American History Hit - The Real Hamilton: Lover, Adulterer, Family Man?

Episode Date: May 6, 2024

Founding Father, first Secretary of the Treasury and focus of one of the world's first political sex scandals - we couldn't do a series about Alexander Hamilton without touching on his personal life.Don is joined by Elizabeth Cobbs in this episode to explore the private lives of the Hamiltons. Who was Elizabeth Schuyler? Did her sister have an affair with her husband? And was the Reynolds affair an elaborate plot or an unhappy coincidence?Produced and edited by Sophie Gee. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for $1 per month for 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. The charge against me is in connection with one James Reynolds for purposes of improper pecuniary speculation. It's August 1797.

Alexander Hamilton, former secretary of the treasury, framer of the Constitution, by reputation devoted father and husband, rights of an illicit romantic entanglement he'd fallen into six years earlier, all an effort to clear his name of accusations of financial impropriety. My real crime is an amorous connection with his wife for a considerable time with his privity and connivance, if not originally brought on by a combination between the husband and wife with the design to extort money from me. It would come to be known as the Reynolds' affair,

and when the scandal went public, Hamilton took the extraordinary step of publishing a nine. 95-page pamphlet entitled, Observations on Certain Documents, in which he explained his motives behind financial moves that had raised suspicion. This confession is not made without a blush. I cannot be the apologist for any vice, because the ardor of passion may have made it mine.

I can never cease to condemn myself for the pang, which it may inflict in a bosom eminently entitled to all my gratitude, fidelity, and love. squirm-worthy, even today. So how did this political star, who'd risen to the firmament of American politics, somehow managed to fall so hard back to Earth, to be confessing a lusty affair to an American public otherwise ignorant of the matter? Was he being responsible, prudent, selfish, or just self-destructive? Greetings, Don Wildman here, and you are listening to American History Hit.

Thank you for joining. us. We are in the midst of a series within our series, several episodes covering the life and legacy of founding father Alexander Hamilton, a man with a mission, if ever there was, to forge a lasting nation based on the political and philosophical values Americans had fought a revolution for. History looks very admirably upon Hamilton's sterling career, but it's always a balancing act to consider these founders to credit their astonishing achievements, while understanding that they were also blemished human beings of their times. In Hamilton's case, history serves up large helpings of both, with a groundbreaking Broadway show to prove it.

But if none of that had happened, we'd have Hamilton's own words. The man was, as they say, non-stop. To explain this more personal side of Alexander Hamilton, we are lucky to have author Elizabeth Cobbs, Professor Emeritus of History at Texas A&M University, where she held the Melbourne Glasscock Chair. In an astonishing career of her own, Dr. Cobbs has written award-winning books, fictional and factual, including The Hamilton Affair, a novel which dramatizes the true events of Alexander and his wife, Elizabeth, which we are surely to talk about today. Welcome to American History Hit.

Dr. Cobbs, my lord, you're the expert we truly needed. Hello. Hello. And thank you so much for this chance to talk about a man that, you know, to this moment gives me goosebumps. even though I published this book a number of years ago. It still thrills me. Yeah, your book came out at the end of the original cast run on Broadway, the Lin-Manuel cast. Did you know about the show before you had started that project?

I mean, it took years to make this, I imagine. I did not. And the funny thing, Don, is that I got so impassioned about this. This was my second novel and second historical novel. And I thought, well, you know, who should I do it on this time? And I got this idea of doing it on Hamilton. And the funny thing is that, well, you know, he was such a novel. a bad guy. He was such a reprobate, such an elitist, such an aristocrat, the kind of guy you like

to hate kind of person. I thought, well, that'll make good grist for the mill. And then I realized as I was researching it, and here I'm a person who's been teaching history for a long time. And I was backwards. I knew the facts, but I had the interpretation all backwards. And even some of the facts have been lost. And so what happened for me is that I just became such a, well, they call Hamel fan as a historian. I became very impressed with him. And I went to my publisher and agent, big New York Times firms. And I said, oh, my next book is going to be about the sexiest man in the American Revolution, Alexander Hamilton. And they looked at me and they said, oh, we could never sell a book about Alexander Hamilton. He's so boring. He's just so boring. So that just motivated me

more, and then I had the great good luck for my book to come out, just as Lynn Manuel Miranda and others were collecting all these Tony awards. Exactly. That was the time. Okay, like I said, if listeners wish to hear about Hamilton's broader career in founding the nation and so forth, there are multiple episodes to our series. So you can check out any one of four of these. He is that big a story. Today, though, we'll be discussing his lives, the softer side of a very edgy man. So, Elizabeth, let's go back to his beginning. beginnings on the island of Nevis, down there in the Caribbean. Not exactly the typical origin story of a founding father, is it?

Not at all. And he's got this history that follows him to his dying day, this history of shame, if you will, the kind of shame that comes from not only being born of the wrong place, but born to the wrong person without any money with this cloud, this horrible, tragic childhood, hanging over him. He was from the very beginning a very attractive. person, not only physically, but also it's just he has a compelling magnetism. I suppose chalked that up to an incredible mind, of course, which would have been evident right from the start. Yes, but an incredible

heart. They say that, you know, don't mind the cracks and things because cracks are how the light gets in. So he was, as a child, exposed to these kinds of tragedies that deepen the heart in some people, other people that just break the heart and the person's broken forever. But Hamilton had this extraordinary compassion that I think you don't see in a lot of the other founders. So let's just discuss the facts of his family. First of all, how was it he's down there in the Caribbean in the first place? Well, his mother was a French Huguenot. That was part of her background, and she herself was born in Nevis and was the daughter of a respected doctor and they had a beautiful house right on the ocean front, right next to the main dock. I went there

actually to experience it in writing the novel. And his father was the fourth son of a Scottish laird, if you will, an aristocrat. But in those days, primogenitor meant that the first son collected all the winnings. And so third, second, third, fourth sons would have to go out and make their fortune. And so the inherent unfairness of that was something that touched Alexander Hamilton before he was born. His father abandoned them, right? He did. Here's the interesting thing. So his mother was actually married to somebody else when she got together with his father. And so the two boys of that union were considered illegitimate, including, of course, Alexander, who was the younger of the two.

So he was born on Nevis because she had fled the island. She had originally gone over to St. Croix, had lived there with her first husband, and fled this violent, abusive, basically fortune hunter, who she was much younger than he was. He blew her fortune. And then he had her thrown into prison because she left her husband. You could be thrown into prison for leaving an abusive husband, as she was. And it was after that that she met his father, Alexander's father. She dies of yellow fever when Alexander is only 12 years old.

Where is his brother in this, James Hamilton? Well, his brother is this sort of secondary character that we know less about, but we do know that Alexander still sent him money when Alexander got a little bit of money, not much when Alexander was only a public servant when he was working for George Washington in that first administration. But you have to understand in terms of where people were. Hamilton himself, Alexander, was in bed with his mother. They were both sick with fever. And she died and he lived, but she died next to him. Oh, my Lord. So his father had abandoned him. He's in literally there's one bed.

So they're lying there. The doctor's tending them both and the mother dies. That's this child. Yeah. so much about this story that is just remarkable. I mean, how quickly he has to recover from this trauma and then become this phenom on this island. This is still a dilemma for people today. How do you imagine yourself into this much bigger life than what you were born to? And Hamilton's especially dramatic that way, obviously. But these are, you know, a smaller population, all sorts of things. I guess there would have been more of a hands-on aspect of government in those days. And maybe he could imagine himself more easily. I don't know. But it's an extreme.

extraordinary leap to make for this kid born on an island. He ends up at King's College, which becomes Columbia University eventually. We're talking about a genius here, right? Yeah, that's such a hard word to pin down. But yeah, super smart and super hungry, super desperate. He doesn't get to stay in this nice, literally literal world that's a welcome to him in briefly unless he can prove it every moment, every moment, every moment that he's an asset. And that's this incredibly dynamic mind and excited nature suddenly intersects with this land that is coping with new ideas, resisting the power that is perfect for a teenager to walk into this with his faculties and suddenly project himself onto this nation and relate to it,

I suppose, yeah. We are telling the story, though, of his loves today. And I want to shift momentarily to the woman of his life eventually is Elizabeth Schuyler. Tell me an entirely different story. We need to go back to the Dutch to really understand who she is and where she comes from, because she's born of the Albany ancestry of Dutch money, the established families of that area. Skyler, top of the heap, right?

Skyler, but even more so her mother, Kitty Van Rensseler. Van Rensseler, if you've ever heard of Van Rensseler Polytechnic in New York State. Yes. The Van Rensler name is a really big name. So she was even wealthier than the man she married. But she comes from this extremely privileged background, but also, in a way, salt of the earth, too. Like, I want to say, you remember I mentioned how Hamilton's father was the fourth son and therefore had no money?

Her father was the first son and the heir to all kinds of wealth. But he chose, Philip Schuyler, her father, he chose to take his inheritance and divide it between himself and his siblings. Oh, interesting. Why Hamilton, why Alexander Hamilton admired his wife's family has really deep roots for that admiration. Yeah, that's an egalitarian aspect to them. Philip Schuyler is also a military man and one of the leading politicians of his times eventually. Boy, does Hamilton marry well. He marries up, of course, but he's also marrying right into the system that most interested him.

Did he ever write reflectively about that choice or was that sort of left to speculation? Hamilton wrote prospectively about his marriage. He wrote to a dear, dear friend when he was talking about, oh, you know, I've got to get married someday. And he gives this list of qualities. You know, I want my wife to be, you know, have a good religious upbringing, but not be a prude. You know, I want her to be this and be that. So some people say, oh, he married up intentionally. He schemeed, et cetera.

And I'm sure he looked at this young woman and thought, oh, that would be a great match. But there were other potential great matches for a man who at 22 is riding alongside George Washington as his principal aid. this guy did not lack for opportunities, romantic or social. But he really, I just think there was something very special about that relationship. There were a lot of ways in which that family co-haired. As I was saying, and his father had this egalitarian outlook. His prospective father-in-law accepted the fact that he was illegitimate, which shows an extraordinary capacity on the part of the Skylar's

to look beyond things for which this young person couldn't be responsible. And also Philip Schuyler had himself, as Alexander Hamilton knew, been dissed by Congress, had been robbed of his military glories for some basically callow political reasons. So Hamilton shared an appreciation for integrity that Philip Schuyler stood for. Let me understand the chronology of them meeting within the early Revolutionary War period here. He had stayed with the family once already, and then Elizabeth, meet at a party in Morristown, New Jersey. And this would have been when the Army was staying there, I guess, over the winter, right?

The Army had several winter encampments, and Valley Forge is what's most famous here in the United States for being this really hard winter. But there were other hard winters in Morristown, New Jersey was one. And yes, they met at a party. She probably would have met him when he came to her father's house on business a year earlier about. But he didn't write about that at all. So we're not entirely sure what that meeting was like.

The interesting thing about it, they do meet, and he already has this kind of rep. Martha Washington dubs him like a Tomcat. You know, he's just, oh, he is handsome. Oh, my gosh, Don, he is so handsome and interesting and fun, and he's a good singer, and he's the life of the party in a very authentic, seeming way. So they do meet and fall in love. Now, you have to remember, he's 22. She's 22.

They're 22-year-olds, Don. They fall in love. Yeah, they've got. I'm sure some like, oh, I want to marry the best, richest, nicest, interesting man or woman in the universe. But then there's just that other person. By the way, her sister, Angelica, is already happily married, has one child already and another on the way. So, you know, there's not really anything going on there with Angelica. But these two young people really just somehow catch on fire at that party.

Right. We have to come back to that because that's important to the general populace here. Everybody knows the story now. But it's actually, these events get all kind of screwy when they get compressed for entertainment purposes. And that's important. There's a thing I learned as I was reviewing these whole things that Hamilton complains, you know, in the play for sure. He wants to go to war. He wants to go to war. He'd already been to war. He had been a big part of the Battle of Princeton. He'd been very active in the early phase of the war, of course, in New York City, stealing the cannons and all that stuff.

He'd already distinguishes himself as a soldier and a very eager warrior. You're right. He had been a soldier. one thing to know about soldiers and how soldiers think, right? There's, there's us, military officers. And military officers battle is what counts in terms of advancement and rank. And it's also what they're there for. They're there to win. And so if you're always at a desk, you're like, I'm just, I'm fine. I'm glad it can help you, sir, General Washington, write your letters and interface with Congress and get money from the Dutch or whatever. But he wants to get back in the field. And that is a very common feeling for soldiers. The other part of this is that when he was a child, and you

spoke earlier about, how did he have the imagination to think maybe life can be something more than what I've got here? And he wrote famously to, again, another really good friend, a childhood friend. At the time, they're both like 13 or 14 years old, and he says, Nettie, I wish there was a war. Because in that era for an unknown, illegitimate bastard son of a Scotch peddler, which is how John Adams later characterized some decades later, there is really only one way to advancement. It's through proving yourself in these acts of daring. There's some beautiful words, he writes about Eliza to her sister, Angelica, and I will quote. In short, she is so strange a creature that she possesses all the beauties, virtues, and graces

of her sex without any of those amiable defects, which from their general prevalence are esteemed by connoisseurs necessary shades in the character of a fine woman. I had to read that about three times to understand what he was saying. He was expressing his great admiration for his love of life's looks, but they were real feelings. Yes, they were real feelings. The thing I always love to quote is this is just before they married when they were both 23. He wrote to her, he said, you not only employ my mind all day, but you intrude on my sleep. I meet you in every dream. And when I wake, I cannot close my eyes again for ruminating on your sweetness.

That's sweet. I've written just that to my wife. She didn't mention that for some reason. I scribbled that on a note. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. They have eight children. They have a productive life, plus an adopted orphaned daughter of a Revolutionary War colonel. This is a very large family, as he is a very large family.

as he is away with George Washington and beyond. Very famously, there is a sort of oppositional force in the great popular storytelling of this love affair, and that is Eliza's sister, Angelica, who we've already mentioned several times. Older child, older sister of the three. I'm so tempted to go into song because I've memorized these songs over these years.

Tell me the truth about this situation. There are all sorts of historical rumors about the love between Alexander and Angelica. Was that ever realized as anything more than admiration? First of all, people don't write those things down. So there's not going to be proven. Even when somebody writes something down, you have to try to verify, corroborate a fact or an alleged fact. I don't think, A, there is no evidence that anything like that happened.

B, had anything like that happened, Hamilton's political enemies would have been so on top of that. They just looked for every scrap of dirt they could find. There were never any allegations to that effect. The thing is, though, is that Angelica was older. She was not quite an Irish twin, you know, where they was less than 12 months apart, but they were really close together. I think they were about a year apart. She and Eliza.

So they were very close, and he was very close not only to Angelica, but by the way to her other sisters as well. She had other sisters, Peggy, Cornelia, Angelica, and he sometimes would write to the other sisters too. And this, by the way, I think this is so fun. This is the 18th century. Now, the 18th century ain't the 19th century. The 18th century is a far sexier century.

The 19th, you get Queen Victoria. You get people putting clothing on the quote unquote limbs of the piano. Let's not say the legs of the piano. So the 18th century, people just talk to each other in this kind of fun and flirty and innuendo dripping kind of way. They did. And so if you look back at one of his letters to say just Angelica, then you might think, oh, obviously he's in bed. with Angelica. But then you'd have to say he's actually in bed with a lot of people because he's a flirt. And a lot of people are. Now, Benjamin Franklin was a flirt, but he did disservantly. He did

sleep around. But Alexander Hamilton would write to many people. In fact, one woman wrote, he didn't even know her well. And she said, can you help me out? My husband's pension hasn't come through yet. He's Treasury Secretary. And he said, I'm paraphrasing, but he said basically, he said, yes, madam, I will do anything for you, but I hope you will bear in mind that I am a married man. Yeah, there you go. He's just, it's the kind of sense of humor he has. Yeah, I mean, this is more of a spiritual sort of affection than it is a physical one, and that's, we can all appreciate that. We've all had those kinds of experiences, but this is a powerful one. Angelica is also a very, very smart woman who gets very involved with discussions of politics and how this nation is going to be formed, giving him strategy ideas on how to deal with the figures, the founding figures.

She has all kinds of opinions. Yes, Angelica is the older kid. She's the firstborn. And she is very attuned to all these political... She's much more of a political animal, if you will, than Eliza was. And she lived in London. So she and her husband, who was a high-ranking merchant, who also, by the way, dueled Aaron Burr and lived to tell the tale.

Really? Yes. So this is just this crazy story that has all these amazing dimensions. But yes, he and Angelica were extraordinarily close, and he was lucky, and she was very lucky to have that relationship, too. And it was respected by their partners. For example, Eliza would open up a letter or Alexander would open up a letter to him from Angelica. And they would read these letters aloud.

So if he really was having sex with her sister, I think he wouldn't have been quite so drippy and quite so effusive. They would have acted differently. So I think that we have to look at all the kind of, if you will, almost body language surrounding these things as well. They were not shy and they were not furtive. I don't buy anything about that. them physically. That's just too weird. Nonetheless, I want to fast forward a little bit to the year 1791. They have been married now for many years, had many children, and he is in the midst of a huge professional challenge. You know, in another episode, we'll be discussing this in detail,

but one of the big things for Hamilton's career and being a founding father is he's trying to persuade this new nation to embrace the idea of a strong federal government, as opposed to the way the way most Americans at the time felt that it would all be the Articles of Confederation, these United States. He's tilted more in the direction of we need a governance that I can pay for an army, et cetera, et cetera. So he's creating the National Bank and all of this is going on around this time frame. And he has to sell this to Congress.

This is a huge deal. In this hot summer of 1791, he meets a woman named Mariah Reynolds. Can you take me down this road, Elizabeth? Yes. Mariah Reynolds was, you know, a young, beautiful woman. Alexander Hamilton, there have been no allegations by anybody if affairs with anyone else. By the way, this guy was really busy, and he's got eight kids, not eight yet, but, you know, it's a very busy man, and he's a veteran. So all the other, the wives and orphans of veterans are

always coming to him for help. He's constantly involved with people. By the way, another person who he brings into their household is the son of the Marquis de Lafayette. And Lafayette is himself in prison, and his wife's parents are guillotined, and he helps safe. this boy. So he's a very busy guy. And what happens, and Mariah Reynolds comes to him and asks for a loan late one night. And what we do know is that he says, I'm sure I can help you. And she invites him to come to her house and give her the money. So he comes that night. It's not pre-planned event. But he responds to whatever her proposition was and certainly her request for money. And he delivers that and they have sex. And that begins an affair that lasts, you know, less than a year.

But it starts when his wife is leaving the next day. And this woman to whom he is extremely close, she's taking his children and herself, and she's going to New York for the summer. So he's left in Philadelphia, hot, sweaty, dangerous, disease-ridden Philadelphia, which was at the time. And this young woman says, hey, buddy. And, you know, bad on. him, you know, he responds. One of the interesting things for me as a professional historian writing, a novel, which might seem like an odd thing to do for a person who mostly lives in the world of fact, is that it gave me a chance to get down into the weeds in terms of understanding why maybe that

affair happened when it did. One thing to understand is that Eliza's mother had 14 children, about half of whom died in infancy. Clearly, Eliza did not want to have that happen to herself. They had eight children. The only time in which Alexander and Eliza had a long period in which they were not conceiving children was the two years before this affair. So there was a four-year period in which that couple did not have any extra children. And I just think that there must have been to some degree an effort by the couple to limit conception.

I only say this because we can't know why this happens when it does, but we know that Eliza, Schuyler, and Alexander had this experience. extraordinary attraction for each other, but that also that there were these ways in which they were trying very hard not to walk down this road, that women had no choice but to walk down, which was constant childbirth, constant risk of death. And of course, we're lucky today that we have other options. It's an extended affair. That's an important thing to realize this goes on for a while. This is not a one-off. And in the process, it becomes evident that her husband, James Reynolds, understands this is happening. He's aware of this and quite possibly engineered this.

Any proof to that fact? Well, the proof is that he comes to Alexander Hamilton and starts blackmailing him. And he doesn't say, oh, I'm so upset. I love my wife. She's just the apple of my eye. He's like, yeah, pay me some money now. So the tone of that, the, again, reading the sort of language of that, this is not a stretch to say that this man immediately starts economically

exploiting his wife and this affair. And so I think, you know, I don't know, but it seems to me quite likely that Mariah wasn't on it to begin with too. And Hamilton later, he tries to explain. And he basically says, you know, I was an egotist. I thought she loved me. I thought I thought it was just that attractive to her. But it wasn't. It was really this. And she's a desperate woman. She's got a bad marriage. You know, life isn't great for her either. This is big money we're talking about. The initial payment he has to make to James Reynolds is a thousand pounds, which is a lot of money in those days. I don't know what the calculation is exactly. Further payments are less than that. I think it comes to a total of

1,300 over the period of this. But it is straight blackmail. This is a straight payment of this guy, and he stops sleeping with a woman after all this starts to become. It's not like this is something he really wants. He's really just trying to keep this thing under wraps because he did the wrong thing and he understands this. Yes, he understands it. And in fact, it ties in, by the way, keep in mind with his mother's sexual shame. Here's a man whose mother was imprisoned and who died and he was robbed of his own inheritance because he was the, as they put it, formally and officially, the son of a horror. He was what was known as an obscene child. So, you know, he knows this is wrong and I'm sure it must have just almost killed him when he realized what he'd done. But yes,

he pays a tremendous amount of money. Now his own salary, that's like a third of his salary. That's like a third of his salary, and he's trying to support his wife and children on a government salary, which is not a lot. He's not like George Washington. He has no lands anywhere. He's not like John Adams. He has no family farm or Jefferson with his hundreds of slaves. He's just a guy on a salary supporting a wife and children. And this guy, he was in prison for forgery, a pension scheme. I mean, this guy's the low life who's doing this to him. So he basically just wants to buy his way out of this thing and and leave it behind, which is the weird part to me because he did leave it behind. And then we get the Reynolds pamphlet.

How does this transpire? Where Alexander Hamilton actually comes right out and publishes all of this for the public to know. Again, a man who wants to clear his name, oddly, because we would all say, and people at the time said, hey, just don't even talk about it because people will forget. But he has this itch. He has to be transparent in a way. It comes out not because he really wants to do this, but because of his political opposition. James Monroe, whose best friends and the immediate neighbor of Thomas Jefferson, gets copies of these letters when Hamilton is first approached by the Congress and says, hey, what's going on here?

And he says, listen, this is not about my robbing the treasury, which they're always accusing him of. This is just, I took my own money because I had to pay off this woman. And here are the letters which show that there's crazy blackmail scheme. he gave them those letters years before. And then what happens is that the letters get leaked. And it's James Monroe who gives them to quote unquote a close friend in Virginia, who doesn't say whose name begins with a T, but let's face this, probably got to be Jefferson. And the letters get leaked later just as a political, you know, I'm just going to toy with your life now. And so long after the affair's over, long after Hamilton has put it behind him, so he

thought the letters were released in the New York papers in the Philadelphia papers. And Hamilton has a choice to say, oh, this is the crazy imaginings of a hysterical woman, which probably people would have believed easily. But he felt he had to tell the truth. He felt he had to tell the truth, no matter who it hurt, and most especially, of course, that would be his beloved wife who was eight months pregnant. Oh, God. All right. And what we're talking about here is an extensive explanation, which is published, as pamphlets are in those days, and distributed, probably written about in all the papers, where suddenly this heretofore glowing paragon of the revolutionary spirit is suddenly dragged into the muck of his own making, but also a political scheme as well. It's really important, I think, to put a point on this, that this is the emergence of the conflict that will dog this country, or at least, at least be what this country is about, to the day we are talking.

This sort of federal governance against the state and all of what becomes part of the civil war, etc. All of this dialogue between these two parts is emerging right now with the Democratic Republicans versus the federalists. And this scandal sits right in the middle of the beginnings of that. Absolutely. If you get to the point where you hate your opponent enough to draw a pistol and shoot him and kill him, the sitting vice president of the United States, Aaron Burr. kills Alexander Hamilton, the former secretary, General Hamilton, by this point, because he'd been

made General Alexander Hamilton. So, and then he goes back, this is always the killer for me, Aaron Burr goes back to Washington, D.C. Well, why? Because laws against killing people in the state of New Jersey and state of New York don't apply in the District of Columbia. There's no national police yet. There's no federal law which would prohibit this. So he goes back and he takes his seat in the Senate and rules on things as the vice president and the chair of the Senate and all that. And so Hamilton is dead, but he cannot be charged. I want to read a bit of this pamphlet because I think it's worthwhile. I have never read these words myself, and here we go.

This is what he writes in the Reynolds pamphlet. This confession is not made without a blush. I can never cease to condemn myself for the pang, which it may inflict in a bosom eminently entitled to all my gratitude, fidelity and love. speaking of his wife. But that bosom will approve, and the public too, will I trust. Excuse the confession. The necessity of it, to my defense, against a more heinous charge, could alone have extorted me from so painful and indecrum. I'm having trouble with the language because it's of that timeframe, but he's very carefully parsing his words to explain the motivation behind this urge of his to out himself completely. It's amazing. Nothing is not amazing about Alamos.

Alexander Hamilton. It's incredible life lived in the fullest, full-throated manner. It's incredible. And I can't, you know, we talk about founding fathers. They're all remarkable people in and of themselves. But Hamilton especially is just the biggest human being of them. Would you agree to that? I do. He leaves nothing on the table. Yes, exactly. In his entire life, his conviction, his commitment to his wife, his love for his children, his commitment to the United States, his dedication. And as you say, I like that, even though it's tough to read the 18th century and 19th century language, he says, this is going to kill me and this is going to kill my wife, who's really an angel. But that's stacked up against the health of our country. That's stacked up against the success of this experiment in people's government. I'm translating now, but that's what

he's saying. And he's saying, well, of course, therefore I have to do this. Because otherwise, what they're trying to say is, oh, this guy was a sleaze, and all he wanted was money for himself, and he paid off corrupt people. And they're trying to make it out to sound like that the accomplishments of the Washington administration, the administration of George Washington, were all basically coming out of the pen of this sleaze bag. So he says, okay, what's my personal reputation? What's my family? What's my heart? What's my wife's heart way in this balance and she of all people. Now, this says a lot about Eliza. He says she of all people will approve. Now, I know she did not approve in the moment, but I think in the long run, she was very proud of him

for having the courage to do that. She stays with him, you know, as well. And who knows what would have happened if he lived on, but I mean, it seems that they were lifelong partners for sure, even if he hadn't died in a duel, a duel of which we will talk about in more detail in another episode. But for now, let's finish this with understanding that she goes on to found an orphanage in his name. It's a remarkable, graceful ending to this abrupt end of his life. She makes it graceful. Yeah. She also, if you go to Washington, D.C. today, Don, and you see the Washington monument, the great Washington monument, Eliza, Skyler Hamilton, and Dolly Madison were the people who put together the money to make that happen. Whenever you look at that monument to our founder,

know that it's also a monument to two remarkable women, Eliza, Skyler, Hamilton, and Dolly Madison, because they were the ones who said, this has to happen. I sure wish it wasn't such a common phrase, founding fathers, because it could never have been done without the other people in the family, let alone the wives of. It's always that story. And we haven't even discussed the death of their son, Philip, in a duel, you know, emulating, you know, all the duels of his time. Yes, and he's, they're all using these same guns, by the way. these are the guns with which John Church, his brother-in-law, had dueled Burr. Then his son uses these guns because they're family guns and is killed.

And then Alexander uses these guns. And we believe doesn't actually probably even fire in the direction of Aaron Burr. So, yeah, why does he duel? Why does he duel? Well, his son died for his father's honor. How could he refuse the same challenge? Elizabeth lives till 1854, age 97, remarkable. Yeah, she lives 50 years after her husband.

She never remarries. She never forgives because they don't ask for forgiveness, people like James Monroe, who comes to her at the end of her life, like, oh, let's be buddies now. And she's like, you know, where's my apology? Because the way her husband was hounded, which led to his death, which robbed her of him, and if her son, and these people never expressed remorse for what they had done. We have been discussing the Hamilton Affair, a novel written by this fine author. Elizabeth Cobbs.

Elizabeth's books have won four literary prizes, two for American history, two for fiction. And she's won four prizes for documentary filmmaking. A Fulbright scholar, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. She has served on the Historical Advisory Committee of the U.S. State Department and the jury for the Pulitzer Prize in History. My goodness, that is a resume, Elizabeth. Thank you so much for joining us. I hope we meet again. Thank you, Don.

I hope so, too. There's so many wonderful stories out there, as you well know. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes, all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great.

But you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share it with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support. Thanks so much.