Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. This is the last day of January's Full Bio series. We're kicking off 2026 with a book about America's 250th anniversary. We're discussing the book Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution by author Amanda Vaill. The eldest Schuyler sisters, Angelica, Eliza, and Peggy, were three of eight children who survived into adulthood. Their father was a war general and the first senator from New York.

On day one of Full Bio, we heard about Peggy, a traditionalist with a feisty spirit, who helped save her baby sister during the war. Yesterday we learned about Angelica, the vivacious, smart woman who eloped with a man who was not honest about his reputation. Now we arrive at Elizabeth Schuyler. She lived to be 97 years old, dying in 1854. She spent almost her entire adulthood as the wife and widow of Alexander Hamilton. He described Eliza as the best of wives and the best of women, but that doesn't mean she lived to serve him. Vaill found out she could be stubborn and get angry, she cared about manners, and her family. Here's Amanda Vaill, author of Pride and Pleasure, our choice for Full Bio.

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Alison Stewart: Eliza Schuyler was originally called Betsy. Who knew that? [chuckles] You knew that. When did she start to be called Eliza?

Amanda Vaill: Well, Eliza is Betsy all through her childhood, and indeed is still called Betsy by her family at the time that she meets Hamilton in 1780. He calls her Betsy quite a lot at the beginning of their relationship. It is at that time that she begins to sign herself and to, essentially, looks like, be asked that she be called Eliza. When her daughter, her second daughter, was born in 1799, she's christened Eliza, not even Elizabeth.

I think what that tells you, among other things, is that Eliza did not like the name Betsy. If Elizabeth Schuyler Jr. had been called Elizabeth, she would have run the risk of being called Betsy, too, and Eliza didn't want to have that happen, so she didn't call her that. She called her Eliza. I think it's one of those things that you do when you get to be a grown-up, you decide you're going to get rid of that childhood nickname that everybody uses for you, and you're going to be something else. That's what she does.

Alison Stewart: She and her sister, they were raised in Albany at the family estate. They were brought to New York City for schooling, and as they grew into young women, they were sometimes called "nymphs of the northern plains"?

Amanda Vaill: Yes, I love that. That's what their father's cousin, William Smith, called them that in a letter. I just thought that was, nymphs of the northern plains, such a great thing.

Alison Stewart: What does that mean, though, when you think about that?

Amanda Vaill: They were nymphs, as in lovely young women, and they were from the north, from Albany. Of course, William Smith is living in and writing in New York City, where he lives, where they had been going to school. I think the two elder daughters were being groomed to be ornaments to society, the wives of important men, whatever. They're down in New York, and William Smith, who is their father's kinsman and lawyer, sees them quite a lot. He gave them this nickname, or describes them in this way, and jocularly. I think he's just making them seem like something out of a poem.

Alison Stewart: There's this great line you write about Betsy turning into Eliza. You write, "She's now older than her mother was at her marriage, but even after spending nine months in Boston, where there were at least some eligible young men, she's still unspoken for. Gentlemen admire her. They speak of her good nature and her sparkling eyes, but they don't ask to marry her, or she doesn't encourage them to." Did she want to get married? Was it on her mind?

Amanda Vaill: We don't have a diary from her, and we don't have girly confessions that she's writing to her buddies, because if she did write such a thing to any of her little friends, like Kitty Livingston or any of them, we don't have those papers. They just disappeared. All we have is the effects, and you have to extrapolate from that.

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Amanda Vaill: What we do know is that in 1775, Tench Tilghman, who was one of Washington's aides, had come to Albany to help out and be present at a meeting of the colonists, the Continental Army, and the Haudenosaunee nations, which the idea was they were trying to get the Haudenosaunee Native American tribes to commit to staying neutral in the war. This was effected. While Tench Tilghman was in Albany doing this, he met both Schuyler sisters. He was at first really attracted to Angelica, who he thought was a very beautiful young woman.

Then he met Betsy, Eliza, Ms. Schuyler, or Ms. Betsy Schuyler, and he was very struck by her candor, her frankness, her charm, not by-- She seems to be the girl that you want to be friends with, but not the girl that you want to marry. At least he didn't think so. Now, Tench Tilghman thinks of himself as a-- he's a kind of a frat boy. Oh yes, he's got conquests all over it. He's done this, he's done-- and that's the kind of guy he is. Angelica is just the kind of girl that he would yearn for and absolutely never get anywhere with because he would never be cool enough for her, but he would think she was the greatest.

Elizabeth is not quite his dish, in part because she's too sharp for him. She sees absolutely what he's up to. At one point he's trying to flirt with her really young cousin, who's one of the Van Rensselaers. She sees exactly what's going on with it, starts laughing at him, and he's not going to think that's very cool. That's the kind of girl she is. She sees stuff. She's honest, she's got a sense of humor. She's also incredibly outdoorsy. She loves the out of doors. She manages to run up a hillside when they're all on a picnic, he, Tench Tilghman, and a bunch of other people, and all the other ladies are going, "Oh, I can't possibly get up that hill without help." Eliza just runs up at and laughs at all the rest of them.

Alison Stewart: You write in the book that Eliza knows who Alexander Hamilton is. How did they actually meet?

Amanda Vaill: Alexander Hamilton had been writing journalism for some of the papers that the Schuylers knew, controlled, so his name was around. She'd seen his byline, if you want, in various newspapers. He'd written columns in support of the colonial positions, and he was known to a lot of the men that were friends of her father. She knew him by reputation. She arrives in Morristown, New Jersey, where she's gone in the freezing cold winter of 1780, because in part, there's absolutely no social life in Albany, where she comes from. She wants to get away.

Her aunt, her father's sister, is married to the physician to the army in Morristown. She's going to go and stay with her aunt and uncle. She arrives, and she goes to one of the assemblies that the officers have on a regular basis in this storeroom of the inn on the Green in Morristown, and lo and behold, there is Alexander Hamilton. She meets him, and nothing could have been further from what her parents would have thought of as an eligible guy. He's really poor, he comes from St. Croix. Actually he comes from Nevis, but he'd grown up in St. Croix. He's in the West Indies, he is illegitimate, and he has absolutely no connections.

What he has is a giant brain, a huge amount of charm, lots of people think he is headed places, and she falls madly in love with him, and he with her. Bang. They have this whirlwind courtship, and after a month, they are engaged. She gets her parents to agree. Her parents, who were not going to have anything to do with John Carter, the mysterious John Carter, who had a job at least, and seem to be semi-respectable, no, no, no. She gets them to absolutely unquestioningly support the idea of her marrying Alexander Hamilton. It's incredible.

Alison Stewart: Yes. They got married December 14th, 1780, at the Pastures. It sounds like it was a real affair, but she was once described as a poor man's wife. How did that affect her?

Amanda Vaill: This is a woman who, I think, one of the things that her life tells you is that she takes whatever situation that life throws at her, and she just deals with it. In the case of Hamilton having no money, which he really didn't, he was in debt, in fact, when they were married, and he was in debt when he died, alas, but she is able. She's thrifty, and she knows how to cook. She can set up a household and run it on next to nothing, and she apparently did that.

I have one of her grocery lists from Philadelphia, when she was married to what was then the Treasury secretary, and you could see she's buying quite economically, stewing meat, lots of vegetable, things that will pad out the stew that she's probably making, it's really fascinating. You can see that she's a very economical person, so she was a good wife for him.

Alison Stewart: It's really telling how devoted to Hamilton she was. There's a point in your book where he has yellow fever, and she wants to get into bed with him. He says, "No, no, no, you'll get it too," and she does get it, too. She was willing to put her life on the line to be with the man she loves. What does this say about her? What does this say about their relationship?

Amanda Vaill: Despite whatever was going on between Hamilton and Angelica, the Hamiltons had what I guess you would call today a hot marriage. Right after they get married, Eliza writes to her sister, Peggy, "Oh, you should marry for love. You've got to marry a guy that you love, because when I-- I'm having a great time." She says, "My dear Hamilton is fonder of me every day," and fonder does not mean he likes me in the 18th century. It means he is besotted. He's a madman in love.

Indeed, Hamilton himself writes, as a postscript on that letter, "Because I am a fanatic in love, your sister thinks I'm great." You can figure out what's going on if you want. [chuckles] Hamilton himself, in the letter to Eliza, that he wrote her in their courtship, referred to how much he was looking forward to what he called the unrestrained intercourses of wedded love.

Alison Stewart: Okay.

Amanda Vaill: I think there was a fair amount of that in their marriage. He's always asking her later on in life if their children are weaned, "Because it is important to me to rest in your bosom," he says. He writes letters to sign this, my darling, my angel. He says to her, not like what most men of the time would say in their letters, which are, respectfully, your husband, John Jay. These are even, affectionately your husband, John Jay. He's really ardent. I think you see that in that relationship, that this was a very powerful thing they had going on together.

When he died, unlike other women who, almost without exception, widows married again in Hamilton's lifetime, they did it whether they needed economic support or they needed moral support or they needed just to have a guy around or something, she couldn't bear the idea she would never have another man. All she could think of was Hamilton her whole life. She wore a little poem that he wrote to her in a bag, suspended on a cord around her neck. She kept a bust of him in the corner and looked at it all the-- When she was first widowed, she wrote her brother saying, "If I didn't have children, I would want to be dead now, so I could be reunited with my Hamilton." This is an extraordinary bond that they had.

Alison Stewart: The book is Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution. It's our choice for Full Bio. Our guest is Amanda Vaill. You did note in the book that Eliza could have a temper.

Amanda Vaill: Oh, yes.

Alison Stewart: When did she let it go? Give us one instance.

Amanda Vaill: Did she let it-- One instance in which she let go her temper, and I find this so ironic, all things considered, also, ironically, Angelica's daughter, Elizabeth, her namesake, eloped with a young man called Rudolph Bunner, who was actually a law student of Alexander Hamilton's, had been his clerk. Eliza was infuriated on Angelica's behalf, because Angelica, having amnesia, I guess, about the fact that she herself had eloped with somebody, decided to be furious with Betsy, as she was called, and said she would never speak to her again.

Eliza went round and gave her a tongue-lashing and such a tongue-lashing that Rudolph Bunner held it against her until, I think, the day he died. He managed to try to undermine her and her efforts to get her husband's biography written, because he was so mad at her for having just been so furious with him.

Alison Stewart: That was Amanda Vaill, the author of Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution. When we return, we'll learn what Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton thought about her husband's extracurricular activities. That's after the break.

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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart and you are listening to Full Bio. We're talking about the book Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution by author Amanda Vaill. We continue with our discussion of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton. Eliza was deeply in love with her husband, Alexander Hamilton. They built a small house uptown in Manhattan and called it the Grange. You can still visit it.

After Hamilton died of a duel with Aaron Burr, she was the keeper of his flame and his secret, so much so that Eliza burned Hamilton's letters to her when he died. Eliza spent the rest of her life attending to his legacy. She fought for his biography to be written. She fought for his papers to be put in the Library of Congress, but first she had to fight for money. He left her in debt, and with questions about his actions. Here's Amanda Vaill with the last edition of Full Bio.

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Alison Stewart: I'm curious, given her temper, what did Eliza think of his relationships first with her sister Angelica, potentially with John Lawrence, and with Maria Reynolds?

Amanda Vaill: Again, with Eliza, one of the things that we're hampered by is that her own letters to Hamilton were, she is most probably most vulnerable and where we would see most of how they interacted, she destroyed those after his death. We don't know what she said to him. We can only judge by her actions and by what other people say about her or by what she writes to other people.

In the case of Hamilton's relationship with Angelica, all we know is that she begins to seem very uncomfortable around her sister and even around her husband. When Angelica returns to America in 1797, she and Hamilton are living two doors apart. The Hamiltons and the Churchs were two doors apart on Broadway. Hamilton at that time is really dancing attendance on Angelica. He's showing up at all of her parties. Eliza doesn't go. She doesn't show up at them.

Alison Stewart: Interesting.

Amanda Vaill: You can see there seems to be this tension between her and Hamilton. He writes her letters, saying, "I hope you're in a better frame of mind now than you were when I left." You can tell that this is when he's away on a business trip, and apparently they were having words. There's some difficulty in the marriage, and you wonder where it comes from, but you see it. You see her reacting to her sister's presence in her husband's life in a way that makes you think, "Oh, she's not comfortable with this." She adored her sister, and--

Alison Stewart: She adored Hamilton-

Amanda Vaill: Yes.

Alison Stewart: -in theory.

Amanda Vaill: Here is this woman who has got a situation in front of her that is causing her possible anguish, and she can't look at it because it will just make her have bad feelings about the two people in the world that she cares the most about. That's all I can see there. The case of Hamilton and John Laurens, she knew very little about this, if anything. All she knows is that Hamilton has a great friend who may or may not have been a closer friend than she knows, and then he dies. She never meets him. That's not an issue for her, really.

Maria Reynolds is a whole other thing. Hamilton's infidelity with Maria Reynolds, which is also, apart from whatever he had going on with Angelica, the only documented case of Hamilton's having a sexual relationship with someone other than his wife is his relationship with Maria Reynolds, who lured him into this relationship when Eliza was away for the summer in Albany with a sick child. The relationship, was it carried on in secret? It was carried on in secret after Eliza returned to Philadelphia and her husband blackmails him. In the payments that Hamilton is making are suspected of being evidence of graft, that he has got his hand on the government till in some way.

He confesses to the affair. He confesses to the blackmail payments in order to save his own political reputation, to say, I am not a thief, I'm not taking money from the government. He ends up writing a pamphlet about this, in which he confesses to all of this publicly. Eliza doesn't know anything about this until the pamphlet is published in 1797. At that point, shortly after the birth of her child, William, she escapes from the family. She runs away, goes home to Albany to her parents. I don't think she'd have done that if she didn't feel like this was a horrific betrayal of her, that she feels upset by what has happened. She feels upset that Hamilton thought to make this public. She's horrified by the whole thing.

It's at that point, actually, and this is parenthetical, that Angelica, horrified that Eliza is behaving in this way, writes her a letter. She says, "You silly girl, don't you understand that anybody who is as famous and as important as Hamilton is going to attract scandal like this? It's just really nothing. You shouldn't think anything of it. It's just the kind of thing that happens. It wouldn't have happened if you'd married into a family less near the sun, but then you would have missed the pride, the pleasure, the nameless satisfactions." It's not much comfort to Eliza.

Alison Stewart: The last hundred pages of the books, they really feature Eliza herself. It's after Hamilton is killed in a duel with Aaron Burr, she finds herself in great debt. She manages to get out of the debt, and later in life, she decides, "I'm going to have Hamilton's papers published, especially all the help he gave George Washington." She has a really, really hard time getting others to agree with her. Why was it so hard for her to have Hamilton remembered this way?

Amanda Vaill: After Hamilton's death, he is succeeded by a Virginia dynasty, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, all of whom were from the unopposing political party. They all opposed Hamilton. They opposed his policies and his vision. His name was mud, literally. The simple act of trying to keep his memory alive was itself a rebellious act. The act of trying to reclaim his position as the author of Washington's Farewell Address was a completely different thing, because Washington, as the founding president of this country, was like god. The Farewell Address, which he had asked Hamilton to write for him, the documentation of their conversations about this was all in Hamilton's papers.

This was, however, considered heresy to say that Washington had not written the Farewell Address. The Farewell Address was like the 10 Commandments coming down to Moses on the mountain. You couldn't say that he didn't write them, but Hamilton had written them to Washington's specifications. Eliza knew because she was in the room when he was doing it, and Hamilton asked her help. The correspondence had been sequestered, taken away, given to a Federalist politician, who kept all those papers in his safe and wouldn't give them back to Eliza when she demanded them. She had to go to court and sue him in order to get them.

Not only did she have to sue him, she had to sue one of Hamilton's executors, who had refused to demand the papers from this politician. Elizabeth said, "Well, fine, you won't to help me? I'll sue you, too." She did, and she got the papers. The fact is that when she gave all those papers, when she sold them to the Library of Congress, all of those papers included the Farewell Address papers. Washington's heirs were horrified that they would be available for anyone to read, and lots of people would know that maybe Washington hadn't written every single word of this Farewell Address, he just approved it, and that Hamilton had written it.

Washington's heir caught up rough. He made a huge protest about it. Eliza's son, John Hamilton, tried to smooth things over, and he tried to apologize for his mother's temerity in doing this, and said, "This is the way that women do things." Eliza has always stood for honesty and clarity and candor. It was she who asked Hamilton to take the last court case of his life, which was a case involving press freedom and the use of truth as a defense against libel. Although he lost this case, the principle of truth against libel was adopted in the New York Constitution the year after his death, because the legislators had seen his trial testimony and his arguments. They had seen what he'd argued at Eliza's behest.

She was a woman who believed in the power of truth, and I think that's a very remarkable thing about her. We don't know very much about her political opinions, but we know that. I think that's a really important thing about her. In a case like this, it's easy to wish that you could show how the Schuyler sisters influenced this or that piece of legislation or helped to enact this or that treaty or influenced this man to do that. You can't do that much of that with this material. What you can do is you can see the landscape that they saw of in the founding era from their point of view, and you can see what they were able to do with it.

Alison Stewart: Is there anything I haven't asked you about the book that you think is very important for people to know?

Amanda Vaill: When I started this book, in the prologue to this book, which starts with Hamilton's death and deathbed, Eliza and Angelica are really pushed to the side at that time. That is really what has happened to them in history, not just to them, but to women generally. From the history of the Founding Era, women had just been pushed out of the picture. I wanted to restore them to the center of this story, and not to ignore the history that we know. I wanted to flip the telescope. I wanted to see the women and the women's story up close, and I wanted the context that they were living in to be seen as something of a remove.

I wanted to make this be the story of the way that women do things, but within the context of a real life, the Revolutionary era. It's one of the things that made the book as substantial as it is. There's a lot of history in this book. You needed to understand what it is that they were doing, and to understand the people that they were interacting with, but at all times, I wanted to keep those women front and center, and I hope I did that.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution. My guest has been Amanda Vaill. Amanda, thank you so much for all of your time.

Amanda Vaill: Thank you, thank you.

Alison Stewart: Thanks again to Amanda. The book is called Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution. It has so much information in it about the Revolutionary War and the Schuylers. It's a really great read. Post production for Full Bio was done by Jordan Lauf. It's engineered by Jason Isaac, and written by me.