What Eliza Hamilton Left Behind | The New York Public Library

By now everyone knows that Eliza Hamilton, the wife of Alexander Hamilton, burned her husband’s love letters before she died—and November 9th will be the 162nd anniversary of her death on that day in 1854 at the age of 97. But if you’re an astute historian, you might notice that Alexander Hamilton was killed in that famous duel way back in 1804. Eliza carried on being fabulous for another 50 years after the death of “my Hamilton.” And not all the letters between Eliza and Alexander were burned, either.

Eliza was born Elizabeth Schuyler in 1757, the daughter of an important landowner and Revolutionary War general. During her girlhood in upstate New York, she and her sisters lived in a world that might be best described as a cross between every Jane Austen novel that you’ve ever read and James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. The Schuyler girls fussed over finery and danced the minuet at balls with dashing young officers, first in British red coats and later in the “buff and blue” of the American troops, late into the night. But instead of fancy needlework, they strung wampum for trade with the local American Indians, and, after a certain party in Boston, taking tea was not in fashion.

One of those young officers was Alexander Hamilton, who came riding in on horseback one day to deliver a message to her father. When they met again the next time, at an officer’s ball during the American Revolution, they were smitten and, soon, married. While they lived at times in upstate New York, in Philadelphia, and in army camps, their most important family home was a mansion in Harlem, known as The Grange, where they raised a passel children—some of them their own and at least one foster child, a little girl named Fanny, the orphan of a Revolutionary War hero. They also planned together an astonishingly ambitious garden that was years in the making.