Book Of Stuff

81

Peggy was a nickname; depending on the source, she was either Margaret or Margarita Schuyler. She was born in Albany in September 1758.

The Schuyler family was one of the wealthiest in New York, and each daughter was, according to Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow, "smart, beautiful, gregarious, and rich ... they collectively charmed and delighted all the visitors to the Schuyler mansion in Albany." Philip and Catherine Schuyler had eight children who survived to adulthood, including three sons; Peggy, the third of Schuyler's daughters, was "very pretty," according to the Scottish poet Anne Grant, and possessed "a kind of wicked wit." The elder Catherine Schuyler's biographer, Mary Gay Humphreys, described Peggy as having "animated and striking" features; as a young woman, she was "lively" and "the favorite of dinner-tables and balls" and, in later in life, was "bright, high-spirited [and] generous."

But not all descriptions were so rosy. In a 1782 letter to Hamilton, statesman James McHenry compared Peggy to her sister Angelica (who he calls "Mrs. Carter" because her husband, John Barker Church, was forced to take the alias John Carter during the revolution), noting that "Peggy, though, perhaps a finer woman, is not generally thought so. Her own sex are apprehensive that she considers them, poor things, as [Jonathan] Swifts [sic] Vanessa did; and they in return do not scruple to be displeased. In short, Peggy, to be admired as she ought, has only to please the men less and the ladies more." According to Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow, Peggy was "sarcastic" and "very beautiful but vain and supercilious."

In 1780, shortly after Hamilton began courting Eliza (or, as Hamilton also called her, Betsey), Washington's aide-de-camp wrote to Peggy at length of his love for her sister; he included a bit of flattery for good measure:
"I venture to tell you in confidence, that by some odd contrivance or other, your sister has found out the secret of interesting me in every thing that concerns her; and though I have not the happiness of a personal acquaintance with you, I have had the good fortune to see several very pretty pictures of your person and mind which have inspired me with a more than common partiality for both. Among others your sister carries a beautiful copy constantly about her elegantly drawn by herself, of which she has two or three times favoured me with a sight. You will no doubt admit it as a full proof of my frankness and good opinion of you, that I with so little ceremony introduce myself to your acquaintance and at the first step make you my confident."
Between when their courtship began and when he married Eliza in December 1780, Hamilton became close to all the Schuylers.

Margarita "Peggy" Schuyler:
Wasn't 'And peggy' or the 'forgotten Schuyler sister'
As you read leggy was the life if the party.
So when people write fanfics saying Peggy's the forgotten one obviously they didn't do research of Mrs Van Rensselaer.
(She married a distant cousin and eloped)

Fun fact: all the Schuyler Sisters were known to be beautiful and rich.
Another fun fact: Peggy wasn't forgotten.
p.s isn't she beautiful.