Alexander and Eliza continued their longtime practice of sheltering orphans. On October 1, 1795, George Washington Lafayette, son of the marquis, appeared incognito with a tutor in New York. Hamilton had never lost his affection for Lafayette, who he thought would recover his popularity in France after the Revolution faded, but the arrival of Lafayette’s son posed a thorny situation for George Washington. The marquis was still imprisoned by the Austrians at the Olmütz fortress, and young Lafayette wanted American help in freeing him. With his paternal regard for Lafayette, Washington dearly wanted to embrace his son, but the Jay Treaty furor made this a vexed question. Washington already stood accused of anti-French bias, and Lafayette, while a certified hero of the American Revolution, had been branded a traitor to the French one.
For Washington, suspended between his personal feelings and political necessity, it was an exquisitely painful predicament. Though he was inclined to have Hamilton send the two young men to Philadelphia, Hamilton thought it prudent to postpone this, and he took the two young Frenchmen into his home. “The President and Mrs. Washington would gladly have received them into their family,” Eliza recalled, but state policy forbade it at that critical time. The lad and his tutor passed a whole summer with us.” Actually, it was the whole winter. For six months, the Hamiltons tried to cheer up the gaunt, melancholy youth before he was finally allowed to see Washington in April 1796 as the Jay Treaty crisis waned.
It was to be more than a year before Lafayette was released from prison and wrote to Washington after what he described as “five years of a deathlike silence from me.” Both thrilled and relieved, Hamilton wrote at length to Lafayette, assuring him that their friendship would “survive all revolutions and all vicissitudes…. No one feels more than I do the motives which this country as to love you, to desire and to promote your happiness. And I shall not love it, if it does not manifest the sensibility by unequivocal acts.” If Lafayette ever needed asylum in America, he would receive a cordial reception: “The only thing in which our parties agree is to love you.” Alexander Hamilton seldom used the word love three times in one letter.
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