Church's letters to him were marked by a coy, knowing self-consciousness. For Church and Jefferson, moreover, a shared love of Laurence Stern's novels-which acutely skewered genteel affectations of sensibility-gave a satirical edge to their correspondence. As Cassandra Good's recent, prize-winning book Founding Friendships carefully explains, Jefferson's gallant and sentimental style was a fashionable way for men and women to write to each other in the eighteenth century, perfectly acceptable in a platonic friendship. “The morning you left us, all was wrong,” he wrote her in February, “even the sunshine was provoking, with which I never quarrelled before.” Had Church, as Cosway predicted, really become “reigning Queen” of Jefferson's heart? “But no, I give you free permission to love her with all your heart.” The same flirtatious style quickly emerged in letters between Jefferson and Church. “If I did not love her so much I should fear her rivalship,” Cosway wrote Jefferson on Christmas day, 1787. In fact, Cosway and Church were firm friends before the latter even met Jefferson. The friendship they developed lasted through a decade of revolutionary tumult.Ĭurious readers have long wondered whether Church's feelings for Hamilton were more than sisterly, just as they have taken similar interest in Jefferson's relationship with Maria Cosway. When Church and Jefferson met, in the winter of early 1788, it was as two Americans in Paris. Among the complexities of politics in the late eighteenth century Atlantic world, plenty of such contradictory alignments came about. What the show doesn't mention is that Church also pursued a long-term friendship with one of Alexander Hamilton's greatest political rivals-Thomas Jefferson. One of the emotional insights of the hit musical Hamilton is its portrayal of the passionate friendship between the protagonist and his brilliant, self-assured sister-in-law-Angelica Schuyler Church.
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