Eighteen The Inouyes, Hawaii, 1924
Nineteen The Minetas, California, 1942
Twenty Daniel Inouye, Europe, 1943
Twenty-One Norman Mineta, 1950s
Momentum
Twenty-Two Claudette Colvin, Alabama, 1950s
Twenty-Three Septima Clark, Charleston, South Carolina, 1898
Twenty-Four America, 1950s
Twenty-Five Teenagers in the American South, 1950s
Twenty-Six Montgomery, Alabama, 1955
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Author
_148337550_
For Chris, who has always believed that anything is possible, and that I am capable of achieving it.
Introduction
New York1804
Alexander Hamilton was going to die. And he knew it.
He was stoic, though his pain was great. His brow was feverish, his body now partially paralyzed from the bullet lodged in his spine. Dose after dose of wine and laudanum were poured down his throat to take the edge off. The tang of coagulating blood hung so heavy in the July air that the people tending to his injuries could nearly taste it on their tongues. As his wounds oozed, his body grew ever more gray and still.
It was late morning, and while the sun was high in the sky, the shadowy specters of a man meeting his untimely end collected in the corners of the room. Perhaps sensing his time was near, Hamilton asked for the minister of the church to which his family belonged to bring him Communion. But Reverend Bishop Moore refused. He didn’t approve of dueling, and he didn’t believe Hamilton to be a good enough Christian to deserve the Episcopal rites. It was Hamilton’s wife, Eliza, who warmed the pew that Alexander paid for, but A. Ham, as he signed his letters, was rarely seen in Trinity Church.
“Please,” Alex might have whispered, “call Reverend John Mason.” Mason was a friend who pastored a Presbyterian church. Mason too refused, saying it gave him no pleasure, but he could not privately give Communion to anyone.
Hamilton became desperate in his last hour to receive the sacrament of the Last Supper. He turned back to Bishop Moore, his eyes pleading for help. “Dueling is barbaric,” Moore told him, “and the church can’t condone it.” With the strength he had left, Hamilton assured Bishop Moore that he regretted his actions, and offered his forgiveness to Aaron Burr for shooting him. If he lived, he promised to spend his days demonstrating just how sorry he was.
Moore relented, and Hamilton, with great difficulty, swallowed the sip of wine and the morsel of bread.
The Hamiltons’ seven living children assembled around him as his blood slowly soaked into the floor of his friend’s home, a stain that would remain there in memoriam for years. Hamilton opened his eyes, drank in the tearstained faces of the children he delighted in, and slowly closed them again, his lids now feeling quite heavy. For the last time, he kissed the sweaty forehead of his toddler son, Philip, named after the son who had himself died in a duel just a few years earlier.
Eliza felt grief’s icy fingers tighten its grip around her chest. Her breath grew rapid, shallow, each unconscious contraction of her diaphragm pushing air painfully through her lungs.
It can’t end like this, she might have thought. These babies need you.
Please God, no.
No.
Eliza didn’t know it yet, but Alex had already penned her a goodbye letter, just in case things ended poorly during his duel with the vice president of the United States. It read:
This letter, my very dear Eliza, will not be delivered to you unless I shall first have terminated my earthly career. The consolations of Religion, my beloved, can alone support you…. Fly to the bosom of your God and be comforted.
With my last idea, I shall cherish the sweet hope of meeting you in a better world.
Adieu, best of wives and best of women. Embrace all my darling children for me.
Ever yours,
A H[1]
You, my friend, may have heard a version of this story before. But there is one character in this scene who you may not have met. A man who, if we shift our focus just slightly, to the edge of Hamilton’s deathbed, opens a portal to a new and fascinating drama. A man whose constant presence in the lives of the Hamiltons gave him access to the inner sanctum on this, the most somber of occasions. A man so overcome with his own emotion at losing his friend that tears openly streamed down his face and he had to excuse himself to regain control.
His name was Gouverneur Morris.
When Hamilton died at the young age of forty-seven (or forty-nine, depending on which record of his birth is to be believed), it was Morris who bore witness to the rudimentary autopsy performed then and there. The doctor fished through Hamilton’s abdominal cavity for the bullet that had hit a rib, pierced his liver, and tore through his diaphragm before stopping in his spinal column.
At the funeral service, Gouverneur Morris sat on the altar of Trinity Church in Manhattan, facing the mourners who had assembled to send Hamilton off into eternity. The size of the crowd was so large that when Morris rose to speak, people strained to hear. The sea of bodies clad in wigs and wool absorbed the sound of his voice, and in the back of the sanctuary, Morris seemed to be whispering.
He admitted to the audience that he was struggling to keep it together, and that, “I fear that instead of the language of a public speaker, you will hear only the lamentations of a bewailing friend.”[2]
