Could you tell me about Eliza’s personality?

runawayforthesummer:

Sure.  She was social, loyal, caregiving, insecure, proud, sensitive, judgmental and impulsive throughout her life.

As a girl, she was somewhat of a tomboy who knew her father’s land very well and made fun of others inability to climb rocks like she could.  She helped with the raising of her younger siblings.  Her mother was not a very hands on mother and seemed to pass the buck to her daughters as a way to prepare them for their future roles.  She may have been a bit coquettish and none of her or her sisters fell for the infantrymen when they descended onto their parents’ house and made life a little miserable for the Schuyler family.  She likely had her eye on a bigger prize.  She was also obedient of her parents, including setting aside her own wishes so they could throw her a wedding.

As a mother and a wife, she said that she had a passion for homemaking.  I think she liked that role and appears to have excelled at her.  Her husband said he could not be happier in a wife and her children described her as the best wife, mother, woman, etc.  She was also generous with what she had–from taking in Fanny to raise to being charitable to other poor women and children to sitting in a jail to have her portrait done and encouraging her friends to do the same to help the artist.  She was also extremely social during this time.  She and her husband went to the theater and balls and dinners and (though I’ve seen different sources on this) she likely had a night that was hers for entertaining the other ladies of the court.  She was also a great help to her husband in his work and took on his enemies as her own.

As a widow, she was dedicated to her children, her husband’s memory, and the New York Orphan Asylum, where she had a very active role and took it extremely seriously.  She ran it with a few other women who she seemed to treasure and them her.  I think in many ways, she took her years as a political wife and really put it to use for that organization.  But I also think it was a mark on how seriously she took her religion.  I also personally think it was in many ways a coping mechanism after all the tragic loses she’d experienced.  For a long time after her husband’s death, she seemed to be in a pretty deep depression.  The orphanage gave her purpose.  In her 80s, she was still traveling, as she went to visit her son William out west where she picked wild flowers in the mornings.  There’s also a charming story about her climbing over a fence to get to a kid’s house rather than walk the long way.  She definitely had a streak of independence. She was also very social, especially after moving to Washington D.C. in the 1840s.  There, she was often called on by sitting presidents and, if she went to the president’s house for dinner, she became a belle again.  She also designed the floral pattern on her couch, which is that excellent homemaker in her coming out.