Here are the bare-boned facts of Peggy’s life: Born in Albany, the morning of September 19 th, 1758, Margarita was a mere 13 months younger than the famous Eliza, who was 18 months younger than the oldest Schuyler sister, Angelica. And who could be more tantalizing than that younger sister, Peggy, mentioned but then omitted by necessity in the musical’s second half? (Miranda managed to condense and include an astounding amount of history, but something had to give!) My first bit of fishing pulled in the family lore that Peggy had bravely rushed into the fray of an attempted kidnapping of her father to save her baby sister. I also knew I should focus on less-explored personas. All else is plausible and even likely, given what is known of historic events and what can be gleaned about the “characters” from their own writings and from biographies like Ron Chernow’s Hamilton, Nathaniel Philbrick’s Valiant Ambitions, and Don Gerlach’s on Philip Schuyler. So let me say at the get-go: The vast majority of Hamilton and Peggy: A Revolutionary Friendship is fact. When my editor, Katherine Tegen, suggested a novel about Alexander Hamilton’s circle- (given the national hunger to know more spawned by Lin Manuel Miranda’s brilliant musical)-I knew I was diving into a sea of expectations and the most stringent of scrutiny by diehard fans.
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