survived the ordeal of their own honorable battles in the War of 1812. And so did the country, though I might be excused, if, in the ten years that followed, I scarcely recognized the nation as my own.
We were all Republicans now. Like it or not.
No one disagreed or dared to. Our new Virginian president, James Monroe—a recent convert to the Hamiltonian idea that we needed a strong regular army even in peacetime—declared it the Era of Good Feelings.
He’d actually run unopposed for the presidency, for there were no more political parties and we were not to have partisanship in the nation. We were to live in a perpetual state of patriotic oneness.
It was, after all, a decade of deceit.
Republicans pretended there was nothing whatsoever hypocritical about their newfound embrace of a national bank and federal institutions. Never mind that they’d destroyed my family for championing those very things.
A retired Thomas Jefferson was now the so-called Sage of Monticello, the prophet of democracy, while to hear people tell it, George Washington had been a mere general in the cause . . .
. . . and Alexander Hamilton had never existed at all.
A whole generation of Americans came of age without hearing my husband’s name, unless it was in diminishment or a curse. And I could scarcely blame them. Hamilton was safely dead and forgotten. We survivors of the founding of the country all let him be forgotten.
Even me.
Chapter Forty-One
September 1824
New York City
MAMA, WE HAVE a visitor!” Lysbet whispered loudly from outside my office door at the orphanage. I peered up from the account books I kept as the society’s First Directress, my hand cramped around a quill after hours of recording and resolving the entries.
At nearly twenty-five, Lysbet had declared herself a spinster, quite contentedly on the shelf, which was why she often assisted my work at the orphanage’s Bank Street headquarters, where there were now beds for two hundred of the city’s neediest children.
Lysbet reminded me of myself when I was about her age, convinced that I, too, would be a spinster. But more than me, she still resembled a more subtle Angelica, except for her unadorned hair and the spectacles she wore upon her nose whenever it was buried in a book—which was often. Lysbet was a serious and sensible young woman, without girlish caprice, so I couldn’t fathom her excitement as she hovered in the doorway, positively vibrating with giddiness.
“What visitor?” I asked,
