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Angelica Schuyler Church: American Aristocrat in Revolutionary London

Department of History research project: Dr Tom Cutterham

I encountered Angelica only obliquely while researching my first book - as the elder sister of Elizabeth Schuyler, who married Alexander Hamilton at the family's Albany mansion in December 1780.

But as I stumbled across snippets of Angelica's own life--her precipitate marriage to an unsuitable man, her voyage to Europe, and her friendships with Thomas Jefferson, Charles James Fox, and the Marquis de Lafayette, I started to find myself working on a new project: her biography. Angelica's English husband, John Church (a.k.a. John Carter), connects her closely to the world of transatlantic finance, as well as to British politics in the turbulent 1790s. But Angelica in her own right was a passionate writer, thinker, friend, and activist, as well as a daughter, sister, wife, and mother. I think she has things to tell us about the transatlantic bourgeoisie in an era of revolution, and about the international connections of a fledgling aristocracy in the newborn United States.

Principal Investigator

  • Tom Cutterham

    Project lead

    Department of History

    Biographical and contact information for Dr Tom Cutterham, Associate Professor of United States History, at the Department of History, University of Birmingham.