ANGELICA

MOLLY BEER | W. W. NORTON | 2025

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

A woman’s life in Revolution…

Few women of the American Revolution have come through 250 years of US history with such clarity and color as Angelica Schuyler Church, who occupied the red-hot center of the movement to forge a new nation.

Angelica Church was more than Alexander Hamilton’s “saucy” sister-in-law, the Marquis de Lafayette’s “amiable friend,” or the heart of Thomas Jefferson’s “charming coterie” of artists and salonnières in Paris. Her transatlantic network of important friends spanned the political spectrum of her time and place.

Where was her place? Born Engeltje in the Dutch-speaking colonial outpost of Albany, Angelica would have many homes over the course of a life flung far and wide by war and circumstances. From Albany to New York, Boston, Newport, Philadelphia, Yorktown, Paris, London, and even the western frontier, from homes grand and simple, Angelica plied her significant influence for the sake of her friends, family, and country.

“What are Kings and Queens to an American who has seen a Washington,” Angelica wrote home from England, where she lived as a prominent American for more than a decade, facilitating diplomacy and enacting the post-war peace.

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.

Women’s roles in history are so often lost to dust and time. But Angelica’s love and labor shine through in this vivid telling of a charismatic woman navigating the American Revolution, the turbulent years of the U.S. Founding, and the creation of a nation premised on the notion that E pluribus unum.