![]() ![]() After Alexander died, she and her eight children were left impoverished. ![]() Elizabeth also showed herself quite savvy with money. Since Alexander was an orphan and the Hamiltons took care of a young foster child, Fanny, for most of her childhood, this work dovetailed with both Elizabeth’s commitment to children and to her husband’s legacy. The organization was involved in the feeding, clothing, and educating of young children. And, during that time, she becomes a well-known and significant philanthropist, working for the New York Orphan Asylum Society. Remembering Eliza’s grief can perhaps embrace their unrecorded grief as well.Įlizabeth lives quite a long time after Alexander dies - 50 years, to be exact. Those anonymous women suffered, too, but those losses existed without the possibility of being named and later recalled. Perhaps, in remembering Elizabeth Schuyler’s grief we are also recalling all the unknown women of the early republic who also suffered miscarriages, the tragic loss of young children, and the despair of women married to unfaithful men. The middle years of her life are configured by grief. In quick succession she mourns the death of her son (who is also killed in a duel) as well as both her parents. This, however, reveals more about Alexander than Elisabeth. Not only was Hamilton killed in a rather absurd duel with Aaron Burr, but Hamilton publicly humiliated her, not only by being unfaithful but by writing a detailed pamphlet (aka The Reynolds Pamphlet) confessing his adultery to save his political reputation. And, her pain is recorded, made visible, in large part, because of the man to whom she was married. In this way, we might name Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton a founding mother or at least a custodial parent of American democracy.īut, Elizabeth suffered, too, because she was married to a famous man. Indeed, this is part of the success of Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical. While the 1619 project might argue that the useable past of America’s founding reveals the structural racism that animates American political life today, Schuyler’s preservation of Alexander Hamilton’s work was intended to showcase how an orphan born outside what would become the United States, resisted the plantation economy and argued for a genuinely united country. The preservation of the past is also aspirational. And, thus, we must be intentional, like Elizabeth Schuyler, about its preservation. Neglect of the Founder’s principles, Will insists, puts our democracy at risk. ![]() As George Will has aptly noted in his The Conservative Sensibility, creating a “useable past” is part of what maintains contemporary American democracy. So, in these ways, “yes” one of the significant features of Elizabeth Schuyler’s life was that she was dedicated to her prominent husband’s legacy and thus she gifted to the American project the preservation of a founding father’s work.īut, also, yes, we should remember her without her husband, because she does the vital work of preserving the story of American democracy. Eliza’s efforts resulted in Hamilton being recorded as the author of this important piece of American political thought. After Hamilton’s death, many of his so-called enemies were then arguing that Madison was the primary author. But she also was able to provide detailed evidence that her husband, not James Madison, had written George Washington’s Farewell Address. We do know that she burned many of her love letters, perhaps, in a bid to tell her story in her own way. Perhaps she believed in her husband’s political project or perhaps, she hoped like Jackie Kennedy, to control the narrative of her husband’s life, particularly as it related to his infidelity. She along with her son, John Church Hamilton, published a biography of Alexander, as well as petitioned the Library of Congress to buy and thus preserve her late husband’s work into perpetuity. She is credited with being the primary agent who ensured that Hamilton’s writings were not only preserved but published. First, memory is an important element of Elizabeth Schuyler’s life. And that, in itself, is an important reminder about the archive of American history. The answer, I think, to these questions is a bit of an unsatisfying “yes” and “no.” Yes, we should remember her beyond her famous husband, but no, we probably wouldn’t recall her without Alexander. ![]()
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