Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Full Bio is our book series where we spend a few days with the author of a deeply researched biography to get a fuller understanding of the subject. Our first Full Bio of 2026 has to do with America's 250th anniversary from the point of view of three women, the Schuyler sisters. We're discussing the book Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution by author Amanda Vaill. The book is about 600 pages that alternates back and forth between the developments of the American Revolution and the family dynamics of three extraordinary women and their family.

Today, we'll arrive at the eldest of the Schuyler children, Angelica, born February 20th, 1756. She was often called Anne as a child. As a young woman, she was vivacious and smart. She would often bask in the attention of men, including Thomas Jefferson, Aaron Burr, and Alexander Hamilton, with whom she had an epistolary relationship. That said, she did elope fairly quickly with John Carter in 1777, a man her father, Philip Schuyler, did not think was worth her time and was a huge headache to him. Carter was sent to see if General Schuyler was mishandling money during the war.

As we find out, John Carter was not who he said he was. That was okay because he made oodles of money that Angelica liked to spend when she moved to Europe in 1783. She would not return to live in America for more than 15 years. Here's Amanda Vaill, the author of Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution.

[MUSIC - Hannibal Hayes: All Of It Theme Song]

Angelica was often called Anne. She was the oldest of the Schuyler children. She was described as "left to nature" as a young girl. What did that mean for her?

Amanda Vaill: Actually, that would have been true of Eliza, Angelica, and Peggy, and probably the younger ones as well. That phrase came from a memoir by a woman who had known the Schuyler sisters' great aunt, Aunt Schuyler or Margarita Schuyler. This woman, Anne MacVicar Grant, was actually the same age as the Schuyler sisters. She is describing the way children in Albany at that time were brought up, and they basically were left to run wild all over their families' country estates when they had them.

This meant going berry picking, running up and down the hills, and wading in the river. Just generally having an Arcadian childhood in which they could do pretty much what they wanted until, of course, the time came when things had to get serious, and they had to go to school and learn how to write and sew and do all those things. Before that, they were left to nature.

Alison Stewart: As Angelica grew older, what was expected of her as the eldest daughter?

Amanda Vaill: The same thing that was expected of all of the children, which was that they behave properly, make a good marriage, bring up their children, and manage their households. They were all expected to be participants in this dynastic society that the Schuylers themselves represented. This did not mean that they couldn't participate in commercial ventures or have rights of their own. One of the interesting things about the Dutch colonies is that women in the Dutch colonies, because Dutch law allowed this, they were allowed to own property. They were allowed to sign legal documents.

Alison Stewart: Wow.

Amanda Vaill: They were allowed to do things that women were not expected to do, or in some cases, allowed to do in the colonies in which English law had prevailed. I think she and all of them expected that they would do this, but then the war came, and it changed everything for them.

Alison Stewart: Explain that.

Amanda Vaill: First of all, a war comes, and the young men disappear. They go to the Army. They go to fight. They go to be aide-de-camp to a general. They are not going to dancing assemblies in Albany with you anymore, or at least not much. Then, of course, there's fighting, and that disrupts things. The whole country was convulsed by this civil war. It was not a war between some foreign power, and they're fighting somewhere else. It was on the colonists' territory. The Schuylers lost their house at Saratoga because General Burgoyne burnt it to the ground. That will affect you pretty fast. I would say they also, to a certain extent, all of these women participated in the war effort. They didn't necessarily boycott things the way the women in Massachusetts did.

The Schuylers didn't seem to do that, but they did make do without social seasons. You didn't go to New York to the assemblies anymore because New York had been taken over by the British. Things became very different.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution. It's by Amanda Vaill, my guest. It's our choice for Full Bio. You often read about Angelica Schuyler as being vivacious. Was this something that she knew about herself and realized she could use to her advantage?

Amanda Vaill: Oh, I think Angelica was an extremely self-aware young woman, and very aware of the effect that she had on people. She was not without vanity. When she was ill later on in her life, she wrote a letter to someone describing her illness, and then saying, "My eyes have not lost their luster." She was always sure that she looked great, and she didn't want anyone not to think that.

She had a really self-aware quality about her. She was critical of people. She said once of an American minister to London, who she considered to be too bourgeois to really associate with people like herself, she said he didn't have the ease and je ne sais quoi of a gentleman. She was very self-aware. She was very self-confident. She was vain, actually.

Alison Stewart: It says in the book, "Marriage is the only honorable provision for well-educated young women." Who is she looking to marry? What does she want in a mate?

Amanda Vaill: Originally, of course, she would probably have been searching for someone of an equal social class to the Schuylers, someone from her own background. Again, the war came, that supply chain was busted. She was not going to find someone like that very easily in wartime in Albany. What she did find was, and again, this is a period when young women are reading novels full of romance and excitement and elopements and duels and this and that and the other. What should come to Albany but a mysterious Englishman who had transplanted himself to America, a sympathizer to the revolution. He's given himself to the Continental Congress.

He is working as an auditor. He has been sent by the Continental Congress to Albany to audit the books of General Philip Schuyler, whom the Continental Congress suspects of fraud, waste, and abuse, I think. He shows up there, and he sees that General Schuyler has a very beautiful young daughter, the elder daughter. She's 20, actually. He realizes that if he makes it up to her, all of his money troubles will be over. He will never have to worry about anything again because, of course, in Dutch New York, estates were not entailed. In the case of Philip Schuyler, all of his children can inherit his estate equally. It's not a question of the son gets everything.

That didn't work that way. This guy, who called himself John Carter, made up to Angelica, told her tales of how he had run away from England because he had killed a man in a duel, and she was absolutely smitten. Her father was suspicious. Who was this guy who'd showed up, flaunting a gold signet ring? Blah, blah, blah. His story didn't check out to Schuyler, and he didn't know anything about his forebears, his antecedents, his family, his friends, his background, anything, and nothing really seemed to check out, so he forbade this man to pay his addresses to Angelica. That only made Angelica more desperate to have him, and she enlisted her young cousin, Stephen Van Rensselaer, to help her.

Stephen Van Rensselaer was able to compel his stepfather, who was the chief priest of the Dutch Reformed Church in Albany, to secretly marry them. She eloped with this guy, John Carter, the two of them got married illicitly with the connivance of Stephen Van Rensselaer. There was nothing Philip Schuyler could do about it. He absolutely blew his stack. Then, within three weeks, they made it all up because Philip Schuyler always, with his children, when one of them would do something he didn't like, he would be furious with them for a week. Then he'd be grumpy for another week, in which he'd be saying, "Well, if they'd just apologize properly, I could do something about it."

Then the week after that, he'd be wanting to buy them a set of china or fix them up with the kids. Unbelievably, he did it that way every single time; that's what happened with all of these children. In the case of Angelica, he's helping John Carter find himself a new job in Boston, hooking him up with merchants there. Lo and behold, John Carter ends up working as a supplier to the American and French armies during the Revolution. He makes unimaginable amounts of-- literally millions of dollars in Revolutionary War money. Just think about what that is in current dollars. It boggles the mind. At any rate, that's what she did. That's what she found. She found that guy.

Alison Stewart: She found John Carter, but his name is not John Carter. We learned his name is John Barker Church. He escaped England because of a potential scandal of his own. First of all, what happened, and how long did Angelica know about this?

Amanda Vaill: She moved to Paris with John Carter, as she thought of him, in 1783. He was going to collect on the debts that the French government owed him and his business partner. Debts that, by the way, ended up bankrupting the French government when they paid them, so that the French government had to try to get new taxes called the Estates General, which is what caused the French Revolution. In a certain sense, you could say John Carter caused a French Revolution. However, we'll leave that thought. Having got all this money, John Carter went back to England and squared things with the people he needed to square them with.

Returned to Paris, where his unsuspecting wife was, and told her, "Well, I know I told you that I was called John Carter, and that I had fled England because I killed somebody in a duel, but in fact, my name is John Barker Church. I fled England because I was bankrupt and I didn't want to pay up, and I didn't have the money, so I ran away from my debts to America. Now I have all this money, and I have gone back to England, and I've paid up my debts, and now we can go to England together, and I can resume my former name." Can you imagine what that was like for her? I certainly can't.

Alison Stewart: How did that go over back at home?

Amanda Vaill: I wish that I had letters from all the people about this. Somehow, the letter from her explaining this to her parents, or the letter from her parents reacting to it, we don't have those. What we do have is letters from his business partner and from other people, all of them going, "Oh my God, did you know this? This has happened." You realize that everybody is quite shocked. Then they just, "Well, okay, that's his name. We'll just go on," and they do.

Alison Stewart: He had money, and she liked to spend money. What did Angelica like to spend money on?

Amanda Vaill: Angelica loved pretty clothes. She has gorgeous clothes. If you look, there's a fabulous portrait of her by John Trumbull. She's wearing the most extraordinary iridescent bronze taffeta dress. It's just incredibly beautiful and elegant. She has on her head a hat that looks as if the entire contents of a milliner's shop had been just piled on it. There's the little pill box, which looks like a candy box. Then there's a bouquet of flowers, then there's a pouf of tulle. It's unbelievable what she's wearing. She also liked to go to the opera, to the theater. She had a box at the Drury Lane Theatre, a box at the opera.

She liked to go to the assemblies at Ranelagh and at Vauxhall Gardens, and of course, she and John Church they together bought a really beautiful, not palatial, but like mini-palatial house on the Thames outside of London, which was called Down Place. It's still there, the house. It was sold by them when they came back to America in 1797, but it was a beautiful house. The Churches did it up gorgeously. Apparently, they had a Grecian temple of the gardens that had a fresco ceiling that was painted by Angelica's great friend, Maria Cosway. She threw parties there. People came to see her. It was really very glamorous.

Alison Stewart: Angelica, her smarts were well known. She was beautiful. She was good to other women. She helped them get involved in society. I was curious: Did she use her smarts for anything more substantial?

Amanda Vaill: Here's the thing. My take on Angelica is that she always really wanted to be a star. Her interest in politics, to the extent that she had them, were less about politics themselves than about her own prominence and her own influence, and her ability to influence people and be where she thought she could matter. She wanted to be in the room where it happened, whatever it was. As a young woman, she was upset when a friend of hers was placed under house arrest because the friend's husband was a loyalist and had fled to Canada, where he was fomenting attacks on the American colonies from the other side of the border.

She went, but the wife thought that possibly he was dead and was very upset about this. Angelica thought, "Oh, I don't want her to think that, and I don't want her to think that badly of me, so I'm going to go and tell her that he's not dead." As soon as Angelica told her that, the woman, Mary Watts Johnson, disguised herself as a maid and escaped from her house arrest and fled, taking military secrets with her to Canada to join her husband, who she knew was there. Something she probably wouldn't have done if Angelica hadn't told her. It was more important to Angelica to show herself to be a mover and shaker here, to insert herself into this situation.

When she was in England with John Barker Church, and the French Revolution had broken out, the Marquis de Lafayette, or the former Marquis de Lafayette, had been imprisoned by the Austrians. His actions in support of the revolution had, in the view of the Austrians, caused Marie Antoinette, the aunt of the Austrian Emperor, to lose her head, so Lafayette had been thrown in prison in Austria. Angelica, in part, was motivated, I think, by sympathy. How could you not be? Lafayette had been a friend, and she was fond of him, as everyone who knew him was. She managed to persuade a bunch of émigrés that she was friends with.

They all got together, and she persuaded the American ambassador to London to violate the terms of America's neutrality policy and back a completely cockamamie scheme to bust Lafayette out of prison in Austria. These French émigrés and Angelica cook this thing up. One of the two people who were supposed to do the busting out is writing Angelica coded letters about where he is and what he's seeing and how he's going to do this, and Angelica is pulling all these strings. She must have felt like she was in her element because she was at the center of this plot. Unfortunately, the whole thing completely blew up in everybody's face in a way that is like the Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight.

Actually, it was one of the funnier things that I wrote when I was writing this. If people's lives hadn't been at stake, I think I would have laughed even harder. It's such a disaster. Fortunately, everybody in the end made it out alive out of this mess. Angelica got them all into it because she just wanted to be a mover and shaker. She didn't actually know what the hell she was doing, but she just went ahead and did it.

Alison Stewart: A lot is made of her relationship with Alexander Hamilton, who was married to her sister Eliza. There were letters. There were meetings. If I read between the lines, there was one suggestion that maybe one of her children looked like Hamilton. How would you describe the relationship between Hamilton and Angelica?

Amanda Vaill: We have no smoking gun, I guess I would say. We have only highly suggestive letters, which, when you consider them in the context of the fact that Eliza and indeed the Schuyler family in general is completely ignorant of these letters, you begin to see that it is entirely possible that there was an illicit relationship going on between the two of them. Angelica wrote to Eliza, "I love your husband very much, and if you were as generous as the old Romans, you would lend him to me for a little while." Whoa.

People have said, "Oh, she was just joking." I find that very difficult to believe. One of the things that over and over sticks out in this relationship is that Angelica, who met the flirtatious Hamilton. He was a verbally flirtatious guy. He would write letters to women who were his friends that were very flirty. They weren't as flirty as the letters he wrote to Angelica. Ones in which he would say things like, "Yours as much as you desire." He would write things that had a comma misplaced, and he would write, adieu, ma chère, and then put a comma, and then put "soeur" after it. "Goodbye, my dear, sister." He did not do that with other women.

He met Angelica three years after she had married John Church, when she'd had two children. She really was maybe not as enamored of her husband as she had been when she first married him, because he really was kind of a boob. He and Angelica immediately began what seems to have been, at first at least, an epistolary flirtation. After Washington was inaugurated, and Angelica had come to America for what turned out to be a six-month stay, during which she was alone in New York with Hamilton, while Eliza was upstate with the family.

The letters that they wrote to each other after that period take on this very super-heated quality that really, really seems suggestive to me. She writes Hamilton from the ship when she was leaving, finally in November of 1789, this amazing letter in which she says, "Goodbye, my dear Hamilton, believe, please be as faithful to me as you say you will be." This is very heavy stuff to be writing to your brother-in-law, in my view. I can't believe there wasn't something going on there. I obviously don't have the proof.

Alison Stewart: That was Amanda Vaill, the author of Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution. Tomorrow, it's Eliza Schuyler. Hey, it's January. "It's so nice when slipping on the slide. Nice to sip hot chicken soup with rice." That Carole King children's song has been stuck by many in the head during this cold snap. Coming up, we're going to scratch the soup itch with New York Times food writer Melissa Clark.