What "Hamilton" Gets Right (and Wrong) About the Real Schuyler Sisters
In Hamilton, which drops on Disney+ on July 3, the Schuyler sisters are played by Phillipa Soo, Renée Elise Goldsberry, and Jasmine Cephas Jones.
The real Angelica, Eliza, and Peggy Schuyler were born to a wealthy family in Albany, and all had relationships with Alexander Hamilton.
Here's what you need to know about the real-life inspirations for the characters.
The Schuyler sisters were looking for a mind at work. Angelica, Eliza and Peggy are an integral part of Hamilton, Lin Manuel Miranda's blockbuster musical which arrives to Disney+ on Friday, July 3. Fittingly, the New York socialites were a significant part of the real Alexander Hamilton's life.
Hamilton married one sister, Elizabeth, in 1780. However, he kept up lifelong correspondences with the other two Schuyler sisters, Angelica and Margarita (a.k.a. Peggy). As Hamilton depicts, the Founding Father's epistolary relationship with his sister-in-law, Angelica, had an undeniable flirtatious undertone.
In the movie version of Hamilton, the Schuyler sisters are played by three utter powerhouses. Jasmine Cephas-Jones has a memorable turn as Peggy, the trio's youngest, before transforming into another character for Act II. Philippa Soo stuns as Eliza, Hamilton's wife who reckons with his infidelity in the song "Burn." And Renée Elise Goldsberry masters Angelica's warp-speed rap in "Satisfied," meant to be a reflection of her mind's pace.
"That's her conversational speed. That's how fast she thinks. You really get the sense that Angelica's the smartest person in the room, and she reads Hamilton within a moment of meeting him," Miranda said of "Satisfied."
This is what you need to know about the true story of the real Schuyler sisters, and how their lives relate to (and at times, contradict) the action of Hamilton. Let's "rewind, rewind" back to 1756, when Angelica, the eldest, was born in Albany, New York...
The Schuyler sisters were born into a prominent New York family.
In the song "Satisfied," Angelica sings, "I'm a girl in a world in which my only job is to marry rich." Here, she's referencing her family's social status. The sisters' father was Philip Schuyler—a general in the Continental Army, senator, and rival of Aaron Burr. Their mother was Catherine Van Rensselaer Schuyler.
Both were descended from aristocratic land-holding Dutch families who settled in Albany, and both were very wealthy (or, as Hamilton puts it, "loaded"). Their home, Schuyler Mansion, sat on 125 total acres, and Philip owned 20,000 acres total.
Recently, the Schuyler family's history has been reexamined through a modern perspective. The mayor of Albany, NY announced a statue of Philip Schuyler would be removed from the front of City Hall, where it had stood for over 100 years. Why? Because Schuyler, according to the Times Union, was the city's largest slave owner.
There were two Schuyler sisters that didn't make Hamilton.
Catharine Van Rensselaer Schuyler gave birth to fifteen children (yep, 15!), eight of whom survived into adulthood—five girls, and three boys. Angelica's line about not having any brothers in "Satisfied?" Also not true.
Angelica, Peggy, and Eliza's youngest sisters weren't featured in Hamilton, but they had interesting lives of their own. A few fun facts: When Cornelia Schuyler Morton's (1776–1808) father didn't approve of her suitor, Washington Morton, Cornelia jumped out of a two-story window into his arms and eloped with him. Catherine Schuyler Malcom Cochrane (1781–1857) was born on the same day as Angelica, but 25 years later.
Angelica was already married to her husband, John Church, when she met Hamilton.
And she was the mother of two toddlers at the time, too. But that doesn't mean there wasn't a love triangle between Angelica, Eliza, and Hamilton, 'cause historians definitely think that might have happened. More on that later.
In 1777, at the age of 21, Angelica married John Barker Church, a Brit masquerading in North America under the alias John Carter. According to Ron Chernow in Alexander Hamilton, rumors claimed Church had changed his name to avoid the aftermath of a duel, and to evade creditors. While in America, he amassed a fortune dealing arms to the colonists and the French—supporting armies that were fighting his own king.
The elopement was not approved by Angelica's family, with her father writing to a friend, "The match was exceedingly disagreeable to me." Even Hamilton's biographer, Chernow, called it a "strange choice," characterizing him as lacking in Hamilton's intellect and civic duty. But he did have something else she wanted: Money and social connections.
While married to Church, Angelica spent years traveling back and forth between Britain and the United States. She spent her adulthood cultivating a rich social circle—like the Prince of Wales (later King George IV) in London, and Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and the French aristocrat Marquis de Lafayette in Paris.
Angelica and Church had eight children together. Later in life, Angelica relocated to New York to join her family, once again. They settled in what is now Allegheny County and Genesee County, New York, and founded a town called Angelica (casual). She died in 1814 at age 58.
Angelica's husband has a spooky connection to Hamilton.
Weird fact: John Church dueled Aaron Burr five years before his brother-in-law, Alexander Hamilton, did—and lost his life. Church also supplied Alexander and his son, Philip, with the guns they would use in their own ill-fated duels.
Yep, Angelica and Hamilton exchanged semi-flirtatious letters.
So, back to Hamilton. Is it true that Angelica and Hamilton had long-standing crushes on each other? Certainly, they had a "friendship of unusual ardor," as Hamilton's biographer, Ron Chernow, wrote in Alexander Hamilton. "It seems plausible that Hamilton would have proposed to Angelica, not to Eliza, if the older sister had been eligible. Angelica was more Hamilton's counterpart than Eliza."
Chernow characterizes their correspondence as "buoyant and flirtatious," remarking that "it is hard to escape the impression that his life was sometimes a curious ménage à trois with two sisters who were only a year apart."
An example of their flirtation? Angelica wrote to her sister, "If you were as generous as the old Romans, you would lend him to me for a little while." In Hamilton, Angelica dwells upon a comma in one of Hamilton's letters. He had written "My dearest, Angelica," implying that Angelica was his dearest.
In real life, Angelica was the one who deployed the curious comma placement. She wrote in 1787 letter, "Indeed my dear, Sir" prompting Hamilton to respond, "There was a most critical comma in your last letter. It is my interest that it should have been designed; but I presume it was accidental. Unriddle this if you can. The proof that you do it rightly may be given by the omission or repetition of the same mistake in your next."
Eliza and Hamilton married in 1780, after a short courtship.
Eliza and Hamilton reconnected in 1780 at a party thrown for George Washington's staff in Morristown, NJ, after first meeting two years prior at Schuyler Mansion in Albany. They began exchanging letters, and were married that same year. She was 24; he was 23.
Hamilton was quite the flirt: "Immediately after dinner, I stole from a crowd of company to a solitary walk to be at leisure to think of you...you are certainly a little sorceress and have bewitched me,” he wrote to Eliza, before they married. However, their marriage would be marked by tumult.
They had eight children together.
But Hamilton focuses only on their eldest son, Philip. That's because his life tragically foreshadowed his father's: Both died in a duel in Weehawken, NJ. Philip died in 1801 at age 19; Hamilton, three years later, just under 50 years old.
After Hamilton's death, Eliza found herself the single mother of seven children—some, very troubled. Philip's death deeply affected Angelica, the couple's eldest daughter. She suffered a mental breakdown, and stopped speaking to anyone, except the ghost of her older brother. She remained only "intermittently lucid" throughout her life, according to Chernow.
She endured Hamilton's very public affair with Maria Reynolds.
It's unclear whether Hamilton had a real-life affair with Angelica, or if theirs was limited to a "flirtationship." However, between the years of 1791 and 1792, Hamilton did have an affair with Maria Reynolds. Eliza and their children were in Albany, NY at the time.
To counteract rumors, Hamilton confessed to the dalliance in a 100-page document called the Reynolds Pamphlet, published in 1797.
"My real crime is an amorous connection with his wife, for a considerable time with his privity and connivance, if not originally brought on by a combination between the husband and wife with the design to extort money from me," he wrote.
Eliza remained married to Hamilton, and eventually forgave him.
Eliza probably burned all of Hamilton's letters.
Hamilton ends with Eliza delivering a monologue about how she continued her husband's legacy. Eliza lived 50 years after her husband's death, passing away at the age of 97 without remarrying.
During that time, she gathered evidence of her husband's accomplishments, which Chernow later used to write his biography. However, she may have destroyed other evidence. According to the Library of Congress website, Eliza may have burned Hamilton's personal letters, as Martha Washington allegedly did with her husband, George's, letters. All of her letters to Hamilton are missing from the archive.
She honored her husband's legacy in another meaningful way. In 1806, she founded the New York Orphan Asylum Society, the city's first private orphanage, serving children in need. The orphanage still exists today, and serves close to 5,000 kids and families each year.
Finally, Peggy had an interesting life, people! Here's what happened to her.
Justice for Peggy! She's barely included in Hamilton, but her life—like those of her sisters'—intersected with many "rooms where it happened." While living at home, Peggy witnessed her father’s work as George Washington's spy master during the Revolutionary War. The YA book Hamilton and Peggy! A Revolutionary Friendship gives Peggy the interiority she didn't receive in the musical.
Author L.M. Elliott says Peggy was the talk of the town. “There was nothing really left of her in her own handwriting, but a lot of people talked about her,” Elliott told Indy Week. “They called her a ‘wicked wit.’ She was ‘endowed with a superior mind and a rare accuracy in judgment of men and things.’"
In 1783, Peggy, then 25, married her distant cousin, Stephen Van Rensselaer, then 19. It was quite a match: Stephen owned 1/40 of the land in New York, and is ranked as one of the richest Americans ever. He went on to found Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
The couple had three children, only one of whom lived to adulthood. Sadly, unlike her sister Eliza, who lived to 97, Peggy died at 42. Maybe Miranda can do Peggy justice in his next hip-hop musical.
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