My Dear Hamilton by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie

Alexander Hamilton’s legacy would have sadly been left by the wayside if not for the work of his wife, Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton.  A brave woman in her own right, Eliza was the daughter of a Major General, adopted by the Oneida tribe, the mother of eight children, and founder of two orphanages in New York City.  She helped her husband with his work and if anything was his “right hand” woman.  Eliza finally gets her own story told in a splendid new historical fiction novel, My Dear Hamilton.

My Dear Hamilton tells Eliza’s story from her teenage years until her death with the major focus being on her turbulent life with Alexander Hamilton.  Their great love endured even with the first major political sex scandal and the untimely death of their son.  

I love reading historical fiction and it’s always a delight to read historical fiction on America’s past.  I’ve read America’s First Daughter by the same authors and have enjoyed that as well.  I love listening to the music from the musical Hamilton and would love to see it live.  Authors Dray and Kamoie love the musical as well and it was the musical that inspired them to write the book from Eliza’s point of view.  

I really liked how the story was framed with an elderly Eliza receiving a visit from former President James Monroe.  The book gave a history to their story together and why Eliza would not forgive him.

I really enjoyed that the novel included the Oneida people and how they were affiliated with Eliza’s family, America’s struggle for freedom, and with Alexander Hamilton himself as he started a school for the tribe.  It was poignant towards the end of the book when Marquis de Lafayette came to visit and asked about the tribe only to be told they had been driven out.  Part of the tribe is actually not far from me in Green Bay.  They traveled through the Great Lakes and found a new homeland in Wisconsin, but it’s still a struggle today for the tribe to keep their tribal land.

Slavery is also a side story in the book with Eliza’s family owning slaves.  I always forget that people did own slaves in the North at the start of our country.  For example, poet Phyllis Wheatly was a slave in New York City.  Eliza and multiple founding fathers struggle with this issue. The authors discuss at the end of the book in their note that the revolutionary war wasn’t just fought by white men in powdered wigs, there were people of all races involved.  I appreciated that real look at history.

The book really brought the founding fathers alive and how they all struggle and had issues with each other.  One thing I’ve found personally interesting is that in books, movies, and the musical, it’s always framed that Hamilton is a hero and Jefferson a villain or Jefferson is the hero and Hamilton is a villain.  I think it was much greyer than that.  Both men did a lot to create our country and make it what it is today, and both men were far from perfect with great sins of their own to contemplate.

As a wife and mother, I’ll admit, I had a hard time with Eliza’s forgiveness of Hamilton after the affair was discovered before his death.  I don’t know if I could be that forgiving.  I liked that after Hamilton’s death, Eliza struggled a lot after she read through his personal correspondence wondering if he had loved her after all and had a very hard time forgiving him.  It wasn’t until after a candid talk with Lafayette that she could learn to move on and love the man he was even with all of his flaws.

Lafayette’s trip later in life back to America was riveting to read about.  I also was amazed that in her eighties Eliza traveled to the wilds of Wisconsin to visit her son.  I can’t imagine in that time period traveling out to that far and returning when in your eighties!  

I LOVED the extras as the back of the book.  It included a note from the author about the actual history the book was based on, discussion questions, a conversation with the authors, and how the book differs from the musical.

Favorite Quotes:

“Forgetting would lift the weighty cloak of the past from my shoulders and make the present so much easier.  But memory unalterably sets our compass and guides us down paths we might have preferred never to have walked at all.”

“As if the notion that all men were created equal somehow meant that one need not aspire to knowledge and ability – all distinctions of class, breeding, or merit discarded, all notions of civility deserted.”

“I hadn’t married a man.  I’d married a mythic hero who’d driven a carriage of the sun across the sky.  No other husband could ever measure up against my dear Hamilton, and it would be cruel to make any man try.”

“He was not a perfect man.  But he was a great one.  It is only plain justice that his wife should remember him better.  And his country, too.”

“It seems, to me that the only just way to judge a person is by the sum of their deeds, good and bad.”

Overall, My Dear Hamilton was a riveting read about one of our nation’s founding mothers and the start of our country. What makes a person remembered and can they still be a good person even with serious flaws?

Book Source:  Review Copy from William Morrow.  Thank-you!

America’s First Daughter by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie

Thomas Jefferson was a founding father, President, and author of the Declaration of Independence.  He was also a very complicated man, husband, and father.  Patsy (Martha) Jefferson, promises her mother on her deathbed that she will care for her father during his darkest moments.  When she takes on this job as a child, she doesn’t realize where this will lead her life and how it might compromise her own chances for happiness.

After her mother’s death, Patsy and Thomas Jefferson travel to France where Jefferson serves as America’s minister to France right as France starts to rise for its own independence.  Patsy comes of age in France, starting as a child and blossoming into a young woman who is full of ideas of her own.  She also falls in love with her father’s secretary, William Short, a man set on a career in diplomacy and ending slavery. “Was there ever a time or place for love better than spring in Paris?”

 Her father starts a scandalous affair with a married woman while in France, and Patsy is even more horrified to discover that her father afterwards starts a relationship with her mother’s half-sister, Sally Hemings, who is also their slave and the same age as Patsy.  

“Of course, I’d also heard him say that a person ought to give up money, fame, and the earth itself, rather than do an immoral act.”

Patsy has to determine what is most important for her and her family and what kind of life she would like to have.  As the years pass by, she loves her growing family more and more, but she wonders if she has made the best choices overall.  After her father becomes President of the United States, she serves as her widowed father’s first lady and helps to make the politicians act in a more civilized manner.

I loved this book.  I loved Patsy’s romance with both William Short and Thomas Randolph.  I loved that the romance didn’t end even as Patsy grew older.  I also loved the real life figures such as the Marquis de Lafayette and Dolley Madison as they appeared and were characters throughout the story. I’ve had a lifelong fascination with Dolley Madison and it was wonderful to see her brought to life.

“Lafayette studied Papa and nodded, thoughtfully.  ‘Tell me.  How did you feel on that glorious day you took your own honest and manly stand and signed your name to the Declaration of Independence?’

Papa’s expression turned wry.  ‘I felt a noose tightening around my neck.’”

There were many parts of the story that I admit, I thought were too fantastical to be true.  There is an author’s note at the end of the novel which points out that these things did happen and that truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.  I also used the internet at various points to look up facts for myself during the middle of the book.

I still have the hardest time with Thomas Jefferson’ relationship with Sally Hemings.  I realized I probably romanticized it in my own mind, but reading this book from his daughter’s prospective, I was even more horrified.  Sally was the same age as his daughters and his wife’s half-sister.  She was also owned by him.  It was wrong on so many levels.  There are points in the story where Thomas Jefferson could have made things right with Sally and he didn’t.  I was horrified when basically all of the slaves were sold off at the end to pay for Thomas Jefferson’s debts.  I felt like he liked to be the “father of freedom” when it suited his intellectual purposes, but not when it would not suit his wallet.

That was actually my other fascination with this book, how bad Jefferson’s finances were.  Patsy’s were also throughout her marriage.  A lot of it on all sides was inherited debt.  I was baffled how someone could inherit debt and not the estate that accrued the debt (happened to Patsy’s husband).  It seems so unfair.  But unfair is also living a life of luxury and not thinking about the consequences for your children, grandchildren, and slaves such as Thomas Jefferson did.

I visited Monticello when I was ten years old and again when I was twenty-four.  This book made me long to return with my children.  Hopefully in a few years when my youngest (Penelope is five right now) is old enough to enjoy it.  It’s hard to put together the full portrait of someone who could design a house so beautiful with someone who was just a contradiction to himself.  No one is perfect.  I also enjoyed that the book used Jefferson’s real letters.

Overall I greatly enjoyed America’s First Daughter.  It had complicated real historical characters, a great setting in time, and a great love story.  It was a story that really made me think about my perceptions of Thomas Jefferson.  I highly recommend it.

Book Source:  Review Copy from William Morrow.  Thank-you!