(6/6/2025)
Angelica: For Love and Country in a Time of Revolution by Molly Beer is an interesting biography of one of our country's earliest celebrities. Born in 1756 to wealthy parents of Dutch heritage in colonial New York, we get a window onto what privileges and obstacles a girl (and later a woman) of her class, culture and times would have experienced.
As she matured during the American Revolution, though women's opportunities were limited, Angelica Schuyler Church, as the daughter of a general, was exposed to many of the iconic personages and scenes from our history textbooks, from George Washington to Marie Antoinette. (Angelica's husband, John Church negotiated supplies for the French army when they came to the colonist's aid and the Church's later lived in Paris as well as England). She was far more than the flirtatious sister-in-law of Alexander Hamilton as depicted in the musical Hamilton.
Her thoughtful correspondence to not only her family but to other influential friends like Thomas Jefferson, for example, has been preserved and well-used by our author, who, by the way, claims Angelica, New York as her home town, a town developed by Angelica's son, and where she later lived at the end of her life. I, not a historian, came away with a better understanding of much of our past, including not only the Revolution but the circumstances involved with Britain's later recognition of the United States as a nation and even the Louisiana Purchase. Angelica's interests and influences were widespread.
I think a book group who enjoys history and women's issues would find a lot to discuss. It is not a long tome, less than 300 pages but well-researched. My only real criticism is that we were too-often reminded of the irony that the fight for liberty was not enjoyed by women nor blacks.