—MARQUIS DE LAFAYETTE TO ALEXANDER HAMILTON
AN EXTREMELY WAGGISH letter interrupted our honeymoon, reminding me that I was now a soldier’s wife. An ambitious soldier’s wife.
The marquis had returned from France a few months earlier with the aid our cause so desperately needed. Supplies. Money. A fleet of ships under the command of French general Rochambeau. It could change everything. It could turn the war. If we found the right opportunity. And my new husband was looking for not only an opportunity of victory, but also a chance to rise in station.
The same man who pretended he could have been content to plant turnips enlisted Lafayette’s help in a campaign to secure a promotion to adjutant general. And when that failed, Lafayette undertook to get my husband appointed as an envoy to France on a mission to obtain loans and expedite supply shipments.
“Paris?” I gasped from my seat before the fire in the sitting room. How would I fare in the social whirl of such a cosmopolitan place? But I’d scarcely had time to wish I’d better applied myself to learning the French language when we learned the appointment had gone to someone else.
“Worry not,” Alexander said, bracing his hands upon the mantel and staring into the flames. “It appears I’ll be shackled to a desk forever while my friends cover themselves in glory. Shall I never receive an opportunity for advancement?”
I went to him, searching for the best way to soothe my husband, as a wife should. “You’re Washington’s most trusted aide,” I said, hoping the reminder of the vital role he played in the war would offer solace. “And as such, you daily command generals in the field even though they outrank you.”
“Once, that might have been enough,” he replied, unconvinced. “But then I met you.” He turned and took my hand. “And now, instead of chasing a glorious death, I must somehow make a glorious life. Which is a great deal more trouble, wife.”
“Fortunately, husband,” I replied, kissing his furrowed brow, “you needn’t do it alone.”
He sighed. “Alas, my duty is soon to separate us. You could make me forget the whole business of war entirely, but I suppose you are so much a Portia that if you saw me inclined to quit the service of your country, you would dissuade me.”
“A Portia?” I asked, then instantly wished I hadn’t. “No, please, not another Roman . . .”
“But I pay you a compliment,” he protested, telling me—at great length, with many quotations of the original Latin, plus a tangential dart into Shakespeare—of an ancient lady who, amongst other heroic things, patriotically concealed her sorrow to be separated from her husband when he went to war.
But I didn’t wish to be separated. I had no children to care for, plantation to manage, or homestead to defend. I had a husband whose joys and travails I had pledged before God to share. And a war that I wished to have a part in winning.
When I told Alexander that I intended to accompany him on his return to headquarters, he kissed my forehead and assented. “I was hoping you might. My Portia. According to Plutarch, Portia’s husband said of her, as I would say of you, ‘though the natural weakness of her body hinders her from doing what men can perform, she has a mind as valiant and as active for the good of her country as the best of us.’”
It was, I thought, the best compliment anyone had ever paid to me. “Why, Colonel Hamilton, I seem to learn something new whenever in your company.”
Heat banked in his eyes. “Perhaps if you submit yourself to my tutelage, you shall have a real education by spring.”
An answering heat rushed over my skin, and I eyed him with curious hunger. “Whatever would you teach me?”
“To start with,” he began, drawing me back to our bedroom, “your classical education is in vast need of improvement . . .”
Whereupon he taught me, by way of demonstration, some choice Latin terms that would have scandalized a harlot. And I minded not at all. In truth, I counted myself the happiest of women, altogether.
Thus, after a perfect Christmas holiday with my family, I went with Hamilton from nuptial splendor and plenty, to the scarcity of the army.
General Washington’s new headquarters was situated at a small Dutch farmhouse near the village of New Windsor, New York. Conditions for the ordinary soldier were dismal, the vast majority clad only in tattered uniforms, shirts, and breeches, shoes worn through, and not enough food or munitions by half. If they were lucky, they shared a single blanket between every two or three men.
It was Jockey Hollow again, with milder weather. How had nothing else improved?
It was unthinkable, but Congress claimed to have no legal power to tax and raise funds for the army they’d called into the field. Alexander argued that the power was implicit, that having declared independence and war, Congress should consider themselves vested with full power to preserve the country from harm.
He was not the only one to think it.
After the expiration of the three-year enlistments that most had signed, the soldiers were angry—at not being permitted to leave, at not being paid, at everything. Indeed, their discontent had boiled over into another mutiny only just resolved, and the tension around camp was still as thick as the frozen mud covering the ground. There was not a little fear that the troops might join Benedict Arnold, who had donned a red coat and recently captured Richmond, Virginia.
For the British.
It was within this surly atmosphere that Alexander secured for us a cramped and dreary room in a boardinghouse, but I could hardly complain when I saw what our countrymen endured. Instead, I donned practical and patriotic
