Elizabeth’s formative years were spent in Albany, still a frontier town. Her upbringing was typical of that of most young girls of wealthy and socially prominent families at that time. Tutored informally at home, she had only rudimentary schooling. A close friend descried her at about the age of 16 as a “Brunette with…dark lovely eyes” & “the finest tempered girl in the world.”
While visiting an aunt, Mrs. John Cochran, in Morristown, N.J., during the winter of 1779-80, Elizabeth Schuyler met Alexander Hamilton, then an aide-de-camp to General Washington, & after a brief courtship the couple were engaged.
Although Hamilton, indigent & illegitimate & a recent immigrant from the West Indies, may have appeared an unlikely match for the daughter of one of New York’s most distinguished families, General Schuyler (who later that winter came to Morristown as military adviser to General Washington) respected the young man’s brilliance & energy & heartily approved the marriage, which took place in Albany at the Schuyler mansion on Dec. 14, 1780. Over the next 22 years the Hamiltons had 8 children: Philip (1782), Angelica (1784), Alexander (1786), James Alexander (1788), John Church (1792), William Stephen (1797), Eliza (1799), & Philip (1802).
In 1782, Hamilton resigned from the army, qualified for the bar, & for the next 7 years he & his wife lived in either Albany or New York City. With his appointment in 1789 as the first Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, Mrs. Hamilton became a prominent member of the small but select social circle which centered around the important officials of the new government, located first in New York then in Philadelphia. Hamilton resigned from President Washington’s cabinet in 1795, and resumed the practice of law in New York City. There the couple lived until 1802, when they moved to a country house in northern Manhattan called The Grange after Hamilton’s ancestral home in Scotland.
On July 12, 1804, less than 3 years after Elizabeth Hamilton’s oldest son had been killed in a duel, her husband was mortally wounded in his famous duel with Aaron Burr. Although he was at the time of his death the most prominent lawyer in New York, Hamilton’s years in public service on a slender salary had depleted his means, & he left his large family virtually impoverished. Hamilton also had secretly paid monies to the husband of the woman he was having an affair with during the 1790s. Mrs. Hamilton received urgently needed support from property willed to her by her father, who died on Nov. 18, 1804; from Pennsylvania lands given to her by Timothy Pickering, a close friend & admirer of Hamilton’s; & from a select number of friends who provided her with funds with which to repurchase The Grange, which had been sold at public auction.
Despite her meager resources, she managed with the aid of friends, to provide an education for her sons, 3 of whom graduated from Columbia College & were admitted to the bar. But her consuming interest was her husband’s reputation, which she defended & sought to embellish for the remaining 50 hears of her life. She carefully preserved every available scrap of his writing, but not a single letter which she wrote to him has survived. Perhaps her husband's very public infidelity had a part in her destroying the letters between them.
With the help of her son James, she worked tirelessly to collect Hamilton’s papers for publication. Particularly intent on demonstrating his major contribution to George Washington’s Farwell Address, she successfully instituted legal proceedings against the federal government to recover Hamilton’s drafts of that famous state paper. To edit his writings she solicited candidate after candidate, some of whom declined & some of whom were unable to share her commitment to Hamilton’s towering greatness. In John Church Hamilton, her 5th child, she finally found an author. Over a period of 30 years John Church published a shelf-full of books on his father’s life, including a 7-volume biography & a 7-volume edition of Hamilton’s works.
In the years of her widowhood, Elizabeth Hamilton also took active part in the charitable work of Joana Graham Bethune & other New York women. When the New York Orphan Asylum Society was organized in 1806, Mrs. Hamilton became “Second Directress” (vice-president). In 1821, she became First Directress, or president, a post she retained until 1849, when she moved to Washington, D.C., to live with her widowed daughter Eliza Hamilton Holly. Living on to the age of 97, she died in Washington in 1854. She was buried next to her husband at Trinity churchyard in New York City.
This posting based in part on information from Notable American Women edited by Edward T James, Janet Wilson James, Paul S Boyer, The Belknap Press of Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 1971
