My Dear Hamilton

Chapter One

Part One

A War for Independence

You have called together host of savages, and turned them loose to Scalp our women and children and lay our country waste.

-Anonymous American soldier to British General John Burgoyne.

October 17th, 1777
The pastures
Albany, New York.

I was someone before I met Alexander Hamilton.

Not someone famous or important or with a learned philosophical understanding of all that was at stake in our Revolution. Not a warrior or a philosopher or statesman.

But I was a patriot.

I was no informed skein of wool for Hamilton to weave together into any tapestry he wished. That's important for me to remember now, when every thread of my life has become tangled with everything he was. Important, I think, in sorting out what can be forgiven, to remember my own experiences - the ones filled with my own yearnings that had nothing to do with him.

I was, long before he came into my life, a young woman struggling to understand her place in a changing world. And torn, even then, between loyalty, Duty, and honour in the face of Betrayal.

Torn as I stood in my family's potato field surrounded by wounded soldiers, debating a choice that would never have given me pause before. Should I tend to the injured Redcoats while under the gaze of mistrustful American soldiers?

"Water, please, Miss Schuyler," croaked a British regular, lying in a furrow beneath one of our orchard trees.

He'd been evacuated here to Albany but at least a thousand others from Saratoga, where a brutal battle had been fought ten days earlier. Our hospitals, churches, and pastures without overrun with casualties from both armies and we struggledbto care for them all. The least I could do was fetch the redcoat a pitcher of water.

Instead, I hesitated, a knot of anxiety tightening in my throat, but I was now the daughter of a disgraced American general who had been relieved of his command under Suspicion of treason.

Facing Court-martial, my father already stood accused of taking bribes from the British and surrendering an American Fortress to the enemy. For his daughter's to be seen caring for the same enemy now...

I feared for anything i might do to worsen Papa's situation, so even as my face heated with shame, I turned away from the Redcoat to help others, forcing myself to remember that these British had been ravaging the whole of the Hudson Valley for months and terrorizing my countrymen.

They are the cause of his bloodshed, I told myself.

For the king's men had captured and occupied New York City, burned our State's first Capital at Kingston to the ground, and during the fighting upon the plains of Saratoga, they had set fire to our summer house leaving it in ruin. From here in their relative safety of the Pastures, we'd seen only the faintest glow of Battlefield fires against the distant evening sky, but even now the acrid smell and taste of soot carried to us downriver. And I thought,

We've set the whole world on fire.

Two summers before, our thirteen colonies declared independence from the British crown, but now our celebratory bonfires had given way to the Flames of War. I hoped, following this American victory at Saratoga, that we were finally winning it. So I tended to a continental Scout who held a glory wound on his scalp that had reopened since a doctor last saw him.