I'm John Batchel, visiting with the author and historian Molly Beer. Her book is Angelica

for love and country in a time of revolution. Angelica is featured, I'm told, in a very big hit

musical called Hamilton, which I do not know, but I'm familiar now with the

plot on the line enough to know. The Angelica you see on stage is not the historical Angelica,

but the spirit of Angelica, because she had connections that are blinding. She knows

everybody that we've had to learn in the fourth grade as founders of the country, including Abigail Adams.

Good heavens.

So we need to put her through the war, however.

She starts having babies as the war breaks out.

What I'm struck by, Molly, is how childbirth doesn't slow them down to read in the parts.

Angelica has a child.

Several weeks later, she's fighting the revolution.

Is that the assumption that women were going to not need time by themselves

and just get right back to their duties?

There was certainly a mandated lying in period, which she, you know, would observe with each of her children.

You know, there's sort of a two-month period where she doesn't move.

But the exception is her third child, who is John Carter, is born really in the midst of the Battle of Yorktown.

And she has until this point been, um, part of General Rochambe's, uh, expeditionary forces.

She's been at Newport with that army since it arrived.

Her husband is their supplier and he is not with her when she gives

birth to this child because he's at Yorktown. And so as soon as a few weeks after the child is

born, she and her sister Peggy are, you know, on the road to Yorktown to rejoin the army.

...