Days after meeting Eliza, he wrote to Peggy, saying that he had already formed “a more than common partiality” for her “person and mind,” then begging her, as “a nymph of equal sway,” to distract Hamilton’s peers with her feminine wiles such that he could monopolize Eliza. Smart, beautiful, gregarious Peggy was a close confidante to Hamilton, who affectionately called her “my Peggy” in his letters to Eliza. I am sure her good sense will soon place her in her proper station.” Born Margarita Schuyler in 1758, Peggy was the youngest of the Schuyler sisters, known as a “wicked wit… endowed with a rare accuracy of judgment in men and things” she was also “a favorite at dinner tables and balls.” One of Hamilton’s closest friends criticized Peggy as a “Swift’s Vanessa” (eighteenth-century parlance for a woman too enamored of talking politics with men to be likable), writing to Hamilton, “Tell her so. Yet in reality, it was Peggy Schuyler who played matchmaker. In the musical, Miranda depicts Angelica as a noble martyr, setting aside her own attraction to Hamilton in order to play matchmaker for Hamilton and a lovestruck Eliza. Certainly their flirtatious and playful letters fueled contemporary gossip, with Angelica joking in one letter to her sister, “If you were as generous as the old Romans, you would lend him to me for a little while.” Yet historians tend to agree that no actual affair took place, as Angelica and her growing family spent sixteen years living abroad in Europe, apart from occasional visits to America. Hamilton depicts a lifelong flirtation and correspondence between Hamilton and Angelica, both of whom the musical suggests were powerless to resist the attraction and intellectual chemistry they shared, even after Hamilton married Angelica’s sister. Schuyler refused to bless the union due to his suspicions about Church’s unsavory past, yet one night in 1777, Angelica left the family home under the cover of darkness, eloping with Church against her parents’ wishes.Īt the time of the Midwinter Ball in 1780, where the Schuyler sisters first encountered Hamilton, Angelica was a married mother of two toddlers-far from the lovesick young socialite portrayed in the musical. Church was handsome, cosmopolitan, and vaguely dangerous, enchanting Angelica through a series of illicit notes and letters. Angelica first encountered Church in 1776, when he was sent to the Schuyler home by Congress to audit her father’s accounts, as Congress suspected General Schuyler of poor command. Yet even so, the suitor Angelica chose was far from a satisfactory match.Īngelica chose as her husband John Barker Church, an English-born businessman and supplier of the Continental Army who settled in the colonies either to escape gambling debts or retribution for a duel. In “Satisfied,” a song set at the 1780 Midwinter Ball where the Schuyler sisters first encountered Hamilton, Angelica sings, “I’m a girl in a world in which my only job is to marry rich / My father has no sons so I’m the one who has to social climb for one.” In reality, Philip Schuyler had three sons and an ample fortune inherited through marriage, meaning that Angelica had her pick of the litter where suitors were concerned. Yet in the matter of stealing hearts, the love triangle depicted in Hamilton takes some creative license with the historical record. The 2020 Movies That Are Streaming Online Early.Angelica was witty, spirited, and well-read, as well as “the thief of hearts,” according to her contemporaries. As the firstborn child of a wealthy and landed Dutch family that had lived in Albany since the early days of the colonies, Angelica was a prominent socialite, mixing with the many high-profile Revolutionary War figures that frequented the Schuyler home due to her father’s rank and stature. In Hamilton, his award-winning Broadway musical, Lin-Manuel Miranda depicts Alexander Hamilton’s wife and sisters-in-law as a proto-feminist girl group, singing in formation and demanding that the Founding Fathers “include women in the sequel.” But who were Eliza Hamilton’s sisters, Angelica and Peggy Schuyler, and were their politics as revolutionary as Hamilton suggests? An investigation into their lives reveals that, although Miranda fudged many of the biographical details, the real Schuyler sisters were truly as unforgettable as the fictionalized characters in the musical.Īngelica Schuyler, born in 1756 in Albany, New York, was the eldest daughter of Continental Army General Philip Schuyler and his wife, Catharine Van Rensselaer Schuyler.
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