This series profiled Alexander Hamilton back on Day Thirteen — the immigrant clerk who built the American financial system, dead at forty-nine in a duel with Aaron Burr. What that episode didn't have room for was what happened next, to the woman he left behind.

Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton was forty-seven years old when her husband died in July 1804. She had already lost her eldest son, Philip, to a duel three years earlier — defending his father's honor, on nearly the same ground. She would go on to lose her home to creditors, briefly, before buying it back at half price. She lived another fifty years.

This episode follows Eliza from her childhood as the daughter of a Revolutionary War general, through a courtship and marriage genuinely strained by financial hardship and a public scandal, through the specific, sustained work she did in widowhood that this country still benefits from today: co-founding New York City's first private orphanage, eventually responsible for the care of more than seven hundred children who weren't her own, while simultaneously spending decades tracking down, organizing, and defending her husband's scattered papers and reputation against a political establishment that had largely decided to let him be forgotten.

This is Day 29 of The Unfinished Founding — a File 47 daily series running through July, leading up to America's 250th anniversary of independence.

A companion article is available on Medium — linked in the show notes.

Subscribe to File 47: Investigative History for new episodes every day this month.