American Revolution | Ep 3 | The Schuyler sisters: Inside America's most famous love triangle

What really happened between Angelica and Hamilton? Did she really ask her sister to "lend him to me for a little while"? Why did Eliza sign her name to the Federalist papers? Did Angelica get a little too close to Jefferson? What about all the Schuyler siblings who didn't make the musical? Join me in conversation with the Schuyler sisters' Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Amanda Vaill for a look at the real stories inside America's most famous love triangle.

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Jump to:

• (00:00) - Intro
• (01:51) - Failing the Bechdel test
• (04:40) - Catherine and Philip Schuyler, a productive marriage
• (06:42) - The story of Dutch colonisation in the Hudson Valley
• (10:28) - Romance, drama and theatrics: The Schuyler family's big feelings
• (13:41) - Education and why the Schuyler girls wouldn't have learned Latin
• (15:45) - Angelica's elopment and deceptive husband
• (23:39) - Angelica's pragmatism
• (24:44) - How Eliza meets Hamilton (not through Angelica)
• (30:00) - A forbidden love
• (34:40) - Ad break
• (34:41) - Did Angelica heighten the Jefferson-Hamilton feud?
• (40:11) - What actually happened between Angelica and Hamilton?
• (41:29) - Angelica's politics
• (43:49) - Eliza's role as Hamilton's intellectual sparring partner
• (50:39) - Eliza's widowhood

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Creators and Guests

Host

Isabelle Roughol

Journalist & public historian

What is Broad History?

The history you think you know, with women in it this time

[00:00:00] Intro
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[00:00:00]

Isabelle Roughol: Hello and welcome to Broad History, a podcast about the history you think you know with women in it this time. I'm your host, Isabelle Roughol.

Today we're continuing our introduction to the women of the American Revolution with an episode on possibly the most famous love triangle in American history, certainly in the revolutionary era, I am of course talking about the Schuyler sisters and their husband slash brother-in-law, Alexander Hamilton.

I don't think I need to introduce you to these people at this point. If you haven't seen the musical, what planet are you living on? And it's actually while watching this musical, in its very, very early days, I believe in 2016, at the Public Theatre in New York, that my guest today met the Schuyler sisters and was inspired nearly instantly to write their biography.

And inspired she was because "Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution" [00:01:00] just earned Amanda Vaill the Pulitzer Prize for biography just a couple months ago. So I'm beyond honoured that she would take the time to speak to us on Broad History.

Before we get going, as always a reminder that Broad History is entirely solo researched, produced, hosted, edited by me, and it can only exist with your support.

A big welcome and thank you to this week's new members: Camilla, Janet, Lynn, Linda, Rosemary, Amy, and Haley. Thank you so much.

You too can get a shout out on the next episode and support this show by joining at broad history.com/membership. Members get early and ad free access to every episode.

Now without further ado, let's meet the Schuyler sisters.

[00:01:51] Failing the Bechdel test
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Isabelle Roughol: Amanda Vaill, welcome to Broad History.

Amanda Vaill: Well, thank you for having me, Isabelle. I'm really, really excited to be here

Isabelle Roughol: I am too. [00:02:00] I, I had such a blast reading your book, and, we're gonna jump right in just as you do in Pride and Pleasure. You start really in the middle of things with a beautiful scene, very haunting scene, which is the death of Alexander Hamilton, who is shot in a duel by Aaron Burr. I don't think that's spoilers at this point.

Amanda Vaill: No, I don't think so. That's the whole point.

Isabelle Roughol: There's a whole musical. I mean, people know that part of the story. Um, and so he's, you know, he's lying there on his deathbed with his friends frenzied and emotional around him, and sort of on, on either side of him you have, really the two women of his life.

You have his wife, Eliza Schuyler Hamilton, and you have her sister, Angelica Schuyler Church, who is Eliza's sister and Hamilton's God knows what.

Amanda Vaill: Muse. We'll say muse. How's that?

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah, God does know, I think. But we'll get to that part. But,it made me wonder,and it's not at all a reproach, but it made [00:03:00] me wonder, is it even possible to talk about these women, these women specifically and the women of their class and of their era, without ending up talking a lot about the men that they attach themselves to?

Amanda Vaill: Well, you know, I don't think the Bechdel Test really works when you get back into patriarchal history, or it doesn't always work because,you know, if it hadn't been for Hamilton, we might never have heard of Eliza or Angelica. Or we might not have cared about them. Equally, as I try to show in the book, he might not have had the career he had if it hadn't been for them.

But, but really, that's kind of what you're dealing with when you are dealing with history in a time when women were not empowered, didn't have agency, weren't rulers. I mean, you know, Eleanor of Aquitaine, yeah, sure, you'd [00:04:00] hear of her. Joan of Arc, you heard of her. But there were countless other women who lived lives in proximity to powerful men, and you didn't really hear of them unless their history came into the history of the men.

And it's a kind of _faute de mieux_, I think. I don't know what to do about it, but there it is.

Isabelle Roughol: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That is the world they lived in and the societies that they lived in. and I think it's actually interesting to look at their lives,and how that relationship to the men who did hold the power that they didn't hold unfolded.

[00:04:40] Catherine and Philip Schuyler, a productive marriage
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Isabelle Roughol: And so that's what we're gonna look at today, and I think we should start by introducing who they are and who they were before Hamilton, the Schuyler sisters.

And as the song goes, we have Angelica, Eliza,

Amanda Vaill: And Peggy.

Isabelle Roughol: Peggy, whom everyone forgets. And we're not gonna talk about Peggy a lot today. And there's more, which I didn't even [00:05:00] know.

Amanda Vaill: Well, you know, I guess for reasons of dramatic economy, they just were sliced out. But in actual fact, in so many ways, it's really important to reinstate not just those two younger sisters, Cornelia and Catherine, but it's important to reinstate their three, count them, surviving, because there were dead boy babies, three surviving brothers.

Because what you're seeing, first of all, is a huge-- The Schuyler family of progeny was substantial, and Catherine Schuyler, their mother, was basically having children, sometimes twins and triplets, neither-- none of whom survived, alas, for incredible periods of time.

Isabelle Roughol: The woman This woman is constantly pregnant, right? She's pregnant while her daughters are having babies. St- she

Amanda Vaill: Her youngest child, [00:06:00] Catherine, is the same. She's actually y- her youngest child is younger than Angelica's oldest child

Isabelle Roughol: Right. Right. It's,

Amanda Vaill: That gives you a real, it gives you a picture of quite a number of things, including that the Schuyler parents had a very ardent marriage. They really did. Um, Philip Schuyler adored his wife and was always saying, "Your mama looks more beautiful now than she looked when she was a girl," in letters to them when she's, you know, in her 50s.

And she-- he just adored her, and she died in 1801, and I don't think he, he was never the same afterwards.

[00:06:42] The story of Dutch colonisation in the Hudson Valley
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Isabelle Roughol: So let's talk about who they are, the Schuylers. Where do they come from? What's their story?

Amanda Vaill: They are of Dutch extra-- There was a substantial Dutch population in America, in the American colonies, particularly in New York State, but also in [00:07:00] Pennsylvania, to a certain extent, New Jersey, all the kind of Middle Atlantic states. They were settled by or colonized by the Dutch West India Company, who once Henry Hudson had explored the New World, they saw this extraordinarily fecund area just teeming with wildlife and native fruits and one thing and another.

Henry Hudson wrote sort of rhapsodically about what they found there. And although he himself, this is in the 17th century, had hoped to use America as a, means to find a passage to the Asian countries for spice trade, it's those who came after him who founded the West India Company, who saw, "No, no, no, this is-- it doesn't matter if this is not gonna lead us to the Spice Islands. This is an incredible [00:08:00] opportunity."

And so they moved in, in large part, in the Hudson Valley, and the Schuylers were the descendants of Dutch colonists who had been induced by the Dutch West India Company to come over and settle this area. And, this was all part of a big global expansionist strategy.

You've got the Dutch contending with the English for domination on the seas and in New England and in the Middle Atlantic states. And indeed, by the time of our story, England had conquered, or at least they had won decisive battles in their ongoing struggle with Holland. And they had been awarded the Dutch colonies in the New World.

And so New Amsterdam became New York, and the Schuylers became British subjects. And they were actually rather enthusiastic British subjects, despite the fact that they held onto their Dutch traditions, [00:09:00] spoke Dutch at home as well as English and French, which they also believed they needed for trading and whatnot.

They were, both farmers and traders. Philip Schuyler had vast, vast land holdings in the Hudson Valley and on both sides of the Hudson. You know, thousands and thousands of acres. And he farmed them. He had mills on them. He was a real pioneer of sort of entrepreneurial extractive economy. He made a gigantic fortune. He was a very, very rich man.

And his wife came from an equally landed and wealthy Dutch, knickerbocker, they were called, the Knickerbocker families. She was a Van Rensselaer, and the Van Rensselaers were, if anything, fancier than the Schuyler. They were a lot fancier than the Schuylers.

They were the ones who were actually lords of the manor and had been [00:10:00] granted a lordship from the King of England once the English had won domination here. So they were the descendants of what was really the most blue-blooded of New York people.

Isabelle Roughol: Right. As close to an aristocracy as North America really

Amanda Vaill: Yeah. And rich. And rich.

Isabelle Roughol: and very rich and very land rich, in particular, and very embedded in that New York, what now is New York State Hudson Valley, right?

[00:10:28] Romance, drama and theatrics: The Schuyler family's big feelings
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Isabelle Roughol: And so these two, Philip and Catherine, get a bit of a shotgun wedding.So Angelica is already in the picture or sort of about to come into the picture when they get married. Bit of tradition. Seems to be a very romantic family, a lot of elopements, a lot of not marrying who you're supposed to, just a lot of...

Amanda Vaill: following your heart, a lot of that going on. And then of course, what's so funny is that Philip and Catherine, up to a point, are quite disapproving when their daughters especially, but also when their sons, don't marry who they're [00:11:00] s- supposed to marry. And, but it never lasts for long because they love their children so much

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah. You can see why they're a family that, that, is just perfectly suited for dramatic treatment and for novels and for theater. There's a lot of theatrics there. So, firstborn is Angelica. then we have Eliza, and then we have Peggy. And those three are born very close together.

right? So they're

Amanda Vaill: were almost a year apart. I mean, they're in some cases almost less than a year apart. So bang, bang, bang, there's three. And then there was a sort of long wait. There was a miscarriage. There may have been more than that. We don't know all of them. And then there were a bunch of sons. They had, John, and who was named after both the parents of both the Skylers were named. The father was named John. So they were big on renaming family names so that the family tree is bristling with Johns and Phillips [00:12:00] and Catherines and Angelicas, and you just, you can never keep them straight. It's just, ugh.

Isabelle Roughol: It's a thing they did, right? Same with the Adams. Everyone is Charles or Abigail or John.

Amanda Vaill: Constantly. And you just, you know, you almost wanna give them numbers and superscripts and stuff.

Then there was, Philip II, Philip Jeremiah, as opposed to Philip John, who's his father. and then there was Rensselaer. And then there were the two daughters. There's Cornelia and there was Catherine. There was another little baby called Cortlandt, and he didn't live to be more than, a child.

And, the two daughters each-- Well, Cornelia in particular also eloped. She was a very vain, pretty girl. Her younger sister married somebody that nobody was that fond of, but she did it kind of on the QT when everybody was in mourning for her mother.

And it wasn't really an elopement. It was like, "Oh, they did this. [00:13:00] Whoops. Well, I guess we'll we'll just have to make the best of it."

Isabelle Roughol: I guess it's done.

Amanda Vaill: So that's what happened there. But the family it was divided into these kind of generational nodes. There were the three older sisters, there was the boys, and then there were the younger girls.

And they seemed to kind of exist in classes in that way. The boys hung together, the older girls hung together, and the little girls were, you know, tagged along, and also little Cortlandt when he was born. But and they were kind of more like add-ons. They were-- In fact, the older sisters later on seemed to feel that they were like nieces almost.

[00:13:41] Education and why the Schuyler girls wouldn't have learned Latin
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Amanda Vaill: And they had them come to stay with them in New York City, come down from Albany so they could go to school, because education was very important in the Schuyler family. They really wanted those, not just the men, but the young ladies to learn more than needlework, but also [00:14:00] to learn geography and handwriting and how to express yourself in a letter and how to speak properly and form sentences and f- history they even read.

And they, I don't know, they did not, I do not believe studied classics, but they did read classics in translation. They spoke French. All the kids learned to speak French, because it was really another language for them. Where they lived in Albany, there were a lot of French Canadians, and there was a lot of French influence, so they just, they s- they spoke it.

Isabelle Roughol: It was sort of the language of, the superpower of the time.

Amanda Vaill: That

Isabelle Roughol: And cla- classics certainly they wouldn't have because,it was extremely improper, at the time for a woman to know Latin. You often see this. Around the same time I studied this, this sort of aristocratic British family and this woman who was very intelligent and part of these salonsshe recounts in one of her letters being incredibly embarrassed because, she had some visitors come to [00:15:00] her house in London, and they caught her while she was receiving a delivery ofHomer, I believe, in the Latin, and she was so embarrassed that these friends of her would know that she read the original Latin because that was so improper for a lady to do.

Amanda Vaill: How wonderful.

Isabelle Roughol: you also see Abigail Adams, and then I'll stop on that, but it always fascinates me because I was forced to learn Latin as a teenage girl. But I wouldn't have, been in that generation. Abigail Adams teaches Latin to her daughter at one point, John Adams to her, "You know, maybe don't, maybe don't do that. She really shouldn't know Latin. Keep it for the boys."So there you go. But so this is how they grew up, right? they're quite intelligent, educated young ladies within the limits of what's acceptable in the era.

[00:15:45] Angelica's elopment and deceptive husband
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Isabelle Roughol: Angelica, the eldest, is the first one to marry. Who does she marry, or who does she think she marries?

Amanda Vaill: I just want to preface all this also by saying that there was a tradition in Dutch culture? As opposed to in English culture, where women were [00:16:00] allowed to, even if they were married, to own property in their own right, to do business. They could sign business contracts and all kinds of other stuff.

And in fact, one of the Schuylers, the girls' aunt was a notable businesswoman, and someone who managed her husband's businesses for him. And I think this gave the girls in the family a sense of independence that they might not have had, had they been raised in a slightly different culture. Women were given a little bit more agency by the Dutch than they were in other colonial

Isabelle Roughol: fiefdoms.

we see that a lot in that era, right? Because the English Americans inherit the coverture laws, right, from England from England

which are so strict, whereas, you know, Spanish women, indigenous women, Dutch women, French women actually have a lot more autonomy that the English women.

lot more autonomy than English women.

Amanda Vaill: This I think, allowed them to feel a bit more independent. Also, of course, there's [00:17:00] this vogue at the time in the late 18th century of sort of romantic elopement novels, plays. Sheridan writes a play about it. The Rivals is about an elopement. All these things are preying on these women.

And so in the war, the Revolution War has broken out, and Philip Schuyler is the general that is in charge of the Northern Department, which is the whole northern frontier along Canada, northern New England. it is a very important theater in the war. And, Albany is both full of, to the extent that it's full of anything, it's full of young officers.

But really, men have gone away to fight, and Albany is not the center of the universe at the moment. And, I think Angelica was probably feeling like She was hungry for romantic attention. And into her life came a man who had been sent by the Continental Congress to [00:18:00] audit the books of her general father, to make sure he was not giving way to fraud, waste, and abuse.

He was kind of sent by the Continental Congress's version of Elon Musk, I like to say.

Isabelle Roughol: Oh

Amanda Vaill: the DOGE

Isabelle Roughol: Never gonna forget the revolutionary DOGE!

Amanda Vaill: The DOGE guys! There are DOGE guys in the Continental Congress, and they send this guy who they don't know. He's, he's, he's come to America under what they don't know is an assumed name.

He is a, although they don't know this, he's an undischarged bankrupt. He's fled prosecution for bankruptcy and left his debts and come to America, adopted a new name, and somehow wormed his way into the confidence of various money-making people and money-laundering, I don't know, people who are in charge of money.

And they think it's appropriate to send him to [00:19:00] audit Schuyler's books, which is actually just richly ironic if you think about it. But anyway, he arrives in Albany, and he sees this girl, the eldest daughter of this very wealthy man whose accounts he's looking into, and he knows that if he makes off with her, he might have a stand to get a piece of the pie, because again, under Dutch law, there's no, there was no entail.

So Angelica would have an equal chance at all of the inheritance of her father with her brothers and her other sisters. It was not, one of those kind of winner-take-all situations

that you

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah. Eldest son

Amanda Vaill: in English, inheritance law. So he romances her. Schuyler refuses him permission to pay addresses to his daughter, because as he says, "I know nothing of this man or of his connections, and I just-- [00:20:00] the match is extremely disagreeable to me," he says.

Whereupon Angelica, who's one smart girl, figures out how to persuade her younger cousin, who is then the patroon or the lord of the manor of Albany and the area around it, she persuades him to get his stepfather, who is a Dutch Reformed priest, to marry the two of them on the down low, and he does.

And then they just, you know,

confront the Schuylers with this _fait accompli._ And there's a huge scene, and people are threatening with this inheritance, and I won't speak to you again, and blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like something out of soap opera. And then, of course, Schuyler just loses, the steam goes out of the machine.

He can't be mad at his children for more than probably 10 days. And then he just, "Okay, come [00:21:00] home. All is forgiven." And that's the way it is.

He's a very loving dad. I do literally have in my notes that I'm looking at right now, "What a soap opera!" Exclamation point. It w- it really it really is.

And the fact is that, he was right. Mm-hmm. Schuyler was right to be suspicious of this guy 'cause he is total, he's a really untrustworthy person. He's a gambler. He makes a huge amount of money very quickly during the war as a war profiteer, selling things, goods and services to the Continental and the French armies.

But after the war, he, with his gigantic fortune, he's unable to sustain over a long period of time that kind of run of luck, and he just gambles away and gets bankrupted a second time late in the book. But, he's not a savory character

Isabelle Roughol: And she doesn't re- she doesn't know any of this until, is it years down the line? Like when it, [00:22:00] or months or

Amanda Vaill: This was horrifying to me. I could not believe it. She marries him, and she thinks his name is John Carter, which is the name that he says he has. But then, when he's made all this giant amount of money during the Revolution, he goes to France with his family, his young family, to get the French government to pay up before they don't have any money again, which is really smart of him, let me say.

And he shows up in France and gets this huge fortune in ca- you know, gold louis, uh, who knows what. And with this, he's then able to go to England secretly and discharge all of his debts, tell his family and friends, all of whom thought he was dead because he just disappeared without a trace, "No, I'm still alive, and not only that, I'm really, really rich."

And then he comes back and [00:23:00] says to his wife in Paris, "Hello, I'm really rich, and my name is not Carter, it's Church."

Isabelle Roughol: it's got like Count of Monte Cristo vibes.

I mean, and you write it really well too because, when I was reading you, I see Angelica marry Carter, and I was like, "I could have sworn her name was Church." You know, I wasn't super familiar, but I've seen the musical. And I was like, "Could have sworn, huh, maybe she had a first husband I didn't know about. I guess at some point this guy dies." no. No, no, no, no. Same man, two names.

Amanda Vaill: And, and, you know, all of these people who are like John Jay are writing, "Well, I guess his name is now Church, so we'll all just pretend that... okay."

[00:23:39] Angelica's pragmatism
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Isabelle Roughol: She doesn't seem to be very mad at him. I would be... I mean, I guess the money's nice.

Amanda Vaill: We don't know what went on behind closed doors. And, I, up to a point, the thing that's interesting to me about Angelica, which I discovered as I went along, is that she is someone who I think she's v- [00:24:00] pragmatic is probably putting it mildly. She plays things, and she, as long as the results please her, she'll go along with it, whatever it might be.

But when they don't please her, she's not so happy. But she's really willing to overlook... I think at one point I said she's not one to maintain a grudge when it can be forgotten to her advantage, and that's really what she

Isabelle Roughol: That's very sharp. That's very sharp. I have to say, I went into the book thinking like, "Oh, Angelica's my favorite," you know, 'cause I like a woman with a bit of spice. And then, and then I, you know, I was like, you know, it's some things she does I don't,I don't think I can abide. But anyway, but we'll get to that.

[00:24:44] How Eliza meets Hamilton (not through Angelica)
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Isabelle Roughol: So second sister is Eliza, and of course Eliza is the one that meets Hamilton, which by the way, the musical makes it sound like Angelica introduced Eliza, you know, stepped aside grandly. No, she didn't meet him pretty much until the wedding, right? So [00:25:00] Eliza's the one who meets Hamilton.

How do they meet?

Amanda Vaill: Well, she, again, Albany is I guess kind of a ghost town at this point. So the way the sisters in "Pride and Prejudice" want to go to Brighton, or any place where there's officers, she arranges to go to Morristown in New Jersey, where the Continental Army is in winter camp, and there are lots and lots of cute officers for her to dance with.

And her father is thrilled because he, this is a way for her to open a sort of back channel to Washington, his boss, and whatnot. So this is all good. And she's down there. Her uncle, who's married to her father's sister, her uncle is the chief surgeon in charge of the war effort in all the armies. So he's the doctor, and she stays with him and her aunt, and goes to a ball at the storehouse in Morristown that they've converted into [00:26:00] a ballroom.

And it's kind of a _coup de foudre_. she meets this guy and blammo, within a month. And here is this man. He has no money. He has no family. All the things that were maybe suspected of being wrong with Carter are certainly wrong with him. Not only that, but he is known to be illegitimate, and he comes from Saint Croix.

I mean, he was actually born on Nevis, but he comes from the West Indies. He is a real rank outsider, but he's on Washington's staff. Washington thinks the world of him. And he is a man of very polished address, and as soon... Boy, when you read his love letters to Eliza, you completely, ugh, how could you possibly withstand this?

He's, he falls in love with her. There are those who think he fell in love as much with her position and her connections [00:27:00] and her money, as with her, maybe more so.But there are also others who say, "Well, no, actually," because Hamilton was so well-positioned with Washington, who loved him like a son, he's a very important card for the Schuylers to possess as a family member.

For whatever reason, Eliza is able to mollify any doubts that her father had about Hamilton, and a month after they meet, they are engaged.

Isabelle Roughol: And he really charms the family, right? He's working on the sisters, he's working on the mom, on the dad...

Amanda Vaill: oh, yeah.

Isabelle Roughol: dad. Like, he is clever.

Amanda Vaill: he is, he is quite... Yeah. he really is. He's one of these incorrigible flirts. We've all known them. He just can't not flirt, and I think part of it is he wants to charm. He really, really wants to charm. There's a neediness about him, [00:28:00] that is kind of his Achilles' heel. He just needs to be adored, and he is also good at manipulating things so that he will be. But he also seems truly to have been in love with Eliza. I mean, he writes her letters that are just, you can't, you know, uh, "Love is a kind of madness, and the proof that you feel it also is proof of your madness also." I mean, ugh.

Isabelle Roughol: This was a time when people could write, people could write and they did. And without wanting to be his therapist from 250 years away, I think it's also really powerful that, he's this orphan boy, right? And he joins this huge, loving, rambunctious family where everyone, loves and fights and is in each other's life, like they won't leave each other alone. That must be [00:29:00] really something for this orphan.

Amanda Vaill: And Philip Schuyler, I think, liked him better than he did any of his own sons. He starts writing h- some of his letters to Hamilton are, "My dear son," he will write him.

Isabelle Roughol: Mm-hmm.

Amanda Vaill: And he was devastated when Hamilton died. Just dev- I mean, it was a- as much as, maybe more than, m- more demonstrably so, than he was when his own son died, which is really amazing.

'cause his son John, his eldest, dies in 1780 whatever it was. and He was upset about it, but he's not like he is about Hamilton.

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah, you can tell. I mean, we're jumping forward, but you can tell that Hamilton is like a piece of the puzzle that just brings all these people, you know, is kind of the sun in the room, And that when he dies, it, it really transforms a lot of the dynamics, which we'll get to in a [00:30:00] bit.

[00:30:00] A forbidden love
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Isabelle Roughol: But, let's talk about him and, and Angelica. So he meets Angelica, pretty much at a rehearsal dinner, right? Or like

Amanda Vaill: I, you know, I d- we don't know. And, I have a little set piece, in which I say, "if we were history painters, this is the scene we would paint."

So I'm, telling people, this is, we don't know exactly who was there or what happened. We know some of who was there. We can deduce who was there. We don't know that Angelica was there. But it would've been possible for her to have been, and it would've been unlikely for her to have not been, since this was a big family occasion, and indeed was the only wedding of any of these children, any of the daughters, that was celebrated from home.

It's the only one. all the others, everybody either eloped or, they got married some- it-- it-- So

Isabelle Roughol: Poor Catherine, like deprived. That's the one thing [00:31:00] you don't do to a mom, right? It's deprive her of her kids' wedding.

Amanda Vaill: Know, and

Isabelle Roughol: kid's

Amanda Vaill: thing is is the marriage that, that she really probably was happiest about, which is when Peggy eloped with Stephen Van Rensselaer.

Isabelle Roughol: Mm, proper Dutch

Amanda Vaill: Eight years younger than she was, but hey, he was the proper Dutch boy.

He was the rich Dutch boy. He was everything that a mother, a Knickerbocker mother could want. Handsome, wealthy, well-educated, apparently devoted to her daughter. But alas, she didn't get to celebrate that. I think it's tragic. Anyway. But so- But we don't know that they met then, but they certainly didn't meet before then, and the earliest they could've met was then.

The next we see of them, Hamilton has gone to Newport, Rhode Island, where Angelica's living with her husband, who is [00:32:00] acting as the supplier for all the French armies and navy ships that were part of Rochambeau's expeditionary force in America, and they were stationed in Newport. And Hamilton goes there with Washington to negotiate with Rochambeau about how they're going to proceed in their strategic plans to counter the British, and he stays with the Churchs.

So I'm f- I'm pretty sure they must have met before then. And the only way they could have would've been if they'd been at the wedding. That's the only time. So that makes sense. And she certainly didn't meet him before.

And what is interesting is, of course, that it was, it's pretty evident as soon as you see letters between them, sparks have flown.

And, I just wonder, you know, [00:33:00] Angelica, she's been so used to always getting her own way. She's the one that whenever somebody meets both the girls, they always, they think, Eliza's lovely and great. What a great pal she is. But the really glamorous one is Angelica. She's the one they all wanna dance with. They wanna date her. They'll be friends with Eliza, but they wanna date Angelica.

And I just think for Angelica to meet this guy that her little sister has enthralled and realize what a prize he is in her scheme of things, because he's romantic, he's brilliant, he's clearly destined for great things. He's ambitious just as she is.

It must have just been a really, a, she m- [00:34:00] she had to have felt a certain amount of asperity about, you know, "How did my little sister get this guy? How did I, pick the one I picked who's okay, and he's making a lot of money, but he's not that great?"

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah, you can absolutely imagine the alternative history if Angelica hadn't married, you know, hadn't met Carter,like which sister he, he might have actually, ended up choosing. You don't rewrite history, right? And it is one of the great love triangles of history, really.

we're gonna take a quick break, and we will be talking more about this incredible triangle. We'll be right back.

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[00:34:41] Did Angelica heighten the Jefferson-Hamilton feud?
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Isabelle Roughol: And we're back with Amanda Vaill. We were just talking about this love triangle of Eliza, Angelica, and Hamilton. There is maybe another love triangle, which is that Angelica, who is decidedly quite the charmer, ends up at the center of one of the big r- rivalries of the [00:35:00] American Revolution, because she has a bit of a flirt with, a flirtation with Thomas Jefferson as well.

Amanda Vaill: Yes she did.

Isabelle Roughol: So what's the beef between these two? And I guess, it's an opportunity to talk about Federalists and Republicans and sort of different intellectual currents as well as the personal animosity perhaps between Jefferson and Hamilton.

Amanda Vaill: Well, nobody talks about it as a possible motivator, at least not that I had discovered. And when I was writing I discovered that Angelica had begun a relationship, a f- it was a flirtation with Thomas Jefferson. And Jefferson clearly was looking for as much as he could get out of the relationship, let's put it that way.

The thing that I've disc- I mean, Jefferson turned out to be a so much, so much a different person than [00:36:00] I had anticipated. I used to revere him as this wonderful intellect, which he is. His time in Paris, oh, this lonely widower over there, so sad, but just being friends with all these French, you know, salonistes who he liked.

But the fact is that he was looking for any kind of female companionship he could find, and he was having some kind of relationship with Angelica's best friend, Maria Cosway, the miniaturist, and she was going back and forth from Paris to London, where she lived. And she was married, and it looked like this was the way he liked it.

There was no possible commitment that he was gonna have to make. And then he meets Angelica, and he kind of drops Maria like a hot potato, which miraculously their friendship survived, Maria's and Angelica's. But [00:37:00] then Jefferson fatally wounded Angelica's sense of, I think, herself and what she was looking for in a romantic partner.

When she sent him a copy of "The Federalist," which Alexander Hamilton had edited and instigated and written most of, and he wrote back to her that, "The tender breasts of ladies were not formed for political convulsion," he told her, and so she should just not trouble herself thinking about these matters.

Well,

Isabelle Roughol: Excuse us?

Amanda Vaill: yeah, excuse me. and then he had the gumption after that, when he found out that she was going to go to America for George Washington's inauguration, he said, "Oh, well, why don't we go together? We can share a cabin on the trip." [00:38:00] And I f-

Isabelle Roughol: Bold

Amanda Vaill: You know, what? And she just, what was so interesting is she just let that one drop.

She wrote a little note saying, "I'm just actually, my travel plans have changed. I'm leaving earlier." And she didn't say a thing to him because of course she didn't want to offend. But, you can see right away she's just like, "That's not on."

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah, she him quick.

Amanda Vaill: So then Hamilton, who has not met Jefferson before this, meets him when Jefferson is being made Secretary of State, and he is Secretary of Treasury.

And this is 1789, and they're in New York. And actually 1790, because Jefferson doesn't come back to assume the mantle until then. And there is, from the first, there is a frost between these two guys. [00:39:00] And, you could put it down to all kinds of things. There's Jefferson the patrician and Hamilton the upstart.

Both of them used to being the smartest guy in the room, and there's not room for two of the smartest guys in one room. So there was gonna be some rivalry there. Jefferson is tall, Hamilton is short. I don't know. But I, you sense there's some discussion of Angelica, and you could kind of see maybe this is a small bone of contention between the two of them as well.

Hamilton wonders how much Jefferson has gotten into, and Jefferson wonders how much Hamilton has been able to entrance Angelica. And so there's already, I mean, leaving aside the fact that they have [00:40:00] very different ideas about government and the way government should work, there's already a sense of rivalry between the two of them, and it just gets worse.

[00:40:11] What actually happened between Angelica and Hamilton?
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Isabelle Roughol: Yeah. I mean, we all wonder. I mean, you're... So you're taking my brain in four different directions, so I'm gonna try to make these organized. First off, we all wonder what's going on exactly with Angelica and Hamilton. And you, you hint that, that there was an affair essentially. Um, well, I don't know if you say

Amanda Vaill: I, yeah. I,

Isabelle Roughol: me. Tell me.

Amanda Vaill: What's so interesting, people say I did it, and I wanna say, "You know, I'm just putting the stuff there. You're the one who's picking up."

Isabelle Roughol: We're drawing the conclusions.

Amanda Vaill: You're drawing the conclusion. I'm not doing that."

Isabelle Roughol: Who knows? Who knows? And in the end, does it even matter? But the way that she, the way that she writes to her sister, I'm sorry, this is where my love for Angelica was challenged when she writes, you know, "You essentially, lend him to me for a [00:41:00] little while."

Amanda Vaill: Oh, yeah. "I love your husband very much, and if you were as generous as the old Romans, you would lend him to me for a little while." And she's always doing things like saying, "Oh, no, the china you chose, mm-mm, you shouldn't. No. Hamilton likes the beautiful in every way, and I don't think it's something he's gonna like."

I'm thinking, "Excuse me. It's my house, my china, and my husband."

You know? "Get out of here."

Isabelle Roughol: It's literally having a sister wife. It's a bit much.

[00:41:29] Angelica's politics
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Isabelle Roughol: You talked about The Federalist, so I want to talk about, and obviously, so that's the great sort of series of essays that are incredibly influential to the Revolution, and there were others before.

Amanda Vaill: What are both Eliza's and Angelica's contribution to, the intellectual and the political livesof the Revolution and of Hamilton's? Well, I think for years people did not think that Eliza [00:42:00] contributed anything intellectually to Hamilton. That he was this flame that burned all by itself, and she kind of helped him burn but didn't contribute anything to it. Whereas Angelica, because she hobnobbed with men and wrote about it and wrote letters to them.You know, there's a few letters that she writes where she has actual kind of political feelings, although not quite honestly as many as I think people have thought she did.

But she was-- She wanted to be in and among those who were making decisions about government and politics, and she liked to be in the room where it happens. She really did. And in that sense, I think she, she could be influential.

The most influential she was really was when the [00:43:00] Marquis de Lafayette, the former Marquis de Lafayette, was in prison during the French Revolution, and she actually fomented a plot to spring him from prison. She was the agent runner on it. The guy who was gonna do the actual job is writing her coded letters explaining how he's proceeding and what the plans are. And she's transmitting those to the people who were, running, the political people that she has to talk to, including the government, American government minister in London then, Thomas Pinckney.

But that, unfortunately, that, that effort led to naught in kind of one of the funnier, sadder and funnier episodes in the book, to me, is what happens to that.

[00:43:49] Eliza's role as Hamilton's intellectual sparring partner
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Amanda Vaill: But Eliza, so far from being just this little help maid, you know, in bringing Hamilton his coffee to [00:44:00] fuel his late night writing sessions, or his slippers to make his feet feel better or whatever, she really, I've discovered, to my surprise, that she really was much more a part of what was going on than I had any idea.

She was clearly his secretary his assistant, his amanuensis, when he was writing, sort of an early, precursor to "The Federalist," which is his Continentalist essays, which he wrote when they were newly married. He had just left Washington's staff, and they were living alone in this little cottage across the river in Depiser's Point, across the river from Washington's headquarters.

And he did not have a secretary. He didn't have-- they had help, domestic help, but they only had her, and she took down what he wrote. And she was a [00:45:00] terrible speller.

Isabelle Roughol: I love that you spot her influence by the spelling mistakes. It's like, "This is misspelled. It's her."

Amanda Vaill: Her f- her fingerprints lit, almost literally are all over these things because the printer, in a haze, haze to rush them into print, didn't even correct them. And you look at the, and you think, "What the hell is this?" And then you think, "Oh wait. Oh, Eliza." It's 'cause it's exactly the kind of spelling mistake that she makes, in, in all of her letters that we have. And you see this and you think, "Oh, I get it."

So then Another thing that really was fascinating to me was that when Hamilton was drafting his memorandum in favor of the founding of the Bank of the United States, which was one of his signature achievements as Washington's treasury secretary and essentially put the foundations under the nascent US economy, he had to do and did a lot of [00:46:00] research about previous republics, how they had funded themselves, blah, blah, blah, blah.

He had a s- there was in the family possession a set of,a quite dense multi-volume tome by a guy called Anderson. Anderson's History of Economics. Guess whose name is written in those books? It is not Alexander Hamilton. It is Eliza Hamilton, and she read them. So she's the one sitting there saying, "Yeah, on page 42, Anderson says blah, blah, blah, so you can quote it."

And all of a sudden she's transformed from this doormat into a research assistant. She's the person saying, "Well, you could, yeah, you could, you can argue that because he says this. in Sumer or in Assyria, they did thus and so, so, you know, you can talk about that."

And [00:47:00] another thing that was really very interesting is that she, to the end of her life, she was very-- she tried when she was collecting Hamilton's papers to find the draft of a speech that he had given at the Constitutional Convention about the role of the president.

It was a very contentious speech, because his, Hamilton's detractors claimed that he had said that he thought America should be a monarchy, and that this speech proved it. But the speech disappeared. People who had notes of it, like Madison, and various other people who were at the convention, disagree about exactly what was said.

And after the war and after Hamilton's death, when she was putting together his papers, she tried to find the speech itself or even the notes that Madison had contemporaneously made of it. Madison [00:48:00] and Jefferson and various of their friends conspired to not furnish this to her. And I was wondering, how the hell did she even know what he said?

And then I found out th- that she had gone to the Constitutional Convention. She'd gone to Philadelphia and spent the night, several nights, with Hamilton before he gave this speech, and presumably discussed it with him, because she wasn't in the room when it happened, because outsiders weren't allowed in there.

So she knew exactly what he was gonna say, and it wasn't just because he said-- I don't think it was because he just said, "Well, I'm gonna say this." You know, she's talking to him. They are discussing it. And I suddenly, oh, right, this is why he calls her my good genius, [00:49:00] why he, you know, always feels like she's necessary to him. It's not just because she keeps a good house, because really any housekeeper could do that. But she is an intellectual companion, and she, y- she's a sounding board for him. She's useful.

And in that way, she really contributes to what his thinking is, and I found that just fascinating. At the very last sort of speech of his life almost, he defended the freedom of the press to the Supreme Court in Albany, the state Supreme Court. And this was a case that Eliza begged him to take. He wasn't gonna take it. He actually had declined to take this case, but Eliza persuaded him to do that. And I find this fascinating that, she had a much more of an active role in his political career than anyone suspected.

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah. [00:50:00] She's one of, history's long list of uncredited literary and political wives. And it makes sense. I mean, anyone who's, ever written anything or lives in a world of ideas, you need someone to bounce things off, right? So that's what would happen in any relationship. You don't...

Y- things don't just happen, in your brain, while you're staring at the page. Th- conversation is required.

And I love that you have the scene where she sends a copy of The Federalist to Angelica, who I think is in Paris or London at the time, and on the cover page she writes, "Alexander Hamilton and Eliza Hamilton."

She writes both

Amanda Vaill: put-- Her name is on there,

Isabelle Roughol: she takes ownership of that work.

[00:50:39] Eliza's widowhood
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Amanda Vaill: I love that. I love that about her. And, after he died, many widows would have just sort of faded into the woodwork. But she really not only collected all of his papers and sold them to the Library of Congress so that he would not be forgotten and he would be always [00:51:00] considered a resource to the nation that he'd helped to found, but she also pioneered to get his biography written and kept, trying to find the right person, and they never panned out for one reason or another.

And she ended up getting her son to write this biography, which, was, it was necessary to get the record down, and she was intent on that. She became a real activist

Isabelle Roughol: it's really interesting. I find that so her widowhood, I mean, she was Hamilton's widow twice as long as she w- ever was his wife, right? She was a widow for half a century. She also, and so Angelica died a decade after Hamilton, and so she, you know, she was... unfortunately the English language, does not have a word for being a bereft sibling, which I think it, it sh- you know, you're not a widow, you're not an orphan, but I think, it, there should be a word for that.

but she, so she lived another 40 years after losing Angelica. And so she's the last one of that triangle to, [00:52:00] to live for decades. and it's like she comes into her own in a different way when she's no longer in either of these people's shadows. I found those final years, at first I found them really sad and melancholy because it's like every one of her youth dies one after the other, right?

She sees there's a Lafayette who visits America, and like she know, they know, they both know it's the last time they see each other.

Amanda Vaill: Know. I love

Isabelle Roughol: when he gets back on the ship to France, it's, that's heartbreaking you know? It's like we know this is

Amanda Vaill: Have such a touching little relationship too. It's very sweet that

he comes to her with this miniature of Washington that he's screwed up because he thought, "Oh, there's some schmutz on Washington's face." He... He tries to take it off, and he smears the whole thing, and then he's, " Oh mon Dieu, this is terrible."

and she, you know, Eliza is a fixer. She's like, "Oh, no, no, no. I know just the person who will fix this. Here is the restorer. We'll go here, and they'll fix it." And they do. And it's so sweet. I just love that

Isabelle Roughol: A- and because she [00:53:00] lives to such a, such an old age,nearly 100, which is in her era incredible, she's like this bridge in American history where she lives long enough, when you think about the history of American women, she lives long enough to see the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848

Amanda Vaill: Yep, she does

And, alas, we don't know what, if anything, she thought of that. But one of the things that I loved was that when she gave all of Hamilton's papers to the Library of Congress, there were no restrictions placed on the papers relating to Washington's farewell address, which Hamilton had written, and which the papers had been kept from her.

She'd had to go to court to get possession of them, which is itself a whole wonderful story of a woman standing up to the establishment and saying, "No, no. those are mine, and you may not have them." But she'd done all of this, and so here are these [00:54:00] papers that say, "Hey, Hamilton had an equal role in this foundational statement about what American government executive power is and what America's destiny should be," and she leaves it to the Library of Congress saying anybody can see it.

And Washington's heirs are furious, and they want to restrict the access, and they go to her son, John, and say, "This is an outrage," blah, blah, blah. John is such a wimp and not really a very terrific person. And he's trying to cover for his mom, and he says, "Well, this is the way that women do things." And I just think, "Yeah.

Isabelle Roughol: Actually it

is, yeah.

Amanda Vaill: sure is." And she knew. I think it was kind of, that's one of her little blows struck for truth and for openness. She said, "Really? This is a woman who doesn't... She doesn't brook fabrication. She does not do it. [00:55:00] And, she's very outspoken, and I love that about her.

This was Amanda Vail, her Pulitzer Prize winning biography of the Schuyler Sisters, Pride and Pleasure, is available as always in the Broad History bookshop.

Isabelle Roughol: There'll be a link in the show notes and at broadhistory.com where you can also sign up for the newsletter, which is entirely free, and you can opt to support the show with a small membership or donation.

This has been Broad History and I've been your host, Isabelle Roughol. Music by Aaron Kenny. I'll talk to you next week.