Category Archives: Eliza Hamilton Schuyler (mother of Louisa Lee Schuyler)

Alexander Hamilton, 1816-1889

26 Saturday Jan 2019

Posted by in Alexander Hamilton, Eliza Hamilton Schuyler (mother of Louisa Lee Schuyler), George Lee Schuyler (father of Louisa Lee Schuyler), Incorporating New York (book manuscript project), Louisa Lee Schuyler

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Alexander Hamilton, a grandson of the Founding Father, served in the American Civil War and was prominent in the social fabric of New York City and Hudson River Valley cultural life before and after the war.

Alexander Hamilton, grandson and namesake of the first Treasury Secretary, was born on this date in New York City in 1816. Hamilton was the younger brother of Eliza Hamilton Schuyler, which thus makes him the uncle of Louisa Lee Schuyler. Hamilton served in Spain as a diplomat on the staff of his friend Washington Irving in the late 1840s and early 1850s. When the American Civil War broke out a decade later he and his brother-in-law George Lee Schuyler served on the staff of General John E. Wool in Virginia and elsewhere. It is lost on us sometimes how close to the Revolutionary War was the Civil War; many of the figures on both sides of the Rebellion were the grandchildren of the first generation of Americans and were convinced that they were fulfilling the wishes of the Founders. It is a theme I expand upon in Incorporating New York, my book manuscript about the Civil War Era generation that came of age in the mid-1850s and lived on through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Alexander Hamilton (1816-1889) headstone, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

Alexander Hamilton was a Civil War officer, prominent lawyer, and founding member & eventual president of the Knickerbocker Club. He died 130 years ago this year and is buried in the Hamilton-Schuyler plot in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery north of New York City, up the hill from the final resting place of his friend Washington Irving. I took the photo above when a friend and I visited early this past December.

(top image/D. Appleton & Co.: A.A. Turner, photographer)

 

Eliza Hamilton Schuyler, 1811-1863

20 Thursday Dec 2018

Posted by in Charles Loring Brace, Eliza Hamilton Schuyler (mother of Louisa Lee Schuyler), Incorporating New York (book manuscript project), Those we remember

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Eliza Hamilton Schuyler was a granddaughter of Alexander Hamilton. She died in December 1863 in the middle of the American Civil War. 

Elizabeth Hamilton Schuyler died 155 years ago today. Ms. Schuyler was a granddaughter of Alexander Hamilton, though they never met; she was born in 1811, seven years after the country’s first Treasury Secretary was killed in a dual by Vice President Aaron Burr. I took the photographs you see here in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery a few weeks ago.

The reverse side of Eliza Hamilton Schuyler’s headstone, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

Ms. Schuyler was a friend and something of a mentor to Charles Loring Brace, whom she encouraged to become involved in philanthropy. She was also a neighbor of Washington Irving at her family’s country estate north of the city in the Hudson Valley. She and husband George also owned a house in Manhattan on 31st Street. Ms. Schuyler and daughter Louisa were active in the creation of the U.S. Sanitary Commission when the Civil War came in 1861. Sadly, she did not live to see Union victory, dying a she did December 1863 with the war still very much in the balance. She was only fifty-two.

J.T. Flexner’s George Washington

15 Saturday Dec 2018

Posted by in Eliza Hamilton Schuyler (mother of Louisa Lee Schuyler), Franklin Delano Roosevelt, George Washington, Historiography, Incorporating New York (book manuscript project)

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James Thomas Flexner’s four-volume biography of George Washington

Late last week I received in the mail a package containing the books your see above. This is James Thomas Flexner’s four-volume biography of George Washington, which the author published from the mid-1960s into the early-1970s. I won’t go too much into the details here and now but reading Flexner’s history of the first president will be part of some projects I have planned for 2019. I am already making a list of various interpretive possibilities. It may seem like a marked digression from my previous endeavors but that would be less accurate than it might seem; one of the major themes of my book manuscript, Incorporating New York, is that the Civil War generation was a bridge from the years of the Early Republic to the modern city and nation. That is one of the reasons I was so keyed up to see the Schuyler family plot in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery last week. Just as one example of such threads: Eliza Hamilton Schuyler was the granddaughter of both Philip Schuyler and Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton, John Jay and Isaac Roosevelt were three of the delegates who voted in favor of the adoption of the United States Constitution in Poughkeepsie in 1788.

I intend to start volume one of Flexner’s series after the holidays. I am a tabula rasa with the Founding Fathers. I started building a foundation by reading James McGregor Burns’s and Susan Dunn’s slim George Washington, part pf the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The American Presidents series, and am continuing now with Harlow Giles Unger’s “Mr. President” George Washington and the Making of the Nation’s Highest Office.” These historians have extensive experience already on the presidents; Burns wrote two authoritative volumes on Franklin D. Roosevelt and Unger penned the authoritative modern biography of John Quincy Adams.