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Angelica Schuyler, Truly Revolutionary

• Michele McAloon • Season 4 • Episode 145

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Professor Beer's website https://mollybeer.net

A woman without a rank helped a country find its balance. We sit down with Professor Molly Beer to explore Angelica Schuyler—born Engeltia into Dutch New York, educated at a royal governor’s table, and fluent in the quiet arts that hold a republic together. Her new book, Angelica: For Love and Country in Time of Revolution, uncovers a life lived at the center of events we think we know: Saratoga and Yorktown, the emergence of parties, and the uneasy peace that follows victory.

Across these pages and letters, we follow Angelica from Albany’s river-crossroads to London drawing rooms and the salons of Paris. She befriends Hamilton and Jefferson at once, attends Burgoyne’s Cambridge gatherings after Saratoga to enact peace in public, and navigates a marriage that gave her unusual latitude to move, write, and influence. Sixteen years in England offered a crucial vantage on the French Revolution—first the promise, then the terror—which sharpened her warning against faction at home. The themes feel urgent now: amiability as an active civic practice, soft power as statecraft, and the daily work of keeping rivals talking.

We also face the contradictions. Raised in a northern household that practiced domestic slavery, Angelica’s views evolved under French antislavery currents and through ties to figures like Pierre Toussaint. The record doesn’t flatter or flatten her; it traces change over time, showing how ideals and habits collide. Molly’s research—letters preserved by Jefferson, Hamilton, Lafayette, and the Schuyler family; archives across the Atlantic; houses that still stand—lets the story read with the pulse of a novel while staying anchored in evidence.

If you’re drawn to Revolutionary history, women’s leadership, and the subtle forces that shape public life, this conversation reframes the founding through a different lens. Listen to learn how a gifted hostess became a strategic peacemaker, how letters steered alliances, and why the most underrated builders of the United States may be the ones who put down the pistol case and set a longer table. Enjoyed this conversation? Follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a quick review to help others discover it.

Michele McAloon:

You're listening to Crossword where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word. And my name is Michele McAloon. I love this interview that we're going to have today with Professor Molly Beer, who has written a book called Angelica, and it is about Angelica Schuyler of Hamilton fame, a woman of the revolutionary era. And it is a great story, a super nonfictional narrative, and makes nonfiction really fun to read. I hope you enjoy the show. If you could please like and subscribe, that helps the algorithm. And tell a friend about my podcast, about what we're doing here. You can find out more information about me at bookclues.com. Happy listening. God bless. Okay, folks, here we are with Professor Molly Beer, the author of a beautiful book called Angelica for Love and Country in Time of Revolution. This is a great book. There's been two really good historical narratives that I have read this year. The first one, and it wasn't published this year, but it was a great book. That's Hamptons, The Wide, Wide Sea. Excellent, excellent, excellent. And this book, Angelica, that centers around the life of an American revolutionary by the name of Angelica Schuyler, Angelica Carter, Angelica Church. So what we'd like to do is welcome the author of this fabulous book. And this is Professor Molly Beer, who was actually raised on a farm in the town of Angelica, which I think started her on the pursuit of this book. Molly Beer is a professor at University of Michigan. She is an award-winning nonfiction writer interested in history, women, politics, and place. And I think you teach English and literature at Ann Arbor. Is that correct, Molly?

Molly Beer:

I teach creative writing and nonfiction writing mostly, yes. In the Department of English Language and Literature.

Michele McAloon:

Very good. Just as a side here, I've really seen good, good nonfiction writing in the past year or two. It seems like it is up its game. Do you agree with that?

Molly Beer:

Oh, absolutely. Uh creative nonfiction has been on the rise for the last 20 years, and I think we're really seeing the fruit of that genre coming of age right now. It's sort of a golden age.

Michele McAloon:

It really is. And your book is a prime example of this. I mean, this woman's story, Angelica Schuyler, her story is so interesting, but how you write this book, it's like a novel. This is an American revolutionary tell-all. Riveting to see what this woman did. So let's begin with how you came upon this figure, because this is actually part of the story, too. So how did you come upon Angelica Schuyler?

Molly Beer:

Yeah, so this is part of the frame story. I'm careful to stay out of the main story, which is new for me. I have been interested in Angelica Schuyler Church my entire life. I grew up in rural western New York, which is sort of a northern Appalachia culturally on a dairy farm during the 1980s when living on a dairy farm was not, you know, how you were getting rich. And I would ride my Angelica Central School bus past Angelica's mansion, which was down on the Genesee River on the way to school. And then I would go to the Angelica Central School. And after school, I'd walk to the Angelica Free Library. I grew up with a female founder of my hometown, but I also understood her as a kid from the oral history of my community to be one of that founding circle. She was Alexander Hamilton's sister-in-law. She was friends with Thomas Jefferson. She knew George Washington. She knew Benjamin Franklin. She knew them all. So growing up, I always thought of these people, how they connected to her instead of the other way around. And, you know, I got out into the world and started, left Angelica, and I realized that nobody really knew who she was, not until she came out and played Hamilton. And it was always sort of sad for me that other American girls didn't have this figure in history to admire and look up to and see as an important person. And, you know, we we have princesses, but we don't really have an American woman who was from that time period. We have Martha Washington, we have Abigail Adams, but Angelica's younger. She was, you know, a younger woman at the time of the revolution who was dynamic and interesting and charismatic. And I had that. And I wrote the book in part so that other American girls and women could have that as could see themselves in American history in that way.

Michele McAloon:

Absolutely. Give us a sense of place because this is really important in her inheritance, where she comes from. It's actually south of Lake Hudson. Where is Genesee? Where is it actually located?

Molly Beer:

Yeah. So the Genesee River runs north from northern Pennsylvania to into Lake Ontario at Rochester. So the city of Rochester is on the Genesee River, also. And this is about 70 miles upstream, so south from Rochester. But yes, place is so important with her all through this.

Michele McAloon:

Place is important throughout her life, which is really is it's the place of America. It's the place of France, it's the place of England, but it really the place of New York City where she is. She doesn't chase history. She just is embedded in history. And she really begins her life like this. And she came from a Dutch heritage, which I think a lot of Americans probably don't understand the significance of that. Can you tell us about that?

Molly Beer:

Yes, absolutely. I mean, American history has been written very heavily from the perspective of England, from the perspective of our relationship to England. But of course, it did not start only as English colonies. There were Swedish colonies and Dutch colonies, and obviously France, because we fought the French and Indian War in North America. And so what is now New York, the uh what is now called Hudson's River, was not called this by the Dutch because Hudson was English, called the North Rivière. This was a Dutch colony up until the 1660s. I think nine, nine generations back, was a gentleman who actually set up the colony within a colony that became the city of Albany, New York. So that so she's really descended from that founding colonial process. Up until her childhood, that colony that became New York was still speaking Dutch at home, was still, you even hear of the enslaved people like Sojourner Truth spoke Dutch as her first language. That colony was still held by Dutch families. The English sort of just came in and replaced it, the leading administration, but they left those local powers in place because that's more efficient than trying to replace them all with someone else. So they left that old order in place in Angelica's family. They intermarried. And in fact, her name isn't even Angelica. As a child, she's Engeltia with the Dutch family.

Michele McAloon:

I wonder when I wonder how you pronounce that. How was that? That again, Engeltia. Yes.

Molly Beer:

Engeltia Schuyler. And so it's not until, you know, she's 10 years old and the Stamp Act riot have just taken place, and New York has a new uh royal governor, and he's trying to bring peace to the colony after these riots and so forth. The Stamp Act has now been repealed and he's trying to settle things down. And he goes to Albany and he stays with her family because they are that, you know, that regional seeded power, kind of like the manure system in England, where you have families that are, you know, taking care of their region. And he stays with them. And then when he returns to New York, he takes Angeltia Schuyler with him to live in his family for the year to learn better English. And also as a symbol of that friendship between this Dutch, this deeply rooted Dutch family in Northern New York and the Royal Administration. Also the friendship between this is always a thing in New York, upstate New York and downstate New York, you know, all along. So yeah. So then she starts to be called Angelica or even Anna for short when she starts to be in English society.

Michele McAloon:

Okay, talk to us a little bit about her parents because her father, and both her father and her mother, I think her mother ended up having 15 children, right? By the end of it all. Can you imagine? Yeah. I mean, she was what, 44 or 45 when she had that last child. So that in itself is heroic. But her father was was actually a very serious player in the revolution. And if you could talk a little bit about him.

Molly Beer:

Absolutely. So when the Continental Congress got together, the shots have been fired at Lexington and Concord, and then when the Continental Congress convenes in Philadelphia, and George Washington is made commander, commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. And under him are four generals. And one of them is Philip Schuyler, who's from New York. He has two in Massachusetts. Remember, this is when the fighting is taking place in Massachusetts. And then he has another general, Charles Lee, who will be in the South, who will be in Charleston and in that southern front. And Philip Schuyler, Major General Philip Schuyler, who's one of those first four major generals under George Washington, he will command the northern department, which is New York. Now you may think Albany is not near anything, but if you're living in the days of sale and travel by water, Albany is where you connect the dots between Canada and New York City. So this is it's navigable up to Albany. And then from Albany, there is a portage to where you can access the waterways of Lake George into Lake Champlain and then up to Montreal and Quebec and the St. Lawrence. So that's a critical area. And we're going to have the first invasion of Canada and the first winter of the war. This is General Montgomery, who's killed at the Battle of Quebec. And so that's all under Philip Schuyler's command. But he's Dutch and New Englanders don't love that. While he is appointed because he brings the New York interest, and they were very careful to spread out the geography of that early leadership. His Dutch heritage will cause him problems. He also helped find the border between Massachusetts and New York, which New England will not forgive him for.

Michele McAloon:

Right, right. And yes, he was not a man without controversy pretty much his whole life, too. He and he actually at the end, he ends up becoming a senator. Is that correct? Correct. Angelica in the end, she tried she actually tried to get him to become the ambassador to, I think it was England, right? Yes. She was not able to do that successfully, but she eventually did.

Molly Beer:

I think she was trying to make herself ambassador to England, but as a woman's end, that meant that your husband or your father was officially in that post and then you did the job. So yes, she was hoping her father would be made ambassador.

Michele McAloon:

Okay, let's talk about her education because uh this is important too. So this is in a time when women were not traditionally schooled or educated in the same way that men were educated. I would say women were educated in different things. They just were not educated in the same way men were educated.

Molly Beer:

Yes, absolutely, especially elite women. It was important that women were educated. If you, you know, if something happened to you, and this is during a war, right? Which is always when women come into much more public power in times of war. So the French and Indian War starts the year of Angelica's birth, and she's certainly raised to be someone who could take over the management of your estate, your household, if she were your wife. And certainly Philip Schuyler is gone. He's gone in for the French and Indian War, after which he sails to England. His wife has twins while he's gone and loses the twins and builds a new house and does all these things in his absence and is deputized as that. Your wife is deputized to do, to stand in for you. You know, we always talk about Benjamin Franklin's common law wife taking over the US postals. I might get that wrong, but Deborah Franks had a major role too. So it was important that women were able to do this. So certainly they were taught to keep books and they were taught to read, uh, but they were not necessarily taught to write. So where you were a young boy and you went to school, you were gonna learn how to speak Greek and you're gonna learn how to speak Latin and you were gonna study the classics and you were gonna learn how to be an orator and how to train for the law. But if you were a woman, you might train as a merchant, because you did have in New York especially a lot of women merchants and Angelica's relatives were were in those roles. And as a hostess, which sounds like a social role or social light role, but when your house stood for you, Mount Vernon or Monticello, your house was an embodiment of the family and the man. It was important who came through. It was a diplomatic space for people in government roles. So so a woman's role, a woman's education was to prepare them for that. So while they weren't writing as much, and Philip Schuyler's wife, Katerina, Angelica's mother, would delegate all kinds of people to write letters for her. But there's I I virtually no sample of her handwriting exists. Angelica was different. Angelica began writing her mother's letters for her by the time the revolution began, and she was writing to her father while he was at the forts and the northern forts, as the general, she would write news from Albany to him. So she was certainly educated to write. So she had that. She went to boarding school when she was eight to learn to speak French. She went to live with a real governor to learn how to behave in an English household. So she's also learning that. And then she has just the natural education you have of sitting at a dinner table where the people who are running, because her father gets into New York politics, where people who are political families are talking. Her family would dine with Governor Moore. They would dine with Governor Tryon, who came after Governor Moore died. Um, she knew Thomas Gage, who became the British commander of the army in North America. He was at dinner at their home. So she's at these tables where you're discussing the colony's relationship. You're discussing politics. And so that education, I think, was very rich for her also. And she was trained to read every day. You had to read a book, a serious book every day because you didn't know who was coming for dinner, and you were in charge of making sure that that conversation was elevated and intellectual and maybe politically neutral.

Michele McAloon:

One thing that you really bring out very, very well in your book, well, you bring out a lot of things, but this is a good point that you bring up is amiability. So here you are, you're talking to a family that they are strict, they are strict Americans. They are, I mean, they are not loyalist, they are continentalists, they are revolutionary, they believe in the independence of the United States from England or the 13 colonies at the time. But she was always striving for what you say, amiability amongst different opinions. And there's a huge lesson that can be learned from that, especially now in this day and age, where we think everything is so divisive, where we think divisiveness is new, it's not new. From day one, Americans have had an opinion, and actually that's who we are. We're not European. We're not. Our individual rights are something that we know intuitively come as created beings, and that we are going to manage. And Europeans, there's no one else in the world that has that. And we knew this 250 years ago. And your story shows that. Anyway, I mean that amiability, great, great point.

Molly Beer:

Yeah, so we have a rubric for greatness, right? And it emphasizes the the battle makers. And it does not emphasize the peacemakers. And uh, you know, it takes the peacemakers to end the war. And uh and and she saw herself in that role. That the example of going to live with the royal governor is obviously not a choice that she makes. That's imposed upon her, I'm sure. But that's that's the role women were often cast in. You would marry to create peace between two countries. Even as a child, you would go into their house to create two countries. That is a very traditional role for women. Angelica is the exact same age as Marie Antoinette, who, of course, is an Austrian princess who marries the future, you know, the defend of France. And that is a political alliance that's made by a woman's situation. So women have often been in these roles. People of her time would say, your role, your job as a woman is to sit on the pistol case. She definitely embraced that. I mean, after General Burgoyne has invaded from Canada and they've had the Battle of Saratoga, but in the midst of that, he has burned her family's farmhouse down and wreaked havoc and had threatened to, you know, move into her family house in Albany when he seized the city. But when he is defeated at Saratoga and sent to Boston with his army, they're called now the Convention Army, just to show respect for the surrender. They come to Albany, where they're technically prisoners of war, but loosely held because they have all pledged not to take up arms in this battle anymore, as was traditional in honor of gentlemen, in honor of the soldier, but so forth. But when he comes to Boston, where Angelica has come to live right before the battle, he invites Angelica and her sister to come to parties that he throws in Cambridge in the prisoner of war camp. And she goes to enact that piece to show, you know, to honor the friendship that is made by the piece and not continue to be angry about the battle. Or her husband fights a duel. This isn't Alexander Hamilton. Her husband, John Barker Church, fights a duel with Aaron Burr before Aaron Burr fights a duel with Alexander Hamilton. And she brings him a few weeks later as her guest to a party, the sort of time period after the French Revolution when tamping down partisan discord is important to be like, we had the conflict, and now the conflict is over. And so now we have to enact the peace and do that border crossing or that aisle crossing work that is necessary for democracy to function. I mean, she's friends with Thomas Jefferson, she's friends with Alexander Hamilton. And at the time, those two were political nemesis. And she and they were friends, they were both confided in her and wrote to her and can valued her friendship. And so that's the space that she deoccupied. And I think that that's to be the person who steps in the middle. I don't think we value that quite enough right now.

Michele McAloon:

No, we don't. And you know something? I I just wrote an article for the Catholic thing, they'll probably get me doxxed. But you know what? The I don't think we value the differences. Men can do things that women cannot do. Women see things that men cannot do. And we still to this day, we don't value that difference. We've trained women that they can do anything. Well, okay, anybody can do anything, whatever, but we haven't trained what that they really can see things that men cannot see. And we haven't trained men to respect that. And we haven't trained women to respect what that men can do, things that we can't do. I'm talking broad generalities, not narrow stereotype roles. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about in general. And she really, you really see that in this person that she sees this things that men cannot see. And these men are smart enough to trust her to help her have to help them see things that they cannot see. And that you really bring that out in the book. I don't know if you intended to, but that really is the substory, I think, of your book.

Molly Beer:

I mean, I didn't go into writing the book with a lot of intention beyond seeing her life as she lived it as well as I possibly could in the primary record. I didn't know what I'd find. I didn't, you know, she's best known for maybe having an affair with her brother-in-law. And so I was like, who is this woman? But she was respected by an awful lot of people and way more people than would respect you if you were behaving in these ways. I wanted to know why everyone talked about her. I wanted to know why she was so present in the historical record, but I really didn't know what I would find. I didn't know what she would represent. And I just, I mean, that word amiable that you already brought up, that's the word everybody, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Lafayette, everybody. Amiable, amiable, amiable for Angelica. And she was a friend maker. And now we call influencers soft power, networkers. But that's not new.

Michele McAloon:

She was an influencer. She was a revolutionary war influencer. Yeah, plus what do we think about her husband? I was conflicted. I mean, she he seemed to me kind of like a cad.

Molly Beer:

But I what did you think? Right? He is an enigma. I mean, people didn't like him in his time. This is another thing we have in the States, right? We're like, you want to get to be a rich man, but as soon as you are a rich man, we're like, damn you. Like, right, exactly. So he had the material to be a CAD, but he also was really supported the revolution. And we see examples throughout his life of some real loyalty. Um, when he becomes the supplier for General Rochambeau's French army when they come to the United States to help win the war after the Battle of Saratoga, that they're so and say march with the American army to Yorktown and participate in that battle side by side in solidarity with the Continental Army, in addition to funding and supplying and clothing that army. So that alliance was really valuable. And Angelico is certainly working to maintain that alliance and to try to help culture clash, not like impede it. But meanwhile, John Barker Church, who's not known that by that, his name at this point is John Carter, living under an alias because he's uh broken with his family, but he does not leave the side of the French army until they, I mean, he escorts them to the ships they get on when they finally leave after the Battle of Yorktown, a year after. He stays with them straight through and keeps making sure they're fed, make sure they have what they need. But he made a lot of money doing that. But he did that diligently. And then he used the money that he made to help fund the Bank of North America, which lent the Continental Congress the money that they needed to fund the Continental Army to make good on the victory at Yorktown, which otherwise the English could have kept fighting. If the Continental Army had sort of fizzled out then, that the war might not have ended the way that it did or when it did. So, yes, he had a lot of money. He had a lot of people who didn't like him. It's what I see of him, you know, he makes one trip across the Atlantic with two children under what, six? I forget when we're, but two young children seems to enjoy that a lot. Writes letters like, you know, about their syllabubs that they're drinking with the milk from their cow and how they're fishing and how the kids get mad in the storm. So he seems to be a good dad, or at least an amused dad. And he gives her all the latitude she needs. She's very separate from him. It's not like Abigail Adams and John Adams, where you can't like tease them apart. Like, what does Abigail Adams do? What does John Adams do? How much of what John Adams does? Can we credit to you? They're one force. But Angelica is the American, John Barker Church is British. They're distinct. You know, he's like, you want to go to Paris for the winter with our friend John Trumbull, the painter, because he's going to paint some of our friends from the war. Have fun. He does not limit her. And their power is separate. He's in Parliament. She's the American in England.

Michele McAloon:

It is. And it's a different marriage because there is so much time apart. And it's hard for us, I think, in a lot of ways to understand that. Here's another factor about her, and one that I actually I really keyed in on because uh as an adult, I've lived most of my life overseas. She lived 16, how many years? 16 years in England with her husband.

Molly Beer:

Yes, 1783 to 1797. She's in England. She comes back for one summer. She comes back for George Washington's inauguration as the first president. That's her one visit home.

Michele McAloon:

Yeah, it's just to me that is kind of amazing. Also, her front row view of the French Revolution. I haven't heard that yet. I have not seen someone else, and I think very few Americans have probably not seen that of someone of an American looking at the French Revolution from England. And it was horrifying. And it and it it was weird because at first they didn't think it was that bad, and then they realized it was really bad.

Molly Beer:

Yeah. So when the Bastille was stormed, everyone sort of was like, yay, the French Revolution happened and it was successful and it's over. And there was hardly any bloodshed. And little did they know. She had safeguarded the alliance with the French during the American Revolution. She had been involved with General Lafayette and she were very good friends. And so when she's visiting Thomas Jefferson and they're talking about the new US Constitution, they're talking about what would a constitution for France look like. So she's been involved in that and she has supported the idea of a French revolution. But the reality, you know, blew everybody's minds. And, you know, when the partisanship in France deteriorated to the degree that you have the guillotine and you have people, you know, killing the opposite party to the extent that was happening, and it becomes so unhinged, uh, you know, that was really tragic. Uh, but I think it also informed her a lot when she got back to New York and there was so much partisanship and there was so much discord and people talking about Thomas Jefferson is gonna ruin the country, Alexander Hamilton is gonna ruin the country. And I think she was like, we we have to have more united than we have partisan discord, or we're gonna end up with the French Revolution here.

Michele McAloon:

Boy, there's so much of this story that uh resonates now in our stupid Indian democracy, all of this stuff, all of our, you know, stupid rhetoric that we're doing right now. One, it's not new. It's not new. Two, it is dangerous. You don't want to go down those roads. It precludes amiability. That was a great lesson she taught. Another thing that you bring up through the book is slavery. I mean, it really is in the face of the enlightenment ideals that the founding fathers were trying to establish in the documents, in society, in the communities, it was really antithetical to what they were trying to achieve, what they were trying to realize. And you bring that up at uh at different points throughout the book.

Molly Beer:

I do. Like I said, I did not know what I would find when I set out to research Angelica's life, whether I would like her, whether I would, you know, have trouble with her. And her relationship with slavery evolved over the course of her life. Sort of the tradition in which she's raised in these Dutch communities in Albany. It wasn't plantation-style slavery like you have in the South, which doesn't, you know, which is not to absolve anything. You have slaves living really right in your home. And it was so close that children would be matched with a child slave. Master child would be matched with an enslaved child. And they even had a like a ceremony for that where the master child would give the enslaved child a pair of shoes. It's sort of that, you know, so it's not a ring, or it's not a wedding ring, but it's a bondage ceremony. And you give a pair of shoes to the person who will now walk in your shadow. And so that's the culture in which she's raised in. So you're trained from early childhood how to be a master. You're trained from early childhood how to be an enslaved person to the idealized version, is then you would spend your whole lives together as a bonded parent, whatever. That's how she was raised. They did acquire an enslaved child when her son was born. I don't know that that was motivated by her or, you know, a gesture for her, but that happened. So there is evidence of that. But she does spend the war years with the French, who were vehemently opposed to slavery, but aware of the contradiction of that because there was plenty of slavery in the French colonies in the West Indies, just not in France. So, you know, when they're marching back from Yorktown, from Williamsburg to New York to sort of chase the British out of New York after that battle, because New York, the a year later the British are still in New York. And um, she's part of that march north. And some of the officers with whom she's friends with are trying to smuggle enslaved people out of Virginia with them, as pretending they're their servant or so forth. And General Rochambeau's got son, for example, got in trouble for that, trying to smuggle. So they were so they were opposed to uh slavery and talking about it and idealistic about it. You know, in her later life, she had mostly hired staff in her household. You know, in France and England, that's was more normal, and that was true when she came back to the states. But her children took two different routes. Her son wound up keeping slaves in not lovely circumstances into his future. And her other daughter was working with uh, there was a Catholic, uh, his name is Pierre Tousson. He was a hairdresser in New York City who was who I know the Catholic Church recognized for his charity work at the time. And he had bought his own mistress, or like he had worked for his own mistress and supported her because she became broke when she was widowed and he'd supported her, and then he did all these like charitable works in New York City. And Angelica and her daughter, Catherine, were uh advocates, his clients, but also his advocates. And he was close to the Schuyler family for a couple generations after that. Her daughter and then beyond. So she was involved with that. So it's different tracks in the thinking. I don't think she was able to break with slavery as much as her daughter did, but I don't think she supported her son's model.

Michele McAloon:

I always find interesting, we always talk about the slavery in the South, but you you very rarely hear about the slavery in the North. And it had a different it wasn't field, as you said, as it, but it was definitely. Domestic slavery in the North. So all had sins to bear on that one. And thankfully, I think the one contribution the United States has done to the world is our civil rights. It's not perfect, but we've done better than anybody else. Believe me, I live in Europe and we do better than anybody else. What were your sources? This is interesting because if you read through your bibliography at the back, it's a series of letters, really, is where you've got most of your information. How in the world did you chase this down? That was a lot of work.

Molly Beer:

So I I hate to say these words in one sentence, but the pandemic helped.

unknown:

Oh, yeah.

Michele McAloon:

Yeah, I believe me.

Molly Beer:

I think you're ready to send that with suddenly I could write libraries all over and they would just send me images. Things have been coming online at an incredible rate. You know, and I finished before the AI crawler sort of crashed the National Archives system. This is a person who has been fictionalized in works for 200 years. People who are writing about the men in her life and they want to add some color to their book about signing documents. Angelica brings the color. But no one had yet done the sort of slow slog of the primary sources. We sort of were told, like, well, there are no records of women. And I found that to be categorically false where she's concerned. I mean, people kept her her letters. Thomas Jefferson kept her letters, Alexander Hamilton kept her letters, you know, they're they're all archived now. University of Virginia, Library of Congress, um, Hobart and William Smith, the the letters exist. But to write about her, I mean, if you're gonna do a biography of Alexander Hamilton or or Thomas Jefferson, like there are 145 biographies about them already. And you can go sort of fact-check them and and follow the trajectory and emphasize something new. But there's never been a biography about her. So I had to go to the primary sources for her life all the way through. I mean, if I'm writing about Aaron Burr, I read his biography. If I'm writing about Thomas Jefferson, I read his biography. But for her, I really relied on primary sources all the way through because people, I mean, you can read her Wikipedia page and it'll be like, she was in New York periodically through this. But no, if you track where she is in the primary sources, she was not sailing back to New York every six months. And you can track it. Like she's in the newspaper, she writes letters. It's possible to figure out where she is basically at least once a month, all the way through her time, all the way through her life, like because she wrote enough. And and so it was amazing to me that so much was present. Of course, her houses are still preserved. Her house in Albany, the Schuyler mansion, where she lived from about the age six, is a museum. And you can go and visit and tour it. And like the furniture is still historically, if not the original, like inspired by. You can go to the Saratoga Battlefield, you can go to her house, her farmhouse that was rebuilt after the Battle of Saratoga. And then the house that I grew up near in Angelica is a private house. It's not public, but it has been kept as a historic monument to that time period. And so it also contains original things. And my town has kept it. In the library where I hung out after school, they have the church family's desk, the ledgers from the town that was originally founded. It just was all there. And there were people who've been safeguarding it. And as soon as I was like, I'm interested in this story, it was like one of those like touch me not plants. It just exploded open. This book could have been three times this long if my wonderful editors hadn't prevented me from being accessible. We didn't need a doorstop.

Michele McAloon:

Right, right.

Molly Beer:

Hopefully there will be more books about her and they can they can go long.

Michele McAloon:

I hope so. I hope so. I kept thinking she'd be such a great Broadway play, but I think they did Hamilton, right? You know, so okay. Was there anyone of her equivalent on revolutionary, so to speak, or was she unique? That is because her life ultimately is reflected in the men that she is accompanying. It really is. But was there anybody else equivalent to her at the at the time?

Molly Beer:

Yeah. So that's a wonderful question. And I'm really glad you asked it. I always think about books about women where you read historical books about women. I say that a lot of them read like, My cat is really a dog book where you're like, it's about a woman, but don't worry, she's different. And I I I take those a little badly because I'm like I'm like, why do we have to like to be write a book about a woman? Why does she have to be like a man? And I tried to write in other women in this book. Madam General Frederica Reedza, who's traveling with Burgoyne's army, to uh, you know, Lucy Knox, Martha Washington, what she was doing. That Martha Washington was in Philadelphia after the Battle of Yorktown, where she had just buried her son, and she's in Philadelphia to lobby Congress. Abigail Adams, the work she's doing there, how much time she spends in England by herself, or how much time she's alone in Boston representing John Adams' interesting interest in the U.S. I think of Janet Montgomery and the sort of like iconic status she held after her husband was killed at the Battle of Quebec. Or I mean, these are elite women I'm looking at. I I try to spread that around, but they're also elite men we're talking about when we talk about the revolutionary. So in terms of the power structure of the time, we're certainly talking about elites. There are women at every at every social level who are, uh, as women do during war, traveling with their spouse, women marching with the armies or keeping the farm uh functioning while they're fighting the war. Like there were women involved at that level too. There were women killed in the war by gunfire, not just like adjacent to. We tend to reduce the revolutionary war to being like there were these six people and it was a social movement. And it took enslaved people and it took and it took Native Americans and it took women and it took men, and it you know, it would not have been accomplished otherwise. So she is unique in many, many ways, as we all are. But I think that one of the reasons her story is important is that a lot of women were involved in this. We just leave them out of the story. We either conflate them with their spouse or we're like, well, they didn't fight in a battle, so they can't have been relevant to the success of the movement. And I disagree with that. I think if you look at other, if you shift the rubric to look at the peacemaking, you shift the rubric to be like, how do we get from here to there? That it that the light shines on women's lives and limits and women's contributions more brightly.

Michele McAloon:

The genius of this biography is is you told it from the point of view of a woman, you are a woman. She is a woman. You never masculinize her. You never say that her intelligence is intelligence, it is not male or female. Human intelligence is just as a product of education. It's a product of education, it's a product of an upbringing, of uh it's gender neutral. So you really do. You present her in such a great light from a very woman point of view, but you present her as a woman. And she was living her femininity to the fullest. And she was a serious player in to create amiability, to create space to talk, to create room to talk. And you know what, ladies? That is our talent. We have that talent. We should not be shunning that talent. We should be embracing that talent. And she really is a great role model for women, especially American women, right now. This book was, it's really what it is so well written. That's and it is. It's one of these great new narratives that's coming out, these new historical narratives that are coming out. So I cannot encourage people enough to read this book. And I would do this to my listening audience, I would do this from maybe early high school too. There's a few adult situations in it, but it's not there's nothing in there that your typical American ninth grader could not handle all the way up to your 51-year-old podcaster. So do you have any future plans for any more books? Because you should. You've got a you you tell a story well and you should.

Molly Beer:

Oh, yes, there will definitely be future books, but I'm reserving this year for uh with the 250th birthday of the country of the Declaration of Independence. I'm hoping to participate a lot in those conversations about Angelica and taking her out in the world and trying to make sure we're talking about women's role in the creation of the United States as well. And then I will embark on the next the next project.

Michele McAloon:

Well, good. I hope I hope to do it because you're you're well worth the read. So uh folks, this is book again. It's Angelica by Molly Beer, and it is published by WW Norton. There we go. Okay. This would make a good Christmas present. Men, if you are a lot of men listen to the show, if you're looking for a good pre-Christmas present, this would be a great book for that. Exactly for that for your book lover in your life. Professor Molly Beer, thank you so much for being and taking time out of your busy academic schedule to talk to about us about your book. Michelle, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate this opportunity.