The Disappearance of Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton
“Hers was a strong character with its depth and warmth, whether of feeling or temper controlled, but glowing underneath, bursting through at times in some emphatic expression.”*
[This is as much a reminder to myself as to anyone else reading once I start quoting extensively from AH’s letters to ESH, as I will do in an upcoming post. ESH very much gets lost because of their one-sided correspondence.]
Unless you’re willing to dig a bit (and I don’t mean reading Tilar Mazzeo’s atrocious biography that makes her even more of a cipher, or taking seriously both Miranda and Chernow’s fictional creations), ESH is sort of a phantom. She’s not unknowable, but nothing is left of her letters to her husband, and we have comparatively few letters to her family during the years of her marriage (and to find those, one has to put in the work - they aren’t easily available transcribed on Founders or in a publicly accessible online volume, although a few letters from others to her do appear in Intimate Life of AH - the letters from Kitty Livingston are especially fun). We find most of ESH’s thoughts/reflections on AH in letters from 1804 and 1805, after his death, and then in her quest to get material for a biography. We also then get a lot of her voice in her letters to others. But to many, the real question is: what was Elizabeth Schuyler like when being courted by, and then married to AH? Who is this person that AH was stating was “the sole proprietor [of my heart]” (13July1781)?
We have around 120 of AH’s letters to her - and we’re missing about another 60 that are mentioned in other letters - but we’re left with the lingering question: who in the world is he writing all of this highly emotional, gushy stuff to? Does she feel the same way? Does she feel more of this/less of that? How does she express herself to him? How does she think and feel?
I’ve tried to do posts about A. Hamilton’s relationships with Nicholas Fish and Matthew Clarkson, and without letters from both sides, there’s no there there. And my post about AH’s feelings about Philip Schuyler was one of the most difficult: because we don’t have AH writing personally to PS in any but a handful of letters, I’m stuck reading what he wrote to other people about his father-in-law to get his take on his father-in-law. I’m doing a few posts quoting extensively from AH’s letters to her, but without her response, it’s like reading into a void.
But there’s something else going on with ESH too, a mixture of misogyny and lack of understanding of the roles of women in the 18th century and just a total dismissal of women’s work. It often plays out as: why would a genius like that have been interested in her. Sometimes (Chernow), it descends into the “this guy was so smart and complicated he would have always needed multiple women to fulfill him intellectually/romantically/physically” trope.
The sum total, when combined with heaping doses of misogyny, disregard for women’s labor, and lack of knowledge of the time period, is to erase her out of both his professional and intimate life. She’s around, maybe doing something, definitely having babies, but she just must not be that important. AH’s own testaments to her and to others about her are ignored.
Elizabeth Schuyler attended diplomatic and political meetings at a younger age than we have any record of AH doing so. She had relationships - often predating AH’s own - with nearly everyone important person in AH’s American life, including members of the Continental Congress, Washington, and members of Washington’s military family. ESH performed all the duties of soft diplomacy, from hosting and entertaining important politicians (Washington, Jefferson, Talleyrand, among many others) to performing the social visits that were so important in the Federalist political era. ESH ran their home (including negotiating where they lived, the rent, the furnishings, the servants, etc), educated their children (besides risking her life nine times that we know of to have them), helped AH with his correspondence, attended political and social events solo and alongside him, communicated political and military news to him and to her family, and advised him on political speeches. ESH was also pretty excellent at handicrafts (but oh wait, those are made by women, so they don’t matter). And I haven’t even touched on her life after his death!
If one is interested in life of the historical AH in 1780 and beyond, one has to grasp that ESH is a real person deeply involved in all aspects of his life thereafter, whose affections AH regarded as “ the only blessing which can make life of any value to me” (10Jul1781), even if we don’t get to hear/read her side of things.
