“Laurens, I Like You a Lot” — Hamilton’s Love Letters
Laurens was the son of the president of the Continental Congress, Henry Laurens, a wealthy South Carolina planter. Like Hamilton, Laurens had heterosexual credentials; in London he impregnated a young woman and then married her to preserve her reputation. In April of 1779 Hamilton began a letter to Laurens as follows: “Cold in my professions, warm in my friendships, I wish, my Dear Laurens, it might be in my power, by action rather than words, to convince you that I love you.” The above sentence is the closest thing to a “smoking gun” in the correspondence of the two young men. It contains the word “friendships,” yet it is a declaration of love. The phrase “by action rather than words” is particularly suggestive of what George Haggerty calls “transgressive desire.” In his book Men in Love, Haggerty argues that the word love serves a particular function in Western culture “precisely because of the way it euphemizes desire (lust), and a heteronormative culture has always been able to use it to short-circuit, as it were, questions of sexuality and same-sex desire.”
