If you know the name Angelica Schuyler, you just might be a fan of “Hamilton,” where she stole the show by belting out “Satisfied.” And the musical just might have given you the impression Angelica was deeply in love with her brother-in-law Alexander Hamilton.
A new biography, “Angelica,” doesn’t claim to clarify that. But it does explore Angelica’s life, starting with her Dutch colonial parents through the American Revolution to France and England and back to her roots in America. Author Molly Beer grew up in the place named for her — Angelica, New York — where Beer rode the Angelica Central School bus yet never read about the town’s namesake in social studies textbooks.
That’s because women weren’t considered central figures in that era — as Beer notes, “I do” was their sole vote. But they bore witness to history and their letters provide a different lens to view that time period.
Born Engeltje on Feb. 20, 1756, Angelica adopted the English version of her name at age 10 when her mother sent her to live in the New York governor’s mansion for the winter. Her father Philip Schuyler was a general in the Continental Army and at one point during the war, he was tasked with invading Canada by George Washington (spoiler, he wasn’t successful), and her well-connected parents hosted the likes of Benjamin Franklin and other prominent colonists.
By all accounts, Angelica was a pretty, well-read, warm, witty connector of people in her orbit. At 21, she eloped with John Carter, an ambitious entrepreneur — real name John Barker Church (he’d fled England over bankruptcy). The couple had eight children, but two died young, including a son named after Alexander Hamilton. As Franklin calculated, “a child born in the colonies was as likely to die as to reach the age of ten,” and the book shows the sorrows of women burying their children.
We also see America’s painful legacy of slavery through her story. When her first son Philip is born, his godfather gave him a “Negro Boy” named Ben. Much, much later, after Angelica becomes friends with Thomas Jefferson in France — “I find in her all the good the world has given her credit for,” he wrote to a mutual friend — she eventually stops writing to him after learning he fathered children with his enslaved house servant Sally Hemings.
But back to Hamilton. The two certainly exchanged flirty letters and Angelica called him “my Amiable” in the famous letter to her sister Elizabeth that inspired a line in the “Hamilton” song, writing: “I love him very much and if you were as generous as the old Romans, you would lend him to me for a little while.” But she urges her sister not to be jealous, saying she merely wants to promote Hamilton’s “laudable ambition, than any person in the world.”
Beer relies heavily on letters written by Angelica, to Angelica, about Angelica. And while the letters are interesting, they shed only so much light on her story — and frankly, many of those letters come from the men in her life, not from her.
