Angelica: For Love and Country in a Time of Revolution (W. W. Norton & Company, 2025) by Molly Beer is a women-centric view of revolution through the life of Angelica Schuyler Church (1756-1814), the eldest daughter of General Philip Schuyler and Catherine Van Rensselaer. The Van Rensselaers of the Manor of Rensselaerswyck were one of the wealthiest and most politically influential families in what was then the still heavily Dutch-influenced Province of New York.
Few women of the American Revolution have come through 250 years of US history with such clarity and color. Angelica was Alexander Hamilton’s “saucy” sister-in-law, and the heart of Thomas Jefferson’s “charming coterie” of artists and salonnières in Paris. Her transatlantic network of important friends in Albany, Paris, London and New York spanned the political spectrum and her letters kept them well-informed. Some of her correspondence with eminent friends has been preserved, including exchanges with Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton and Lafayette.
Engeltje
She was born as Engeltje, a Dutch-speaking “little angel” and slave-owning colonial girl who witnessed the Stamp Act riots in the Royal British Province of New York.
She came of age under English rule as Angelica, the eldest daughter of the most important family on the northern part of Hudson’s River. Her mother Catherine was a descendant of Kiliaen van Rensselaer, one of the founders of New Netherlands. Even from her upbringing she was surrounded by powerful women, from her mother, to women like Catherine Moore, Margaret Kemble Gage, Baroness von Riedesel, and more.
She was raised to be a domestic diplomat responsible for hosting indigenous chiefs and enemy British generals at dinner and rose to become a prominent member of the social elite – an early American socialite. Her name is remembered in the village and town of Angelica, in Allegany County, NY.
She was in Boston when General John Burgoyne arrived with his surrendered troops after the Battles of Saratoga. In Newport, Rhode Island she received French troops under the command of her soon-to-be dear friend Marquis de Lafayette.
She was in Yorktown after the decisive British defeat and then in Paris and London, helping to determine the standing of the new nation on the world stage.
Angelica’s sister (one of eight siblings) Elizabeth Schuyler married Alexander Hamilton in the Schuyler Mansion in Albany, NY in December 1780. Angelica eloped, and lived in Europe for sixteen years with her British-born husband John Barker Church, who became a Member of Parliament.
A woman of great influence in a time of influential women like Catherine the Great (1762-1796) and Marie-Antoinette (1755-1793), Angelica was at the red-hot center of American history at its birth. She was Madame Church, wife of a privateer turned merchant banker, whose London house was a refuge for veterans of the American war fleeing the guillotine in revolutionary France.
Across nationalities, languages, and cultures, across the divides of war, grievance, and geography, Angelica wove a web of soft-power connections that spanned the War for Independence, the post-war years of tenuous peace, and the turbulent politics and rival ideologies that threatened to tear apart the nascent United States
In a revealing woman’s-eye view of the revolutionary era, Molly Beer breathes new life into a period usually dominated by masculine themes and often dulled by familiarity.
In telling Angelica’s story, she illuminates how American women have always plied influence and networks for political ends, including the making of a new nation.
Upcoming Author Event
Molly Beer will be at the Albany Book Festival on Saturday, September 27th at noon, on a panel with Russell Shorto. Learn more here.
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