Before Lin-Manuel Miranda gave them voice (and a couple of terrific songs) in “Hamilton,” Eliza and Angelica Schuyler were known primarily to scholars of the American Revolution as Alexander Hamilton’s wife and sister-in-law — a lot closer than the average sister-in-law in Angelica’s case. Ron Chernow’s comprehensive Hamilton biography noted how much he depended on Eliza and how dazzled he was by Angelica, but now come Molly Beer’s biography, “Angelica: For Love and County in a Time of Revolution” and Amanda Vaill’s ”Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution" to paint fuller pictures of these women. Both authors remind us that the records of female efforts and achievements have been largely neglected by historians until very recent times. “Women’s work and words have been unseen or unheard and undervalued, appropriated by or attributed to others, or excised from the telling as unimportant or superfluous,” writes Beer, and Vaill expresses the same sentiments in slightly less pointed terms.
Both writers begin by tracing the sisters’ roots in New York’s Dutch-American aristocracy, important for understanding the wealth and stature of their father, Philip Schuyler, and the position in society it gave his daughters. Although Vaill’s book is wider in scope, cogently sketching the lives of younger sisters Peggy, Cornelia, and Kitty while focusing on Angelica and Eliza, she and Beer follow the same cast of characters through the Revolution and the early years of the Republic. (Beer closes with Angelica’s death in 1814, Vaill with Eliza’s in 1854.) Each stresses women’s roles as supporters of their husbands’ careers and as independent agents, raising funds for charity, cultivating social and political connections, managing multiple households, and bearing numerous children: Angelica had eight, Eliza nine. Vaill’s elegantly detailed text provides a clearer narrative than Beer’s elliptical prose, but both excel in vivid scene-setting.
So far, so relatively similar. What’s fascinating about reading these books in tandem is to see how differently two writers covering much of the same material can depict the same people, sometimes even the same events. It’s most noticeable in their treatment of Angelica. In Beer’s book she is a shrewd manipulator of men and occasions, the weaver with other privileged women of intricate webs of influence, for whom “every dinner, every ball, every fête champêtre was political.” In Vaill’s more jaundiced assessment, she is “desperate to be involved in matters of moment; she wants to be an actor in the drama taking place around her…. In fact, she wants to be the star.” Eliza is very much in her older sister’s shadow according to Beer; Vaill portrays her as a strong, tough-minded woman, a secure anchor for her volatile husband and far less inclined than Angelica to be snowed by a glib tongue.
Equally dramatic is the contrast between the authors’ views of that husband and his charged relationship with Angelica. Vaill paints a driven, quick-tempered man, given to impulsive actions and overheated responses to perceived insults, but also notes his integrity and devotion to the new nation. Her portrait of Hamilton’s deep love for his wife does not stop her from quoting at length from his eyebrow-raising correspondence with his sister-in-law, nor from noting that in the summer of 1789 they spent a month alone together in New York and mentioning the striking resemblance of Angelica’s youngest son Richard to his uncle Alexander.
Beer does quote Angelica’s famous letter asking Eliza to “lend him to me for a little while,” but she avoids the even more suggestive missives Vaill includes and does her best to downplay their involvement. Perhaps she fears that it would detract from her portrait of Angelica as a political mover and shaker, but Beer also seems to dislike Hamilton. She generally interprets his behavior negatively and at one point asserts that in 1782 he ran against Philip Schuyler (who adored his son-in-law) “in the race for Albany’s congressional seat”; Vaill and Chernow both specify, supported by footnotes Beer does not provide, that Hamilton was appointed by state legislators to New York’s congressional delegation.
Beer’s odd misstatement is, regrettably, not an outlier but characteristic of a scattershot text with some gratuitous editorializing (“lives are the sum of actions, whatever their intent”), odd digressions, and astonishing omissions. In 1783, the man Angelica married as John Carter, flush with cash from his wartime investments, returned to England to assume his real name, John Church, and pay off the debts that prompted his flight to America to escape imprisonment for bankruptcy. Beer never describes Angelica’s reaction to this staggering news. There may not be any direct evidence of her response, but gliding over the issue by stating that Angelica “had entered her time of confinement [after giving birth to her fourth child] as Madame Carter and emerged as Madame Church” is glaringly inadequate. Vaill offers the needed context — “she has lived with this man for six years…and all the while he has been lying to her” — and persuasively imagines her reaction: “What can she believe about him in the future?” An experienced biographer and historian with three previous books to her credit, Vaill flags her well-informed speculations throughout “Pride and Pleasure” by posing them as questions.
Still, despite its flaws, “Angelica” is lively and readable. And the arrival of two new books about the Schuyler sisters’ contributions to the shaping of a new nation can only be a cause for celebration. Spotlighting women’s unacknowledged roles in making history does not diminish the men they loved and worked beside; it enriches us all.
Wendy Smith is the author of “Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931-1940.”
ANGELICA: For Love and Country in a Time of Revolution
By Molly Beer
Norton, 352 pages, $31.99
PRIDE AND PLEASURE: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution
By Amanda Vaill
Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 720 pages, $35