The Hamilton Affair(138)

“How did he die, ma’am?”

“He was killed in a duel like his father. With the same gun.”

“By Mr. Burr?”

“No, by someone else but for the same reason.”

“What was that?”

Eliza wasn’t sure how to answer. Duels didn’t happen much anymore. When news of Alexander’s death hit the papers, New Yorkers had been stunned. His funeral procession took two hours to wind past the grief-stricken throngs that gathered on sidewalks, hung out windows, stared down from rooftops. Ships in the harbor flew their colors at half-mast, cannons fired from the Battery, church bells pealed across the city. Citizens wore black armbands for thirty days. The New York Supreme Count draped its bench in black crepe for months afterwards. A group of eminent men started the Anti-Dueling Association.

By the 1830s, it seemed almost no one was killed in an affair of honor anymore, at least north of Delaware. The South was another country—as more and more people were insisting, and which was just as well in Eliza’s opinion, though her husband said on his deathbed, “If they break this union  , they’ll break my heart.”

Eliza recalled everything he said that last night. “Guard our children for me, my darling, best of wives.” In the hour of delirium, when his words no longer made sense, he fretted so persistently about a shoe he’d lost that she gave him one. It rested under his hand until it fell to the floor.

It would be hard for Julia to imagine why men once walked willingly to their deaths in defense of honor, a treasure that modern society valued very little.

“It was over politics—and Thomas Jefferson,” she said.

“Did Northerners and Southerners hate each other even then?”

She shook her head a little too emphatically. “No. And they don’t now, either, Julia. Americans fought over ideas, just like today. Everyone loved George Washington, and he was a Southerner.”

Eliza privately admitted to a grudge against Virginians, but she didn’t want the girl to carry that burden. When James Monroe knocked on her daughter’s door in 1825 and asked to speak to Mrs. Hamilton, she had been dumbstruck. She’d done everything possible to avoid seeing the Virginian’s face during his long presidency. He came to her.

Eliza was enjoying the sunshine of the garden with her grandson when a maid gave her Monroe’s card, and she had trouble adjusting to the gloom when she went indoors. Against the light of the parlor windows, he looked like a silhouette cut by one of the portraitists on Pennsylvania Avenue. She knew she must welcome him to sit, but couldn’t bring herself to do so.

“Good morning, Mrs. Hamilton,” he said in that silky Tidewater accent. He must have sensed reticence because he continued without removing his tan riding gloves. He laid one hand atop the other on the head of his elegant cane.

“Good morning, sir.” She couldn’t say his name.

But she could be polite. She could hold her tongue, as Alexander had never learned to do well enough.

“I thought we ought to meet,” Monroe continued. “Time softens memories. We’re both nearing our graves and I’d like to think we could set aside our differences.”

Differences? Was that what he called whipping the furies who hounded her son and husband to their deaths? Was that what he called cruelly exposing her marriage to public ridicule—an act so deeply damaging to her love that only Philip’s death finally cauterized the wound? Differences?

The Virginian hesitated. “So much time has passed.”

Eliza had to place her hands on a chair to control her trembling.

“Mr. Monroe. If you’ve come to tell me that you sincerely repent, that you are very, very sorry for the misrepresentations and slanders and stories you circulated against my husband—if you’ve come to say this, I accept your apology.”

She lifted her chin. “But unless that’s what you wish to say, unless you want forgiveness for what you did to us, no amount of time, no nearness to the grave, makes a whit of difference.”

Alexander once told her that Monroe was very brave at the Battle of Monmouth Courthouse, but the man had become a coward. On that day in Washington, he dropped his eyes and left.

Eliza knew it was her Christian duty to forgive. Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us. If she didn’t absolve the man who devastated her family, perhaps Heaven wouldn’t ask her to sit, either. She could hardly expect God’s mercy. But must one pardon those who never repented? Did the Lord?

In the end, she simply decided that since He had taken away so much, He must grant her this.

It comforted Eliza that Alexander had atoned for his own mistakes years before, even though it flayed her pride at the time. She knew she would find her husband in Heaven. His sacrifices and generosity—his mercy even toward Burr—far outweighed his sins.