During the day Alexander worked, and I took the little ones above deck to enjoy the passing scenery of towns on the shoreline, green pastures, and blazing red autumn foliage. As I watched the children play and laugh and even bicker, my heart was torn between joy at their innocent hopefulness and sorrow at having learned the terrible and unexpected news that Peggy’s little son, Stephen, had died in his sleep. Her husband had written that she was too indisposed to travel or receive visitors, so I hadn’t had the chance to see her during our visit, and I ached to offer her what comfort I could.
But by night, beneath the light of two lanterns swinging from the joists above us, I joined Alexander amidst his letters, treatises, newspapers, paper, ink, and quills. “My arms and ammunition,” he quipped.
“And who are we to fight?”
“Almost everyone,” he said, ruefully. “The foes of the new Constitution are many.”
A few weeks earlier, my husband had returned from Philadelphia, where he affixed his signature to a blueprint for an entirely new government. He hated the plan—which he thought a hodgepodge of ideas and bitter compromises, particularly between the northern and southern states on the issue of slavery. But he’d said that “without these compromises, no union could possibly have been formed, though Washington does not think this Constitution will last twenty years.”
Twenty years. Long enough for my sons to grow into men and get their educations. Long enough for my daughter to fall in love, marry, and have children of her own. Long enough for the new baby growing in my belly to get a good start in life. It had been only ten years since my sister climbed out a window to elope with John Church and that felt like a lifetime ago.
Twenty years of peace and stability would be enough, I thought. We could fix the rest. We could keep working to end the injustice of slavery and make the new nation live up to the ideals of the revolution. But first we needed a nation.
And nine states would have to ratify the Constitution before it would become law.
Alexander had a plan to make that happen. A secret plan.
“We must defend the Constitution,” he said, shuffling papers. “We must overwhelm the opposition with evidence and arguments. The Constitution is as flawed as some of my clients, but like them, it deserves a fair trial. At least in the court of public opinion.”
Resting a stack of books in my lap, I helped him clear a space upon which to write. “And how are you going to make that happen?”
“With a series of essays,” he said, the scratching of his pen competing with the creaking of the boat and the sloshing of the river against the hull. “Anonymous essays. Maybe thirty in all.”
“Thirty?” I wondered how he’d manage such a thing, given the other demands on his time. “So many?”
“There will be other writers, of course. Though our identities must remain secret.”
Not a secret from me, I hoped. “Who will help you?”
“I don’t know yet,” he replied. “I intend to recruit John Jay, Gouverneur Morris, and William Duer.” Jay was an experienced statesman and judge. Morris, a peg-legged bon vivant—the penman of the Constitution. And Duer, a wealthy New York legislator.
“Not Burr?” I asked.
Alexander frowned. “Not Burr. He’s not a man to commit himself to paper, even secretly.” I sensed, even then, there was more to it, but my husband was too caught up in his idea for me to interrupt. “The trick will be to coordinate the essays without anyone catching wind of it. How to make our writing similar enough that no outsider can deduce who wrote what, and no single man can be vilified or lionized for it.”
“Ambitious,” I said. But I didn’t realize how ambitious until we were at home, on solid ground, and I was awakened before dawn by the faint sound of knocking downstairs. Very familiar knocking.
Three quick raps followed by two slow ones.
I sat up in bed to find my husband dressing in the dark. “Is that . . . ?”
“Jemmy Madison,” my husband said, grinning. “He’s hurried back from Philadelphia to join the project.”
I was confused because I thought the project was to be by New Yorkers for New Yorkers. “But he’s a Virginian.”
“Exactly. And we need Virginia to ratify, too,” Hamilton replied, having adjusted the scope of the work by an order of magnitude. But I understood that if he was to build a whole country, he was going to have to persuade a whole country.
By the time I’d dressed and seen the children down to the kitchen for a bleary-eyed breakfast of porridge under Jenny’s watchful eye, I found the two men in the dining room, a stack of books and papers between them. It was a scene I’d witnessed a hundred times. “Does my husband have you skulking about in subterfuge at strange hours of the day and night again, Mr. Madison?”
The pale little man smiled. “I owe no small apology for waking you and your servant, Mrs. Hamilton. But I received a message last night—”
“We think we can deliver four essays a week now, instead of two,” Hamilton interrupted, slapping his hand on the table to punctuate that happy fact before looking squarely at me. “With your help . . .”
They explained that they desired me to act as a sort of courier to collect the essays from the other men’s wives, then deliver them to confidential intermediaries who would pass them to the publisher in secrecy. What thrill I felt to play a part in such a vast conspiracy!
But in the end, it was not so vast. Morris begged off. Duer’s first essay was so disappointing my husband didn’t wish for him to write
