Laura: Our second research trip occurred later that year, and once again began in New York City, where we undertook research at the New-York Historical Society and New York Public Library. We got to handle one of Eliza’s letters, and getting to hold something she once held and seeing her signature across the page was another powerful moment. But first, we started at Weehawken, New Jersey, standing on that cliff’s height, looking down into the forested slope where Alexander Hamilton dueled Aaron Burr, lost his life, and left his devoted wife impoverished and alone to raise their seven surviving children. We wanted to see the city as Hamilton might have seen it, and to experience the sights and sounds that might have filled his mind in those fateful moments. But in the end, we knew that our novel was not a novel about Alexander Hamilton. It was about his wife. We wanted to understand her journey. And that’s what took us to upstate New York.
Stephanie: I was a little skeptical at first that we needed to visit the battlefields of Saratoga, because we have no evidence that Eliza was ever there. We had a great day in the museum, acquainting ourselves with the battles and trying on Revolutionary War costumes before walking the fields where Benedict Arnold was so fatefully injured in our cause. And the trip ended up being an important piece of our understanding of Eliza as a general’s daughter and a girl raised at the frontier. Understanding her world and the way the war was literally on her doorstep gave us a richer understanding of who she came to be, and how she might have envisioned herself as part of the struggle of the soldiers around her. She lived all her life on the Hudson River and that river turned out to be the key to winning the war.
Laura: Our last stop, and in some ways, the most meaningful, was in Albany. We attended a little festival at Fort Crailo where Eliza’s mother, Catherine Van Rensselaer Schuyler, came of age and acquainted ourselves with New Netherlander food, traditions, and customs. One thing that certainly stood out for us was the relative strength and independence of New Netherlander women. It was a reminder to us that the roles and rights of women in early America varied significantly amongst the colonies. Because of their cultural heritage, Eliza and her sisters had more options and autonomy than many women of the time period—certainly more than the women in Virginia we portrayed in America’s First Daughter. The Schuyler sisters knew women in Albany who remained unmarried by choice and lived as property holders without any man to rule over them. Even without the revolutionary ideas swirling about their dinner table, they may have come to expect to have a choice in who they married and how they lived their lives. Perhaps that’s why so many Schuyler daughters eloped against the wishes of their parents.
Stephanie: Our last stop was the Schuyler Mansion where Eliza and her family made their home. And that was only right, because Eliza spent much of her married life with Alexander there, too. In our research field trips we often get a feeling of a place. An impression or a mood. When we visited Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello while writing America’s First Daughter, we were overcome with a sense of bittersweet majesty. The Schuyler Mansion, a gorgeous Georgian mansion overlooking the Hudson River, had a feeling of quiet tranquility to it. We could easily imagine why Eliza spent so many summers there with her children. It must have been a relief to get away from the hustle and bustle of political life in the city. Nevertheless, there is no getting around the fact that it was a plantation where more than a dozen enslaved persons toiled for the happiness of the family, and though little evidence of their presence remains on the site, our guide Danielle was a wealth of information about their lives. We were fascinated by tales of Prince, whose presence was important enough to General Schuyler that he actually used his name as a code word. And we knew that even though the historical evidence was sparse, these people deserved their rightful place in our novel just as they do in the American experience as a whole.
Laura: Visiting the house was also useful for us in trying to sort fact from legend. Like the historians at the mansion, we suspect that the historical account of Loyalists breaking in to capture Philip Schuyler and Peggy rescuing her baby sister from tomahawk-wielding invaders may have been embroidered. However, because the source of the tale is a member of the family, and because the incident betrayed the risks revolutionary women like Eliza Schuyler faced, we included it. But first, we spent quite a long time meandering around the main hall trying to figure out from which angle a hatchet could have been thrown that would account for the gouge in the railing. Ultimately, we couldn’t find one, so we opted to have the man simply chop at the banister instead!