“A comma in the middle of a phrase”

Here’s one last posting about Angelica (Schuyler) Church, for now. In the early years of the republic, she exchanged letters with a lot of American political men, and some of those letters seem flirtatious. Among those correspondents was Thomas Jefferson, whom Church met through the artist Maria Cosway.

Some authors writing about Church’s brother-in-law Alexander Hamilton take it as a near certainty that the two of them had a sexual affair: Willard Sterne Randall in Alexander Hamilton, Arnold Rogow in Fatal Friendship, Warren Roberts in A Place in History. Other authors say they just played at flirting, or never acted on their attraction, or that it’s simply impossible to know.

Me, I’m not sure Hamilton was even in Angelica Church’s league—not when her husband John Barker Church was around to supply both money and excitement. And if they were having a secret affair, I’d think they’d be less flirtatious in the letters each probably shared with his or her spouse. But it’s impossible to know.

The Hamilton show on Broadway presents the two in-laws’ relationship as an unconsummated yearning, mostly on Angelica’s part. That comes through most in a number titled “Take a Break,” in which Angelica sings:

In a letter I received from you two weeks ago
I noticed a comma in the middle of a phrase
It changed the meaning. Did you intend this?
One stroke and you’ve consumed my waking days
It says:
“My dearest Angelica”
With a comma after “dearest.” You’ve written
“My dearest, Angelica.”

In his surviving correspondence Hamilton never wrote “My dearest Angelica,” with or without a comma. (He did write “my dear Angelica” in three letters between 1794 and 1803.)

The inspiration for that verse clearly comes from an exchange between Angelica Church and Alexander Hamilton in 1787. In the first letter, Church wrote:

You had every right my dear brother to believe that I was very inattentive not to have answered your letter; but I could not relinquish the hopes that you would be tempted to ask the reason of my Silence, which would be a certain means of obtaining the second letter when perhaps had I answered the first, I should have lost all the fine things contained in the Latter. Indeed my dear, Sir if my path was strewed with as many roses, as you have filled your letter with compliments, I should not now lament my absence from America: but even Hope is weary of doing any thing for so assiduous a votary as myself. I have so often prayed at her shrine that I am now no longer heard. Church’s head is full of Politicks, he is so desirous of making once in the British house of Commons, and where I should be happy to see him if he possessed your Eloquence.

Hamilton wrote back in December:

You ladies despise the pedantry of punctuation. There was a most critical comma in your last letter. It is my interest that it should have been designed; but I presume it was accidental. Unriddle this if you can. The proof that you do it rightly may be given by the omission or repetition of the same mistake in your next.

So Mr. Church resolves to be a parliament-man. I had rather see him a member of our new Congress; but my fervent wish always is that much success may attend all his wishes. I am sincerely attached to him as well as to yourself.

Hamilton signed that letter “Adieu ma chere, soeur” (Adieu my dear, sister), to drive home the joke about punctuation. Or was it a joke?

In any event, it was Hamilton, not Church, who read meaning into a misplaced comma and wondered what it meant about the other’s affections. Hamilton even invited Church to repeat the “the same mistake” in her next letter. If she did, that document is lost. The next letter we have is from late 1789, and Church wrote:

Adieu my dear Brother, may god bless and protect you, prays your ever affectionate Angelica ever ever yours. . . . Adieu my dear Hamilton, you said I was as dear to you as a sister keep your word, and let me have the consolation to beleive that you will never forget the promise of friendship you have vowed. A thousand embraces to my dear Betsy, she will not have so bad a night as the last

No commas out of place there, plus a mention of his wife and of “the promise of friendship…as a sister.”

Angelica Church wrote that letter just as she finished a visit to New York without her husband, and some authors think that was when she and Hamilton consummated an affair. But it’s impossible to know.

Thomas Jefferson Looks at the Ladies

Today’s Boston Globe offers a review of Mr. Jefferson’s Women, by Jon Kukla. The reviewer is Prof. Michael Kammen of Cornell, whose A Season of Youth is an interesting exploration of how the memory and symbolism of the American Revolution played out in American art and literature.

Kammen writes:

Jon Kukla never uses the familiar colloquial phrase, but [Thomas] Jefferson comes across as a male chauvinist pig - a misogynist even more committed to patriarchalism than many of his contemporaries. He had no interest in education for women, except to prepare them for deferential roles as republican mothers. Equally serious, he strongly opposed any place for women in civic life.

Of course, the same could be said for most of Jefferson’s contemporaries, male and female. His misogyny appears not in his policy ideas but in his private writings.

This lifelong outlook had its genesis in 1763, when a socially inept Jefferson at 20 proposed marriage to the lovely and well-connected Rebecca Burwell, age 17, who rejected him in favor of a gentleman less rustic and with a superior lineage. For almost a decade thereafter, even as his male friends married, Jefferson displayed a dismissive mistrust of the fair sex and in 1770 recorded the following in his memorandum book: “Entrust a ship to the winds, do not trust your heart to girls, / For the surge of the sea is safer than a woman’s loyalty.” There was nothing wrong with his libido, however, because during the summer of 1768 he made repeated attempts to seduce the wife of one of his closest friends, who was away for months on frontier militia duty and had asked Jefferson, who lived nearby, to serve as the guardian of his wife and young child.

On Jan. 1, 1772, at the age of 29, Jefferson married a 23-year-old widow, Martha Wayles Skelton. . . . The Jeffersons appear to have enjoyed a happy marriage that produced six children, only two of whom survived to maturity. When Martha died of exhaustion in 1782 following her final pregnancy, Jefferson's grief was not only genuine but overwhelming. As Martha lay on her deathbed, she displayed four fingers and said to her husband that “she could not die happy if she thought her four children were ever to have a stepmother brought in over them. Holding her other hand in his, Mr. Jefferson promised her solemnly that he would never marry again.” He did not, yet two intense but very different relationships ensued.

One of those relationships was Jefferson’s unrequited interest in Maria Cosway, an Englishwoman he met in Paris. The image above is an engraving of her that Jefferson had at Monticello; click on it for more detail about her.

The other relationship was with Sally Hemings, Martha’s half-sister. Jefferson’s own words acknowledge his attempts to woo the four white women, but the evidence of his affair with Hemings appears in his closely documented activities and her pregnancies, in other people’s words, and in the Jefferson Y-chromosome haplotype. Kukla’s book and Kammen’s review testify to how many scholars now accept without quibble that Jefferson and Hemings had a sexual relationship, an idea still controversial a decade ago when Annette Gordon-Reed analyzed the previous historiography in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. Kukla ultimately credits Jefferson with “thoughtful actions that implied respect, gratitude, and some measure of affection” during that relationship, noting how the law hemmed him in from treating Hemings better.

When it came to women, Jefferson was also hemmed in by his own personality. Though he was eloquent on paper, and thus eloquent to us, he was a diffident speaker and apparently shy. But as a rich, intelligent Virginia gentleman, he didn’t like to admit such shortcomings. Kukla’s book tracks how we know Jefferson showed interest in four women not enslaved to him. Three turned him down, two while they were married to other men. Yet, in a bitter irony, he wrote complaints about the uncertainty of “a woman’s loyalty,” putting the blame on the other sex. Jefferson certainly felt the bitterness, but I think he was too close to the situation to note the irony.