Philip Schuyler

A group of 34 autograph letters signed ("Ph. Schuyler"), various sizes, many with integral address leaves, 69 total pages, Albany, 1790–1804, to his daughter Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton; some seal tears occasionally affecting text, fold separations (some repaired with cellotape), letter of 29 November 1800 badly stained, blank margins adjacent a few address cut away, letter of 11 May 1802 defective with some loss of text, letter of 19 April 1803, defective and incomplete.

A group of 34 autograph letters signed ("Ph. Schuyler"), various sizes, many with integral address leaves, 69 total pages, Albany, 1790–1804, to his daughter Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton; some seal tears occasionally affecting text, fold separations (some repaired with cellotape), letter of 29 November 1800 badly stained, blank margins adjacent a few address cut away, letter of 11 May 1802 defective with some loss of text, letter of 19 April 1803, defective and incomplete.
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An intimate glimpse of the tender and affectionate relationship between the patriarch of the Schuyler family and his cherished daughter Eliza. Most of the letters regard health matters as well as the constitutions of his immediate family—including letters permeated with keen concern for the health and welfare of Hamilton, Eliza, and their children due to intermittent outbreaks of yellow fever both in Philadelphia, where the couple resided during Hamilton's tenure as Secretary of the Treasury, and at home in New York City, where Hamilton resumed his law practice after leaving office on 31 January 1795. While not prevalent in either city in 1790, pockets of the disease caused panic in New York, as Schuyler recounts in his letter of 31 August 1790 from Albany: "[T]he prevalence of the Yellow Fever at NYork and of its progress thro every part of the city, have exuded the most painful sensations. Citizens are quitting city, to fly from the effects of this fatal disorder ..." He implores Eliza to leave the city with her husband and children, "prevail on him to accompany you, he owes to you to his children and to all to whom he is so dear not to expose his life ..." In his letter of 5 November 1790 Schulyer notes how Eliza's nerves are shaken when the disease claims the life of one of her servants, and again extends his invitation to her and her family to remove to Albany. If throughout the course of this correspondence Schuyler appears to overly fretful about his own health and that of his family, it should be made clear that seven of his fourteen children never survived to adulthood and that he did suffer his entire life from various ailments, most notably, and painfully, from gout.

Both Eliza and Hamilton ultimately did contract a violent case of yellow fever in 1793 in Philadelphia. They repaired to their summer home two and a half miles outside the city and fortunately were attended by Hamilton's boyhood friend from St. Croix, Dr. Edward Stevens, who was experienced in saving patients' lives from the disease through measures more tonic (and less debilitating) than bloodletting and bowel purges.  By 1799, Eliza relented and sent her children to Albany. In his letter of 20 September, Schuyler insists on "detaining" her children at his Albany manor, along with her sister Angelica and her children. His reason to avoid inhabiting the city was that a Mr. Ray had ventured into the city on one single occasion and immeditately fell ill with the disease. (Cornelius Ray was director of the Bank of New York with offices near Wall Street; he apparently survived.) Schuyler also suggests that Hamilton move his offices a mile or two out of town (his place of business was located in Robinson Street, near where the disease was most widespread). 

Other letters concern the unhappy marriage of Eliza's youngest sister, Cornelia, to Washington Morton (Schuyler rebuffed Morton when he asked for her hand, so the couple eloped), the miraculous reformation of his profligate son Rensselaer (who was now quite "industrious"), advice on plantings at the Grange, the fluctuating health of her sister Margarita (she died 14 March 1801, aged 43), and the solicitous care with which her sister Cornelia tended him after the death of his wife, Catherine, in March 1803.  

Surprisingly, he does mention politics in his letter of 16 April 1804 about the New York gubernatorial election: "The animosity between the Lewisers and the Burrers is such that it is conjectured blood will be shed on the days of election." Both candidates, former New York Attorney General Morgan Lewis and Aaron Burr, the incumbent vice president of the United States, were both Democratic-Republicans. Nevertheless, Burr was backed by members of the Federalist Party who wanted to see New York join the New England states in an independent confederation—a scheme opposed by none other than Hamilton himself, one of the most highly profiled and influential Federalists in the party. ""If the Foederalists could have been prevailed on to preserve a perfect neutrality, there would have been such splitting of the democrats that the failing party would in probability at the expiration of three years have enlisted under the foederal banner." Burr lost the election and killed Hamilton four months later in the infamous duel at Weehawken.

"[O]f you and yours I am the parent, and may it please the almighty to let me remain in life, that you and they may constantly experience my love, my tenderness, and my gratitude to the dear deceased." Four months after Hamilton's death and a little less than a month away from his own, Schuyler poignantly writes the grieving Eliza: "I  felt my Dearly beloved Child the pangs you would experience on a return to a place where the sweet smiles, the amiable affability, the cheerful and enduring attention of the best of men had been wont to meet your eyes and apprehending from what I felt, that your pangs would be severe, I have addressed, and I hope with humility and fervor, the divine disposer of all events to mitigate your grief and to pour the balm of consolation into your wounded bosom. It is a beneficent God and his gracious providence that our comfort, our consolation, our peace of mind must be derived ... in this seeking let us remember that we do not injure that health which is so precious to our dear Children. Yes my beloved I say our children, for of you and yours I am the parent, and may it please the almighty to let me remain in life, that you and they may constantly experience my love, my tenderness, and my gratitude to the dear deceased."