Lafayette’s time at court was filled with lackluster accounts and embarrassing anecdotes. He was in his teens for most of his time at Versailles, and he was a country-groomed one at that. He felt out of his element and refused to speak at great length on any topic he did not know about…which were many…for fear of sounding foolish. This gave others the impression that the young man was aloof and passionless.
Marie Antoinette did indeed laugh him from the floor for his bumbling dance skills. He once drank so much in an attempt to keep up with his notably naughty brother-in-law that he had to be carried away in a carriage, completely wasted. Social elites feared that the Noailles family had brought a dud into the fold.
Lafayette later assured his reader in his memoirs that this perceived passionless attitude was due his younger self’s fear that his pride would be wounded if he was made out to be ignorant of some important point or courtesy. This descriptor was dropped after his time in America. From then on, the court viewed him almost as a romanticized young adventurer hero worthy of gossip and interest.
5. It’s hard to be offended when white people jokes involve bland food/tourist dads in socks and sandals/white girls in yoga pants obsessed with pumpkin spice/suburban PTA moms and other harmless and mostly true stereotypes while jokes about POC involve them being called thugs/criminals/slurs/uneducated/illegal immigrants.
i fucks with u heavy if ur white and you reblog this
sm0k3-ring
6. They’re usually really fucking funny and don’t perpetuate stereotypes that will ever affect me economically, politically, or cause me any true harm, let alone create risks that “justify” my murder and/or death
“I am pleased with every instance of delicacy in those that are so dear to me, and I think I read your soul on the occasion you mention. I shall therefore only intreat you to consider me as one who wishes in every way to promote your happiness and that I shall never give or loan but with a view [] Great Ends. Embrace my Child for me….”Philip Schuyler to AH, 25Jan1781
“Elizabeth’s father was a gouty old aristocrat, noted for his proud and imperious bearing, his strong conviction that New Englanders were socially not much better than Yahoos, and his fondness for family trees.” Miller, Alexander Hamilton: Portrait in Paradox.
Philip Schuyler “had a frosty attitude towards his social inferiors,” Chernow, Washington: A Life.
In his time, Philip Schuyler (1733-1804) was the leader of the upper New York landed gentry. In 1777, his Saratoga property alone was estimated to be worth 10,000 pounds. He also owned the Pastures (Schuyler Mansion) in Albany, and property in the Mohawk Valley, Hudson River Valley, farms, a flour mill, and the first flax mill in America, in addition to the portion of the sizable Claverack estate inherited by his wife, Catharine (nee Van Rensselaer*). Schuyler owned one schooner and three sloops used for transporting produce, wood, etc, to markets south of Albany. He supplied the British Army pre-Revolution, and sold flour, lumber, etc to the American Army. There’s some debate about how wealthy he actually was in 1780 after the destruction of much of his property in Saratoga, and his fortune had certainly diminished by the time of his death in 1804. During the War, he was a major general in the Continental Army and head of the Northern Department for a time.** He was a member of NY State Assembly (1768-1775); member of the Continental Congress 1775; 1779-1780) and offered the Presidency of that body; NY State Senator (1780-1784; 1786-1790; 1792-1797); NY State Surveyor General (1781-1784); U.S. Senator (1789-1791; 1797-1798); and President of the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company.
“[In Albany], amidst a circle of friends, to whom his social virtues more endeared him than the lustre of his reputation, he, whose lot from infancy had been cast among strangers, enjoyed all the happiness of finding in General Schuyler and his family a second parent, and new relatives.” John C Hamilton, The Life of Alexander Hamilton, 1840
AH’s attachment to the Schuyler family was a very significant turning point in his life: emotionally, psychologically, politically. Schuyler family concerns would thereafter play a dominant role in AH’s life. The friends and colleagues AH had before knowing the Schuylers become sorted through a Schuyler filter - people they disapprove of, he comes to disapprove of. People they like become AH’s dear friends. (As some historians have noted, AH’s thoughts on slavery were possibly complicated by the fact that the Schuylers were a slaveowning family, using enslaved persons for domestic service***.) On several levels, it’s impossible to imagine him leaving Washington’s military family in 1781 without having married into the Schuyler family first. AH, in turn, invariably aids the Schuylers’ political fortunes and assists them with various legal and property issues and financial transactions.
Of course, most historical interest in their relationship surrounds the military association and political partnership between Philip Schuyler and his son-in-law. Philip Schuyler and AH knew each other from at least 1776. They may already have been loosely acquainted through others, possibly through AH’s relationship with Gov. William Livingston of NJ, who was born in Albany and related to both Philip Schuyler and his wife Catharine, and whose daughters (Catherine/Kitty, Susanna/Suky, and Sarah) were close friends with the Schuyler sisters. (John Jay and Sarah Livingston marry in April 1774 at Liberty Hall, Livingston’s Elizabethtown mansion; AH may have attended, and I wonder if Schuyler family members were also in attendance.) AH first visits the Pastures in November 1777 to discuss military matters. He did not meet Catharine or Peggy on this occasion, and it’s been disputed whether he met Elizabeth, his future wife, at this time.
When Philip and Catharine Schuyler send their second-born daughter to seduce AH ****Elizabeth Schuyler arrives in Morristown in February 1780, she and AH decide on marriage in less than eight weeks. An additional benefit for AH is that he already knows her father, and that they like each other (for those biographers who think that AH was considered an unacceptable suitor for other women). When Philip Schuyler arrives in Morristown in late March, AH and ES declare their intention to marry and he seems overjoyed. As he writes to AH the following year:
You can not my Dear Sir be more happy at the Connection you have made with my family than I am, until a child has made a judicious choice the heart of a parent is continually in anxiety but this anxiety vanished in the moment that I discovered w[h]ere you and she had placed your affections.
The two men would be steadfast political partners for the next 20+ years, until AH’s death. Most of Schuyler’s surviving letters to his son-in-law are focused on current events and political matters. They worked together to support the ratification of the Constitution and the Federalist cause, including discussing their preferred candidates and how to secure the election and appointment of those persons they wanted in positions of power. A few fun examples from PS:
I thank you for the hints you give relative to a certain person and shall not fail to Improve them. 5Feb1781
I attempted during the last meeting to make the landed provision you mention but found men’s minds not quite ripe for it… 4May1783
We have reason to conclude that success will attend our endeavours for the re-appointment of Mr. King. 5Jan1795
In one letter, Philip writes James Madison at the request of AH.
Of course, there was self-interest on both sides in the success of their partnership, and not only so that they could both see the new nation develop as they thought it should develop. As one historian noted, Schuyler held $60,000 worth of securities to be funded, a holding that may have been responsible, according to Senator William Maclay, for his hair standing “on end as if Indians had fired at him” when there was opposition to AH’s plan to fund the national debt. But as I’ll get into in the next post, they clearly saw a great deal in each other through their shared values.
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On a personal level, reading his letters to AH, Philip Schuyler comes across as a terror of an in-law: over-bearing and micromanaging of AH’s family life. He sometimes writes like he’s creepily claiming the Hamilton children as his own. Some favorites:
Mrs. Carter was yesterday delivered of a fine boy I hope her sister will give me another. PS to AH, 16Sept1781. (referring to the future birth of Philip Hamilton, born January 1782)
Another: following the yellow fever scare when the Hamilton children and then AH and EH flee to Albany, the parents return, leaving the Hamilton children with the Schuylers for a time. They then requested the return of their children. Philip’s response:
It is very natural that you and my Dear Eliza Should be anxious to have your children with you, but in this instance I apprehend your prudence has given way to your feelings…I have concluded it would be improper to Acceed to your wish… If however after some farther experience you shall Judge that all danger is past, I will either carry down the little one and his nurse, or send them in charge of my son Rensselaer, but the others we all agree must remain until Spring….The children are all in perfect health, so happy and docile and afford us so much pleasure and real satisfaction that we should part with them with infinite reluctance, you must not therefore Insist upon depriving us of them. PS to AH, 17Nov1793. (It’s unclear what transpired next, but by 15Dec1793, with the exception of Angelica, all of the Hamilton children are back with their parents in Philadelphia.)
But that’s the problem of silence from one side: almost all of AH’s letters to his father-in-law are missing/gone. Mitchell states that “the bulk of their correspondence with each other, found in a trunk at Albany” was “burned by the son of a Schuyler executor in one of those monstrous acts of private prerogative.”
Other evidence paints a fuller picture of their personal relationship: AH lived/stayed in Philip Schuyler’s home in Albany for long stretches of time and traveled to his home in Saratoga. He entrusted the care of his wife and education of his children, the family AH describes as “all my happiness,” to his father-in-law for several periods. Philip helped AH with the building of the Grange - getting lumber, conferring on the design. [He also provides money and school supplies for the education of the Hamilton boys, and lots of food and other goods to the Hamilton household - it’s a bit unclear how much AH knew about this, though he likely knew quite a bit since he entrusts so much of Elizabeth’s financial care to Philip in the July 1804 will.] Philip provides details in his letters about his gout, constipation and stools. He shares mundane daily details: the size and price of fish. How good the mutton he had was. And while the health and eating habits of Philip seem like strange details to share, it’s possible that AH shared the same mundane details with his father-in-law (as, for example, Philip worries about the health of AH in letters to his other children). In one of the few surviving letters, we find the classic, “Nothing new here,” but also an account of a fire on a vessel from Albany. It seems likely that these types of details were shared between the two of them regularly. Most convincingly, based on Philip’s own letters in response, at times AH sent a letter to his father-in-law by every post*****.These strong ties extended to the Schuyler clan: three of Elizabeth’s sisters name their sons ‘Alexander’ (Peggy being the sole outlier, but she only had one son).
In brief, for nearly 25 years, Philip Schuyler would have been AH’s most immediate model of a patrician “head of the family,” and it’s likely that Elizabeth modeled her marriage, household management, and family life after that of her parents.
So going back to my very first quotes, why was Philip so accepting of AH, so sure of AH that he wrote, “this anxiety vanished in the moment that I discovered w[h]ere you and she had placed your affections?” What exactly did AH and PS have in common besides their connection through Elizabeth? How did AH regard his father-in-law on a personal level? Since we don’t have his letters to PS, can we speculate on their personal closeness through other letters? I’ll address these questions in part 2.
*It never fails to amuse how much difficulty people had spelling Rensselaer. AH spells it several different ways, and finally sorta gets it consistently correct by the mid-1790s.
**There are a lot of detailed histories of Philip Schuyler during the American Revolution, including the controversy over Fort Ticonderoga and the Battle of Saratoga; the court-martials; his relationship with GW during the war; etc. I’m going to do my best to only discuss this as it relates to his personal and political partnership with AH.
***According to sources I’ve read, Philip Schuyler may have at one time owned 27 or more enslaved persons (of African and Native American descent). According to the 1800 census records, he owned 11 in that year. I’m unsure if this reflects evolving ideas about slavery or perhaps was indicative of a gradual lessening of dependence on a slave workforce (as was becoming increasingly common in many northern states), or some other financial consideration. What is clear from his letters to AH is that at least into the late 1790s, Philip was still engaged in buying and selling enslaved persons (for the Hamiltons’ and/or the Churches’ ownership).
****This misogynistic quip is my very bad joke, pointedly referencing some biographies where Elizabeth is seen as a means-to-an-end by both her father and her fiancé/husband. As can be seen through his letters to his children, Philip Schuyler was a strong believer in the Enlightenment ideal of love, romance, and deep companionship in marriage. I doubt he would have approved of the marriage if he did not feel AH and ES were sincere in their desire to be committed and loving lifetime companions devoted to each others’ happiness. Though he did sometimes believe (with Angelica S. Church and Cornelia S. Morton) that he knew better than his daughters what kind of spouse would bring them the greatest personal happiness.
*****How did Philip Schuyler respond to AH’s affair with Maria Reynolds? I’ve argued that the Reynolds Affair became an open secret among top politicians shortly after AH’s ‘confession’ in December 1792 - they also share some of the same political enemies who have copies of the Reynolds letters in their possession, so there’s no way Schuyler doesn’t hear about it within the next year, if he wasn’t already told by the guilty party. There are no surviving letters between the two from Nov 1782 to Nov 1783. In summer and fall 1797/early 1798, there’s no indication of anything amiss between Philip Schuyler and AH. (There are hints that Angelica Church only came to know about the affair upon her return to NY residence in spring 1797.) I like to think Philip Schuyler had his own hand in AH’s recollection in the Reynolds’ Pamphlet that, “I have paid pretty severely for the folly….”
Consummation in this context could be used to refer to both a wedding ceremony and the first act of post-nuptial sexual intercourse. But final consummation is a term for a theorized religious event in Christian eschatology that follows the period of judgment after Christ’s second coming. Found in both Catholic and Protestant writings, this event is also sometimes called “the consummation of all things,” or “the end of all things;” it’s “the end of the world/of time” in Christian discourse. (There’s no final consummation in terms of a wedding or marital act.)
AH is probably joking using the religious meaning of the phrase (”My getting married is like the end of the world!”) and getting added wordplay out of consummation also meaning a wedding and/or sexual act. According to Troup, AH was a “zealous believer in the fundamental doctrines of Christianity” in his college years, so it seems very likely that he would have been familiar with this religious phrase (as later handlers of this letter likely also were, otherwise it’s easy to speculate this would have been edited out). This interpretation also aligns with other religious language and analogies that AH used in his letters to JL re his marriage to ES, e.g. “I confess my sins. I am guilty,” even his use in the prior sentence of the same letter of “transgress the bounds” - also a phrase found in religious literature and especially biblical commentary, and his general (joking?) feelings on his impending marriage (“completes my doom”). I contend that AH is writing to JL: “I’m committing to marriage [restore the empire of Hymen]. You’re invited to witness the end of the world,” and getting wordplay out of the double - perhaps triple - meaning of consummation in the latter sentence. His use of “final consummation” here is an excellent example of what ES termed the “playfulness of his wit.” I’d also speculate (especially when read with otherletters) that AH took marriage quite seriously in 1780 and saw matrimony as a profound life change.
templeait