In a man’s letters, you know, Madam, his soul lies naked . . . whatever passes within him is there shown undisguised . . . nothing is inverted, nothing distorted. . . .
This is the pleasure of corresponding with a friend, where doubt and distrust have no place, and every thing is said as it is thought . . . I have indeed concealed nothing from you, nor do I expect ever to repent of having thus opened my heart.
—Samuel Johnson (author, journalist, wit) to Mrs. Thrale, October 27, 1777
WE HAVE ONLY TWO LETTERS FROM ALEXANDER Hamilton to the youngest of the famed Schuyler sisters trio—his introduction and playful plea for Peggy’s help in courting Eliza, plus a long postscript attached to a note from her sister right after their marriage. But scattershot throughout his love letters to Eliza are passing references and tidbits of gossip about his soon-to-be little sister, and fond, teasing messages he asks Eliza to pass along to Peggy. Pieced together, they reveal much about the younger Schuyler’s high-spirited personality and the quick, intuitive, and affectionate friendship between Peggy and Hamilton. He almost immediately began referring to her as “my Peggy.”
To walk through Hamilton’s letters is to stroll a lush verbal garden of the most glorious scents and colors: profuse, intoxicating—also full of thorns and stings if he were displeased! I’ve quoted them and others from the Schuyler circle throughout my novel—misspellings and all, and with signature lines, dates, and locations appearing as they do on the original documents—so you can experience these letters’ immediacy firsthand. Within them, you will feel for yourself in vivid descriptions and pleas the palpable heartaches, hardships, and hopes of the people fighting our Revolution. (Also in homage to the epistolary novel tradition of the time, for all you English majors who groaned through Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded.) In the eighteenth century, people spoke of and to their friends in far warmer and adoring ways than we do today. Their letters are filled with tenderness, compliments, longings to see one another, love advice, and gentle jests. Personas are laid bare in the most delightful ways.
Hamilton’s poeticism, insecurities, bluster, and passion rise off the pages of his letters and handed me much of his dialogue in this novel and my ideas for its plot and characters. I immediately knew how to write Peggy’s uncle, Dr. John Cochran, when reading his letter calling a fellow officer a “nincompoopa!” And Lieutenant Colonel Varick’s constant “please to give my best to Miss Peggy” in his letters from the Saratoga battlefield led me to suspect the earnest Dutchman had quite a crush on the youngest daughter of his commanding general.
Sadly, no letters written by Peggy during this novel’s time period survive. What we do know of her is gleaned from what other people have said, including the appearance and disappearance of Marquis de Fleury as a suitor. But what a wondrous skeleton of her life and of her vibrant and savvy personality they gifted me. Carefully cross-referenced, those letters also helped me track her whereabouts, showing she was indeed in the right place at the right time to witness some of the most momentous events of the American Revolution. Given what people said of her, it also felt totally plausible that she could have actively participated in several crucially important war efforts—like her father’s spy rings.
Contemporaries called Peggy “lively,” “charming,” “bright, spirited, and generous,” “the favourite of dinner-tables and balls,” even “wild” (according to Benjamin Franklin), and possessing “a wicked wit.” Hamilton obviously considered her confident enough, possessed with enough charisma and appreciation for satire, to jokingly promise to write a play about matters of the heart in which she would star. In 1795, a French aristocrat who escaped the guillotine to settle in the United States described Peggy as “endowed with a superior mind and a rare accuracy of judgment for both men and things.” Madame de la Tour du Pin was not at all impressed by the intellect or sophistication of most Americans she met. But she admired Peggy.
Peggy indeed spoke French fluently, painted, and clearly was just as interested in politics and philosophies as her more famous oldest sister, Angelica. James McHenry’s calling Peggy a “Swift’s Vanessa” in a letter to his fellow aide-de-camp, Hamilton, was eighteenth-century code for a woman who was well-read, articulate, and passionate in talking about philosophy and political ideas—conversations at that time deemed more “masculine” than feminine. (McHenry’s dialogue in Chapter Seventeen was taken directly from that letter.) Tragically, McHenry dubbed her a Vanessa disparagingly, displaying his own discomfort with a smart, strong woman as well as the societal constraints that must have so frustrated Peggy. If McHenry is to be believed, Angelica was saved from the same negative label because of her lighter, more flirtatious touch, and her ease with other women.
It says a lot about Hamilton that he had such an affinity for intelligent and articulate women. The same can be said of Peggy’s father, General Philip Schuyler. All visitors to his Albany mansion, The Pastures, praised the lively and well-informed conversation among his amiable, dark-eyed daughters. Clearly, Schuyler encouraged their learning and discourse. In many ways, he was quite progressive, dividing his primogeniture (his legal right as firstborn son to inherit his parents’ entire estate) with his brother and sister. His letters to his daughters typically began with “My beloved child . . .”
Schuyler family documents also unveil a gutsy and loyal young Peggy—detailing her saving her baby sister during the Loyalist kidnapping raid and traveling through the wilderness of upstate New York to help nurse Schuyler. She appears an unflinching caretaker. General John Bradstreet, a father figure and close family friend, is said to have died in the comforting arms of a teenage Peggy, who had stayed by his sickbed. Her younger siblings were often left in her care, even after she married. And, according to a letter from Schuyler to General Heath asking he safeguard his daughters’ passage, Peggy accompanied Angelica on the dangerous trip to Yorktown to rejoin her husband—most likely to help tend to her newborn nephew and his young siblings.
Such devotion among sisters was commonplace in the eighteenth century—think Jane Austen novels a few decades later—but seems especially beautiful and symbiotic among the Schuyler trio. Their back-to-back births clearly made them playfellows. Eliza was only eighteen months younger than Angelica, and Peggy thirteen months younger than Eliza. As much as she clearly loved them, and possessed traits of each older sister, Peggy must have struggled for notice given the dazzling, intellectual Angelica, “the thief of hearts,” and Eliza, “the little saint” of the Revolution. Hence the theme of Peggy’s coming-of-age and finding her own sense of self and agency within this novel.
I speculate the real-life Peggy had a particularly strong, empathetic bond with her father. Madame de la Tour du Pin, for instance, stated that Peggy had learned to speak French so well by “accompanying her father to the general headquarters of the American and French armies.” Peggy also suffered the same physical ailments that plagued Schuyler. Plus, she simply seemed to be at home more than her sisters. School bills show Angelica and Eliza in New York City together (without Peggy), and in the letters of 1777 I can find no mention of Eliza being in Albany. Angelica, of course, was already in Boston at that point with her new husband.
All the family events, battles, spies, visits (of Iroquois, French, and Patriot delegations), plus the “celebrity” appearances in this novel are factual. The details of my scenes were gleaned from journals, letters, and news accounts of the time. Much of the dialogue spoken by the novel’s real-life characters comes straight from words they wrote themselves—such as George Washington’s love advice to Peggy at the end of the novel, which I pulled from a letter he wrote to his grandniece.
Out of their Albany home, Schuyler did run a critically important “black chamber operation” network of Canadian, Iroquois, and New Yorker informants, spies, and double agents. He gathered information on enemy movements and intentions through his scouts and informants and by intercepting British communiqués. He and his staff would open, copy, and reseal these letters and then send them on to their intended recipients, who’d never know the information was compromised. Schuyler also fed his enemies false information and fake letters between him and George Washington. He was probably the Revolution’s most skilled military intelligence and counterintelligence officer.
In many ways, Schuyler was Washington’s right-hand man—detecting conspiracies for surprise attacks in New York, Canada, and adjacent northern states; guarding our vulnerable back door at the Canadian border; and finding ways to supply the Continental Army when others left its soldiers to starve and freeze. He continued to do so even after his honor was so publicly maligned by Congress and the New England delegates, chiefly John Adams. Besides serving as the commander of the Northern Army from 1775 to mid–1777 and as a New York delegate to Congress, Schuyler was also the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, responsible for negotiating war alliances with the six Iroquois nations.
We forget that the almost decade-long Revolution was also a horrifyingly bloody civil war between neighbors. A third of Americans were committed Patriots, a third were Loyalist Tories, and another third were basically neutral, trying to survive the back-and-forth violence, desperate to keep their farms or small shops operating so they could feed themselves. But there was no avoiding the war and its arguments in the state of New York. Raids on Tory and Patriot strongholds were constant and could be vicious from both sides.
Rangers and marauding “cowboys” and “skinners” attacked any and all travelers and isolated farms. (Those terms came originally from a Loyalist irregular cavalry raised by Colonel James De Lancey, which stole cattle and other livestock from civilians and took them to the British Army in New York City. “Skinners” belonged to a battalion of British refugee volunteers commanded by the former attorney general of New Jersey, Brigadier General Cortlandt Skinner. Eventually the phrase became more indiscriminate, describing all manner of guerilla bands and highway robbers.)
As was true with Patriots, Loyalists were motivated by both idealistic philosophy and self-interested hope for profit and social advancement. Many Loyalists still had family in England and took pride in being part of the British Empire and the constitutional rights it granted its citizens. They feared what they saw as anarchy in the Patriots’ actions—especially in Boston with its famous tea party and its mob tar-and-feathering of royal officers and sympathizers—and distrusted what kind of government people who had promulgated such violence could create. Some were xenophobic, fearing the influx of foreigners and radical Protestants who tended to flock to the cause of liberty.
The political rifts could be heartbreaking. During the series of battles at Saratoga, for instance, firing ceased for a moment so that two brothers could wade across a stream to embrace each other, before going back to their opposing sides and the resumed fight.
Tragically, our Revolution ended a peaceful and democratic confederacy that had endured for centuries among neighboring American Indian tribes—the Oneida, Tuscarora, Mohawk, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca—known as the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy or the Hau de no sau nee (meaning: people who build). Their longstanding league disintegrated into civil war as well, when four of the tribes decided that allying with the British and Loyalists would better help them keep their native lands, culture, and sovereign autonomy. Colonists had repeatedly violated boundaries established in treaties between the ruling British and the Iroquois—poaching or farming on territory guaranteed to the tribes, lands the Iroquois had traditionally hunted or inhabited. The four “Loyalist” tribes anticipated that a Patriot-controlled government might allow even more encroachment.
They joined the British as scouts and forward raiding parties, greatly helping the British navigate the wilderness of upstate New York. Burgoyne, for one, knew that years of skirmishes, hostilities, and the recent bloodbath that was the French and Indian War had imbedded a visceral fear of Iroquois warriors that he fanned with outrageous proclamations and threats—hoping to cow Patriots and rally Loyalists. Eventually, trying to undercut their ability to fight, Continental troops raided tribal villages, decimating the Mohawk, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca societies. The Oneida and Tuscarora villages had been similarly destroyed by the British and their allied Iroquois.
I don’t know that Peggy met Hamilton by Benedict Arnold’s hospital sickbed, but it is a legitimate possibility. All three were in Albany at that time. (Legend holds that Hamilton met Eliza during his official mission to General Gates, but there are no records of such an encounter. Schuyler was indeed in Saratoga rebuilding his house.) It is fact, however, that Peggy’s father was a friend and admirer of Arnold’s, frequently intervened on his behalf with Congress, and supported his taking command of West Point. Arnold’s betrayal would have hit the Schuyler family hard as a result.
Tracking Hamilton’s mentions of her in his letters to Eliza, Peggy must have met Marquis Francoise-Louis Teissedre de Fleury in Newport, Rhode Island, where it makes sense that she was staying with Angelica and her husband, then commissary for the newly landed French army. I had to really dig to learn much about Fleury. Like Lafayette, he came to the States on his own to volunteer with the Continental Army. And like hundreds of other Frenchmen whose names are lost to history, his enormous contributions to the Patriot cause are largely forgotten—even though Fleury was one of only eight individuals honored during the American Revolution with a commemorative medal (described in Chapter Thirteen).
Born in Southern France, Fleury joined the French Army at age nineteen, serving in Corsica before sailing to America. At first, Congress didn’t know what to do with the flood of idealistic French officers, but Fleury was soon a captain with the Continental’s corps of engineers. Well trained and a natural leader, Fleury eventually rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. He served (and was wounded several times) at Yorktown, Brandywine, Germantown, Monmouth, the horrific siege of Fort Mifflin, and Stony Point—the attack that earned him a Congressional Silver Medal of Honor. A British commodore wrote of Fleury’s charge, “The rebels had made the attack with a bravery they never before exhibited.” Fleury did indeed share his reward money with his foot soldiers and showed mercy to his enemy, “a generosity and clemency which during the course of the rebellion had no parallel,” wrote the commodore. “Instead of putting them to death, [he] called to them to throw down their arms” and they could expect to be given quarter—a humanity some British commanders had failed to show Patriots in several terrible instances that resulted in massacres of wounded Patriots who had surrendered.
Ingenious as well as brave, Fleury wrote General Washington a marvelously enthusiastic letter, in awkward English, describing self-propelled, exploding fireboats he hoped to launch into the British fleet anchored in the Delaware River and threatened Philadelphia in 1778. (I pull directly from that letter for Henry’s dialogue in Chapter Fourteen.) Washington applauded Fleury’s “Zeal for the Public Service” and suggested using “some desperate fellows” and “the greatest Secrecy and Caution” to “make the experiment.” As far as history knows, nothing came of Fleury’s plans. (Perhaps they were discouraged knowing the failure of “the Turtle”—a fantastical eight-foot-long, one-man, egg-shaped submersible—technically the first submarine used in warfare—pedaled through the waters of New York Harbor to try to attach an exploding mine to the hull of a British warship.)
By the way, each year since 1989, the United States Army has awarded individuals who have made significant contributions to army engineering the de Fleury Medal, a replica of the one presented the Frenchman in 1779.
When Peggy met him, Fleury would have been thirty-one. His Newport host described him as “sociable, jocose, and very agreeable in conversation, of a free, liberal turn of mind in matters of religion.” It really bothered me that I could never resolve what happened between the two of them after Fleury mentioned his hopes of marrying Peggy in a letter to Hamilton. All I knew was that after the war, he returned to the French Army and fought in a variety of campaigns from South America to India to Europe.
My stubborn quest to gather some hint of what killed their romance led me to heartbreaking letters sent twenty years later, in 1800, from Lafayette (then in France) to Hamilton on behalf of Fleury’s widow. While the brief biographies I could unearth about Fleury listed conflicting versions of his death—from being executed in the French Revolution to dying in battle, his body never found—her plea for a pension for his service in the American Revolution states that he committed suicide. I mourned when I learned it.
I finally decided to write his and Peggy’s story to reflect the sudden, passionate friendships and love affairs often brought about in the heat of war; the mysteries surrounding what my adult children tell me is a known term used by millennials: “ghosting”; and what I came to believe was Peggy’s clear sense of self-possession and self-determination. I think Peggy had the sense to refuse to accept anything but complete and utter devotion. It’s what she seems to have offered those she loved. And she waited until she found it.
In June 1783, Peggy married her distant cousin, Stephen Van Rensselaer. Some accounts have them eloping—perhaps because the match scandalized Albany since he was turning nineteen and she twenty-four years old. But her family seemed very pleased. Kindred souls in intellect and devotion to public service, Peggy supported his running for office and becoming lieutenant governor of New York in 1795. He also served as a state senator and US congressman. He inherited one of the largest fortunes in United States history, becoming Lord of Van Rensselaer Manor, the last Dutch land-granted patroon in America. Immediately, Hamilton teasingly nicknamed Peggy “Mrs. Patroon.”
Peggy gave birth to three children, but by 1801, at age forty-three, she was chair-bound, crippled with gout and suffering what might have been stomach cancer. Hamilton was in Albany on legal business when her condition deteriorated. Hamilton remained in the city for three weeks, visiting her sickbed almost daily. True to her brave, witty self to the very end, Peggy “was sensible to the last and resigned to the important change,” Hamilton wrote Eliza at their New York City home. He seems to have been by his little sister’s side as she drew her last breath.
Even then, Hamilton remained loyal to his Peggy, their fates intertwined. He threw his energy into supporting her husband’s campaign for New York governor. This pitted Hamilton against Aaron Burr, who promoted Van Rensselaer’s opponent. The competition fueled their political animosity. Three years later, Hamilton died in their infamous duel.
I like to believe Peggy was waiting for him on the other side.
There are many anecdotes—funny, touching, astounding—about the people surrounding Peggy and fighting the Revolution that I wish I could have included. But please see my bibliography for wonderful, deeply humanizing biographies of Hamilton; Washington and his devoted wife, Martha; his aides-de-camp; Arnold; Lafayette; and Philip Schuyler—who truly was an important “supporting” founding father.
I’m sharing two stories about a younger Philip Schuyler because they reveal so much about him, the close bonds the Americans and the British, Patriots and Loyalists, had before the Revolution, the very international complexion of the new nation, the fortitude of its women, and the largesse enemy officers could show one another in the midst of carnage.
During the French and Indian War, Schuyler became great friends with his commander, British General John Bradstreet, eventually even naming his firstborn son for him. Bradstreet remained in America, becoming a surrogate father/grandfather to the Schuylers. So much so, Schuyler was willing to sail to England on business for him, leaving Catharine to oversee the building of their Albany mansion, with three daughters all under the age of five. She was pregnant, too, with twins who perished shortly after their birth while Schuyler was absent.
On that voyage, the captain of Schuyler’s ship died. Schuyler took over the navigation, because he was quite smart mathematically. That put him at great peril of being executed when the next mishap occurred—French privateers, or pirates really, captured the ship. But Schuyler managed to negotiate for his life and for the lives of the other British-born passengers because he spoke French so fluently.
Once, during the French and Indian War, Schuyler and his unit had flushed the enemy off a tiny island in the watery regions of upstate New York. The French and American Indians retreated. They mounted a counterattack as Schuyler and his men were canoeing back to the main shore to join their company. In the midst of the crossfire, Schuyler heard a badly wounded French Canadian crying out in agony and begging not to be left there to die. The British soldiers with Schuyler ignored their enemy’s pleas. But Schuyler plunged into the waters, swam back to the island, lifted the enemy onto his back, and found a place he could wade across the stream, carrying him. The French Canadian lived. Years later, during the Revolution, he became a spy for the Americans out of gratitude for Schuyler saving his life.
Of course, like so many of our founding fathers, not all about Philip Schuyler is admirable. He bought, sold, and owned fellow human beings, even while he fought to liberate himself. He had as many as twenty-seven enslaved people working in his Albany and Saratoga houses, including two who are documented as having run away, desperate for freedom. Those I mention by name in the narrative are factual, such as Prince and Lisbon, who Schuyler clearly trusted to protect his family, home, and expensive property like horses that were critically necessary to their survival during a war. And while Schuyler fought to protect and supply the Oneida and Tuscarora—often at his own expense—he did support the Continental Army’s raids through enemy Iroquois settlements, which devastated their crops and villages, leading ultimately to the collapse of their tribal society and independence.
A brief word about the perplexing marriage of Angelica and John Barker Church, alias John Carter during the Revolution: despite his devolving into a bragging, carousing dullard, when Church met Angelica—if an early portrait of him is to be believed—he was quite handsome, with enormous eyes and thick wavy hair. For a whip-smart, passionate young woman—who had grown up in New York City’s lively society and as a constant, pampered guest of the royal governor, Lord Henry Moore—Church’s cosmopolitan aura would have been quite alluring. Perhaps his secretive past—gambling debts, a romance gone wrong, a duel—was exciting to her as well. After all, when an impressionable teenager, Angelica had witnessed the elopement of Lord Moore’s daughter and its aggrandizing romanticism.
As intellectual and committed a Patriot as her little sister, Angelica must have thought Church would become an important player in the Revolution. He did, indeed, provide critical aid to the cause by finding supplies for the French army. But he also profited as that commissary, making a large fortune for himself. As such, he was a controversial character. At one point, Washington said that all profiteers should be hanged.
In 1783, Angelica and Church left for Paris so he could collect payment for his services to Rochambeau’s forces. They then settled in London, where Church became a member of the British Parliament and Angelica a famously charming hostess. She became something of a muse to Thomas Jefferson (then ambassador to France) as well as to her brother-in-law, writing letters to both that were filled with impassioned philosophy and political ideas, doled out in dazzling and affectionate language. She came back to New York on frequent visits, and her close, intellectually intimate relationship with Hamilton was always subject to gossip. Still, she and Church had five sons and three daughters, and Angelica seemed to delight in being a mother. Sometimes she refused to receive visitors if she were in the middle of a card game with her children.
It is said Church owned the pistols Hamilton carried to the duel that killed him—the same pair Hamilton’s son Philip died by. Ironically, Burr and Carter had dueled in 1799, both of these men surviving that confrontation.
The double agent Moses Harris is fact—tracked in Washington’s and Schuyler letters and verified by his later application for a pension. Much of his dialogue I culled from a wonderful 1878 article (see my bibliography), in which his grandchildren detailed the stories he’d told them, including the rather amazing lifesaving Masonic sign of distress! According to his gravestone in the Harrisena Cemetery, in Queensbury, New York, Harris lived to be eighty-nine years, eleven months, and twenty-four days old.
True, too, is the story of the little fifer, Richard Lord Jones, who also survived to old age, treasuring that three-dollar bill Martha Washington gave him, kept folded exactly as she handed it to him.
The winter of 1779–1780 is still one of the most brutal recorded in America. Snows began falling in the first week of November and didn’t stop until April. For the only time in recorded history, all of the saltwater inlets and harbors of the Atlantic coast, from North Carolina to Maine, froze over and for more than a month remained closed to ships. The ice in the Hudson River just above New York City was measured at eighteen feet thick. The red fox that now inhabit our continent are said to be descended from a brace brought to the Eastern Shore by British landowners that were able to walk across the wide Chesapeake Bay frozen solid during that time.
From July 1781 to December 1783, when the war was officially ended, Richard Varick served as George Washington’s recording secretary. He stayed in Poughkeepsie, organizing and editing thousands of Washington’s letters, dispatches, journal entries, and battle proposals that arrived in trunks under escort of His Excellency’s personal guard. It is entirely fair to say that Varick and the scribes he diligently oversaw to produce the forty-four volumes of Washington’s wartime papers housed in the Library of Congress are responsible for our knowing what we do about our Revolution. He married Maria Roosevelt, was mayor of New York City from 1789–1801, and lived until 1831.
When describing how Arnold broke the 1777 Siege of Fort Stanwix, I couldn’t find a place to tuck in the bodacious defiance of the Patriots inside that ramshackle fortification. Told they would all be summarily massacred when the fort eventually fell if they didn’t surrender immediately to the far superior British forces outside their walls, a young Peter Gansevoort refused to yield. Then he and his sick, starving, and ammunition-depleted troops tore up their shirts and stockings to raise a makeshift American flag as the ultimate thumbing of their noses at the British Empire.
I can’t help but wonder if his future grandson, Herman Melville, thought of Gansevoort’s valiant tenacity when writing his masterpiece Moby-Dick.
Ann Bleecker and the death of her baby is also fact, a tragic example of the cost to civilians in any war, particularly for refugee families facing exposure, hunger, dangerous terrain, and unsanitary water. She is also one of those largely forgotten trailblazers in our history. Ann Eliza Schuyler Bleecker was one of America’s first published female poets. She wrote about the raw beauties of the wilderness and the devastating tumult of the Revolution. But she also dared to cry out the agonies of loss—the first female poet to acknowledge and therefore raise female anguish to the legitimacy and dignity of grief that epic bards like Homer granted their male warrior-heroes. Her poem “Written in the Retreat from Burgoyne” is haunting in its honesty.
I’ll end with admitting that I kind of fell in love with George Washington as I researched. His legendary stoicism and calm was not natural to him. He evidently had quite a volatile temper during his youth that he learned to muffle—mostly. Therefore, his composure was hard-won and a practiced, stunning act of self-control, especially given his huntsmen-soldiers’ lack of training and supplies, and the betrayals, jealousies, and constant backbiting among his officers and Congress.
“My old man,” Martha Washington affectionately called him—obviously he did not take himself too seriously! He loved, he hurt, he laughed, he joked, he feared, he faltered, but he stubbornly held to his convictions and dragged a new nation to its feet. He did indeed love to dance for hours at a time, to play catch, and to romp with his herd of dogs. And when he loved people he was absolutely devoted to them. He was heartbroken at the death of his stepdaughter, just as Martha describes to Peggy in Chapter Nineteen.
I highly recommend your dipping into the wonderful website Mount Vernon runs (http://www.mountvernon.org/digital-encyclopedia/#personal) to experience for yourself the anecdotes related there that so humanize the “father of our country” we too often represent in cold marble.
Paraphrasing the brilliant Lin-Manuel Miranda, George Washington recognized that history had its eyes on him and all those daring to rise up for freedom. Thank God for those who stubbornly fought on—no matter the disasters, the naysayers, the daunting size and power of the empire they fought, the battles, winters, starvation, and diseases that decimated them, nor the improbability and absolutely unprecedented audacity of their ideas. All of them—including Peggy and her big sisters.