Pride and Pleasure

Amanda Vaill's narrative nonfiction work traces the lives of Angelica Schuyler Church and Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, two daughters of Revolutionary War general Philip Schuyler, from their childhood in colonial New York through the founding of the American republic and into the 19th century. Vaill argues that the sisters' stories have been buried beneath the histories of the men they married and supported, and she sets out to recover a hidden narrative that shaped, and was shaped by, the founding era.

The Schuyler sisters grew up in extraordinary privilege along the Hudson River. Their father built the Pastures, a grand English-style mansion in Albany staffed by more than a dozen enslaved people. The three eldest daughters, Angelica (called Ann), Elizabeth (called Betsey, later Eliza), and Margarita (called Peggy), were educated in Albany and New York City, learning music, dance, embroidery, and household management. They spent their early years at their great-aunt's estate, the Flatts, running wild over the fields and absorbing the political life surrounding their father's growing prominence.

When the Revolution began, Philip Schuyler was named a major general and transformed the Pastures into a military headquarters. Angelica, socially adept and ambitious, functioned as a social connector for her father, leveraging her charm and position. In 1777 she eloped with a mysterious English accountant named John Carter, provoking a furious family confrontation that subsided into grudging acceptance. Carter's real name, it later emerged, was John Barker Church; he had fled England under a false identity to escape bankruptcy proceedings and, after making a fortune supplying the armies, reconciled with his English family.

Eliza's path diverged sharply. At a military dance in Morristown, New Jersey, in the winter of 1780, she met Alexander Hamilton, Washington's aide-de-camp: a brilliant, impoverished, illegitimate orphan from the West Indies. They fell in love almost immediately. Hamilton bombarded her with ardent, needy letters testing her devotion; she responded by sending him a transcription of the medieval ballad "The Nut-Brown Maid," in which a girl pledges unconditional loyalty to an outlaw lover who turns out to be a nobleman. They married in December 1780 at the Pastures.

Their marriage was a partnership forged by shared ambition. When Hamilton broke with Washington in 1781 over a petty quarrel and set up a modest household near the Hudson, Eliza served as his secretary as he drafted a proposal for a national bank. She helped him prepare The Federalist essays arguing for ratification of the Constitution and stayed up all night helping him compose the memorandum that persuaded Washington to approve the Bank of the United States. She managed their household on limited means, raised their growing family, and navigated the obligations of a political wife through the presidencies of Washington and Adams.

Angelica, meanwhile, built a glittering life in Europe. She settled first in Paris, where she cultivated friendships with Benjamin Franklin, the American diplomat, and Thomas Jefferson, the American minister to France, before moving to London. There she hosted balls attended by the Prince of Wales and secretly helped orchestrate an audacious but failed plot to rescue the Marquis de Lafayette—the French general who had fought alongside Hamilton during the Revolutionary War—from an Austrian prison. Throughout this period she carried on a charged correspondence with Hamilton that exceeded ordinary familial affection, exchanging letters with coded punctuation and embedded endearments. During Angelica's 1789 visit to New York, when she and Hamilton were alone in the city for most of July while Eliza was in Albany, their relationship seemed to deepen permanently. Vaill suggests that something significant occurred between them, though no documents record exactly what happened.

The crisis that tested both sisters arrived in 1797, when journalist James Callender published documents accusing Hamilton of financial corruption during his tenure as treasury secretary. The accusation stemmed from Hamilton's entanglement with a woman named Maria Reynolds and her husband James, who blackmailed him after an affair that began in 1791. To clear himself of the corruption charge, Hamilton published the Reynolds Pamphlet, confessing to the adultery in detail. Eliza, who had just given birth to their son William, fled to her parents' home in Albany. Angelica wrote to console her, framing the suffering as the price of proximity to greatness.

The final years of Hamilton's life brought mounting losses. His eldest son, Philip, was killed in a duel in 1801 at 19, defending his father's honor. Hamilton sank into depression, retreating to the Grange, the country house he and Eliza built in Harlem. When Vice President Aaron Burr, Hamilton's longtime rival, challenged him to a duel in 1804, Hamilton accepted but resolved not to fire. He wrote Eliza a farewell letter: "Adieu best of wives and best of Women." On July 11, 1804, Hamilton was fatally shot at Weehawken and died the following afternoon with Eliza and Angelica at his bedside.

The second half of the book follows Eliza's 50-year widowhood as she transformed into a formidable public figure. Hamilton left debts of approximately $55,000, and her father's death four months later provided inadequate provision, compounded when her younger sisters challenged a land transfer Schuyler had made to her. Friends rescued the Grange by purchasing it at auction and selling it back to Eliza at half price.

Eliza channeled her grief into institution-building. She co-founded the Orphan Asylum Society in 1806, eventually becoming its first directress and growing it from 10 children in a rented house into a campus serving hundreds. When evidence surfaced of abuse by the asylum's superintendents, she waited until she held formal authority, then terminated them and reformed the institution's governance.

Her most consuming project was preserving Hamilton's legacy. She discovered among his papers letters from Angelica that revealed the depth of their connection and removed them along with her own correspondence and the Reynolds affair documents. She sued Rufus King, a politician holding Hamilton's papers about Washington's Farewell Address, in Chancery Court to recover documents that Hamilton's executor secretly transferred to King, and won. She signed an affidavit declaring that Hamilton wrote most of the Farewell Address and that she was present during its composition.

Beginning in 1844, the elderly Eliza traveled repeatedly to Washington to lobby Congress to purchase Hamilton's papers for the Library of Congress. She attended presidential levees, socialized with former first lady Dolley Madison, and walked daily to the Senate galleries. When former president James Monroe, who decades earlier had been involved in leaking the Reynolds affair documents, visited seeking reconciliation, she refused to forgive him. On August 5, 1848, Congress approved the purchase for $20,000, what she called "the most interesting business of my protracted life."

Angelica died in 1814 at 58, her later years marked by homesickness, declining health, and her husband's infidelities. Among her papers was a packet of Hamilton's letters, entrusted to her daughter Kitty rather than returned to Eliza.

Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton died on November 9, 1854, at 97, at her home in Washington. Her son James was at her bedside; she pulled him into an embrace and said, "God bless you, you've been a good son." Her body was returned to New York for burial beside Hamilton at Trinity Church, Wall Street.