Celebrating Peggy Schuyler and Hamilton

September 19, 2025

This weekend, I enveloped myself in the stirring sounds of defiant hope, electrifying creativity, and tradition-be-damned audacity. To celebrate my birthday and Peggy Schuyler’s—whom I profile in my biographical novel Hamilton and Peggy! A Revolutionary Friendship—I went to a big-screen showing of Hamilton, released in limited run for the musical’s 10th anniversary. Seeing that groundbreaking work on stage in late 2016, with its original cast, changed my life (wanting to know more about the real-life sister relegated to only 36 solo words in Lin Manual Miranda’s theatrical masterpiece, I had the joy of researching and writing about an extraordinary, proto-feminist, multi-lingual, feisty young woman patriot). Watching the film of a live performance by the same OG players in the cocoon of a cinema a few days ago totally renewed me.

Go see it if you can—in a movie theatre, before it closes, swallowed up in its exhilarating magic. I promise the experience will restore and steel you too, to “rise up” for our messy but shrewdly framed democracy. It’s an enthralling reminder that our nation grew out of the Age of Enlightenment, with what was a truly revolutionary concept in the 18th century—that every human being has the intrinsic ability and equal right to think and, therefore, to participate and consent in how we govern ourselves. Even a bastard, orphan immigrant, like Alexander Hamilton.

Miranda’s homage to the brilliant—and, yes, deeply flawed—Alexander Hamilton, the cast members’ breathtaking performances, its sophisticated mixture of musical genres, and his amazingly succinct and galvanizing recap of a ragtag collection of disparate Americans uniting to fight an empire and then forge an entirely new government, are stunning promises that anything is possible when we humans use our imagination. When we brave envisioning new things, new ways of doing, new interactions for the common good.

Even in the face of repeated setbacks. Even in the face of an unstable leader like King George who sings a love song in Hamilton to his “sweet, submissive subjects” and then—with Miranda’s delightfully witty writing flair—adds: “when push comes to shove, I will send a fully armed battalion to remind you of my love.”

Miranda did a phenomenal job spotlighting little remembered but pivotal revolutionaries like spy Hercules Mulligan and abolitionist John Lawrence in addition to Hamilton and Aaron Burr. He also poignantly eulogized the profound resilience and quiet patriotism of his wife, Eliza. So, it’s understandable there wasn’t time to flesh out Peggy Schuyler. 

That turned out to be to my good fortune. Her story SO deserved its own telling.

Called “a wicked wit,” “a favourite at dinner tables and balls,” and blessed “with a rare accuracy of judgment in men and things,” Peggy was the only one of the famed three sisters to be in the right place at the right time to potentially aid her father’s critically important work as George Washington's most trusted spy master and negotiator with our allies, the Oneida. She even dashed into the fray of an attempted kidnapping of her father by loyalists to save her baby sister.

Hamilton immediately embraced “spritely Peggy” as “my little sister.” In his wonderfully gossipy letters, he’d dismiss potential suitors with comments like, “He is not clever enough for Peggy. He sings well and that is all.” One of Hamilton's close friends, James McHenry, criticized her as being “a Swift’s Vanessa”—18th century code for a woman too keen on talking politics with men to be truly likable. “Tell her so. I am sure her good sense will soon place her in her proper station.”

Clearly, Hamilton didn’t. In fact, in later years, Hamilton—who valued education above all else—would send his children to Aunt Peggy “for schooling” during the summer.

I always love talking with students, but discussing Hamilton and Peggy! immediately after its publication in 2018 was a particular treat. Constantly, when I began my slide show with Peggy’s one surviving portrait, somewhere in the auditorium a female voice began to sing, rising in confidence and resonance as friends around her joined in and the lyrics of “The Schuyler Sisters” spread through the hall, to a collective near shouting of this verse:

I've been reading "Common Sense" by Thomas Paine
So men say that I'm intense or I'm insane
You want a revolution? I want a revelation
So listen to my declaration

We hold these truths to be self-evident
That all men are created equal"
And when I meet Thomas Jefferson (unh!)
I'm gonna compel him to include women in the sequel (work!)

Some would even jump up to make this iconic pose at the song’s ending lines: “We're looking for a mind at work! (Work, work!)/ Hey! (Work, work!)...

I teared up every time seeing those teenage women’s jubilant sense of inclusion and agency in what before had always been taught as the sole creation of founding fathers. I ended those school visits by telling them to be Swift’s Vanessas and their male classmates to be Hamiltons, with Alexander’s immigrant sense of drive and destiny, a man who “wrote his way out” and revered smart women.

Some might tag that battle cry as DEI—I would call it quintessentially American.

I hope you will read (or re-discover) Hamilton and Peggy!. Or listen to the marvelous audiobook narrated by Cassandra Campbell.

You’ll find more about Peggy in past blogs:

https://lmelliott.com/lauras-blog/meet-peggy-schuyler

http://www.lmelliott.com/lauras-blog/and-peggy-schuyler-sisters-ninja/

http://www.lmelliott.com/lauras-blog/peggy-ya-heroine/

http://www.lmelliott.com/lauras-blog/peggys-romantic-life/

Book trailer created by director Alexander Sharp