ANGELICA SCHUYLER ~ America's First Heart Throb

A Master Passion - A Founder's Marriage

Angelica, older sister to Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, was a piece of work. Perhaps you've met someone like her--enchanting, intelligent, daring, filled with boundless energy, bubbling over with wit. She was also a champagne tastes kind of gal who brought the party along with her, brightening any room she entered. Men and women alike adored her. She had admirers not only in America, but in France and in Britain, too, among them the leading lights of the time.  

The French Statesman Talleyrand, the Whig Leader, Charles Fox, the play-write Richard Brinsley Sheridan, as well as Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, and the Marquis de Lafayette were among the many luminaries who fell beneath her spell. 

We can no longer see the glamor in this picture of her and her first child, painted by Trumbull. Fashions in beauty change. In one letter to his father-in-law, Hamilton speaks of Angelica and his wife Elizabeth as "our brunettes." I'm not certain if Angelica had blue eyes or the melting black eyes of her younger sister.  Whichever, it was her animating high spirits, wit, and a killer sense of style which knocked 'em all dead. In her own time, she was known as "the thief of hearts."

While accompanying her husband to England, Angelica thrilled to visit the glamorous European capitols, to be introduced at the French Court and to meet the Prince of Wales et al, but she missed her warm extended family, too. Here's an excerpt from a letter she wrote to her brother-in-law, Alexander Hamilton:

“You are happy my dear friend to find consolation in words and thoughts. I cannot be so easily satisfied. I regret America. I regret the separation from my friends and I lament the loss of your society. I am so unreasonable as to prefer our charming family parties to all the gaieties of London…I shall send by the first ships every well written book that I can procure on the subject of finance…"

Good as her word, she sent our soon-to-be First Secretary of the Treasury a copy of Adam Smith’s seminal work on economics, The Wealth of Nations.

Angelica and Hamilton engaged in a life-long flirtation, evidence of which survives in any number of letters.

Hamilton playfully writes to her: "I seldom write to a lady without fancying the relation of lover and mistress. It has a very inspiring effect.”

Angelica writes: "Indeed, my dear, Sir if my path was strewed with as many roses as you have filled your letter with compliments, I should not now regret my absence from America.”

Note the odd placement of the comma. The romantic in Hamilton certainly did!

“...You ladies despise the pedantry of punctuation. There was a most critical comma in your last letter.  It is my interest it should have been designed; but I presume it was accidental…” and in return he signs: Adieu ma chere, Soeur.  A. Hamilton”

Though Hamilton's political enemies made a great deal of their public repartee, it seems highly doubtful that these two, for all their word-play round the subject, ever shared a bed.  For one thing, the Schuylers were a proud and tightly-knit family, all of whom, from beginning to end, whole-heartedly admired Hamilton. The sisters, Elizabeth and Angelica, loved and supported each other from the beginning of this triangular relationship to the end--and beyond.

Here is a letter Elizabeth wrote to her sister just after her departure to England: “My very dear beloved Angelica: I have seated myself to write to you, but my hearts is so saddened by your absence that it can scarcely dictate, my eyes so filled with tears that I shall not be able to write you much. Tell Mr. Church for me of the happiness he will give me in bringing you to me, not to me alone, but to fond parents, sisters, friends and to my Hamilton, who has for you all the affection of a fond own brother."

Speaking of Talleyrand and Chevalier Beaumetz, who had traveled to America to escape Madame Guillotine, Angelica call them: "Martyrs to the cause of moderate liberty…To your care, dear Eliza, I commit these interesting strangers. They are a loan I make you till I return to America, not to reclaim my friends entirely, but to share their society with you and dear Alexander the Amiable.

By my Amiable you know that I mean your husband, for 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 do not be jealous, my dear Eliza, since I am more solicitous to promote his laudable ambition than any person in the world and there is no summit of true glory which I do not desire he may attain, provided always that he pleases to give me a little chit-chat and sometimes to say I wish our dear Angelica was here…Ah! Bess! You were a lucky girl to get so clever and so good a companion.”

Thomas Jefferson by Mather, elegant at the French Court

Amusingly, Hamilton's chief political enemy, Thomas Jefferson, seems to have also fallen under the spell of the formidable Mrs. Church's, this during 1788, when he was America's ambassador in Paris. The Ancien Regime still ruled France at this time, although events were only an eye blink distant from the coming Revolution. Here is a graceful excerpt from a letter from Jefferson to Angelica: 

The morning you left us, all was wrong, even the sunshine was provoking, with which I never quarreled before. I took it into my head he shone only to throw light on our loss: to present a cheerfulness not at all in unison with my mind. I mounted my horse earlier than common. I took by instinct the road you had taken...

"I think I have discovered a method of preventing this dejection of mind on any future parting.
"It is this. When you come again I will employ myself in finding or fancying that you have some faults & I will draw a veil over all your good qualities if I can find one large enough."

Six months after, Jefferson begs Angelica to return to Paris and in August 1788 he seductively proposes that she accompany him on shipboard when they both return to America.

Think of it, my friend, and let us begin a negotiation on the subject. You shall find in me all the spirit of accommodation with which Yoric began his with the fair Piedmontese.


(The characters Jefferson refers to were in an erotically charged scene in Sentimental Journey, a best-selling novel of the day by English writer Laurence Sterne. Yoric is forced to share a room at a crowded Italian country inn with a lovely female stranger. These two characters will eventually have sex.)

"Let’s go back together then. You intend it a visit; so do I. While you are indulging with your friends on the Hudson, I will go to see if Monticello remains in the same place, or I will attend you to the falls of Niagara, if you will go with me to the passage of the Potowmac, the Natural Bridge, etc.,"

A decade later, Jefferson, then Vice President, is still trying: "... I shall entertain the hope that we may meet at this place, as on a middle ground. perhaps you may find it not unpleasant in winter to get this much nearer to the sun. but whether we meet or not, I shall for ever claim an esteem which continues to be very precious to me, and hope to be, at times, indulged with the mutual expression of it."

Lin-Manuel Miranda's hip-hop version of the Schuyler Sisters~

~Elizabeth, Angelica, Peggy~

But we're all overlooking Angelica's most important man--her husband. Biographers and armchair historians alike think of him as dull and boring. So apparently did Angelica after a decade of marriage.

In the beginning, however, John Barker Church was a handsome fast-talker, a down-on-his-luck aristocrat in America, fleeing the consequences of a duel and a host of unpaid debts. He courted his American princess under the cover of a war-time commissary business, using the alias 'Carter.'

After Major General Schuyler, her father, soon forbade the smooth-talking Englishman access to the house, but the damage was done. They eloped in classic style. One night, she climbed out the window and down a ladder into John's waiting arms.  Angelica's doubly patrician parents, (her mother was a van Rensselaer) were beyond furious. It took a year, stern interventions by Dutch grandparents, and a suitable offering in the shape of a son christened 'Philip', to reconcile them. 

It looks quiet today, but The Pastures, the Schuyler's home on the banks of the Hudson, was once the site of high romantic drama. Over the years, four thwarted and love-struck Schuyler daughters, one after the other, climbed out those upstairs windows into the arms of lovers.*

Once upon a time, before he became a successful insurance underwriter, (one who was by contemporary accounts was "fonder of premiums than payouts,") John Barker Church was a dashing rakehell with the scent of brimstone about him.  He seems to have been a type America loves--entrepreneur/con-artist. Once he reached America, his luck turned; all the cards went his way. He ended his Revolutionary War with a tidy fortune in his pocket. 

In the 18th Century it was more or less expected that graft would be a large part of the pay-off for a nimble supplier, so the tarnish--the unpaid soldiers of the Revolution and their blood-on-the-snow sufferings--didn't stick. From an aristocratic welcher, Church was, by the end of war, transformed into a man sufficiently wealthy to return to England with a colonial princess on his arm and with his pockets sufficiently full to "win" a seat in Parliament. 

In later years, letters sent by New Yorkers-in-the-know reported John Church's immense wealth as well as his appetite for underwriting all day and gambling all night. Both were occupations that, though fraught with risk, were also liable to bring immense rewards. For me, the picture that comes together is of a man of high intelligence and energy who had a positive delight in walking the edge--whether it was a bet laid upon the turn of a card or upon the successful return of a cargo of spices or a whaling ship.

Today, we call such people "thrill junkies," and perhaps this is the trait which brought Angelica and her husband together. From the number of passionate letters written to her that have survived, she thirsted for romance and was a mistress of leading on her admirers. Her looks, education, and brains ensured that she had but to crook a little finger and men came running. And why would we be surprised at her life-time of daring? She had, after all, climbed out that window, risking her honor and her future with a man whose real name she'd probably, even then, hadn't known.

~~Juliet Waldron

See All My Historical Novels At:     http://amzn.to/1UDoLAi   

And for a fictional riff which uses elements of Angelica's story check out:

http://amzn.to/1U1RTvE

*Elizabeth is the only daughter who was married (properly) at the house, because her sweetheart, Alexander Hamilton, was the only suitor for any of his girls of whom Philip Schuyler approved. 

Alexander Hamilton Returns

 

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It’s no mistake that people are discovering Hamilton again, that least known, most difficult to appreciate, and perhaps the most personally conflicted, of America’s Founding Fathers. Less a politician than a matchless administrator, Hamilton was a leader who actually seems to have believed the things he said, a man who did not use his time in government to feather his own nest.  He was self-made, without family or fortune, but with a unique, nuts and bolts understanding the new science of economics and the realities of international trade, of money and banking. The men Hamilton worked beside, men like Washington and Jefferson, were American aristocrats, slave owners, whose power base lay in land. Jefferson, particularly, took an almost feudal view of the future, imagining a new nation comprised of large landowners ruling over laboring classes of sharecroppers and slaves.

Hamilton’s political enemies, busy calling his patriotism into question, conveniently overlooked the fact that a large part of his character was almost Quixotic. Far from being a man obsessed with self-interest, he often behaved like a knight strayed in from some earlier age. At the start of the Revolution, he gave his hard-won college money to outfit a rebel artillery company. He crossed the Delaware with the remains of George Washington's army as a foot-sore captain, freezing and hungry beside his men. During the war, he was the kind of officer who led from the front, and also the kind who intervened when his soldiers, still hot from battle, wanted to summarily execute their prisoners.  As an aide-de-camp, he served his boss George Washington selflessly and tirelessly, becoming the perfect secretary/assistant to a beleaguered general with no other such brilliant props upon which to lean. After the war, in his new incarnation as attorney, he was not afraid to defend ex-loyalists whose property had been illegally seized by vengeful neighbors. Hamilton also advocated for ordinary men, one a humble ferry owner, whipped and bullied by a local landlord. Law, Hamilton said, should be dealt alike to all citizens, whether rich or poor.

For a brief time, he even may have dreamed, during the heady first years after America’s founding, that we could have a “pure” government, one without party, because servants of this new republic would be genuinely ‘public-spirited’. After all, if a person wished only the common good—as opposed to only ‘good’ for ones’ friends-- by use of the ancient tools of common law, common sense and ordered debate--pragmatic, mutually agreeable solutions must, naturally, emerge. ‘The People’ (as then defined) could govern themselves, not only without the aid of a king or dictator, but without special interest groups, too. 

But Hamilton was also an outsider, an immigrant, a “come here,” a fact his enemies never forgot or forgave. Worse, he was born illegitimate. An orphan, he arrived on these shores as a charity child. He was called, slightingly, a “Creole,” or, with franker hostility, by John Adams, “the bastard brat of a Scots peddler.”  Interestingly, this is the trope which has moved Hamilton back into public consciousness. Lin-Manuel Miranda, a multi-talented first generation American, is making a big splash with a hip-hop opera at The Public Theater in NYC.  I learned about this exciting theater piece around the time I’d begun re-editing a decade old “in-the-drawer” book—The Master Passion—but this unforeseen enthusiasm, and its success, truly delighted me. After all, someone young, gifted and vocal also wanted to make some art out of the life of this colorful, fascinating genius. 

Hamilton has been in my life since I was ten. I’d early learned that he’d worked against slavery, and that, like the wandering lost prince of all the fairy tales, he’d come to the ‘Kingdom’ with nothing but the brilliant head on his shoulders. As a teen, he'd fought for freedom. He’d won the respect of a legendary commanding general and won the hand of a local 'princess'. He’d spent the rest of his life devising ways to help his adopted country become well-governed, rich and happy. He'd fought like a tiger to get his brilliant—but far-less well-informed and/or insightful 'founding brothers'—to understand and assist his plans.

I won't go into Funding & Assumption or his many other financial plans here. The simplest way to explain Hamilton's importance to America is that if he hadn’t created a system to unite those thirteen bickering colonies by getting them to pay the debts incurred to fighting men—and to the businessmen who’d backed the war of independence—there would be no United States today.  Then as now, nation or family, paying the bills is essential to safety and security, the firm base from which all creative endeavor and industry flows.

Unavoidably, Hamilton was also a man of his time, one scarred by a childhood full of violence, poverty and humiliation. He was a true genius and as result could be vain, brash and impatient with slower minds. He injured and embarrassed his family and friends with a sordid love-affair. His insecurities and his anger toward the enemies who dragged him through the mud caused the political missteps which destroyed his own Federalist party. The duel in which Hamilton died might have been avoided by a more circumspect man, one more assured of his status as a 'gentleman'.

Beyond all, he remains--to me and to others--a true tragic hero, a great man destroyed by fatal flaws. If Alexander Hamilton hadn’t come here, hadn’t fought in the Revolution, or practiced law and set still important precedents, hadn't been one of those critical first creative, hard-working public servants,  there probably would be no United States today.

A few good books on a large subject:

 

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow ISBN: 1594200092 Penguin, 2005

The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 21 volumes, Harold C. Syrett, Ed., Columbia University, 1987

Founding Brothers by Joseph L. Ellis, ISBN: 9780375405440, Knopf, 2000

Hamilton by Forrest McDonald, ISBN: 9780393300482, W.W. Norton, 1988

Alexander Hamilton and the Constitution, by Clinton L. Rossiter, Harcourt, Brace, ISBN: 9780151042159, 1964
 

~~Juliet Waldron

 

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