Hamilton: The Musical charts the life of its title star, but its climax leaves the stories of the supporting characters suspended short in 1804. The audience learns a little about what Eliza Hamilton (nee Schuyler) did next, but Aaron Burr, Angelica Schuyler and Maria Reynolds and are all left in Hamilton’s shadow.
According to history, however, the lives of the other people close to Hamilton were as interesting as the events of his. Bankruptcy, sex and frequent transatlantic escapades feature prominently, along with the odd egotistical village-building project. Read on, and hope Lin-Manuel Miranda is considering a sequel.
Hamilton’s lifelong friend/rival/foe/murderer lays out his destiny in one of his first lines: “I’m the damn fool who shot him”. Hamilton’s death, of course, happened in part because of Burr’s promotion to Vice President of the United States. But it was also the beginning of the end for Burr’s career. As his most recent biographer, Nancy Isenberg, wrote in 2007: “Once he had killed Hamilton, Burr could do nothing right.”
As he outlined to his daughter Theodosia afterwards, the fact Hamilton was shot in New Jersey but died in New York meant that Burr was in the middle of two states’ messy legal wranglings: “There is a contention of a singular nature between the two States of New York and New Jersey. The subject in dispute is, which shall have the honour of hanging the Vice-President. You shall have due notice of time and place. Whenever it may be, you may rely on a great concourse of company, much gayety, and many rare sights.”
In the end, neither had the honour: Burr’s New Jersey murder charge was dropped after a group of Congressmen convinced the state’s governor that the duel was fair, and his New York one was dropped eventually, too.
Burr was convicted by New York of the misdemeanour dueling charge (the death of Hamilton’s son, Philip, in the same spot that he would be shot, prompted the founding father to make accepting a duel in New York illegal; he then went on to do so himself). This meant he couldn’t vote, practice law or occupy a public office for 20 years.
Burr was considered an outsider in Jefferson’s administration, and although he left the gossip in New York for Washington after the duel, he stepped down from his Vice-Presidency in 1805. That’s when things begin to get strange: Burr’s steady, patient ambition witnessed in Hamilton had no part in a bizarre scheme to establish an independent empire in Louisiana.
The one-time Revolutionary even contacted the British government, pleading with them for help in setting up the empire. Along with James Wilkinson, then commander-in-chief of the US Army, Burr tried to make the empire happen again in Spanish America when tensions rose along the border of Mexico. Letters later showed he had also asked for money from Spain, despite the fact he secretly wanted to help Mexico overpower the Spanish in Southwest America.
Things rose to a head in 1806, when Burr led a group of around 80 well-armed men to New Orleans. His justification was that if he settled there with these “farmers”, then they would be well-prepared to defend the land he had leased, meaning he wasn’t out of pocket.
Wilkinson, however, betrayed Burr, and told Jefferson of Burr’s plans. Jefferson promptly put out a warrant declaring him a traitor, and Burr was, some months later, arrested for treason. Six months later, he was acquitted - no evidence of treason was found and one of the smoking gun letters said to be from Burr was actually written in Wilkinson’s handwriting.
Nonetheless, Burr’s reputation – already pockmarked in the North – was now in tatters throughout the country. He was also near-destitute, having long exhausted his parents’ inheritance. He escaped the scandal and his creditors thanks to his doctor, who lent him the money for a ship fare to England.
He spent between 1808 and 1812, when his daughter Theodosia died at sea at 19, in a self-imposed exile in London. Remarkably, he continued to exhume his idea of conquesting Mexico to the extent of (unsuccessfully) soliciting funding. He was thrown out of London and, after a while in France, Napoleon Bonaparte refused him, so he hung out in Scotland, Denmark, Sweden and Germany.
Burr had been going through this turmoil a widower: his beloved wife, also named Theodosia, had died in 1794. Throughout his career he was besmirched as a ladies man – in part due to his seduction and subsequent abandonment of 14-year-old Margaret Moncrieffe, during the Revolution.
But he made up for lost time when he got to Europe, philandering with dozens of women and making abstract notes about his liaisons in a secret journal. Isenberg's biography includes one of his entries: “Vis. inv. pr. U. pa. bi. jo. ma. bi. fa” (decoded: “after repeated invitations, I had sex with a Swedish maid who was not very handsome, but well built”).
Such exploits were not without consequence. He adopted Aaron Columbus Burr when the child was eight – it's believed that the boy was the product of an affair between Burr and a mistress. Burr also fathered two illegitimate children with one of his servants, Mary Emmons.
Both of them, Louisa Charlotte and John Pierre, took their father's last name and his spirit: John became an active member of Philadelphia's Underground Railroad and served as Chairman of the American Moral Reform Society.
It should be noted, too, that several of his biographers also considered Burr a feminist. He was a loyal follower of Mary Wollstonecraft and, by accounts, a loyal and fair husband and father to both Theodosias.
Monogamy arrived, for a brief while, after nearly 40 years of widowerhood when Burr met Eliza Jumel. By this point, the disgraced politician was 77 and had returned to New York as Aaron Edwards in an attempt to evade his creditors. Jumel’s story is perhaps worthy of its own musical – born into poverty, raised in a brothel and orphaned in her teens, she married into fortune.
She married Burr, who was 19 years older than her, just over a year after her first husband died and swiftly moved him into her late husband’s home.
It was a marriage of short-lived convenience: she was after his stature, the cash-strapped Burr was probably after her money. But even in the four months of marriage they had before separating, he managed to jeopardise her fortune. The divorce came through three years later: on September 14 1836, the same day that Burr died, aged 80.
According to Miranda, Angelica nurtured an unsatisfied (and potentially requited) love for Hamilton for her whole life. The fact that she was buried in the same graveyard, but not the same plot, as Hamilton and his wife Eliza, inspired the line made Miranda “cry the hardest” when he was writing the musical: “She is buried in Trinity Church / Near you”.
What else did Angelica Schuyler get upto with her “wealthy husband… [who was] not a lot of fun” for the rest of her life? Well, firstly, she changed her name, to the rather less exciting Church. Angelica married John Barker Church, an Englishman who escaped to America after racking up considerable gambling debts (and an alias: John Carter), who supplied arms to the revolution.
Contrary to the reasons she rejected Hamilton – against her heart’s desire – the real Angelica couldn’t give two hoots about how her social standing affected her match, and eloped in 1777 with the disgraced Church after her father became understandably suspicious about his past.
The couple moved to Europe after the war, in 1783. Angelica had eight children, and by this point there were three of them in existence (the subsequent five were born afterwards).
Church proved, indeed, a safe bet. He became a US envoy to the French government, moving the family to France and enabling Angelica to unleash her long-honed social skills on high society: she befriended Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette – whom, in 1794, she attempted to free from the Austrian prison of Olmutz along with a coterie of French emigres in London.
After Paris, the Churches moved to London, where Angelica continued to charm the Prince of Wales before he became King George IV. She became a patron of the arts, sponsoring artist and Revolutionary darling John Trumbull. They had a house near Windsor, Downe Place, where Angelica enjoyed hosting parties.
In the late 1780s, the Churches abandoned the city for a pile in Wendover in Buckinghamshire while he served as a member of parliament. Angelica kept up her links with America’s upper echelon, attending George Washington’s inauguration in 1789.
A decade later, the family moved back to New York and were given 100,000 acres of land in New York state because Congress couldn’t afford to pay back a debt to Church. It was their son, Philip, who took charge, and built a village inspired by the architecture and town planning of Paris - he named it Angelica. It's still there, but looks a lot like any other upstate New York town.
His parents were similarly humble in their building ambitions: merely creating a 30-room mansion called Belvidere, which was meant to be a summer home. Once they had finished it, in 1810, they decided they’d just live in it all year round. Angelica died four years later.
Angelica really was as smart as the musical suggests: she made literary quips in the correspondence that she kept with the founding fathers, including, of course, Hamilton. The letters between the star-crossed in-laws suggest there was a more affection relationship than normal between them, but we’ll never know if an affair actually took place.
By the time of Hamilton’s death, Elizabeth “Eliza” Schuyler (Betsy to Hamilton) had been bereaved six times in three years: her eldest son, Philip, died in a duel in 1801, then her husband was shot in the same spot in 1804. In between, the Hamiltons’ fifth child, John Church, died aged 10, while her mother, brother John and Peggy, her sister had passed away before Hamilton did. A few months later, her father died.
Alexander and Eliza had eight children in total, with the youngest born in 1800, and Eliza raised them while supporting her husband’s ascending political career and moving between various US cities in the process. She was even pregnant when he wrote the Reynold’s Pamphlet, making his affair with Maria Reynolds public.
The revelations caused her to abandon Hamilton in New York, and move to her parents in Albany, where she gave birth. She returned to New York three months later.
She was left with Hamilton’s debts – most of the revolutionaries, it transpires, were big spenders. Despite such grief, she really did channel her energies into good causes, namely, New York’s first public orphanage, which she founded in 1806, and continued to work at, including as director, for 42 years.
Eliza was also the one who told Hamilton’s story. She defended his name, forcing James Monroe to apologise for accusing Hamilton of financial impropriety. She also organised his letters, papers and writings (“You really do write like you’re running out of [time]”), even keeping the sonnet he sent to her in the early days of their courtship in a package around her neck.
She retired from the orphanage in her nineties, but continued do charitable work, raising money to build the Washington Monument.
Eliza died in 1854, aged 97, and had spent the past eight years struggling with memory loss, but managed to reminisce clearly about Hamilton. Despite outliving him by 50 years, she never re-married, and was buried near Hamilton in Trinity Church.
As is often the case with historical sex scandals, the woman in Hamilton’s came out badly. Maria Reynolds was just 23 when she approached Hamilton with a story about an abusive husband and a request for help. The man behind the scheme, James Reynolds, was considerably older than her and had married her when she was 15.
He had long been cooking up money-making schemes: he often tried to claim damages from his years fighting in the Revolutionary War in the hope of getting some money from the government.
Hamilton paid his last “loan” to Reynolds, thus ending the affair, in 1772, and the next year Maria had divorced him - with the assistance of none other than Aaron Burr. She ran away with Jacob Clingman, who had been colluding with her ex-husband, to Virginia.
They married and lived in relative peace until 1797, when the Reynolds Pamphlet was published and she became an object of public scorn and derision.
As with many others surrounding Hamilton, she sought escape in England for a little while, and when she returned to the US – specifically, Philadelphia – she had neither husband nor his name. Maria Clement swiftly became the housekeeper of a doctor, whose surname was Matthew, and she married him in 1806.
Maria and James did have a daughter, Susan, who was a small child when the Hamilton affair was happening. The divorce and scandal saw Burr and congressman William Eustis send Susan to boarding school.
She had the same misfortune with men as her mother, however, eloping at the age of 18 with a man named Francis Wright, who swiftly dumped her. Susan became a prostitute, before moving back in with her mother in 1808. She went on to marry several times.
Maria, however, managed to turn her life around. Now the wife of a doctor, she gained respect within Philadelphia and became a Methodist. She died in March 1828, aged a few days short of her 60th birthday.