Angelica

You may be most familiar with her as one of the Schuyler sisters, belting her way across the Broadway stage with strong opinions about Common Sense by Thomas Paine and forlornly accepting she’ll never be satisfied while musing on her feelings toward her sister Eliza’s new husband, Alexander Hamilton. But what else do you really know about Angelica Schuyler?

In Angelica: For Love and Country in a Time of Revolution, author Molly Beer illustrates the powerful role women like Angelica Schuyler Church played in Revolutionary-era politics, diplomacy, and society. For women like Angelica, the world was changing fast at home and abroad. Angelica follows the titular Schuyler sister as she comes of age in a powerful Dutch New York household and its political circles, learning lessons of etiquette, societal hierarchy, family, and politics. The sung Broadway decree to “include women in the sequel” to the Declaration of Independence is illuminated by Angelica’s non-fictionalized upbringing surrounded by powerful women, from her mother, Catharina Schuyler, to women like Catherine Moore, Margaret Kemble Gage, Baroness von Riedesel, and many more. Their influence helped her learn to play the game of society, while also challenging women’s roles as wives and mothers. She grows to become an influential social and political figure in America, England, and France, hosting salons in Paris and forging lasting relationships with familiar figures, like the Marquis de Lafayette. As she lives through the tumult of the Revolutionary era, Angelica also grappled with the Revolution’s scope, espousing equality while growing up around slavery.

In this excerpt, Beer examines competing visions for the future of the country at a turning point of the Revolution and how women like Angelica might fit in that future.

Excerpt

Treason, under English law, was the betrayal of a state authority to whom one owed allegiance, and it was a popular word in 1776. Petit or petty treason was the betrayal by a servant, wife, or child of their master, husband, or parent. If a subject killed a sovereign, the crime was worse than ordinary murder because the crime was not against only one person, but rather against the order of things: A woman convicted of any form of treason was to be burned at the stake.

The War of Independence was very much against the order of things. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," Angelica read along with every literate American alive. But what of women? What would their independence look like? A woman was required by law to be the dependent of a father, a husband, even a younger brother-or, absent these, a ward of the state. Like a child, she required a guardian. Even a widow, a "relic," was seen as bound to a man and beholden to his interests, albeit a man not even physically present. And yet, if these were truly new times, if an individual had natural rights that came from somewhere other than an anointed king, the structure of marriage and family would necessarily become different.

Such logic likely seemed at once as ludicrous and thrilling as the Pinkster festival or her childhood birthday parties when inversions of power played out only to revel in their absurdity, like the interludes of chaos in a Shakespeare comedy, when a Bottom is on top. Everyone understood that the world would be righted by the play's end. But the revolution taking place around Angelica was not a game or a play. When the chaos ended, what shape would the country take?