General Schuyler and the House Where Hamilton Came to Court

Philip Schuyler was born in Albany in seventeen thirty-three and spent his life inside the twin engines of this city, its commerce and its wars. His family was old Dutch money, with land and mills and connections stretching up and down the Hudson Valley. When the Revolution came, he became a major general in the Continental Army and threw himself into the logistics of a war being fought in his backyard.

He planned the Continental Army's invasion of Canada in seventeen seventy-five. He worked to slow General Burgoyne's advance in seventeen seventy-seven, ordering trees felled across roads and bridges demolished ahead of the British columns. He was replaced by Horatio Gates before the Saratoga battles themselves, which was the frustration of his military career; Gates got the credit for a campaign Schuyler had spent months preparing.

When Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga in October of seventeen seventy-seven, Schuyler hosted the British general as a prisoner-guest at this mansion on Catherine Street. It was an act of conspicuous graciousness that Burgoyne reportedly found astonishing, the house of the man whose own property the British had burned at Fort Edward. The mansion itself, built between seventeen sixty-one and seventeen sixty-five, was the center of Albany's social world.

A young artillery officer named Alexander Hamilton came here to court Schuyler's daughter Elizabeth. They married in the parlor. Years later, after Hamilton died in the duel with Aaron Burr in eighteen oh four, Schuyler survived his son-in-law by only a few months.

The house still stands on Catherine Street, preserved as a state historic site since nineteen seventeen, with its original parlor and the view Hamilton would have recognized.