If Eliza swung high enough, she could nearly touch the branches. When Angelica scolded, she pulled back on the ropes and swung higher.
If she’d looked out from the treetops, she could have seen her mother directing the family slaves as they planted lilac bushes along the new foundation. Mother had promised them a strawberry garden, where they could eat their fill, and the girls had a great swing in a tree on the lawns, which Prince had made for them.
The Schuyler family spent the summer of 1765 not at the Pastures, but camping on Eliza’s father’s new lands in Saratoga. They lived, army style, in roomy canvas shelters that snapped in the breezes, while work was going on all around them. Father oversaw the laborers, who brought down great virgin pines that shuddered and fell, and the men next raised up a sawmill and planed the logs into timber with which Mother said they would build a home. It would have two stories and such pretty flowers.
For Angelica, Eliza, and Peggy, this frontier plantation was a second childhood home, just as much as the grand riverfront compound in Albany, and the family increasingly spent all but the harshest months of the winter at the edge of the wilderness in Saratoga.
Eliza was nine in 1766, the summer when the house at Saratoga was completed. By now her father was a rich businessman with contracts running the ferry trade from Albany to New York City and on his private fleet of schooners, and he would soon be promoted to the rank of colonel. After Stephen Van Rensselaer and James Duane, both relations of her mother, Philip Schuyler was the third-richest man in the Upper Hudson, and all around them at Saratoga that wealth was growing.
These were working estates, where much of the family’s food and income was produced, running to large acreages, and dozens of tenants and slaves provided the grand landowning families like the Schuylers with the income that allowed them to live like the colonial aristocracy of which they considered themselves part.
The privilege did not go uncontested. Periodic uprisings, by tenants and, later, by slaves, preoccupied men like Philip Schuyler throughout New York and New Jersey. That spring, the plantation owners were especially edgy after an upstart Westchester County manorial tenant named William Prendergast incited a rent war that unsettled estates all along the Hudson River as far north as Albany. A thousand angry farmers or more stormed the countryside, demanding that the doors of the landlords’ debt prisons be thrown open, and at the estate of Kitty’s father, John Van Rensselaer, fisticuffs gave way to bullets. At Rensselaerwyck, the Albany County sheriff, Harmanus Schuyler, laid siege to a farmhouse, and large landowners scrambled to the frontier to assess the mood among their own distant tenants.
The Schuyler plantation at Saratoga was at the crossroads that summer of several especially important land patents, many of which were owned by the Schuyler family’s relations. Eliza and her sisters listened quietly in front of the fireplace on cool summer nights that year, while the grown-ups talked passionately and sometimes angrily of danger from their tenants and, increasingly, about bitter politics. Eliza’s Van Cortlandt, Van Rensselaer, and Livingston cousins all made the trip upriver to Saratoga to stay with the family in late June and to check on property. Eliza and her sisters, along with their constant playmate Anne MacVicar, raced to meet younger cousins on the docks as the sloops arrived from downriver. Twelve-year-old Mary Watts, a china-doll beauty and a De Lancey cousin, was one of those arrivals, and she may have come alone for the summer because her family was already quarreling with the Livingston relations. Angelica and Eliza also became fast friends sometime this summer, or one soon after, with their cousin Kitty Livingston, from a New Jersey branch of the family, and Eliza and Kitty sent each other gossipy letters as teenagers.
There was a great deal to discuss urgently in the political realm, and it wasn’t only the prospect of revolting tenants that had the grand landowners like Eliza’s father so agitated. Resentment toward the British crown was also part of what the adults discussed in the evenings. Eliza heard terms now like the “Stamp Act” and understood that the new law made her father and her uncles angry. Eliza also heard now words like “tyranny” and “taxes.” Soon, the tenants were not the only ones beginning to murmur of revolution. Some of her visiting kinsmen talked of something now called the Sons of Liberty, a secret movement whose motto was “No taxation without representation.”
William Prendergast would have to pay for his treacherous rent war. All the visitors agreed with Philip Schuyler and Eliza’s angry Van Rensselaer relations. Prendergast stood trial at the end of that summer, facing down a court whose judges were primarily landowners.
Unsurprisingly, the landlords found against a tenant revolution. The sentence, when it came down, was gruesome: Prendergast was ordered “hanged by the neck, and then shall be cut down alive, and his entrails and his privy members shall be cut from his body, and shall be burned in his sight, and his head shall be cut off, and his body shall be divided in four parts, and shall be disposed of at the king’s pleasure.” This was the price of rebellion against the British crown a decade before the American Revolution.
Angelica, who had been invited to New York City at the end of the summer for a stay with new British governor Sir Henry Moore, his wife, and their teenage daughter, Henrietta, had a front-row seat for some of the drama of the Prendergast trial. The wife of William Prendergast, a woman so beautiful that jurors at her husband’s trial were sternly cautioned not to let that influence proceedings, roared up to the front courtyard of the governor’s mansion on a steed and pleaded with Sir Henry to commute her husband’s terrible death sentence. Angelica watched agog with excitement. Sir Henry, moved as much by Mehitable Prendergast’s beauty as by her speech, gallantly overturned the verdict and immediately issued William Prendergast a full pardon.
It was a disastrous misstep with the great landowners of New York. The governor’s pardon turned William Prendergast into a tenant folk hero, fueled resentful talk of counter-revolt, and unleashed fresh complaints about years of British mismanagement among the wealthy of the colony, including Philip Schuyler. The governor had just unwittingly helped to light one of the fuses of the coming revolution.
It was another minor revolt, though, that captured Angelica’s imagination that fall, during her first grown-up visit to New York City. The governor’s wife doted on the ten-year-old social butterfly, and for her part Angelica idolized the governor’s haughty and impulsive daughter. The stylish seventeen-year-old Henrietta promptly added a dose of great excitement to Angelica’s trip when, disobeying the dictatorial commands of her father, she climbed over the garden wall and ran off with a young captain in one of the society scandals of the season. Her impulsive actions would forever define Angelica’s idea of the romantic.
When Angelica returned from her city sojourn, the other girls jealously and sometimes suspiciously noted the change. When Eliza ran across the lawns down to the river to meet the boats, Angelica cringed with embarrassment and would no longer race her. Angelica practiced mincing daintily down the gravel path and lifting her skirts above the dust like Henrietta instead. Angelica sat primly on the edge of the seat when company came and fussed in the mornings longer with her bonnet ribbons. This or that was all the New York fashion, she solemnly informed her sisters. She shrugged off Eliza’s urgent whispers to hurry or Papa would be cross. Eliza and Anne MacVicar still joked together decades later over “Angelica’s early air of Elegance & dignity when she first returned from New York.” When Kitty and Philip Schuyler noticed the change, they decided it was time to send both the older girls off to boarding school. They had on their hands budding young ladies. Those early airs and graces would need to be honed and disciplined at school if in a few years’ time the girls were to become eligible young brides and, as Philip Schuyler insisted should be the case, obedient daughters.
Eliza may have gone away to school earlier than the fall of 1768, but she was definitely in New York City by the autumn of the year she turned eleven. Mrs. Grant, a fussy, respectable widow living on Hanover Square in Lower Manhattan, agreed to board “two of the children for 50 a year, two pounds of tea, one of loaf sugar each, their stockings & shoes mended, but new work must be paid for the making.” Their father, as a man on the rise in the world of New York politics now, was in and out of the city, but Eliza’s parents primarily entrusted the girls to the care of her mother’s cousins, Elizabeth and John Livingston, who soon reported back to the girls’ parents that “the young ladies are in perfect health and improve in their education in a manner beyond belief, and are grown to such a degree that all the tucks in their gowns had to be let out some time ago.”
The education of wealthy colonial girls like Eliza and her sisters had a clear and definite focus: that of training young women in the social graces and household skills that would make them desirable wives and estate mistresses. Angelica and Eliza already knew how to read. Aunt Gertrude had seen to that and had insisted that the girls practice reading Shakespeare aloud while she did her needlework. Music was an essential element of a family’s private entertainment, and all three of the Schuyler girls learned to play the English “guittar,” although Eliza had to admit that her sisters were more skillful, no matter how long she practiced. Peggy was the one with real musical talent.
Writing and penmanship, especially, set clever upper-class girls apart from the middle classes. It was expected that, like their mother, Angelica, Eliza, and Peggy would someday manage large household accounts, so clear, neat penmanship and basic arithmetic were important skills. Very young girls learned their first numbers and letters by embroidering samplers, and needlework was a universal skill among ladies. Mastery of the subtler points of grammar and spelling, though, was considered particularly “elegant,” and only a young woman who was an unusually “fine scholar” would consistently spell correctly.
In the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson would write a letter to his eleven-year-old daughter, Polly, offering a glimpse of the education of girls in elite colonial circles. He advised:
With respect to the distribution of your time, the following is what I should approve:
From 8. to 10. o’clock practise music.
From 10. to 1. dance one day and draw another.
From 1. to 2. draw on the day you dance, and write a letter the next day.
From 3. to 4. read French.
From 4. to 5. exercise yourself in music.
From 5. to till bedtime, read English, write [i.e., practice penmanship], &c.
. . . Write also one letter a week. . . . Take care that you never spell a word wrong. Always before you write a word, consider how it is spelt, and, if you do not remember it, turn to a dictionary. It produces great praise to a lady to spell well.
The education the Schuyler girls received closely mirrored that which Thomas Jefferson wanted for his daughter a decade later, and Angelica flourished as a young scholar and bloomed as a fine young lady.
Eliza struggled. She was never good at spelling, and she found writing awkward. She was self-conscious of her letters. Angelica danced more prettily. The French master despaired of Eliza’s accent and how she stumbled on her verbs, while Angelica chattered like a native. Angelica found her introduction to New York society thrilling. Eliza, whose great talent was the careful, intricate embroidery that Angelica didn’t have the patience for, longed to be home in the country.
Boarding school was only one half of the Schuyler girls’ education, though. Eliza and her sisters were caught between two worlds, and each would have to decide which of those worlds they would make their lives in. The Schuyler girls belonged to a merchant family with deep roots in the Hudson, and their parents anticipated that all their daughters would marry someone from a similar background. Indeed, they might reasonably have expected that their daughters would marry into an extended network of family cousins and second cousins. So Eliza was also educated in the life of the frontier and equipped by her parents to succeed in building and managing an agricultural and entrepreneurial estate on the edge of the wilderness, and it was here that she shone. Eliza doled out her pin money carefully, on sensible, industrious girlhood purchases: a new set of strings for the guitar, a bit of fine muslin for her embroidery. Angelica was perfectly capable of blowing her entire allowance on a whim if a bit of finery in a window caught her eye. Eliza, a precocious little treasurer, shook her head at her sister’s impulsiveness, but there was no shadow between the girls. Angelica kissed her sister fondly and turned to her ribbons.
During the girls’ summers home in Saratoga, Kitty and Philip attended to the other half of their daughters’ education. Eliza lived for those summers. She wanted nothing more than to be outdoors and especially on horseback. She loved riding fast in the open countryside and the feeling of flying. She never minded dusty boots and did not always remember to wear a bonnet. Had they been living in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Angelica would have been Jane Bennet and Eliza, Eliza.
Philip Schuyler was a forbidding man, but the sight of his outdoorsy younger daughter made him smile, and he knew that if there were one of his girls he wanted with him on a military campaign, it was not the fussy and fine Miss Angelica but her tough-minded tomboy sister. In the summer of 1770, when Eliza was approaching her thirteenth birthday, Philip Schuyler planned to attend the grand Indian council of the Six Nations, where fifty Iroquois sachems, from all the clans of all the nations, would gather at a site two days’ travel farther west even than Schenectady. They would ride for days, through the great pine forests, and a young girl would need to be a steady horsewoman. When her father wanted to speak to her, Eliza’s heart sank. What had she forgotten? Her father did not have patience for disobedience and insisted on military order. When instead he asked if she thought she were old enough for an adventure, she hugged Papa and promised to be as brave as any soldier. Even the stern Philip Schuyler laughed. She was plainest of his three daughters, but when her dark eyes lit up with excitement, she turned into a beauty.
The grand council meeting was in July, and Eliza packed her satchel with the discipline of any general. She rolled her needles and some sturdy thread into a bit of cloth, tied neatly with a ribbon. There would be no time or place for heavy books, and anyhow Eliza didn’t care about reading. She cared about her riding gloves and extra bootlaces.
Eliza and her father, accompanied by at least one household slave, would travel by barge and then by horseback days through pine barrens and rough countryside. As they journeyed west along the Mohawk River, they almost certainly stopped overnight at Johnson Hall, the estate of Sir William Johnson, where Eliza met Sir William’s elegant and cloistered teenage Anglo daughters and perhaps some of Sir William’s half-native children. Sir William Johnson was also going to the grand council, and Eliza and her father probably made the final stages of the journey with Sir William and his entourage. Philip Schuyler went as both a major landowner and an elected member of the New York Assembly. He and Sir William joined more than two thousand representatives of the Iroquois and Cherokee nations and a delegation of British officers.
Eliza understood that Sir William was an important figure at these meetings. The natives trusted him, her father explained, to keep fair records of the council agreements with the settlers. Agreements were recorded on wampum belts among the Iroquois, and each design in colored shell- and beadwork told the story of a conversation. To accept the gift of wampum meant to accept an agreement as binding, and frontier girls learned to string wampum as readily as they could work samplers. Eliza, an especially accomplished needlewoman, made beautiful pieces of wampum that drew admiration.
Council meetings were exciting and deeply political, and it was not typical for a young woman like Eliza to attend them. If Philip Schuyler had had a son old enough, it is unlikely that Eliza would have accompanied her father. Her brother John, however, was only five, and her newest baby brother, Philip Jr., was still a toddler.
As she and her father arrived at council, all around Eliza were Indian families setting up camp along the banks of the river. All day, there were long speeches with debating. At family meals on the late summer nights, the Iroquois women pounded out summer corn, and boys pulled wriggling fish from the Hudson.
Her father was well known and well regarded among the Iroquois, and so Eliza tried to remember to act like a lady. She tried to be like the Iroquois girls, who listened carefully to everything that was said at council. The Schuyler family’s political ties with the native clans went back already generations, and it was Eliza’s first serious introduction into that world of politics. Philip Schuyler explained now to his daughter why some matters were easy and others were so difficult and contentious.
Philip Schuyler also explained that Eliza herself was part of an old network of ties and alliances. Her father and her grandfather had both been initiated into the Mohawk and Onondaga tribes as honorary members. Now, the sachems welcomed Eliza in a naming ceremony. With her brown hair tied in braids like that of the Indian girls, she stood tall and quiet when the tribal elder in his robes and feathers placed a string of beads around her neck. Eliza was now a member of the Iroquois family, and she was proud of her Indian name, which her father said meant “One of Us.” Eliza liked the idea that she belonged to the frontier and to the Onondaga. Eliza was a girl of the woods, who could scramble over rocks as fast as any of the Mohawk girls, and who learned to speak some of their language. Philip Schuyler knew, but probably did not explain yet to Eliza, that these rituals of allegiance might someday preserve the safety of his daughter and her family on the frontier. He knew that relations with the Iroquois were dangerously fragile.
In New York City and at school again come autumn, Eliza felt the stark contrast between her two worlds, and was homesick. The Schuyler girls were too young to stroll across the Kissing Bridge or dance at the Governor’s Ball in June, but there were “routs,” where Eliza practiced dancing with the other young people from the colonial upper classes. She tried not to wriggle as a servant teased and pulled her hair into a dramatic updo for parties, and she learned how to wear high-heeled satin shoes on cobblestone streets without spraining an ankle. She wore, in the fashion of the day, satin and brocade dresses cut low enough to raise modern eyebrows and tucked bits of fine lace into her swelling teenage bosom in cold drawing rooms during the winter. On Sundays, she and Angelica sat primly in a family pew at Trinity Church, alongside their Van Cortlandt and Livingston cousins, attended by the slave their father had sent with them. The family owned at least five slaves during these years, including Eliza’s mother’s favorite, Prince, who stood behind Kitty’s chair every night at dinner; additionally, there were Cutt, John, Peter, and Bett. The girls were not alone in having an African servant. Slaves made up roughly a quarter of the population of New York City in the fall of 1770.
Before long, their younger sister Peggy joined the two older girls at school in the city, and each girl had her own family role and personality. Angelica was the most sophisticated and socially ambitious of the three sisters, and she thrilled to the romances she discovered in novels and poetry. “A very Pretty Young Lady,” as one visitor noted emphatically, she looked the most like their mother, who had been a beauty. Angelica was also a flirt and obsessed with the social graces and accomplishments that would make her a fine lady. Peggy, on the other hand, was dark-haired, plump, and, some said, the prettiest of all the three sisters, with a sarcastic sense of humor that intimidated those less clever and less witty. She possessed the lion’s share of family musical talent, and played the guitar with real skill and sang moving ballads in a clear soprano. She also inherited her father’s imperious demeanor, and she and Philip Schuyler clashed on more than one occasion. She was his willful child and, with her saucy tongue, his most exasperating daughter.
Eliza was the classic middle sister and the peacemaker. She took after her father, with a strong-boned face a bit too thin and angular to be called beautiful on a young woman. She had an enviable figure and a healthy, athletic build from hopping over fences and riding horses fast. But she also had a stubborn independence and a native modesty that made it easy to overlook her amid her flashier sisters. Eliza was, someone who knew her said, “a Brunette with the most good-natured, lively dark eyes . . . which threw a beam of good temper and Benevolence over her whole countenance.” Angelica was the socialite, and Peggy could be a bit of a laddish rebel. Eliza was a quiet force who kept the three sisters together.
By 1773, the Schuyler girls’ formal educations—such as they were—were over. New York City, however, was increasingly where Eliza’s parents and her family spent time during the 1770s, thanks to Philip Schuyler’s burgeoning political and military career. When the family was at home in Albany or Saratoga in the summers, handsome young captains were also increasingly frequent visitors, as the word spread that Philip Schuyler had a particularly fine wine cellar and three entertaining and lively daughters. Social conventions on the frontier were famously relaxed, and Kitty and Philip Schuyler understood from personal experience how one thing might lead to another and how carts can come before horses. Philip Schuyler cast a discerning, fatherly eye over the callers, and on more than one occasion showed a young gentleman to the end of the wharf, pointing in the direction of downriver. Visitors to the Pastures, after all, might fall as easily in love with the family’s wealth as with one of his daughters, and Philip was wary of these bounty hunters. His concern was not unwarranted. Officers remarked in their private journals that Philip Schuyler lived like a prince in a veritable woodland palace, and his property ran to the tens of thousands of acres. With three increasingly boy-crazy country girls and, by 1773, three young sons now to contend with—John, Philip Jr., and baby Rensselaer—Kitty Schuyler was feeling beleaguered and understandably tired.
Romance was on the mind of all three of the Schuyler sisters. In the summer of 1766, their cousin Mary Watts had come to stay for the Saratoga season. Then, Mary—known to everyone just as Polly—had been a rare, “china doll” beauty. Now “Lovely Polly,” as she was known, was nineteen and more striking even than she had been as a girl. She was also high-strung, snappy, and snobbish. “Rich and nervously irritable” was how one person who knew Mary put it, and now, it seemed, she had found a perfect partner: Colonel Sir John Johnson, the careless and randy son and heir of Philip Schuyler’s friend Sir William. John quietly jettisoned his common-law wife, a local working-class Dutch girl, packed off their two small children, and proposed to Mary Watts. The Schuyler girls found the idea of their glamorous cousin marrying a baronet very romantic.
The wedding took place at the end of June in New York City, and in July the Schuyler girls watched the river eagerly each morning for the newlyweds’ arrival. What would Lady Mary wear? How long would the bride stay in Albany on her wedding visit to their common aunt, Judith Van Rensselaer? When would she and Sir John call on Father? In their bedroom at the Pastures, the girls debated these fine points, and when Lady Mary and Sir John arrived in Albany, Mary was pleased to be given a celebrity reception.
Already, however, family tensions were brewing. Talk of revolt and tyranny and taxes still occupied the gentlemen in the public houses and around the fireplace after dinner. Increasingly, cousin Mary’s new husband was staking out a position that placed her on a collision course with kinsmen like Philip Schuyler and Aunt Judith.
When, in the year that followed, Sir William Johnson died and Sir John inherited, the newlyweds found themselves at the center of a powerful political network, just at the moment a new war was on the horizon. This time, the war would not be between the British and the French but between the British and the “American” settlers. Everyone in the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys would have to choose sides in the coming bloody conflict.
Philip Schuyler already knew that, when the time came, he would throw in his lot with the Sons of Liberty and the patriots, and he was already laying down the contacts that would make him an important Revolutionary War spymaster. Eliza and Angelica would act as his eyes and ears in the Hudson Valley and gather sensitive military intelligence to forward to General Schuyler. They weren’t spies exactly. But they weren’t not spies either.
Behind enemy lines, their recently married cousin Mary Watts would get drawn into espionage, as well. She, too, would have to choose sides and decide whom to spy for.