Ever so often I go through my history tag and look up people whom I’d only skimmed over before, and today it was Angelica Hamilton, second child of Alexander and Eliza Hamilton. (As everyone probably knows.) But her story is so sad –
Having been exceedingly close to her older brother, Angelica was so unhinged by his death that she suffered a mental breakdown. That fall, Hamilton did everything in his power to restore her health at the Grange and catered to her every wish. He asked Charles C. Pinckney to send her watermelons and three or four parakeets- “She is very fond of birds” – but all the loving attention did not work, and her mental problems
worsened. James Kent tactfully described the teenage girl as having “a very uncommon simplicity and modesty of deportment.” She lived until age seventy-three and wound up under the care of a Dr. Macdonald in Flushing, Queens. Only intermittently lucid, consigned to an eternal childhood, she often did not recognize family members. For the rest of her life, she sang songs that she had played on the piano in duets with her father, and she always talked of her dead brother as if he were still alive. In her will, Eliza entreated her children to be “kind, affectionate, and attentive to my said unfortunate daughter Angelica.” In 1856, Angelica’s younger sister, Eliza, contemplating Angelica’s expected death, wrote, “Poor sister, what a happy release will be hers. Lost to herself half a century!”
So absolutely heartrendingly sad. I wish mental health treatment and medication had existed in those days.