Angelica Schuyler was the eldest child in a Dutch-descended family in Albany, New York, which rose quickly to prominence during the decades of imperial turmoil that followed the Seven Years’ War. Marrying an ambitious but unknown British-born merchant in 1777, against her parents’ wishes, Schuyler crafted an important role for herself in a world shaped by overlapping networks of kinship and commerce. Neither a “republican mother” nor a “female politician,” Schuyler was a high-flying dynasty-builder who pursued her own idea of her family’s interests across a patchwork of social worlds, from Boston merchants to Parisian aristocrats, London gamblers to New York matrons. In doing so, she helped forge the connections and circulations that made the new American state work, placing the Schuylers and their allies at the centre of federal power during the crucial years of constitutional ratification and the early Washington administration. This project uses Schuyler’s colourful and highly mobile life as a lens through which to analyse the structural interrelation of politics, political culture, and political economy in the late eighteenth-century Atlantic world. It argues that the gendered work of making families and networks was central to the epochal projects of revolutionary class-formation and state-building in this era.
Tom Cutterham is an Associate Professor of United States History at the University of Birmingham. His first book, Gentlemen Revolutionaries: Power and Justice in the New American Republic, was published in 2017, and his work has also appeared in Enterprise & Society, American Political Thought, the Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies, the Journal of Historical Sociology, and the William and Mary Quarterly. He has two articles forthcoming in the Journal of the Early Republic, and is currently co-Investigator with Peter Hill on the AHRC-funded networking project, “Reframing the Age of Revolutions.”
