[00:00:00] Intro

Isabelle Roughol: Hello and welcome to Broad History, a podcast about the history you think you know with women in it this time. I'm your host, Isabelle Roughol.

Today we're continuing our introduction to the women of the American Revolution with an episode on possibly the most famous love triangle in American history, certainly in the revolutionary era, I am of course talking about the Schuyler sisters and their husband slash brother-in-law, Alexander Hamilton.

I don't think I need to introduce you to these people at this point. If you haven't seen the musical, what planet are you living on? And it's actually while watching this musical, in its very, very early days, I believe in 2016, at the Public Theatre in New York, that my guest today met the Schuyler sisters and was inspired nearly instantly to write their biography.

And inspired she was because "Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution" [00:01:00] just earned Amanda Vaill the Pulitzer Prize for biography just a couple months ago. So I'm beyond honoured that she would take the time to speak to us on Broad History.

Before we get going, as always a reminder that Broad History is entirely solo researched, produced, hosted, edited by me, and it can only exist with your support.

A big welcome and thank you to this week's new members: Camilla, Janet, Lynn, Linda, Rosemary, Amy, and Haley. Thank you so much.

You too can get a shout out on the next episode and support this show by joining at broad history.com/membership. Members get early and ad free access to every episode.

Now without further ado, let's meet the Schuyler sisters.

[00:01:51] Failing the Bechdel test

Isabelle Roughol: Amanda Vaill, welcome to Broad History.

Amanda Vaill: Well, thank you for having me, Isabelle. I'm really, really excited to be here

Isabelle Roughol: I am too. [00:02:00] I, I had such a blast reading your book, and, we're gonna jump right in just as you do in Pride and Pleasure. You start really in the middle of things with a beautiful scene, very haunting scene, which is the death of Alexander Hamilton, who is shot in a duel by Aaron Burr. I don't think that's spoilers at this point.

Amanda Vaill: No, I don't think so. That's the whole point.

Isabelle Roughol: There's a whole musical. I mean, people know that part of the story. Um, and so he's, you know, he's lying there on his deathbed with his friends frenzied and emotional around him, and sort of on, on either side of him you have, really the two women of his life.

You have his wife, Eliza Schuyler Hamilton, and you have her sister, Angelica Schuyler Church, who is Eliza's sister and Hamilton's God knows what.

Amanda Vaill: Muse. We'll say muse. How's that?

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah, God does know, I think. But we'll get to that part. But,it made me wonder,and it's not at all a reproach, but it made [00:03:00] me wonder, is it even possible to talk about these women, these women specifically and the women of their class and of their era, without ending up talking a lot about the men that they attach themselves to?

Amanda Vaill: Well, you know, I don't think the Bechdel Test really works when you get back into patriarchal history, or it doesn't always work because,you know, if it hadn't been for Hamilton, we might never have heard of Eliza or Angelica. Or we might not have cared about them. Equally, as I try to show in the book, he might not have had the career he had if it hadn't been for them.

But, but really, that's kind of what you're dealing with when you are dealing with history in a time when women were not empowered, didn't have agency, weren't rulers. I mean, you know, Eleanor of Aquitaine, yeah, sure, you'd [00:04:00] hear of her. Joan of Arc, you heard of her. But there were countless other women who lived lives in proximity to powerful men, and you didn't really hear of them unless their history came into the history of the men.

And it's a kind of faute de mieux, I think. I don't know what to do about it, but there it is.

Isabelle Roughol: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That is the world they lived in and the societies that they lived in. and I think it's actually interesting to look at their lives,and how that relationship to the men who did hold the power that they didn't hold unfolded.

[00:04:40] Catherine and Philip Schuyler, a productive marriage

Isabelle Roughol: And so that's what we're gonna look at today, and I think we should start by introducing who they are and who they were before Hamilton, the Schuyler sisters.

And as the song goes, we have Angelica, Eliza,

Amanda Vaill: And Peggy.

Isabelle Roughol: Peggy, whom everyone forgets. And we're not gonna talk about Peggy a lot today. And there's more, which I didn't even [00:05:00] know.

Amanda Vaill: Well, you know, I guess for reasons of dramatic economy, they just were sliced out. But in actual fact, in so many ways, it's really important to reinstate not just those two younger sisters, Cornelia and Catherine, but it's important to reinstate their three, count them, surviving, because there were dead boy babies, three surviving brothers.

Because what you're seeing, first of all, is a huge-- The Schuyler family of progeny was substantial, and Catherine Schuyler, their mother, was basically having children, sometimes twins and triplets, neither-- none of whom survived, alas, for incredible periods of time.

Isabelle Roughol: The woman This woman is constantly pregnant, right? She's pregnant while her daughters are having babies. St- she

Amanda Vaill: Her youngest child, [00:06:00] Catherine, is the same. She's actually y- her youngest child is younger than Angelica's oldest child

Isabelle Roughol: Right. Right. It's,

Amanda Vaill: That gives you a real, it gives you a picture of quite a number of things, including that the Schuyler parents had a very ardent marriage. They really did. Um, Philip Schuyler adored his wife and was always saying, "Your mama looks more beautiful now than she looked when she was a girl," in letters to them when she's, you know, in her 50s.

And she-- he just adored her, and she died in 1801, and I don't think he, he was never the same afterwards.

[00:06:42] The story of Dutch colonisation in the Hudson Valley

Isabelle Roughol: So let's talk about who they are, the Schuylers. Where do they come from? What's their story?

Amanda Vaill: They are of Dutch extra-- There was a substantial Dutch population in America, in the American colonies, particularly in New York State, but also in [00:07:00] Pennsylvania, to a certain extent, New Jersey, all the kind of Middle Atlantic states. They were settled by or colonized by the Dutch West India Company, who once Henry Hudson had explored the New World, they saw this extraordinarily fecund area just teeming with wildlife and native fruits and one thing and another.

Henry Hudson wrote sort of rhapsodically about what they found there. And although he himself, this is in the 17th century, had hoped to use America as a, means to find a passage to the Asian countries for spice trade, it's those who came after him who founded the West India Company, who saw, "No, no, no, this is-- it doesn't matter if this is not gonna lead us to the Spice Islands. This is an incredible [00:08:00] opportunity."

And so they moved in, in large part, in the Hudson Valley, and the Schuylers were the descendants of Dutch colonists who had been induced by the Dutch West India Company to come over and settle this area. And, this was all part of a big global expansionist strategy.

You've got the Dutch contending with the English for domination on the seas and in New England and in the Middle Atlantic states. And indeed, by the time of our story, England had conquered, or at least they had won decisive battles in their ongoing struggle with Holland. And they had been awarded the Dutch colonies in the New World.

And so New Amsterdam became New York, and the Schuylers became British subjects. And they were actually rather enthusiastic British subjects, despite the fact that they held onto their Dutch traditions, [00:09:00] spoke Dutch at home as well as English and French, which they also believed they needed for trading and whatnot.

They were, both farmers and traders. Philip Schuyler had vast, vast land holdings in the Hudson Valley and on both sides of the Hudson. You know, thousands and thousands of acres. And he farmed them. He had mills on them. He was a real pioneer of sort of entrepreneurial extractive economy. He made a gigantic fortune. He was a very, very rich man.

And his wife came from an equally landed and wealthy Dutch, knickerbocker, they were called, the Knickerbocker families. She was a Van Rensselaer, and the Van Rensselaers were, if anything, fancier than the Schuyler. They were a lot fancier than the Schuylers.

They were the ones who were actually lords of the manor and had been [00:10:00] granted a lordship from the King of England once the English had won domination here. So they were the descendants of what was really the most blue-blooded of New York people.

Isabelle Roughol: Right. As close to an aristocracy as North America really

Amanda Vaill: Yeah. And rich. And rich.

Isabelle Roughol: and very rich and very land rich, in particular, and very embedded in that New York, what now is New York State Hudson Valley, right?

[00:10:28] Romance, drama and theatrics: The Schuyler family's big feelings

Isabelle Roughol: And so these two, Philip and Catherine, get a bit of a shotgun wedding.So Angelica is already in the picture or sort of about to come into the picture when they get married. Bit of tradition. Seems to be a very romantic family, a lot of elopements, a lot of not marrying who you're supposed to, just a lot of...

Amanda Vaill: following your heart, a lot of that going on. And then of course, what's so funny is that Philip and Catherine, up to a point, are quite disapproving when their daughters especially, but also when their sons, don't marry who they're [00:11:00] s- supposed to marry. And, but it never lasts for long because they love their children so much

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah. You can see why they're a family that, that, is just perfectly suited for dramatic treatment and for novels and for theater. There's a lot of theatrics there. So, firstborn is Angelica. then we have Eliza, and then we have Peggy. And those three are born very close together.

right? So they're

Amanda Vaill: were almost a year apart. I mean, they're in some cases almost less than a year apart. So bang, bang, bang, there's three. And then there was a sort of long wait. There was a miscarriage. There may have been more than that. We don't know all of them. And then there were a bunch of sons. They had, John, and who was named after both the parents of both the Skylers were named. The father was named John. So they were big on renaming family names so that the family tree is bristling with Johns and Phillips [00:12:00] and Catherines and Angelicas, and you just, you can never keep them straight. It's just, ugh.

Isabelle Roughol: It's a thing they did, right? Same with the Adams. Everyone is Charles or Abigail or John.

Amanda Vaill: Constantly. And you just, you know, you almost wanna give them numbers and superscripts and stuff.

Then there was, Philip II, Philip Jeremiah, as opposed to Philip John, who's his father. and then there was Rensselaer. And then there were the two daughters. There's Cornelia and there was Catherine. There was another little baby called Cortlandt, and he didn't live to be more than, a child.

And, the two daughters each-- Well, Cornelia in particular also eloped. She was a very vain, pretty girl. Her younger sister married somebody that nobody was that fond of, but she did it kind of on the QT when everybody was in mourning for her mother.

And it wasn't really an elopement. It was like, "Oh, they did this. [00:13:00] Whoops. Well, I guess we'll we'll just have to make the best of it."

Isabelle Roughol: I guess it's done.

Amanda Vaill: So that's what happened there. But the family it was divided into these kind of generational nodes. There were the three older sisters, there was the boys, and then there were the younger girls.

And they seemed to kind of exist in classes in that way. The boys hung together, the older girls hung together, and the little girls were, you know, tagged along, and also little Cortlandt when he was born. But and they were kind of more like add-ons. They were-- In fact, the older sisters later on seemed to feel that they were like nieces almost.

[00:13:41] Education and why the Schuyler girls wouldn't have learned Latin

Amanda Vaill: And they had them come to stay with them in New York City, come down from Albany so they could go to school, because education was very important in the Schuyler family. They really wanted those, not just the men, but the young ladies to learn more than needlework, but also [00:14:00] to learn geography and handwriting and how to express yourself in a letter and how to speak properly and form sentences and f- history they even read.

And they, I don't know, they did not, I do not believe studied classics, but they did read classics in translation. They spoke French. All the kids learned to speak French, because it was really another language for them. Where they lived in Albany, there were a lot of French Canadians, and there was a lot of French influence, so they just, they s- they spoke it.

Isabelle Roughol: It was sort of the language of, the superpower of the time.

Amanda Vaill: That

Isabelle Roughol: And cla- classics certainly they wouldn't have because,it was extremely improper, at the time for a woman to know Latin. You often see this. Around the same time I studied this, this sort of aristocratic British family and this woman who was very intelligent and part of these salonsshe recounts in one of her letters being incredibly embarrassed because, she had some visitors come to [00:15:00] her house in London, and they caught her while she was receiving a delivery ofHomer, I believe, in the Latin, and she was so embarrassed that these friends of her would know that she read the original Latin because that was so improper for a lady to do.

Amanda Vaill: How wonderful.

Isabelle Roughol: you also see Abigail Adams, and then I'll stop on that, but it always fascinates me because I was forced to learn Latin as a teenage girl. But I wouldn't have, been in that generation. Abigail Adams teaches Latin to her daughter at one point, John Adams to her, "You know, maybe don't, maybe don't do that. She really shouldn't know Latin. Keep it for the boys."So there you go. But so this is how they grew up, right? they're quite intelligent, educated young ladies within the limits of what's acceptable in the era.

[00:15:45] Angelica's elopment and deceptive husband

Isabelle Roughol: Angelica, the eldest, is the first one to marry. Who does she marry, or who does she think she marries?

Amanda Vaill: I just want to preface all this also by saying that there was a tradition in Dutch culture? As opposed to in English culture, where women were [00:16:00] allowed to, even if they were married, to own property in their own right, to do business. They could sign business contracts and all kinds of other stuff.

And in fact, one of the Schuylers, the girls' aunt was a notable businesswoman, and someone who managed her husband's businesses for him. And I think this gave the girls in the family a sense of independence that they might not have had, had they been raised in a slightly different culture. Women were given a little bit more agency by the Dutch than they were in other colonial

Isabelle Roughol: fiefdoms.

we see that a lot in that era, right? Because the English Americans inherit the coverture laws, right, from England from England

which are so strict, whereas, you know, Spanish women, indigenous women, Dutch women, French women actually have a lot more autonomy that the English women.

lot more autonomy than English women.

Amanda Vaill: This I think, allowed them to feel a bit more independent. Also, of course, there's [00:17:00] this vogue at the time in the late 18th century of sort of romantic elopement novels, plays. Sheridan writes a play about it. The Rivals is about an elopement. All these things are preying on these women.

And so in the war, the Revolution War has broken out, and Philip Schuyler is the general that is in charge of the Northern Department, which is the whole northern frontier along Canada, northern New England. it is a very important theater in the war. And, Albany is both full of, to the extent that it's full of anything, it's full of young officers.

But really, men have gone away to fight, and Albany is not the center of the universe at the moment. And, I think Angelica was probably feeling like She was hungry for romantic attention. And into her life came a man who had been sent by the Continental Congress to [00:18:00] audit the books of her general father, to make sure he was not giving way to fraud, waste, and abuse.

He was kind of sent by the Continental Congress's version of Elon Musk, I like to say.

Isabelle Roughol: Oh

Amanda Vaill: the DOGE

Isabelle Roughol: Never gonna forget the revolutionary DOGE!

Amanda Vaill: The DOGE guys! There are DOGE guys in the Continental Congress, and they send this guy who they don't know. He's, he's, he's come to America under what they don't know is an assumed name.

He is a, although they don't know this, he's an undischarged bankrupt. He's fled prosecution for bankruptcy and left his debts and come to America, adopted a new name, and somehow wormed his way into the confidence of various money-making people and money-laundering, I don't know, people who are in charge of money.

And they think it's appropriate to send him to [00:19:00] audit Schuyler's books, which is actually just richly ironic if you think about it. But anyway, he arrives in Albany, and he sees this girl, the eldest daughter of this very wealthy man whose accounts he's looking into, and he knows that if he makes off with her, he might have a stand to get a piece of the pie, because again, under Dutch law, there's no, there was no entail.

So Angelica would have an equal chance at all of the inheritance of her father with her brothers and her other sisters. It was not, one of those kind of winner-take-all situations

that you

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah. Eldest son

Amanda Vaill: in English, inheritance law. So he romances her. Schuyler refuses him permission to pay addresses to his daughter, because as he says, "I know nothing of this man or of his connections, and I just-- [00:20:00] the match is extremely disagreeable to me," he says.

Whereupon Angelica, who's one smart girl, figures out how to persuade her younger cousin, who is then the patroon or the lord of the manor of Albany and the area around it, she persuades him to get his stepfather, who is a Dutch Reformed priest, to marry the two of them on the down low, and he does.

And then they just, you know,

confront the Schuylers with this fait accompli. And there's a huge scene, and people are threatening with this inheritance, and I won't speak to you again, and blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like something out of soap opera. And then, of course, Schuyler just loses, the steam goes out of the machine.

He can't be mad at his children for more than probably 10 days. And then he just, "Okay, come [00:21:00] home. All is forgiven." And that's the way it is.

He's a very loving dad. I do literally have in my notes that I'm looking at right now, "What a soap opera!" Exclamation point. It w- it really it really is.

And the fact is that, he was right. Mm-hmm. Schuyler was right to be suspicious of this guy 'cause he is total, he's a really untrustworthy person. He's a gambler. He makes a huge amount of money very quickly during the war as a war profiteer, selling things, goods and services to the Continental and the French armies.

But after the war, he, with his gigantic fortune, he's unable to sustain over a long period of time that kind of run of luck, and he just gambles away and gets bankrupted a second time late in the book. But, he's not a savory character

Isabelle Roughol: And she doesn't re- she doesn't know any of this until, is it years down the line? Like when it, [00:22:00] or months or

Amanda Vaill: This was horrifying to me. I could not believe it. She marries him, and she thinks his name is John Carter, which is the name that he says he has. But then, when he's made all this giant amount of money during the Revolution, he goes to France with his family, his young family, to get the French government to pay up before they don't have any money again, which is really smart of him, let me say.

And he shows up in France and gets this huge fortune in ca- you know, gold louis, uh, who knows what. And with this, he's then able to go to England secretly and discharge all of his debts, tell his family and friends, all of whom thought he was dead because he just disappeared without a trace, "No, I'm still alive, and not only that, I'm really, really rich."

And then he comes back and [00:23:00] says to his wife in Paris, "Hello, I'm really rich, and my name is not Carter, it's Church."

Isabelle Roughol: it's got like Count of Monte Cristo vibes.

I mean, and you write it really well too because, when I was reading you, I see Angelica marry Carter, and I was like, "I could have sworn her name was Church." You know, I wasn't super familiar, but I've seen the musical. And I was like, "Could have sworn, huh, maybe she had a first husband I didn't know about. I guess at some point this guy dies." no. No, no, no, no. Same man, two names.

Amanda Vaill: And, and, you know, all of these people who are like John Jay are writing, "Well, I guess his name is now Church, so we'll all just pretend that... okay."

[00:23:39] Angelica's pragmatism

Isabelle Roughol: She doesn't seem to be very mad at him. I would be... I mean, I guess the money's nice.

Amanda Vaill: We don't know what went on behind closed doors. And, I, up to a point, the thing that's interesting to me about Angelica, which I discovered as I went along, is that she is someone who I think she's v- [00:24:00] pragmatic is probably putting it mildly. She plays things, and she, as long as the results please her, she'll go along with it, whatever it might be.

But when they don't please her, she's not so happy. But she's really willing to overlook... I think at one point I said she's not one to maintain a grudge when it can be forgotten to her advantage, and that's really what she

Isabelle Roughol: That's very sharp. That's very sharp. I have to say, I went into the book thinking like, "Oh, Angelica's my favorite," you know, 'cause I like a woman with a bit of spice. And then, and then I, you know, I was like, you know, it's some things she does I don't,I don't think I can abide. But anyway, but we'll get to that.

[00:24:44] How Eliza meets Hamilton (not through Angelica)

Isabelle Roughol: So second sister is Eliza, and of course Eliza is the one that meets Hamilton, which by the way, the musical makes it sound like Angelica introduced Eliza, you know, stepped aside grandly. No, she didn't meet him pretty much until the wedding, right? So [00:25:00] Eliza's the one who meets Hamilton.

How do they meet?

Amanda Vaill: Well, she, again, Albany is I guess kind of a ghost town at this point. So the way the sisters in "Pride and Prejudice" want to go to Brighton, or any place where there's officers, she arranges to go to Morristown in New Jersey, where the Continental Army is in winter camp, and there are lots and lots of cute officers for her to dance with.

And her father is thrilled because he, this is a way for her to open a sort of back channel to Washington, his boss, and whatnot. So this is all good. And she's down there. Her uncle, who's married to her father's sister, her uncle is the chief surgeon in charge of the war effort in all the armies. So he's the doctor, and she stays with him and her aunt, and goes to a ball at the storehouse in Morristown that they've converted into [00:26:00] a ballroom.

And it's kind of a coup de foudre. she meets this guy and blammo, within a month. And here is this man. He has no money. He has no family. All the things that were maybe suspected of being wrong with Carter are certainly wrong with him. Not only that, but he is known to be illegitimate, and he comes from Saint Croix.

I mean, he was actually born on Nevis, but he comes from the West Indies. He is a real rank outsider, but he's on Washington's staff. Washington thinks the world of him. And he is a man of very polished address, and as soon... Boy, when you read his love letters to Eliza, you completely, ugh, how could you possibly withstand this?

He's, he falls in love with her. There are those who think he fell in love as much with her position and her connections [00:27:00] and her money, as with her, maybe more so.But there are also others who say, "Well, no, actually," because Hamilton was so well-positioned with Washington, who loved him like a son, he's a very important card for the Schuylers to possess as a family member.

For whatever reason, Eliza is able to mollify any doubts that her father had about Hamilton, and a month after they meet, they are engaged.

Isabelle Roughol: And he really charms the family, right? He's working on the sisters, he's working on the mom, on the dad...

Amanda Vaill: oh, yeah.

Isabelle Roughol: dad. Like, he is clever.

Amanda Vaill: he is, he is quite... Yeah. he really is. He's one of these incorrigible flirts. We've all known them. He just can't not flirt, and I think part of it is he wants to charm. He really, really wants to charm. There's a neediness about him, [00:28:00] that is kind of his Achilles' heel. He just needs to be adored, and he is also good at manipulating things so that he will be. But he also seems truly to have been in love with Eliza. I mean, he writes her letters that are just, you can't, you know, uh, "Love is a kind of madness, and the proof that you feel it also is proof of your madness also." I mean, ugh.

Isabelle Roughol: This was a time when people could write, people could write and they did. And without wanting to be his therapist from 250 years away, I think it's also really powerful that, he's this orphan boy, right? And he joins this huge, loving, rambunctious family where everyone, loves and fights and is in each other's life, like they won't leave each other alone. That must be [00:29:00] really something for this orphan.

Amanda Vaill: And Philip Schuyler, I think, liked him better than he did any of his own sons. He starts writing h- some of his letters to Hamilton are, "My dear son," he will write him.

Isabelle Roughol: Mm-hmm.

Amanda Vaill: And he was devastated when Hamilton died. Just dev- I mean, it was a- as much as, maybe more than, m- more demonstrably so, than he was when his own son died, which is really amazing.

'cause his son John, his eldest, dies in 1780 whatever it was. and He was upset about it, but he's not like he is about Hamilton.

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah, you can tell. I mean, we're jumping forward, but you can tell that Hamilton is like a piece of the puzzle that just brings all these people, you know, is kind of the sun in the room, And that when he dies, it, it really transforms a lot of the dynamics, which we'll get to in a [00:30:00] bit.

[00:30:00] A forbidden love

Isabelle Roughol: But, let's talk about him and, and Angelica. So he meets Angelica, pretty much at a rehearsal dinner, right? Or like

Amanda Vaill: I, you know, I d- we don't know. And, I have a little set piece, in which I say, "if we were history painters, this is the scene we would paint."

So I'm, telling people, this is, we don't know exactly who was there or what happened. We know some of who was there. We can deduce who was there. We don't know that Angelica was there. But it would've been possible for her to have been, and it would've been unlikely for her to have not been, since this was a big family occasion, and indeed was the only wedding of any of these children, any of the daughters, that was celebrated from home.

It's the only one. all the others, everybody either eloped or, they got married some- it-- it-- So

Isabelle Roughol: Poor Catherine, like deprived. That's the one thing [00:31:00] you don't do to a mom, right? It's deprive her of her kids' wedding.

Amanda Vaill: Know, and

Isabelle Roughol: kid's

Amanda Vaill: thing is is the marriage that, that she really probably was happiest about, which is when Peggy eloped with Stephen Van Rensselaer.

Isabelle Roughol: Mm, proper Dutch

Amanda Vaill: Eight years younger than she was, but hey, he was the proper Dutch boy.

He was the rich Dutch boy. He was everything that a mother, a Knickerbocker mother could want. Handsome, wealthy, well-educated, apparently devoted to her daughter. But alas, she didn't get to celebrate that. I think it's tragic. Anyway. But so- But we don't know that they met then, but they certainly didn't meet before then, and the earliest they could've met was then.

The next we see of them, Hamilton has gone to Newport, Rhode Island, where Angelica's living with her husband, who is [00:32:00] acting as the supplier for all the French armies and navy ships that were part of Rochambeau's expeditionary force in America, and they were stationed in Newport. And Hamilton goes there with Washington to negotiate with Rochambeau about how they're going to proceed in their strategic plans to counter the British, and he stays with the Churchs.

So I'm f- I'm pretty sure they must have met before then. And the only way they could have would've been if they'd been at the wedding. That's the only time. So that makes sense. And she certainly didn't meet him before.

And what is interesting is, of course, that it was, it's pretty evident as soon as you see letters between them, sparks have flown.

And, I just wonder, you know, [00:33:00] Angelica, she's been so used to always getting her own way. She's the one that whenever somebody meets both the girls, they always, they think, Eliza's lovely and great. What a great pal she is. But the really glamorous one is Angelica. She's the one they all wanna dance with. They wanna date her. They'll be friends with Eliza, but they wanna date Angelica.

And I just think for Angelica to meet this guy that her little sister has enthralled and realize what a prize he is in her scheme of things, because he's romantic, he's brilliant, he's clearly destined for great things. He's ambitious just as she is.

It must have just been a really, a, she m- [00:34:00] she had to have felt a certain amount of asperity about, you know, "How did my little sister get this guy? How did I, pick the one I picked who's okay, and he's making a lot of money, but he's not that great?"

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah, you can absolutely imagine the alternative history if Angelica hadn't married, you know, hadn't met Carter,like which sister he, he might have actually, ended up choosing. You don't rewrite history, right? And it is one of the great love triangles of history, really.

we're gonna take a quick break, and we will be talking more about this incredible triangle. We'll be right back.

[00:34:40] Ad break

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[00:34:41] Did Angelica heighten the Jefferson-Hamilton feud?

Isabelle Roughol: And we're back with Amanda Vaill. We were just talking about this love triangle of Eliza, Angelica, and Hamilton. There is maybe another love triangle, which is that Angelica, who is decidedly quite the charmer, ends up at the center of one of the big r- rivalries of the [00:35:00] American Revolution, because she has a bit of a flirt with, a flirtation with Thomas Jefferson as well.

Amanda Vaill: Yes she did.

Isabelle Roughol: So what's the beef between these two? And I guess, it's an opportunity to talk about Federalists and Republicans and sort of different intellectual currents as well as the personal animosity perhaps between Jefferson and Hamilton.

Amanda Vaill: Well, nobody talks about it as a possible motivator, at least not that I had discovered. And when I was writing I discovered that Angelica had begun a relationship, a f- it was a flirtation with Thomas Jefferson. And Jefferson clearly was looking for as much as he could get out of the relationship, let's put it that way.

The thing that I've disc- I mean, Jefferson turned out to be a so much, so much a different person than [00:36:00] I had anticipated. I used to revere him as this wonderful intellect, which he is. His time in Paris, oh, this lonely widower over there, so sad, but just being friends with all these French, you know, salonistes who he liked.

But the fact is that he was looking for any kind of female companionship he could find, and he was having some kind of relationship with Angelica's best friend, Maria Cosway, the miniaturist, and she was going back and forth from Paris to London, where she lived. And she was married, and it looked like this was the way he liked it.

There was no possible commitment that he was gonna have to make. And then he meets Angelica, and he kind of drops Maria like a hot potato, which miraculously their friendship survived, Maria's and Angelica's. But [00:37:00] then Jefferson fatally wounded Angelica's sense of, I think, herself and what she was looking for in a romantic partner.

When she sent him a copy of "The Federalist," which Alexander Hamilton had edited and instigated and written most of, and he wrote back to her that, "The tender breasts of ladies were not formed for political convulsion," he told her, and so she should just not trouble herself thinking about these matters.

Well,

Isabelle Roughol: Excuse us?

Amanda Vaill: yeah, excuse me. and then he had the gumption after that, when he found out that she was going to go to America for George Washington's inauguration, he said, "Oh, well, why don't we go together? We can share a cabin on the trip." [00:38:00] And I f-

Isabelle Roughol: Bold

Amanda Vaill: You know, what? And she just, what was so interesting is she just let that one drop.

She wrote a little note saying, "I'm just actually, my travel plans have changed. I'm leaving earlier." And she didn't say a thing to him because of course she didn't want to offend. But, you can see right away she's just like, "That's not on."

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah, she him quick.

Amanda Vaill: So then Hamilton, who has not met Jefferson before this, meets him when Jefferson is being made Secretary of State, and he is Secretary of Treasury.

And this is 1789, and they're in New York. And actually 1790, because Jefferson doesn't come back to assume the mantle until then. And there is, from the first, there is a frost between these two guys. [00:39:00] And, you could put it down to all kinds of things. There's Jefferson the patrician and Hamilton the upstart.

Both of them used to being the smartest guy in the room, and there's not room for two of the smartest guys in one room. So there was gonna be some rivalry there. Jefferson is tall, Hamilton is short. I don't know. But I, you sense there's some discussion of Angelica, and you could kind of see maybe this is a small bone of contention between the two of them as well.

Hamilton wonders how much Jefferson has gotten into, and Jefferson wonders how much Hamilton has been able to entrance Angelica. And so there's already, I mean, leaving aside the fact that they have [00:40:00] very different ideas about government and the way government should work, there's already a sense of rivalry between the two of them, and it just gets worse.

[00:40:11] What actually happened between Angelica and Hamilton?

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah. I mean, we all wonder. I mean, you're... So you're taking my brain in four different directions, so I'm gonna try to make these organized. First off, we all wonder what's going on exactly with Angelica and Hamilton. And you, you hint that, that there was an affair essentially. Um, well, I don't know if you say

Amanda Vaill: I, yeah. I,

Isabelle Roughol: me. Tell me.

Amanda Vaill: What's so interesting, people say I did it, and I wanna say, "You know, I'm just putting the stuff there. You're the one who's picking up."

Isabelle Roughol: We're drawing the conclusions.

Amanda Vaill: You're drawing the conclusion. I'm not doing that."

Isabelle Roughol: Who knows? Who knows? And in the end, does it even matter? But the way that she, the way that she writes to her sister, I'm sorry, this is where my love for Angelica was challenged when she writes, you know, "You essentially, lend him to me for a [00:41:00] little while."

Amanda Vaill: Oh, yeah. "I love your husband very much, and if you were as generous as the old Romans, you would lend him to me for a little while." And she's always doing things like saying, "Oh, no, the china you chose, mm-mm, you shouldn't. No. Hamilton likes the beautiful in every way, and I don't think it's something he's gonna like."

I'm thinking, "Excuse me. It's my house, my china, and my husband."

You know? "Get out of here."

Isabelle Roughol: It's literally having a sister wife. It's a bit much.

[00:41:29] Angelica's politics

Isabelle Roughol: You talked about The Federalist, so I want to talk about, and obviously, so that's the great sort of series of essays that are incredibly influential to the Revolution, and there were others before.

Amanda Vaill: What are both Eliza's and Angelica's contribution to, the intellectual and the political livesof the Revolution and of Hamilton's? Well, I think for years people did not think that Eliza [00:42:00] contributed anything intellectually to Hamilton. That he was this flame that burned all by itself, and she kind of helped him burn but didn't contribute anything to it. Whereas Angelica, because she hobnobbed with men and wrote about it and wrote letters to them.You know, there's a few letters that she writes where she has actual kind of political feelings, although not quite honestly as many as I think people have thought she did.

But she was-- She wanted to be in and among those who were making decisions about government and politics, and she liked to be in the room where it happens. She really did. And in that sense, I think she, she could be influential.

The most influential she was really was when the [00:43:00] Marquis de Lafayette, the former Marquis de Lafayette, was in prison during the French Revolution, and she actually fomented a plot to spring him from prison. She was the agent runner on it. The guy who was gonna do the actual job is writing her coded letters explaining how he's proceeding and what the plans are. And she's transmitting those to the people who were, running, the political people that she has to talk to, including the government, American government minister in London then, Thomas Pinckney.

But that, unfortunately, that, that effort led to naught in kind of one of the funnier, sadder and funnier episodes in the book, to me, is what happens to that.

[00:43:49] Eliza's role as Hamilton's intellectual sparring partner

Amanda Vaill: But Eliza, so far from being just this little help maid, you know, in bringing Hamilton his coffee to [00:44:00] fuel his late night writing sessions, or his slippers to make his feet feel better or whatever, she really, I've discovered, to my surprise, that she really was much more a part of what was going on than I had any idea.

She was clearly his secretary his assistant, his amanuensis, when he was writing, sort of an early, precursor to "The Federalist," which is his Continentalist essays, which he wrote when they were newly married. He had just left Washington's staff, and they were living alone in this little cottage across the river in Depiser's Point, across the river from Washington's headquarters.

And he did not have a secretary. He didn't have-- they had help, domestic help, but they only had her, and she took down what he wrote. And she was a [00:45:00] terrible speller.

Isabelle Roughol: I love that you spot her influence by the spelling mistakes. It's like, "This is misspelled. It's her."

Amanda Vaill: Her f- her fingerprints lit, almost literally are all over these things because the printer, in a haze, haze to rush them into print, didn't even correct them. And you look at the, and you think, "What the hell is this?" And then you think, "Oh wait. Oh, Eliza." It's 'cause it's exactly the kind of spelling mistake that she makes, in, in all of her letters that we have. And you see this and you think, "Oh, I get it."

So then Another thing that really was fascinating to me was that when Hamilton was drafting his memorandum in favor of the founding of the Bank of the United States, which was one of his signature achievements as Washington's treasury secretary and essentially put the foundations under the nascent US economy, he had to do and did a lot of [00:46:00] research about previous republics, how they had funded themselves, blah, blah, blah, blah.

He had a s- there was in the family possession a set of,a quite dense multi-volume tome by a guy called Anderson. Anderson's History of Economics. Guess whose name is written in those books? It is not Alexander Hamilton. It is Eliza Hamilton, and she read them. So she's the one sitting there saying, "Yeah, on page 42, Anderson says blah, blah, blah, so you can quote it."

And all of a sudden she's transformed from this doormat into a research assistant. She's the person saying, "Well, you could, yeah, you could, you can argue that because he says this. in Sumer or in Assyria, they did thus and so, so, you know, you can talk about that."

And [00:47:00] another thing that was really very interesting is that she, to the end of her life, she was very-- she tried when she was collecting Hamilton's papers to find the draft of a speech that he had given at the Constitutional Convention about the role of the president.

It was a very contentious speech, because his, Hamilton's detractors claimed that he had said that he thought America should be a monarchy, and that this speech proved it. But the speech disappeared. People who had notes of it, like Madison, and various other people who were at the convention, disagree about exactly what was said.

And after the war and after Hamilton's death, when she was putting together his papers, she tried to find the speech itself or even the notes that Madison had contemporaneously made of it. Madison [00:48:00] and Jefferson and various of their friends conspired to not furnish this to her. And I was wondering, how the hell did she even know what he said?

And then I found out th- that she had gone to the Constitutional Convention. She'd gone to Philadelphia and spent the night, several nights, with Hamilton before he gave this speech, and presumably discussed it with him, because she wasn't in the room when it happened, because outsiders weren't allowed in there.

So she knew exactly what he was gonna say, and it wasn't just because he said-- I don't think it was because he just said, "Well, I'm gonna say this." You know, she's talking to him. They are discussing it. And I suddenly, oh, right, this is why he calls her my good genius, [00:49:00] why he, you know, always feels like she's necessary to him. It's not just because she keeps a good house, because really any housekeeper could do that. But she is an intellectual companion, and she, y- she's a sounding board for him. She's useful.

And in that way, she really contributes to what his thinking is, and I found that just fascinating. At the very last sort of speech of his life almost, he defended the freedom of the press to the Supreme Court in Albany, the state Supreme Court. And this was a case that Eliza begged him to take. He wasn't gonna take it. He actually had declined to take this case, but Eliza persuaded him to do that. And I find this fascinating that, she had a much more of an active role in his political career than anyone suspected.

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah. [00:50:00] She's one of, history's long list of uncredited literary and political wives. And it makes sense. I mean, anyone who's, ever written anything or lives in a world of ideas, you need someone to bounce things off, right? So that's what would happen in any relationship. You don't...

Y- things don't just happen, in your brain, while you're staring at the page. Th- conversation is required.

And I love that you have the scene where she sends a copy of The Federalist to Angelica, who I think is in Paris or London at the time, and on the cover page she writes, "Alexander Hamilton and Eliza Hamilton."

She writes both

Amanda Vaill: put-- Her name is on there,

Isabelle Roughol: she takes ownership of that work.

[00:50:39] Eliza's widowhood

Amanda Vaill: I love that. I love that about her. And, after he died, many widows would have just sort of faded into the woodwork. But she really not only collected all of his papers and sold them to the Library of Congress so that he would not be forgotten and he would be always [00:51:00] considered a resource to the nation that he'd helped to found, but she also pioneered to get his biography written and kept, trying to find the right person, and they never panned out for one reason or another.

And she ended up getting her son to write this biography, which, was, it was necessary to get the record down, and she was intent on that. She became a real activist

Isabelle Roughol: it's really interesting. I find that so her widowhood, I mean, she was Hamilton's widow twice as long as she w- ever was his wife, right? She was a widow for half a century. She also, and so Angelica died a decade after Hamilton, and so she, you know, she was... unfortunately the English language, does not have a word for being a bereft sibling, which I think it, it sh- you know, you're not a widow, you're not an orphan, but I think, it, there should be a word for that.

but she, so she lived another 40 years after losing Angelica. And so she's the last one of that triangle to, [00:52:00] to live for decades. and it's like she comes into her own in a different way when she's no longer in either of these people's shadows. I found those final years, at first I found them really sad and melancholy because it's like every one of her youth dies one after the other, right?

She sees there's a Lafayette who visits America, and like she know, they know, they both know it's the last time they see each other.

Amanda Vaill: Know. I love

Isabelle Roughol: when he gets back on the ship to France, it's, that's heartbreaking you know? It's like we know this is

Amanda Vaill: Have such a touching little relationship too. It's very sweet that

he comes to her with this miniature of Washington that he's screwed up because he thought, "Oh, there's some schmutz on Washington's face." He... He tries to take it off, and he smears the whole thing, and then he's, " Oh mon Dieu, this is terrible."

and she, you know, Eliza is a fixer. She's like, "Oh, no, no, no. I know just the person who will fix this. Here is the restorer. We'll go here, and they'll fix it." And they do. And it's so sweet. I just love that

Isabelle Roughol: A- and because she [00:53:00] lives to such a, such an old age,nearly 100, which is in her era incredible, she's like this bridge in American history where she lives long enough, when you think about the history of American women, she lives long enough to see the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848

Amanda Vaill: Yep, she does

And, alas, we don't know what, if anything, she thought of that. But one of the things that I loved was that when she gave all of Hamilton's papers to the Library of Congress, there were no restrictions placed on the papers relating to Washington's farewell address, which Hamilton had written, and which the papers had been kept from her.

She'd had to go to court to get possession of them, which is itself a whole wonderful story of a woman standing up to the establishment and saying, "No, no. those are mine, and you may not have them." But she'd done all of this, and so here are these [00:54:00] papers that say, "Hey, Hamilton had an equal role in this foundational statement about what American government executive power is and what America's destiny should be," and she leaves it to the Library of Congress saying anybody can see it.

And Washington's heirs are furious, and they want to restrict the access, and they go to her son, John, and say, "This is an outrage," blah, blah, blah. John is such a wimp and not really a very terrific person. And he's trying to cover for his mom, and he says, "Well, this is the way that women do things." And I just think, "Yeah.

Isabelle Roughol: Actually it

is, yeah.

Amanda Vaill: sure is." And she knew. I think it was kind of, that's one of her little blows struck for truth and for openness. She said, "Really? This is a woman who doesn't... She doesn't brook fabrication. She does not do it. [00:55:00] And, she's very outspoken, and I love that about her.

This was Amanda Vail, her Pulitzer Prize winning biography of the Schuyler Sisters, Pride and Pleasure, is available as always in the Broad History bookshop.

Isabelle Roughol: There'll be a link in the show notes and at broadhistory.com where you can also sign up for the newsletter, which is entirely free, and you can opt to support the show with a small membership or donation.

This has been Broad History and I've been your host, Isabelle Roughol. Music by Aaron Kenny. I'll talk to you next week.

[00:00:00] British Podcast Awards 

Isabelle Roughol: Hey, it's Isabelle. Wouldn't it be insane if this tiny show I produce all by myself in my bedroom won Listener's Choice at the British Podcast Awards? Any podcast is eligible. They just need our listeners to mobilise and vote. And you've been such an incredible audience, I think we can do this. Go to britishpodcastawards.com/voting right now, I'll put the link in the show notes, and type in Broad History. There's only a few days to do this, so don't delay please. You'll make my day. Britishpodcastawards.com/voting. 

[00:00:34] Intro

Isabelle Roughol: Hello and welcome to Broad History, a podcast about the history you think you know with women in this time. I'm your host, Isabelle Roughol. The American Revolution, perhaps more than any other era in history, is known to us as a pantheon of great men that we've put up on literal pedestals.

So if we want to recover the other half of history and [00:01:00] understand American independence from the perspective of women who lived it, we should be able to rattle off their names-- Eliza Schuyler, Phyllis Wheatley Peters, Mercy Otis Warren, Deborah Sampson, Elizabeth Freeman, Molly Brant...-- as easily as we rattle off Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, Franklin.

So for the next few episodes, we're gonna look at a few individual women and see what their lives can teach us about the early days of the United States. Today we start with perhaps the most famous of them all, Abigail Adams, and to talk about her, our guest is historian Woody Holton from the University of South Carolina, who wrote her biography back in 2009.

Abigail was born Abigail Smith in Weymouth, Massachusetts in 1744. Her father was a liberal congregational minister who emphasised reason and morality, but also kept people in bondage.

Her mother was descended from the great [00:02:00] Quincy political dynasty. Abigail was smart and erudite. Despite not having much formal schooling. She lived in a world of ideas and letters and friendships, and left a large correspondence, which allows us to know her better than most women of her time.

Abigail met John Adams, then just a country lawyer when she was 15 and they had a patient courtship until they married five years later.

She was the first Second Lady of the United States from 1789 and the second First Lady from 1797, though those titles weren't used back then. She was both wife and mother to two presidents, though she never got to see her son in the White House. She was also quite the capitalist with a shrewd mind for making money. That's where Woody Holton picks it up.

[00:02:55] Woody Holton's path to Abigail Adams

Isabelle Roughol: 'Woody Holton, hello and welcome to Broad History

 You have a [00:03:00] particular distinction of being the first man on this podcast, because I have to say it's quite rare to find male historians with an interest in women's history. I'm thrilledthat it is the case however. And I'm curious how you came to Abigail Adams.

Woody Holton: Oh, well, fun question. And I'll start by saying I, I have, I bite my tongue in making fun of my students who've suddenly gotten interested in Alexander Hamilton because of the play, because I realized that I kind of got interested in early America from a play called "1776," and Abigail Adams plays a very prominent role in that.

So that was sort of in the back of my head. But for this project, as a scholar, I was not interested in her any more than anybody else. I was always interested in women's history 'cause it's producing the coolest scholarship, and 

I was writing a book that I admit is pretty boring called "Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution." And what makes it so boring is a lot of it's about bond [00:04:00] speculators and it argues that people who had bought up soldiers' war bonds at pennies on the dollar, were really indirectly the motive for the US Constitution because it gave the federal government taxing authority to pay them off.

It's a complicated argument. There's different versions of it. But I knew that this was gonna be tough for readers and I like having some readers outside academia. So I was looking for one of these guys that I could use as a stand-in for all the others. He would be the person that you really get to know.

And it was frustrating 'cause I'd find one guy's in letters, another guy's out letters, a third guy's account books, and there wasn't one guy for whom there was really a ton of documentation until when I was about to give up on this idea of having one person to carry through my book, I found my guy, and he wasn't a guy, it was Abigail Adams.

[00:04:51] Abigail Adams, the capitalist

Woody Holton: She was separated from her husband all the way from 197-- sorry, 19... from 1774 to 1784, a [00:05:00] decade. A couple of visits in the early years, but then he was in France, and his visits are a little tougher. She was separated from him for a decade, and she called it her widowhood, even though she was never actually a widow. She was emotionally miserable. She really loved John Adams. A hard thing to do, in my opinion, 'cause the guy was so full of himself, but she managed it and she missed him.

But, but, but during that same decade where she's so emotionally miserable, or maybe because of that misery, she took over the family's farm and finances, as many women did while their husbands were off at war, or like John off at Congress and off in France as a diplomat.

She took over the family finances and she ran them much better than John, her husband, the future president, ever had. She wasn't a great farmer, but neither was John. It's not great soil up there. But she made him rich, A, by speculating, buying these bonds at a, at pennies on the dollar. and the interest was figured on the [00:06:00] face value of these bonds.

So a bond that says, this is a $100 bond, you get $6 a year." Okay, $6, that's not a bad interest rate. Fine. But she'd paid a fourth of the face value, so she's really getting $24 a year, a massive annual return without touching the principle, which was eventually paid back at pretty close to face value.

She made a killing off of these bonds. And she also, while her husband was over there in France, then as now, Americans believed that French fashions were the top of the world, and so she had him send her merchandise from France. And actually Barcelona handkerchiefs were a big thing at the time too. That was a women's wearing apparel. And, because there was a British blockade, a lot of those shipments were captured by the British, but for the few that weren't captured, you could name your own price as a seller. And so she made a killing, trading in this stuff.

And she [00:07:00] speculated in land in Vermont. There were 13 colonies, but there were trying to be 14, who rebelled. Vermont wanted to be the 14th colony, and New York said, "No, you may not, because all that territory you guys claim is actually part of New York." So it was very much in flux, and that's the time to invest, and she did.

She bought up hundreds of acres in the name of her husband, who was gone, and in the name of her eldest son, John Quincy Adams, who would later be president after his dad, and two other sons, and even in the name of her daughter, who was not yet married. And that's why Abigail could buy land in her name because she's a feme sole, that is a woman alone. They're allowed to own property, but married women are not.

So the one person in the family in whose name Abigail did not buy any of this Vermont speculative land that you buy at 300 acres a pop, the one person she didn't buy any land for was herself 'cause she couldn't because as a married woman she couldn't own property.

But she made all this money for John, and it's not like he [00:08:00] was shocked when he came home 'cause they'd been corresponding about it. 

[00:08:03] John Adams's conservative attitude to money 

Woody Holton: But then the correspondence turns out to be really interesting because John was conservative in a lot of ways. He wanted to declare independence from Britain, but he really admired the British government and thought that we should probably institute something like a king and something like a House of Lords here, here in the US even after we declared independence.

And he wasn't as bad as, Alexander Hamilton. Alexander Hamilton, I can't believe that he's become a sex symbol today because at the time he was Mr. Patriarchal Conservative. He thought that we should literally have a king, that we'd elect him the first time and then he'd serve for life. 

And likewise, the Senate. I've got a brother-in-law who's in the US Senate, and he would like this, I'm sure, on, on a personal level because Hamilton's idea was that you elect senators and then they become the House of Lords, and they serve until they die. And John Adams was not quite as conservative as Hamilton, but he's politically conservative. He [00:09:00] was also personally conservative. And, I'm sure you know about "Gone With the Wind," but there's one line that didn't make it from the book into the movie that, that goes to a lot of that white Southern... when they're not thinking about slaves, they're thinking about land. And Scarlett O'Hara's father says to him, and, I'm already a South Carolinian but I'll go to the Georgia accent, "Land, Scarlett! Land's the only thing worth fighting for or dying for. It's land."

And so you think of that stereotype that I just played as the opposite of John Adams 'cause he's up there in Massachusetts where everybody's pinching pennies and making money and r- moving into merchanttrade and industry and all that.

But John Adams had the same attitude. So whenever he had some spare money, he would write Abigail home and say, "Ooh, I hear Vesey's place, which is right next to my place, is up for sale and I really wanna buy Vesey's place." And she would write back saying, we can do that if you want, but you're only making 1% a year,annual return on your land, [00:10:00] and Vesey's place will be like that, 1% a year. And I can get you 20% a year or more, on bonds."

And so there's this wonderful debate 

[00:10:08] How Abigail sold imported goods from France

Isabelle Roughol: Well, I'm glad we're starting there because, when I was reading your biography, and, you know, to be fair I wasn't super familiar with Abigail's life, but that's certainly something that I was not expecting at all. She is like this early American financial capitalist. That's quite a risk-taking attitude, right? Because bonds, it's sovereign debt. America is a new country. Who knows if it, is gonna keep faith and repay its debt at this point. It's very unsure. I thought that was pretty bold of her 

Woody Holton: And, and what you were just articulating there, that's John Adams thinking. That's, you're thinking like John. You gotta think like Abigail if you're gonna make any money here 'cause you're right. But because it's so risky, it's just like her importing those Barcelona handkerchiefs and nice stuff from Paris and Amsterdam. 

she once wrote him, "If one in [00:11:00] three arrives, I should be a gainer." that, that is literally I'm charging more than four times the normal price. And so if we can just get a few of these through. And John at one point said, "Let me send you, I've been sending these big shipments. One of them just got captured by the British, so let me start sending you a little bit here and there."

And Lafayette was in Paris. He basically took the winters off during the American Revolution and went all the way home even though it's a two-month trip. Anyway, Lafayette was coming back to America and John Adams set him up with some stuff to give Abigail. That was Abigail's chance to meet Lafayette.

But my point is she s- he says,"It'll be much safer if instead of sending you one or two big shipments a year, I'll send you lots of little ones. We'll spread the risk." Which is again, John Adams type thinking. And Abigail wrote back a dutiful 18th century,British and British world wife and says, "You're the master, and if that's what you wanna do, that's what we'll do, wanna do."

But there's a problem with that, sending these little packages here and [00:12:00] there, is that you don't have a warehouse. And so in order to send small packages all the time, you're gonna have to buy retail. And it's all about buying wholesale at wholesale prices and then selling at retail, prices. So her whole point was, yes, it's risky. That's what makes it so profitable. 

[00:12:19] Was Abigail guilty of insider trading?

Woody Holton: And then I also have to tell you that there's risk and then there's risk. If your husband is in Congress, we're dealing with this issue right now in the American Congress. There's a bunch of politicians, both Republicans and Democrats, who wanna forbid congresspeople from playing the stock market.

And I always thought that was always the case. And the good ones, like my brother-in-law, they put their money into blind trusts so they don't know till they finish their congressional term whether they've lost money or made money. But the bad ones absolutely. In fact, there's a stock index fund in the US now

Isabelle Roughol: The Nan- the Nancy Pelosi index, is it?

Woody Holton: Oh, you've heard of it?

Isabelle Roughol: I've heard... Yes.

Woody Holton: I wish I had money to spare 'cause [00:13:00] that's where I would put it.

Isabelle Roughol: She has an impressive, impressive, return for sure. I mean, nothing like the president's returns, but it's

Woody Holton: Oh, if I could get Nancy Pelosi and Abigail Adams together, that would be a place to be a fly on the wall.

Isabelle Roughol: I would wanna be in that room for sure.

[00:13:16] How a preacher's kid got to be so boldz

Isabelle Roughol: So we started kind of somewhere in the middle,

 let's go back a little. Who is Abigail before, before even she's Abigail Adams? And, how does she become this, this great capitalist? Is there anything in her background that, brings her in that direction? I mean, she's, she's the daughter of a vicar, right?

Of a rector, I

Woody Holton: She is. and we call them PKs over here, preacher's kids. And it's the stereotype of preacher's kids is that they are the wildest kid in the community. and, we don't have a ton of evidence of her being wild in the sense that they are now, but she was, I think, wild in her thinking.

And I think that can come, I've already told you I've come from a, from a political family. My father was also in politics like my sister and [00:14:00] her husband and so forth. And, it can give you a feeling of entitlement,and, and a blindness to your privilege. But one of the things that comes with that is self-confidence.

I think it's... so few records survive from that era, more from Abigail Adams than from most women by far. But even with her, so few records survive that we have to be very careful with our psychobiography of what made her so bold. But if I had to name one thing. Oh, and her father was the speaker, I'm sorry, her grandfather was the speaker of the House of Representatives in Massachusetts.

 The legislature was the Massachusetts legislature, right? It wasn't Parliament. And so my point is after the governor, her granddad was, uh, was the top guy in Massachusetts.

Her father was a preacher. Her mother was a preacher's wife, which was, and I think this is still true, I know from, from families I know where, where, uh, the husband or wife is a vicar, so is their spouse. And that was certainly true for the women of their time. Uh, you get [00:15:00] two for the price of one, if a, church hires a married priest, he's getting two people, two people's labor.

And so the mom is out handing out hams to the widows in town and things like that. And so I think she got, I mean it's a problematic term, but noblesse oblige, a l- a bit of sense of "one must do what one can." and,That sort of modern liberalism is certainly not radicalism. There was nothing radical about either Abigail or John.

But I do think that, if you had to, gun to my head, if I've got to say what made her so self-confident, you would have to start with having a mom and a dad who were major figures in the community and a grandfather who was a major, person in the community. The result of all of that is a s- I think you can sum up in s- in a single word, and I'll be s- curious to see how this word crosses the Atlantic: saucy

That is, John and Abigail were constantly calling each other saucy, and that term survives in the US today [00:16:00] as sassy.

[00:16:01] Did the TV show get the Adams right?

Woody Holton: He certainly had self-confidence too, I would say too much.

Isabelle Roughol: Um, a bit too much, yeah.

Woody Holton: You got that impression as well? 

Isabelle Roughol: Well, don't, I don't know, how much of my vision of Adams is, Paul Giamatti in the series. But that's kinda how I picture him in my head, and also, having read your book and a few others where he shows up, and I think generally,same with Hamilton, same with Jefferson, every time I come across them, I'm like, "Ugh, these egos," you know? Which I guess you need to have done what they did, but,they're particularly prickly men sometimes

Woody Holton: Oh, prickly is a great word 'cause that's one that pulls all those folks together. 

 I should say that Abigail had a s- sense of that too. That is, she was as passionate as John was, and this was my biggest critique of the... I kn- I realize not everybody watching us has seen the HBO movie "John Adams," but I could describe very quickly. Giamatti portrays John Adams as passionate, and Abigail sort of behind him rubbing his [00:17:00] shoulders, "Calm down, John."

She's soothing him. And they got that not from the written record, but from the 1950s TV shows. There used to be one called "Father Knows Best," but it was really about mother knowing best because she soothes Father. She's home all day, of course, watching soap operas and vacuuming. And Dad comes home and he's all hot and bothered about something, and she calms him down.

And that stereotype may or may not be true for the 1950s. Probably not, 'cause most w- moms were working too. but is certainly not true for the Adamses. Everybody that John Adams hated, and at various times he hated John Hancock, definitely Jefferson, even Hamilton, who was on, is in his political party once there were parties. Really George Washington, although you couldn't say so, it's kinda like saying you hated God. But everybody that John Adams hated, Abigail hated more.

So don't think of her as calm and soothing. She was just as passionate as he was, and the show completely misses that. And misses [00:18:00] child-raising too, 'cause the kids completely followed orders from their parents, which cl- I don't know. the person in charge of that obviously had never had kids. But Abigail would go, "Bed," and snap, the kids would go dashing off to bed. No back talk. I realize it was 18th century, but actually one of the cool things, completely unrelated and then I'll stop, is One of the cool things about them is they were both opposed to corporal punishment of kids, which they weren't the only ones who had that attitude, but they were very, very much on the cutting edge of that.

[00:18:29] Phoebe Abdee and Abigail's ambivalent attitude to slavery

Woody Holton: Mm. Well, uh, that's not the question I was gonna ask, but 

Isabelle Roughol: Since you mentioned corporal punishment, that made me think of slavery. What was their attitude to slavery? Was slavery present in their life? It was for many of the Founding Fathers,

Woody Holton: Yeah. John, th- had very little experience of slavery, ever until maybe as president. There were a lot of slaves in Washington, DC. He was president when the capital moved from Philadelphia down to Washington, so he started to experience slavery.

no, and [00:19:00] he had Black workers. I think they were not enslaved in Philadelphia. But my point is she's really the one to talk about here 'cause she was raised in part by slaves. There was one woman in particular named Phoebe, later married a man named Abdee, Phoebe Abdee. who, here's the, here's one of the s- most stunning comments from Abigail.

Let's see. Slavery's abolished in 1783 by the same Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, that would later make Massachusetts the first state to, legalize gay marriage, quoting the same phrase, "All men are born equally free." How can we stop some pe- men and women, from marrying?

Anyway, the Supreme Court in 1783 of Massachusetts, after a woman named Mum Bett, who she later changed to Elizabeth Freeman, she sued and got free in 1783, and then the precedent, that was earlier, but then the precedent gets set in '83.

Anyway,Phoebe Abdee was freed in 1783, but by then she was [00:20:00] old. And Abigail really took care of her. So Phoebe would come back from her garden or whatever and find a load of firewood on her porch or half of a pig. And that was Abigail. and it was-- You could call it reparations.

She'd done her own little reparations effort 'cause she understood maybe she wouldn't have done this if Phoebe had been freed at age 20, but since she'd be- been a- freed at age 60, which was old back then, she felt a responsibility to her.

Again, it rhymes with what she had done as a kid, going around with her mom to deliver charity to the widows and other poor folks.

So on the one hand, she's got a somewhat patronizing attitude 'cause she was the patron of Phoebe Abdee. 

On the other hand, after Abigail's parents had both died, her mother in a dysentery epidemic in '75, her father in '83, basically of old age. After her natural parents had died, she was talking about Phoebe Abdee in some other context, and Abigail [00:21:00] referred to Phoebe as "the only surviving parent I have."

And you know as a French speaker that parent can mean something a little broader than mom and dad in French. So she may have been pulling from that, but, either way, she's thinking of her as a relative. And I can tell you a story from the 1790s. Like Melania, she didn't spend a lot of time in the capital with her husband when he was president, partly because, she was aware of malaria in Philadelphia and even more so in DC.

But anyway, she's up in Massachusetts and she writes John a letter. We're glad when they're separated 'cause we get letters. But she's up there in Massachusetts and she has a servant boy. It's fair to call him a boy 'cause he was quite young, but who was free but was Black. And, with her encouragement, he enrolled at the local primary school.

The other kids... I had an experience like this 200 years later. the, the other, kids in this school, the white kids, they had no problem with him, but [00:22:00] their parents said, "We're all gonna pull our kids out of the school if you don't get rid of this Black kid." And Abigail, you know, James came and told her about what, what had happened, and she s- went and spoke with the schoolmaster and some of the parents and quoted,the golden rule to them, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

So she really kinda looks like Martin Luther King in, of the 1790s in that story. 

[00:22:26] Understanding Abigail's racism 

Woody Holton: But now I gotta take you back a little bit to 1784. Of course, Britain had abolished slavery long before we did in 1865. They d- a court decision, took a while for anybody to obey it, but of 1772, had abolished slavery in Britain 12 years before she got there.

But she goes to Othello, and I think, I'm not a Shakespeare scholar, but I think one of the whole points of that play is bigotry is wrong. You know, one of the reasons that Iago doesn't like Othello, is determined to bring him down, is who's this Black guy who's advanced so much higher than me or whatever.[00:23:00] 

So it's an anti-s- anti-slavery and anti-racism, not even anti-slavery 'cause slavery's not a story in there. It's an anti-racist play. And Abigail wrote home to her sister in Massachusetts, "I could scarcely conceal my disgust at this sooty," sooty, S-O-O-T-Y, because black as soot, "this sooty Black man touching the fair Desdemona."

And it was really that hand-to-hand contact. She had also that racist gene, and I think it may have come out in a, in,in London because as an American abroad, she felt a need, and the ambassadors unofficially, that's what he was, the ambassador.

They called him First Minister or whatever. no Minister Plenipotentiary. Anyway,she's representing the United States in London, and slavery is an institution over here, and she hates it, but she feels like she's gotta defend it.

 It was horrific what she said, but it was, it's a challenge for all of us who [00:24:00] write biographies of her. How can you with the one hand call Phoebe your parent and quote the golden rule to get your Black servant boy back into this white school, and on the other hand, talk about the sootyOthello? So you tell me, your interpretation. It's certainly out there to, waiting to be interpreted how she could

Isabelle Roughol: Y- 

Woody Holton: go to such extremes.

Isabelle Roughol: Reading you, I mean, one, I think she's just, none, none of us are immune from unconscious biases, and certainly not in her era. I think she's probably, just absolutely swimming in this sea of racial prejudice, which, even the most enlightened, it would be very hard to be completely free of it.

And also she doesn't seem very happy when she's in Europe. She certainly does not like French women very much. And she doesn't seem to beas open-minded as she might be about other things. She doesn't seem to be,the way I'm reading it, particularly excited about discovering foreign cultures and foreign people and, you know... She has a very, even though [00:25:00] she is not a Puritan herself, I read her as a very American Puritan showing up in Europe and thinking, "What is this decadence in front of me?"

Woody Holton: As a French native, you'll be shocked to hear that there's a certain class of Americans who go to Europe so that they can come home and say, "I never realized how much I liked the good old US of A until I was over there."

Isabelle Roughol: there's a whole class

of French people who go abroad for the same reasons, I think. 

Woody Holton: Right, right.

[00:25:25] Golden Rule Contradictions

Woody Holton: I've brought that question up with students and they've pointed out, Othello was a soldier, and the kid was a kid.

and so I think there are a lot of people, it won't shock you to hear that I'm not big on Donald Trump, but, I did notice the other day that,one of my fellow South Carolinians with a car even more beat up than mine had stalled out in the middle of the intersection.

They happened to be Black, and the guy helping him with the classic pickup truck and multiple Trump stickers happened to be white. So I think if you're vulnerable, you're gonna bring out my belief in the golden rule. If [00:26:00] you're powerful and carrying a sword or whatever... And she was right about Othello, by the way.

He did end up stabbing his wife. And may- you know, she knew the play by the time she saw it, so maybe that had

Isabelle Roughol: Yes, that may be it

Woody Holton: too. That may have been a more of a feminist statement than a racist statement. 

Isabelle Roughol: there's also, and then we'll stop talking about Othello. I should probably know the play better, to comment on it. B

[00:26:20] 

Woody Holton: ut she,she's commenting on the relationship with the white woman, right? Which,even the, in, in that era, and in many eras after, even the progressive, even the anti-slavery, folks were not keen on mixed relationships or, there were plenty of abolitionists who thought that the freed, Black people should just move to Africa, right? Absolutely. including Lincoln. He still said in the Emancipation Proclamation, so these were, it didn't free a single slave. It only says in places that we conquer after this, we're gonna free slaves. But then what are we gonna do with them? Ship them off to Africa. It's in the [00:27:00] Emancipation Proclamation that they'll be colonized maybe in the far west, maybe in Africa.

And the Quakers, you could go back to my era, the 18th century, the Quakers were the only white friends that Black people had in the quest against slavery. But name a Black Quaker. There's hardly any because the Quakers didn't want Black people in their faith. So you're certainly, certainly right.

And, oh, and I do think you're right also, Sex is the last thing to change. There's a wonderful Sidney Poitier movie called "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner." And the older couple about my age are lovely liberals in every respect. They may have even marched in Washington in 1963. But then their beautiful w- wonder bread skinned white daughter comes home with Sidney Poitier. I mean, I would be thrilled if my daughter or son came home with Sidney Poitier 'cause he's Si- he's him, but

it took, it was a, took a little selling. I th- and of course, the line is always, "What will the neighbors say?" Now, I don't care, but what will the neighbors say anyway?

Isabelle Roughol: Okay. 

[00:27:58] Ad break

Isabelle Roughol: we've [00:28:00] traveled all over history. We're gonna take a quick break, and then we're gonna come back to Abigail, and we'll come back to Abigail's correspondence and her most famous letter. But first, we'll take a quick break. We'll be right back.

Isabelle Roughol: Hey, it's Isabelle again. Just a quick midroll break to say a huge welcome and thank you to new members of Broad History this week. Deborah, Katie, Adrienne, Erin, Tony, Lynn, Cynthia, Jason, Amy, Marsha, Kathleen, Julie, Peggy, Cheryl, Merryll, Jennifer, Beth, Tanya, Melissa, and Camilla. Wow. Your support means the world to me. There is no Broad History without you, so thank you.

How do you get your name in the show? Well, it's easy. You go to broad history.com/membership and you sign up. For a few quid bucks, euros a month, you'll get the podcast early and ad free, party access and discounts to events, merch, anything else I can come up with in the next few months as we grow, and you [00:29:00] will be supporting independent writing and podcasting, research and storytelling into women's history.

Your support right now just as I'm getting going, is incredibly important and I am so grateful for it. It's at broadhistory.com/membership. Okay, back to the show.

[00:29:17] "Remember the Ladies": Abigail's most famous letter

Isabelle Roughol: And we are back with Woody Holton to talk about Abigail Adams. Now, Abigail is famous for three words that have often been very misunderstood.

And the words are in a letter that she writes to her husband, to John Adams. And so if you'll humor me, I will read it, but I will actually read a larger section of it because it is so often taken out of context, and then I would love your thoughts on what she actually means.

So she writes, "I long to hear that you have declared an independency." So she writes in March '76, like about three months before the Declaration of Independence.

"I long to [00:30:00] hear that you have declared an independency, and by the way, in the new code of laws, which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.

Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.

That your sex are naturally tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of master for the more tender and endearing one of friend. Why, then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity?

Men of sense in all ages abhor those [00:31:00] customs which treat us only as the vassals of your sex."

And then she finishes with a bit of a softening. "Regard us, then, as beings placed by providence under your protection, and in imitation of the Supreme Being, make use of that power only for our happiness."

That's the full bit.

And that's, in a letter where she talks about spring is coming, and we should be planting vegetables, and news from home, and news from the front, and it's all over the place. It's like there's journalism in there, and there's, just very mundane home talk, and then there's this.

What is she talking about?

[00:31:33] Abigail was not a feminist

Woody Holton: Well, first, I'm very glad that you read as far down into that letter as you did,especially going all the way to "regard us as beings placed under your protection." it would never occur to me, I swear, I'm, I'm not a, I'm not a good feminist, but even I would never say to my wife if she was sitting over there, "God has placed you under my protection."

that, that's a reminder that I don't think we should call her a feminist since that has a very 20th and 21st century [00:32:00] meaning. I think proto-feminist is certainly, fair and correct, particularly when we finally get to what she, to her will, which we should save time for.

But, um,

okay.

We will get to the will. so I'm glad you got to the protection part because we don't wanna overdo this. and actually another picture of that I picked up writing the book was this woman never in her life rode a horse. Lots of women rode horses. Enslaved women ro- knew how to ride horses in many cases in the South.

and sh- and I don't know why she didn't. I think she thought it was not ladylike enough. And so it just shows how complex we are that somebody who was such a forerunner, in so many ways was also two steps forward and then there's that one step back.

[00:32:44] "The vicious and the lawless"

Woody Holton: So I'm glad you got down there that far, but the thing I'm really glad you got to was the vicious and the lawless.

She later threatens rebellion and all this o- There's a lot of fun stuff in there. And she, l- as lots of scholars have pointed out, she takes a lot of John's own [00:33:00] phrases and throws them back at him. That is, he'd used them against the British, "All men would be tyrants if they could."

that's a standard part of the sort of s- political psychology of American patriots or American rebels against the British, that there's a natural tendency to be tyrannical. And so they're worried about being the victims of that tyranny. And she's pointing out, " well, wait a minute. When you say men, I think you meant or you could have meant, should have meant men in the sense of male. all males are naturally tyrannical."

so there's lots of clever things. There's even fun things and the threat to rebel, is the most fun of all. But there's really serious business going on here, and that is spousal abuse. And I wish I could take credit for it, and I more wish I could remember who.

It may have been Elaine Crane, but one of the other Abigail biographers, was the first to really point this out, that it's really about the vicious and lawless. There's two kinds of men, and she's partly daring to prove that he's in the good kind. but then there's this other bad kind that [00:34:00] tyrannize over their wife to the extent

And she doesn't q- It would be going too far to, to be too explicit and say men who hit their wives. But I was persuaded, o- once you hear that, you can't unhear it, I think, in everything she's writing, in that letter.

And then the same scholar that I'm remembering, and I'm pretty sure it's Elaine Crane, also points out really sadly, that, there was an alcohol gene, they didn't use that language at the time, in the Smith family, that is her family, which results in the death of two of her three sons,who basically died of alcoholism.

And it also w- was a terrible problem for her brother, William. He had a bunch of kids and couldn't take care of them, and so they were farmed out to other families. And, the wife had maybe no say in that. but,alcohol and, a form of abuse w- there's no evidence, I really wanna be sure to not libel William Smith,because there's no [00:35:00] evidence of him physically hitting, his wife, but he certainly emotionally abused her and may well have physically abused her too.

And so,this public statement th- that's quoted on every statue of Abigail, and rightly so, had a very personal side to it. A, the nothing is m- can be more intimate than spousal violence. But then even more personal than that, if, this other scholar is right, that it's really about, about her own brother.

so you start from that and then y- and then... And it is amazing that she can go from that to kidding around about rebelling. But as I think students have also pointed this out to me, that the joking, there's joking and then there's joking, and she is kidding around, but she kinda had to kid around to soften the claim.

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah. I think, with that interpretation, which I hadn't heard and I, and was like really kind of a lightning moment for me when I was reading your book, because with that interpretation, now I reread this letter and I [00:36:00] find it so incredibly modern, right? Because we're talking about domestic violence and femicide a lot nowadays. It's a big part of,women's battles. But also in the way that she is softening the blow. There's almost a bit of a Not All Men thing there, being like, "I'm not talking about you," you know? But,it's,I just found it really interesting.

[00:36:23] She was not advocating for political rights

Isabelle Roughol: The thing that she's not talking about, which is often how "Remember the Ladies" has been interpreted is the vote, right? did she ever want to vote? Did she... Was it 

not even, was it just, was it just out of even consideration at the time? 

Woody Holton: The one way I'd say it's not out of consideration, she does complain there that men are not-- that women are not represented,in,

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah, laws without, no voice or representation. Yeah, she

Woody Holton: Yes, absolutely. And she writes another letter in June of 1782, that is, is very sad and not feisty or saucy, like much of the tone of this letter, where she really [00:37:00] goes into complaining about women being taxed and, having their sons taken away to war and all that, and not being represented and not having a vote.

But,she never went beyond complaining about it. D- demanding a change to that was still beyond the pale. It was still beyond the pale for the majority of the people at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, and it was only because, Frederick Douglass stood up and agreed with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others at the convention in saying that this is the right upon which all the others are based, that we gotta ask for the right to vote.

so that would-- that's what I'd say in her defense, is 72 years later, it was still, unthinkable. it's not that people didn't want it, and there were anonymous pieces in the newspaper. Judith Sergeant Murray was saying, "Why shouldn't women vote?" there, there was things out there, mostly anonymous things.

but for her, for Abigail, it was too much, to ask for. 

[00:37:52] The disarming power of humour

Woody Holton: And even though she's talking about the most horrible thing, spousal violence, she can do it with that threat to rebel. [00:38:00] But the problem with that, the one problem with threatening to rebel is John knows she's joking, and so he writes back saying, "I cannot but laugh at your feminine propositions."

And as, uh, Cokie Roberts was another biographer of Abigail Adams and a big NPR person, and she used to say Abigail must have wanted to kill him. And I'm sure that's true. And so that's the problem. If you do something, if you put the joke in there to soften it, then that's an opening. It's like playing bridge and, oh wow, if I play the seven of spades, he's gonna play the eight of spades, and he did kinda trump her there.

Isabelle Roughol: I thought that too when I read it. I thought, We've all, we've all, I, I just, it's one of those moment where I felt, 250 years apart, I felt I could relate entirely to Abigail's experience, which is how do you deliver the feminist creed that you want to deliver, but you soften it so that it doesn't rankle, but then you make it serious enough that people don't respond with a joke, and then opposite you, you know you have someone who [00:39:00] laughs it off. I, we've all been there. So I thought I really, I really related with that. 

[00:39:05] The mutual education of women

Isabelle Roughol: I think the one thing that she's quite, insistent, consistently very vocal and more so,than the vote clearly throughout her life is education, is girls' education.

'cause I think people connect her to the vote, connect her to Remember the Ladies.

Actually, it's girls' education that I think she's most passionate about. What is it that, what is the problem that she sees?

Woody Holton: first let me just say how much I agree, just 'cause if you were to try to stat-- s- do it statistically, she mentions, spousal violence, if we're even right, and I think we are, about that once that I can think of in all of her 2,000 surviving letters. And she mentions education all the time.

 She clearly was pissed off, uh, that she had a cousin who went to Harvard, and she wrote him saying, "I wish I could go to Harvard," uh, and, "Tell me everything you learned in, in algebra class," or, or whatever. and that was probably [00:40:00] another little joke that he took as a joke, and so he didn't teach her a damn thing.

But we also shouldn't go too far into thinking that she was uneducated. A, you read the letters, you can tell she's very educated.

I-- being on your talk show reminds me of a talk show, an all-night talk show I was on in Denver, Colorado one time. So at 3:00 in the morning, some guy asked me, "Oh, what would, what would Abigail Adams have thought about 9/11?"

and I actually had an answer, about 9/11 because she knew something about Islam. back when they were courting in their courtship letters. By the way, all these letters are available online for free, and I really recommend them to people. Just, Google "Adams Electronic archive." Uh, anyway, oh, thank you.

 in one of the courtship letters she said, "I wish I could fly to you o- on the wings of Buraq, of the Buraq of Muhammad." And I go, "What?" so I of course had to look it up because my knowledge of, uh, Islam and most religions is pretty thin. But that's how Muhammad traveled up to heaven, he was on a Buraq, a flying [00:41:00] horse.

Uh, and so she once again, not for the first time, beat me in classic knowledge, and that's because she read the newspapers where there would be excerpts from the... It was, it was hard to come up with enough stuff to put in a colonial newspaper before the Revolution. I think one reason they fought the Revolution was so they'd have some American news.

And so they 

Isabelle Roughol: War,

war has always been great for newspapers.

Woody Holton: And for Americans learning geography, yeah. But anyway, they would stuff poems and history of Russia and all this stuff. You could learn that stuff from the papers, but also her grandfather had a huge collection of books, which she was known to have consulted.

But to me, the most interesting thing about her education is the letters she wrote her peers and especially female cousins, where they would say, "Oh, I've just read..." She would say, you'll like this as a French woman, "I've read Molière and he's so dirty. It's terrible. I hate it. I had to keep reading," you know,

Isabelle Roughol: See why I think she's a Puritan?

Woody Holton: Yes, exactly.

Isabelle Roughol: You hate Molière. Come on

Woody Holton: Right. Yeah. Well, by her [00:42:00] standards. And as I say, "I had to keep reading," she says. And then her friend would write back, say, "Yeah, and, and I find Chesterfield even worse." There's a guy named Lord Chesterfield who basically wrote advice to young men on how to seduce young women. Uh, she hated him. The only thing she ever published in her lifetime was by accident. She sent somebody else's denunciation of Lord Chesterfield to a Boston newspaper with an introduction, and he didn't, she didn't mean for the introduction to be printed. That's her one publication out of all the great stuff she wrote.

Anyway, my point is these letters that she wrote back and forth with her female friends and cousins, you'd think, "Oh, how far away did that cousin live? Three colonies away? Three towns away?" Nope. The, uh, she lived next door. They're writing letters to practice their skills. So I would not describe her the way you would describe Ben Franklin as self-educated, I would call her socially educated.

They're not self-educated, they are mutually educated. And she did [00:43:00] get far enough to know what, A, to write a mean letter, although in terrible s- handwriting, in my opinion, and terrible spelling, One of the few things that she was really insecure about was her spelling. but everybody spelled poorly in those days, so that's not a very good thing to worry about. but, she also was educated enough to know how uneducated she was, and was determined to rectify that for herself. And so while she was in London, she attended lectures, and in Philadelphia, she would go to, I think she went to some dissections.

She went to watch Congress. Although the one time she went to watch Congress was when they were voting on whether the bond speculators or the soldiers who'd actually done the fighting were gonna get the windfall at the end of the w- at- after the Constitution was adopted and the federal government had tax money to spend.

but much, more generously, she was constantly pushing, young women to take opportunities to get educated and pushing men to allow women to attend their lectures. Public lectures were a big thing. This is back in the day where if you lived in New Haven, [00:44:00] Connecticut, even if you had nobody, or near New Haven, even if you had nobody in the graduating class, you would still go to graduation for the pure entertainment.

and so yes, I agree that's the biggest, thing she p- she pushed in her letters for women was education. 'Cause of course, if you have education, then you can battle the other things and maybe, ultimately battle for the vote.

Isabelle Roughol: And in that way, I think she prefigures,a lot of the feminist battles of the 19th century, right? Because it j- it very much becomes a theme, you say women can't do this, you say women can't do that. Well, of course, nobody's teaching them, you know.

No one is born with those skills, right? You have to develop them, and so you're keeping women as, you know, eternal children, not just legally, but also by refusing to develop their intellects.

Woody Holton: Absolutely. That's all over the Seneca Falls resolution. Women can't do this because they're uneducated, and by the way, we're gonna keep you uneducated

Isabelle Roughol: By the way, you can't be educated. Yes, you're not allowed in universities and schools, et cetera.

[00:44:58] The first First Lady in Washington

Isabelle Roughol: There's two things I want to talk [00:45:00] about. well, one thing I want to talk about before we talk about her will, which I promise you we will, is that she is the first First Lady to move to Washington.

 She lives in the White House briefly. . 

Woody Holton: Yeah. Before you guys burned it down.

Isabelle Roughol: Sorry.

Woody Holton: still very bitter about that

Isabelle Roughol: We've each done some things we regret. what does she think of it? What does she think of, life in Washington and of life in federal politics, which, John dragged her into?

Woody Holton: Sh- she hated the White House. it was unfinished. They moved into a, to, a fixer-upper. it, it had been built, but it, but not furnished and, it leaked and all that stuff. And,like all the first ladies after her, she's-- that's part of her job. We'll see whether, AOC's husband also takes care of the plumbing in the White House when she's

Isabelle Roughol: Are we opening bets on AOC then?

Woody Holton: Yeah.

I think that's a different website. So she hated that part of the job. She was exposed to slaveryin a bigger way than [00:46:00] before, and became more opposed to it than before, than ever before, I think. and,and she was aware that it was a malaria trap, being a swampy southern area and didn't like it for that reason.

And I think I'm doing a book on disease now, so I'm noticing that disease is the thing behind so many, many things. so she was not a happy camper in Washington. Yeah, and she didn't like seeing people saying horrible things about, her husband. 

[00:46:26] What we don't like about Abigail

Woody Holton: You know, one of the questions that I disappoint people is the most frequently asked question of a, a Abigail biographer probably is, what influence did she have on her husband?

And on his politics, I have to say not much. She tended to be more extreme than him. One of his low moments as president was the Alien and Sedition Acts, putting congressmen and newspaper editors in jail, and it actually happened, for criticizing him and his administration. And of course, there was a war to justify it,a war against the French, that took place only at sea between [00:47:00] 1798 and 1800.

But, he got a lot of criticism, rightly so, I think most of us agree, for signing the Alien and Sedition Acts. But she thought they should be tougher, because she was quite, the partisan. yeah, we haven't had time to talk about things I don't like about her, but I'll just mention, tick off a couple of them.

One was that she was an absolute partisan. She was a hater, to use internet language. And she also didn't allow two of her, kids to marry the person they truly loved. and, I, w- this was a time when the kids were getting control over who they married and they weren't all, they weren't arranged marriages.

And so technically, if they'd pushed harder, but she had the force,of all of her power and deployed it against both John Quincy and Nabby, her daughter, marrying the right person. and, and that was sad. 

[00:47:51] The final will and testament of Abigail Adams

Woody Holton: The place where she did have the biggest influence on her husband, to go back to that, is the will.

So if you're ready to talk about that, we can

Isabelle Roughol: Yes. Yes, we can wrap up on the Will[00:48:00] 

Woody Holton: all right. So remember that John, when Abigail wrote him in 1776 saying, "Remember the ladies," he wrote back saying, "I cannot but laugh." So that's the basis for people m- like me saying she didn't influence him much, and she didn't in the terms of actual laws getting passed.

But you'll also recall my saying early on that she made a killing for him in all sorts of speculative and some of them unscrupulous ways. And all of that money, because she's married to him, is his money to do with... If he'd had a mistress, he could've spent it all on his mistress, because it's his money even though she earned it, and that was one of the great forms of oppression that lasted for centuries and did not end in 1776 with independence.

The, the 13 states all continued to follow the English common law. It was only when we started to bring in states like Louisiana and Mississippi, which had a little bit of a, a French history to them, and then later Texas and Florida and so forth,that women started to own property, and eventually we get in, starting in [00:49:00] 1839, women's, married women's property laws.

but that's way in the future. That's long after she died. And so she was not allowed to own property, but here's the great discovery that caused me to say, "I have to write this book," and that is she's not allowed to own property as a married woman. She did it anyway. She took some of that money she'd made for her husband and set it aside.

She called it, "my own pocket money." Th- this, and tellingly, "This money which I call mine," 'cause she knew legally it wasn't. But she used it for things her husband didn't normally, approve of, like supporting Phoebe more than,than he would've wanted her to, and for, Oh, she used it to bribe her kids to move closer to her, which if my parents had that much money, they probably would've done that.

"Hey, we'll ... Don't worry about work. There's a mansion you can have if you'll just move next door to us." I could relate to that, now that I've got kids of my own out there. She used it for interesting purposes. But she also held onto a bunch of it so that in [00:50:00] January 1816, when she thought she was dying, she had, it was 10,000, $6,000, but you could probably multiply that times 20 to get a sense of what it would buy today.

she had, she still had that much to write in her will. and in her will, sh- she had all of these nephews and sons-in-law and grandsons and so forth, who were really in bad financial shape. The 19th century was ups and downs in the economy, and a lot of them were in the real low stages, and she left these guys nothing.

She left it all to her nieces, her daughters-in-law, her granddaughters, and even to her female servants. She left it all to women. But that's not even the most surprising thing about it. The most surprising thing about it is that she wrote that will at all in 1816 because her husband was still alive.

He famously died. Oh, we're about to celebrate the 150th anniversary, I'm sorry, the 200th anniversary of John Adams' [00:51:00] death on July, it'll be in the past tense for people watching us because it was on July 4th, 1826, same day as Jefferson. So my point is that her husband died after her, so there was no reason to write her, for her to write a will.

And no right, she had no right to write a will either. And she was aware of that. She wrote, "I, Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams, by and with his consent," and that changed everything. Even though he didn't sign it or anything, she claimed that he had approved it. And then it was up to him after he found this will in his wife's papers, he would've been completely within his rights to just throw it in the fire because he was the master of the house.

But what he actually did was comply with it to the letter. And to me, that almost makes up for him saying, "I cannot but laugh at your feminine proposals." because, within their own household,he was acknowledging that even though English common law is still operative in [00:52:00] America, didn't give her the right to own property and write a will, sh- there was a moral right which she insisted on and which he acknowledged.

And to me, that was their most fascinating collaboration.

[00:52:12] Legacy and Farewell

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah, I think there's a lot of, of tenderness to that final, final act in both, John Adams and their sons and male relatives not, not fighting this, in acknowledging her ownership and her decision. and in her, continuing 'cause for her whole life she cared for a lot of relatives, and in her death she continued to care for all the women in her life, which, yeah, I thought was a very beautiful ending to her life and an ending to our conversation.

Thank you so much, Woody Holton, for taking so much time to help us know Abigail Adams so much better.

Woody Holton: Well, I've really en-enjoyed the conversation. I told you I've had certain questions that I always get asked, but you didn't ask me any of those. So these are all new questions, so it made for a really fun conversation. So thank you, and I, I, I enjoyed it. 

[00:53:00] That was Woody Holton. You'll find his book "Abigail Adams: A Life" in the Broad History bookstore, as well as his latest "Liberty is Sweet", where he continues to expand who we think about when we think about the American Revolution. If you look closely at the cover, the patriot pointing their gun at two red coats is actually a woman in disguise. The bookshop is linked in the show notes as always.

Isabelle Roughol: If you don't subscribe already, sign up for the newsletter and read the articles at broadhistory.com. This week I wrote an explainer on coverture, the reason why married women like Abigail Adams could not own property. There's more background on the women we talked about last week with Carol Berkin, you know, women like Deborah Sampson, Lydia Darragh, Sybil Ludington, and Molly Pitcher, and also why it's so difficult to even know the truth of their lives. And there's some great illustrations too by a Broad History listener, Heather Rogers, who doodles American [00:54:00] presidential history. It is great fun. It's all at broadhistory.com where you can also opt to support the show and get every episode early and ad free by signing up for membership.

And finally, if you enjoy the show and you must have if you listened this far, please go and nominate it for Listeners' Choice in the British Podcast Awards. And no, you do not need to be British to vote for this particular British election. It is britishpodcastawards.com/voting. I haven't won an award since college and I'd kind of like to thank you so much.

This has been Broad history, a podcast about the history you think you know with women in it this time. I've been your host, Isabelle Roughol. Music by Aaron Kenny. I'll talk to you next week. [00:55:00] 

Isabelle Roughol: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome. Hello, and welcome to Broad History, a podcast about the history you think you know with women in it. This time, I'm your host, Isabelle Roughol The first historian of the American Revolution was a woman in 1805 Mercy Otis Warren published a three volume sweeping history of the more than two decades from the Stamp Act in 1765 to the ratification of the American Constitution in 1788.

A revolution to which she had contributed as a pamphlets, a playwright, and a frequent correspondent with many of the founding fathers. John Adams, who had been a friend of Warren's, responded to the book with a now infamous sentence. History, he said, is not the province of ladies. Adams was more than a little miffed by his unflattering portrayal in the book, but he wasn't [00:01:00] wrong.

Not that history shouldn't be the province of ladies, obviously we're here, but that it typically wasn't, and it was going to be less and less as the 19th century wore on the professionalisation of the field, as of so many others in the Industrial Revolution. And if you wanna know more about that, you can go back to the very first episode of Broad History.

Pushed women out. It replaced Antiquarians, amateur upper class nerds with time on their hands with certified professional historians. Authority came in the form of a university education and a university position, and universities did not let women in, male historians concerned with their field's legitimacy and understandably less preoccupied with representation, focused on power, on politics and geopolitics, war and diplomacy, the Great Men version of history.

And so women among others, even those whose contributions had been famous in their day, faded out of the [00:02:00] grand narrative. Their stories remained in folktales and family lore, in diaries and letters packed up in attics, in newspaper archives, and museum reserves for nearly two centuries until in the 1970s, the feminization of higher education led to a great boom in scholarship on women's history, and their stories were reclaimed.

This is true of pretty much every era, and I think particularly true of the American Revolution, a time when history often blends with a national founding myth in which 60 odd men were enshrined as the founding fathers in a virile civic religion. Happy Birthday America this summer. As the United States commemorates a very emotionally complex semi quincentennial, I thought we could use an alternative to the rather masculine official celebrations.

Of course, the founding fathers are the primary characters of the American Revolution, and that makes [00:03:00] sense and we will talk about them. Of course, combat in the Revolutionary War was mostly a masculine experience, and no one's denying that. But that doesn't mean women weren't there as they always are in war, and not just as passive victims, patriot women, loyalist women, both free and enslaved, black women, indigenous women.

They were all there with their bodies and their labour on the line contributing economically. And yes, politically, and we know the Declaration of an Independence made promises it did not keep to women or to anyone really, but propertied white men. And that's what we're gonna be talking about over the next few weeks.

The introduction I just gave you is actually inspired by the one, Dr. Carol Birkin, one of the preeminent scholars of women in the American Revolution, gives in her book, revolutionary Mothers. I was privileged to speak with her at length for two episodes. She is raising a curtain on the American Revolution with us this week, and she will be coming [00:04:00] back at the end of the series to close it.

But if you are a member of Broad History, you can hear both episodes right away. And if I'm honest, I'm especially partial to the second one. Go to your members' feed right now and you'll find the episode. If you're not a member of Broad History, now's your chance. Sign up at broad history.com/membership and you'll get the details to listen right away.

As a member, you'll receive every episode early and with this series, I'll release episodes to members in batches. There's already two more coming next week, you'll get full access to the archives and more benefits as broad history grows. But most importantly, you help me make broad history happen. I research, produce, host, and edit this show entirely by myself.

And your membership is the only way this can happen this week. There are many new members I want to acknowledge. We have a significantly larger listenership than when I last left you to prepare this series. [00:05:00] We went a little bit viral. If you're a longtime listener and have no idea what I'm talking about, go to the newsletter.

Go to the website, broad history.com. I'll explain it that. But thank you and welcome to the following new members, Mary Eleanor, Christina, Tracy, Cheryl, Susan, Mary Jo, Mary Beth, Diane, Melissa Allison. Let me know when you see a pattern. Lauren, Jennifer, Kate, Kimberly, Avril, Laura, Jennifer, Carol, and Kathleen.

And if you don't want a subscription, you can support with a donation of any amount of your choosing, as did Anna, Barbara, and Melissa, Lydia, Cassie, Molly, Amy. Again, let me know if you see a pattern, Elena, Ann, Hailey, Sarah Ellen, and Barbara, as well as several anonymous donors. This is also something you can do at broad history.com/membership.

Thank [00:06:00] you so much to all of you and to early members for this exceptional support. Okay, now without further ado, comfortable, we're travelling 250 years back to Colonial America. Here is Dr. Carolyn. Here is Dr. Carol Birkin.

[00:06:26] Meet Carol Berkin

Isabelle Roughol: Dr. Carol Berkin. Hello. Welcome to Broad History.

Carol Berkin: Hello. Nice to be here.

[00:06:32] The three principles of colonial America's patriarchal society

Isabelle Roughol: Thank you so much for sharing so much of your time. We're lucky to have you for two episodes. We're going to bookend this series with you. So today we start the revolution. So, um, let's set the scene first. What, what does America look like before revolution? What does colonial society look like, uh, for women and for gender roles?

Carol Berkin: Well, mostly I, I imagine you're talking about white women because [00:07:00] Native American women have a completely other gender system. And African American enslaved people have a limited, actually, they also have a reverse gender system. 'cause the women went out to work in the fields and the men became artisans.

But anyway, if you're talking about white women, one of the first things, what the colonies are all different. People don't realise they were founded by different groups. They were founded by different purposes. They have pretty much the same political structure, but it, it varies. Their economies vary. One of the things that unites them is their, uh, gender ideology in regards to women.

And that's sort of ironic, I guess. Uh. Colonial America and [00:08:00] England, um, for a, is a patriarchal society. That is, it traces everything through the father, and if you get married, you go to live in with his, uh, domain, not, not your mother's Uh, and it was based on three principles, the, which will seem absolutely absurd to us today.

But, uh, the first was that God declared that woman must be obedient and subservient to her father and then her husband because of the Garden of Eden. That apparently Eve is to blame for the temptation that got them expelled from the garden. And what it proved was that Eve is high, that women are highly susceptible to the devil's, uh, appeal.

Uh, which is why of course most witches were [00:09:00] women were assumed they were witches. Uh, secondly, what they termed science in, in their day in the early 18th century, which was that the women's brains were smaller than male brains and consequently weaker. And this explains why women were incapable of rational thinking.

Now, in the 18th century, in the 17th century, rational thinking meant also moral decision-making telling right from wrong. And so obviously, uh, if you didn't obey your father and you didn't obey the guidance of your husband, heaven only knows what chaos in society you can create. Uh, and, and this theory explains why men raised their children, uh, that is women could teach their [00:10:00] daughters female chores and skills, but socialisation of children was the responsibility of the father.

What your place was in society, what your place was in the family, what your moral values would be, because women were incapable of that.

The third branch of this sort of, to put the icing on the cake, was the law, which codified these assumptions of, of religion and of science, so to speak. And the law simply said. Once when you are unmarried, you are under the domain of your father. And once you get married, you are under the domain of your hu your husband. So that in colonial society, uh, before the Revolution, women had no real legal identity. They [00:11:00] couldn't sue or be sued. Anything, uh, any money they earned went to their husbands.

Uh, they, they couldn't, uh, uh, write a will and, and leave what they brought into the marriage to anyone. In fact, their bodies belong to their husbands, and we are just beginning to really look at that. But I'll tell you that if a woman ran, if a slave ran away from his master, the poster that was put up said, runaway.

If a wife ran, ran away from her husband, the poster said, she has abducted her body from me.

Isabelle Roughol: Wow, the entitlement.

Carol Berkin: Yes. Yes. So she literally belonged to her husband.

[00:11:54] The permanent childhood of women

Isabelle Roughol: Is that very similar to, to Britain at the time, or is it particularly strong in, in America?

Carol Berkin: It, [00:12:00] it is complicated in Britain because of aristocracy. That is ma uh, uh, married aristocrats, once they bore a son for their husband could do what, generally speaking could do whatever they wanted. Uh, in America, in fact, in America fornication was only a woman's crime. Men could not be accused. They, they, they might be unfaithful, but, but fornication was a woman's crime.

So what we have is a kind permanent childhood, uh, uh, set for women. They were passed from their father to, to their husband, uh, through marriage. And they were to be not just silent in the church, but they were to be silent in terms of all [00:13:00] civic activity. Now, this was the ideology. There were of course instances women certainly quote gossiped and sometimes gossip against a man could bring down his reputation in, in town.

The, there's sort of variations on this, but technically speaking, women were legal non-entities. Now, you could, there is one exception to this, and that is often sailors and ship captains who were away for a very long time could legally empower their wives not to be femme couverte which is what all wives were women covered, but femme seule And it was always temporary and it was always through the granting by the husband behind a [00:14:00] lot of the laws relating to women was the desire not to make them be a burden on the community. And so that's why femme seule was available to husbands who were away for a long time. But also that's why women had dower rights.

Doer rights said a woman was entitled to one third of the property of the husband when he died. Why? It wasn't because they thought she'd done such a wonderful job being his wife. It was so that she wouldn't go on Public doll. Uh uh. So you can see that more than anything else, women were sort of passive recipients of history by rule, by law, by religion, by science.

Uh, and all of [00:15:00] this is going to change in the American

Revolution.

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah. Yes. That's important context to set because when we know what we're about to know about how women behaved in the revolution, um, that is very striking. So in this context, revolution breaks out or revolt. I dunno if you can call it a revolution right away, but, um, in our minds it's, you know, it's Boston and the Tea Harbour.

Kind of, you know, what happens, what, what starts all this off?

[00:15:26] The roots of revolution in the French and Indian war

Carol Berkin: Uh, Boston likes to claim it's everything. But in fact, what starts it off is the overwhelming and somewhat surprising victory of England in the French and Indian War. Now, when I was in school, I grew up in Mobile, Alabama, where all they taught was the coming of the Civil War, the Civil War, and the aftermath of this.

I thought the French and Indian War was a war between French and Indians. no, it was a war between France and [00:16:00] England and the Indians on the whole sided with France. And it was a long war, and it was bitterly fought and England won at great expense. The Crown borrowed money from local London merchants.

They raised taxes, and when it was over, the treasury was empty. And they couldn't endure that because they hadn't defeated France. They hadn't conquered France. France was mobilising its army and its navy again for the next conflict. And those two countries will be at war until World War I, I mean they, they, they continued this rivalry.

So Britain had to keep up its army, it had to keep up its navy, it had to re-arm its men. And now it also had to govern Canada because they had taken Canada from the French. [00:17:00] So they were in a, as my son would say, in a pickle. Uh, they couldn't raise taxes in England anymore because the people would riot.

So they changed their mind about why they fought the war. They give it a different spin and they say, we fought it to protect the colonists, uh, of New England from the French. And so they need to pay some of the costs of, of this new size of the empire. For the first time in 1763 and dramatically in 1765, they passed taxes on Americans.

This had never been done before. The American legislatures taxed the American colonists, indirectly. England taxed them dramatically because they had a mercantile system that [00:18:00] says, you can't trade with anybody but England. If you wanna buy French wines, you have to buy it from English merchants. If you wanna, you can't trade with any of the Caribbean islands that belong to other countries.

And so that was, in essence, America's understanding that was how they were taxed. So now England passes the stamp act that says you have to put a stamp on every legal document, on every plan card, on every divorce paper on every, and Americans who had been cheering with Britain's victim, uh, a victory in 1763 suddenly felt themselves under attack by the British government law after law were, was passed the, the trade with foreign countries, which Britain had never really overseen before.

I often say that they lost their empire 'cause they were too cheap to impose to, to enforce their laws. Uh, suddenly they [00:19:00] send customs collectors over and they arrest, uh, uh, cap tape boats from, uh, ships from John Hancock and others who are caught trading with the enemies. And it's a completely different ballgame.

All of a sudden, Americans are beginning to feel that England is oppressing them. That parliament doesn't, doesn't care about the, the wellbeing of the colonies that they're being used. And so, for 10 years, really from 1765 to 1775 and 76, when they declare independence, you see this buildup of antipathy toward the British government.

And also a buildup of a sense that we are separate from Britain. It's a, you know, if you, if we're a toddler, you'd say separation, individuation. You know, they're beginning to, they, they don't think of [00:20:00] themselves as Americans. They think of themselves as Marylanders and Virginians and Connecticut. But they all agreed that they're all being oppressed first by Parliament.

And then finally by the Declaration of Independence, they say the king is a tyrant. And, and that's, that's the final blow that you have a tyrannical king. You have a legislative government that's oppressing you. What can you do? You have to declare your, your independence.

[00:20:33] Boycotts, liberty cloth and the political radicalisation of women

Carol Berkin: So during that whole pre-revolutionary period, women played an absolutely critical role.

It is, it is. I'm often asked, what was the most radical thing about the American Revolution? And I'm tempted to say the politicisation of women. It happened, boom. Just like that. They went from being silent [00:21:00] on all civic and political matters to being called to action. Uh, immediately. Why? Because the reason most of those laws Britain passed were repealed was the Americans hit on an astonishingly effective te uh, strategy.

They called a boycott on British goods, and the two main British goods were cloth, which is what was wool And cloth was what was driving the British in, uh, uh, industrialization and tea, which though it wasn't produced in Britain, was produced in its colonies in the Far East. And everyone in parliament was making a lot of money off that.

The Americans. Tea was the drink of choice because no one drank milk. Pasteur was not, uh, uh, alive yet. [00:22:00] Uh, no one drank water. And so they boiled water. They drank tea, and they drank an enormous amount of alcohol. Uh, when I was writing one of my books, I evaluated, I looked at the statistics according to modern day interpretations of what would make you an alcoholic.

Every man, woman, and child over the age of eight was an alcoholic, right? So, so they, they, but not to be able to drink tea for women, when it was also a social experience. It was one of the few experiences where women got together, especially rich and upper middle class women. They, tea services were very big, uh, uh, purchase.

It indicated that you were genteel so, and cloth. I mean, as [00:23:00] soon as British cloth became available, American women threw their spinning wheels away. Spinning was the most hated activity in a woman's

life it's so dull. Like women did it for centuries or millennia even, and it's duller than watching paint dry.

that's exactly right. I tell my students the only thing duller is watching bass fishing on television. And, you know how much women hated it because we have letters where women are writing to another woman, I'm pregnant, I hope it's a daughter 'cause I can make her do the spinning. and we know that unmarried sisters who came to live with a married sister got given that job and she was called a spinster.

So women made a huge sacrifice when they agreed to this boycott of British cloth. [00:24:00] And boy did they agree,

Isabelle Roughol: Which, shows that they were very political then to be willing to do that for the cause.

Carol Berkin: It Blew away the idea that women couldn't make rational or moral judgements. 'cause here they were saying, for the sake of our liberty, for the sake of our freedom, for the sake of our, you know, society, we are not going to purchase British cloth.

And they not only didn't purchase it, there were all these spinning bees that they had and everybody had to learn how to spin because they hadn't done it in a long time. They spun flax, by the way, linen clothing. But more importantly, they began to advertise that they would be boycotting, they wrote manifestos and published them in the papers.

The only time a woman's name ever appeared in the paper before this period was as an [00:25:00] obituary. And here were women saying, we the women of Edonton North Carolina. Are banning the drinking of tea and the purchase of cloth not because our husbands told us to, because we support liberty and freedom in America.

I mean, it was, it was overnight ministers who had told women their whole careers be silent in the church, and you have no business talking about politics or social questions. All of a sudden, praising these women I have a, uh, a minister from North Carolina who says, uh, the hills will celebrate the patriotic women.

it was, the most astonishing turnabout really. [00:26:00] I think in up to that date in American history, women were being applauded by what we would call radical men, men who were moving toward independence. The president of gonna be the president of Yale said, women are more patriotic than men are. Look at, look at them picketing, picketing shops, uh, where, uh, merchants are trying to sell British goods.

It was, and, and, and the women began to think of themselves as political actors. It wasn't just that they were doing politics. They were defining themselves as political. One young girl summed it all up. She said, we commence perfect statesmen, and they called themselves Daughters of Liberty. And so what you see is the [00:27:00] world stood on its head in terms of gender ideology, and if the women had not supported the boycotts, the boycotts would've failed.

Men wrote in, in their legislatures, they wrote letters of protest and legal claims that these laws were legal. Parliament paid no attention. They couldn't have cared less. They thought all Americans were religious dissenters and country bumpkins. But when the women stopped buying cloth and tea, then, then, uh, and the, and the pri the sales dropped dramatically.

Then Britain repealed most of the acts they had passed. So women really So

Isabelle Roughol: women really discovered their power there.

Carol Berkin: Yes, yes. They, they had what historians would call agency. They [00:28:00] realised that they could make choices that would shape history, and, and that's a pretty heavy thing to discover after decades and decades and decades and centuries of being told this is none of your business.

Isabelle Roughol: Mm-hmm.

[00:28:17] Loyalist women

Isabelle Roughol: And that, that's not all women though, of course, right? Because you had, you had loyalists of course. Do we know, do we know what was the proportion in society of, you know, Patriots versus loyalists or.

Carol Berkin: We, we've, at the bicentennial year, people invested an enormous amount of time, and energy, trying to count the number of loyalists, which of course was, you know, like how many jelly beans in a jar. Even loyalists women thought of themselves as political because they opted to remain loyal to their legal king.

You know, this was, this was what the revolutionaries were doing [00:29:00] was heresy. Uh, it was treason. And they, and they articulated their position in the same way that the revolutionary women articulated theirs. Uh, they, they couldn't support the boycott. They couldn't support not drinking tea, but they could support their husband's loyalty to the, to the crown.

Uh, John Adams always said, one third, one third, one third, one third were loyalists. One third were revolutionaries, and one third were neutral. I think the number of neutrals in the 1776 was the biggest group, because most of the PE farmers said, you know, somebody's gonna tax me. What do I care who it is? I don't have any power.

Many of them could not vote if they were tenant farmers or if they were hired help. And they said, [00:30:00] eh, you know, what difference does it make to me? The war and the behaviour of the British army is what turned many of these neutrals into revolutionaries. The British army behaved so arrogantly, uh, they engaged in so much rape of American women.

They destroyed people's homes. They burned the furniture. As the army marched across America, uh, uh, they burned the furniture to keep warm when they made camp, they took the crops, they took everything all the stored food. And Americans, uh, uh, who were subjected to this became revolutionaries. Uh, I, I think that you would find that that was true in many countries that felt themselves invaded.

Isabelle Roughol: Yes.

Carol Berkin: this, [00:31:00] this is not unique.

[00:31:02] Break

Isabelle Roughol: And we'll talk in a minute about, about this very thing, the very experience of, of the battles themselves and of the fighting for, for women on the home front. We'll just take a quick break and we'll be right back.

[00:31:14] The revolution was the real Civil War

Isabelle Roughol: We're back with historian Carol Berkin talking about women in the American Revolution, and we were just talking about sort of, uh, the lead up to re revolution the importance of, uh, women in boycotting, uh, British goods and in finding their political power.

And you were just telling me about, uh, the behaviour of the British Army and how that turned so many Americans in favour of the revolution and, and against the, what was essentially an occupying force.

And that's what I found so interesting. The more, the more I read about the American Revolution, the more depth it, I, I find that it has, because it's such a unique conflict you have, um, a revolution, uh, a change of regime from monarchy to, to republic.

You have a war of, of independence from a [00:32:00] colonial power.

Carol Berkin: And you

have a

civil war. Exactly. And that's what I wanna get to because, you know, this cuts across, families, across towns. You have no traditional frontline really. You have fighting in every home, in every town hall, everywhere.

yes. Uh, it is really more a civil war than what we call the Civil War in America. The Civil War in America was geographic the south, against the north, right? This is a war of. Individuals where individuals loyalty lay. And in the same families, I think particularly in Massachusetts of, say the Quincy family.

One Quincy daughter married John Hancock.

One Quincy daughter married one of the leading Massachusetts loyalists. The sons divided between [00:33:00] loyalists and revolutionary. And this was true. Towns were divided, families were divided, brother against brother. And it, it, it was so, uh, uh, intense, I guess is the, the word, because you couldn't remain, as the number of neutral positions began to va vanish, it was very hard to try to remain neutral.

The Quakers tried to remain neutral, and, really in the end, many of them wound up One became a general in Washington's army. It's, it's, and if you see the, the British Army marched first in the north. It abandons New England. Almost immediately, they take Boston after the Tea [00:34:00] Party. There's Lexington and Concord, and by 1776, they're out of New England.

Then they're in the middle colonies, New York, Philadelphia, and across New Jersey.

[00:34:14] The South bore the brunt of the fightingx

Carol Berkin: But the biggest fighting was in the South two major campaigns there. It's not hard to understand why there were more loyalists in the South than anywhere else who were the loyalists in the South. And this is one of the great ironies of the American Revolution.

It, it's so interesting and so complex. All the back country farmers, well, not every one of them, but most of them supported the crown, the king, on the grounds of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Who was their enemy? The planters of the coastal counties who were oppressing the farmers in the back, taxing them [00:35:00] and not letting them organise counties so they couldn't vote in the legislature.

And this was going on through the entire period. And in fact, in 1775 before the Constitu, the uh, uh, declaration of Independence was signed, North Carolina back country farmers waged war on coastal elites. Uh, they were defeated, but, but there was a warfare in north ca So the British were not stupid. They said, let's go where we have the most likelihood of having supporters.

And this meant in the South, the fighting was most brutal because guerilla warfare was the Patriots' only, uh, the Americans, uh, uh, only method the British army swept in, took over, Charleston took over. And so you [00:36:00] get these famous heroes, the swamp fox and other, uh, guerrilla guerilla fighters. And so it's American against American.

It's loyalist troops against guerilla troops. And, and there's a lot of no quarter that is, if you win, you massacre the other side. So the south is just a hotbed of conflict.

Not to mention that the British Army issued a proclamation saying, any slave that escapes to our army will be given their freedom.

They're trying to destroy the Southern planter economy. And so you have this movement of black Americans seeking freedom.

[00:36:51] War is everywhere and women can't sit it out

Carol Berkin: Uh, it's, it's exactly the kind of fog of war, if you will, that we talk [00:37:00] about in 20th Century wars, or 21st Century wars. But most people think the revolution was the little quaint war where people with muskets faced each other and went, bang, bang, bang.

And then that was it.

Isabelle Roughol: the red coats and the kid with the, the, with the fife and the, and the,

Carol Berkin: Yeah.

Isabelle Roughol: And it's not that at all. It's a very modern, very modern war really.

And, and so of course women can't sit it out, right? I mean, it's happening everywhere around them, so they are part of it.

Carol Berkin: It's not just happening around them. It's happening on their farm. It's happening on their plantation. It's happening in their home. One of, if you read the letters of these women, it's amazing. One woman said they came in and they destroyed every bit of furniture and tore the drapes down and then tore the buckles off my shoes.

'cause they thought they were gold. I mean, and worse than that crops, I [00:38:00] mean, most people with subsistence level farmers or sold some, uh, farm goods to the market. Crops were taken, uh, uh, stored food was taken. Uh, women were left. It, there was inflation, there was an absence of supplies. They needed, uh, salt for instance, they bought their salt from England.

And what did you use salt for to preserve food for the winter? Well, they no longer had salt. And women spent months trying to find, an alternative. In one case, they came up with walnut. Ash must have made the food taste terrible. But I mean, they're desperate. And it's all summed up in this letter from a wife to her enlisted man husband in Washington's [00:39:00] army.

She writes, winter is coming. We have no woo wood and we will freeze. We have no food and we will starve, pray, come home. So the war is evident in the lives of women everywhere.

The same is true in the middle. Middle col now states where rape is, is a danger. Uh, one of the British commanders on the on Staten Island said, with delight, if a young maiden steps out into her garden, she's likely to be ravished.

You know, he thought that was funny. And so you can see that I, I start my discussion usually with my classes, with this, well, when doing revolution. Well, if they didn't notice the war was going on, either they [00:40:00] were high on drugs or they were in some kind of catatonic state 'cause it was happening right in their town, in their, on their farm.

[00:40:10] The heroism of ordinary people

Carol Berkin: And so you see heroism That is, I mean, ordinary people, that's one of the things that so strikes me about the revolution. I mean, everybody knows about Washington and, uh, all the big wigs, but the tar heroism of ordinary people is really just amazing. And these women, many of the women, for instance, in the south, stored ammunition and guns for the guerilla fighters.

And if the loyalist troops or the British troops heard, they marched up to the house demanding these things. There were women who burned their own home down in order to prevent them from getting the weapons. Uh, uh, this [00:41:00] one woman who I just love, her husband had a, uh, 'cause he was off fighting, had a ornamental Japanese sword over the fireplace, and she, there was a, a matron, a woman in her forties.

You know, she comes out of the home wielding this sword and she says to the British, you take one step closer and I'll cut your head off. And they're so sort of stunned that they turn around and leave.

I, I, I mean, yeah, it, the, the things that, the bravery and the loss that they encountered, I mean, you burn your home down, basically.

That's the only possession of, you know, that's a woman's domain. And they, that they spied the, the number of women who acted as spies, who acted as messengers couriers is just amazing.

[00:41:57] Riders and Spies: how women used being underestimated to serve the revolution

Isabelle Roughol: One thing I was, I was, uh, stunned to read [00:42:00] about, because we all hear about Paul Revere, you know, uh, on his horse going to, uh, warn, uh, Patriots, the, the British are coming. Right? Well, it wasn't just Paul Revere. There were dozens of messengers and many of them stopped. He, he got stopped. And by the way, they didn't say the British are coming because they were still British at the time. They

Yes. The red coats.

Carol Berkin: The Army red coats are coming. There was a young girl in upstate New York, near Poughkeepsie, whose father was the commander of a militia unit, and a courier came from Danbury, Connecticut and said, we're being killed here by the British Navy.

They're bombarding us. You've got to send help. And then he collapsed, sort of. So the father, the, the commander of the militias sent his daughter Sybil Ludington to ride [00:43:00] out across the whole county. I mean, people couldn't telephone one another. They couldn't send an email. They didn't all live close to each other.

Sybil Ludington rode out in the night to every single home and said. Must we're mustering the militia come to our home. She was, I think, instead of being called the Paul Revere of women, which is what some people labelled her, I think Paul Revere should be labelled as the Sybil Luddington of men, because Sybil Ludington finished her ride and she was the only one involved in it.

There were women like this, girls like this, all in every state. They, they played on the British assumption that women, you know, weren't involved, didn't know what was going on, which was a really dumb thing to, to think.

Uh, there [00:44:00] was a woman in ma, a young girl in Massachusetts who had to carry a message to Washington when he was in Boston, and it's like Little Red Riding Hood.

She had a little basket of food. And when she was stopped, she said, oh, I'm gonna see my sick uncle and my mama packed, uh, food. And, and the British, and these women got away with that. Uh, it, it, they used every, they used every assumption, stereotypical assumption whenever they could. And in every colony, every state, you see women spying, uh, Lydia Darragh in Philadelphia, the British occupied Philadelphia.

And they took over the house. The officers took over the house next door to hers, and she said, please don't take my house. I'll give you a room where you can meet. And they said, okay, we'll hold our set planning sessions. Lydia Darragh's [00:45:00] husband was a, uh, undertaker. She was an older woman, a Quaker. She, the, the commanders come over one night and they lock themselves in this room, and she knew something was up.

She, she goes and listens at the door and she hears they're planning a surprise attack on a segment of Washington's army that's housed at Valley Forge. But this group is some, uh, nearby and she wants to notify Washington's army. Her son is actually enlisted with Washington's army. Her husband's an undertaker.

And because people were afraid of disease from corpses, as soon as someone died, they got them outta the city. So they put a note to Washington warning him of this surprise attack in the jacket of a corpse, and somehow [00:46:00] communicated this to her son. And when the corpse reached outside, you know, the waggon reached outside of the city.

He looked in the jacket, and, and Washington was prepared for this so called surprise attack. I mean, little old lady saved a branch of Washington's army. They are everywhere. And the stories are the, the one thing I will tell you though about these girls, young girls who carried messages, I read, uh, so many of their accounts that were passed down through the family over the ages.

Nobody body ever rode out on a nice, clear night. Every one of these accounts from Maine to Georgia begins, it was a dark and stormy night. Apparently the weather was never good if you were, if you were a messenger. So, but what you see is sort of, [00:47:00] the heroism of ordinary people and of women whose life experience had not prepared them to play that kind of active role.

[00:47:13] The revolutionary army was full of women, actually

Carol Berkin: And, and I would add that in the Army, I always get angry at, those pictures of Valley Forge, which just shows soldiers. It's like a bro conference, you know, uh, uh, traipsing through the snow. That's not what Valley Forge was like at all. Remember the woman who said, "we're gonna starve. We're gonna freeze, come home"?

Everywhere the American Army and the British Army settled in for winter quarters. Women, children, favourite pets poured into those encampments. They became instant cities. Valley Forge became an instant city filled with [00:48:00] family. Because the women were afraid of starving to death. They were afraid of being raped. They were afraid they couldn't survive the, and so they poured in, in the winter to these encampments.

I I can only tell you that you, you'll see the same thing in modern wars in Vietnam. Anytime either of the Army settled down, little countrysides all became thriving towns.

Washington hated this. He, he despised, he, he wanted to have a super professional army like the British did.

Isabelle Roughol: Well, I have a question about this because, so these are the people that we ended up calling camp followers, sometimes with some scorn. Um, but I don't understand why Washington hated it because these women worked for the army. And what plan did he have for the cooking, the washing and everything? That's, You are [00:49:00] right.

How was it gonna work?

Carol Berkin: First of all, there were no prostitutes in the encampment. The American army made absolute, this doesn't mean they weren't outside the encampment, you know, but camp followers were not prostitutes in either army.

In the British army, oddly, the officers were not allowed to bring their wives. But the enlisted men were. Those were the camp followers, and they were listed, by the way, by the guy who kept records as baggage. And that's why where I grew up in the South, if a woman was a little loose, people would say, oh, she's just a piece of baggage. Because they didn't understand that these camp followers were married to the, anyway,

So in America, Washington was furious.

And then he said, "I can't send them home 'cause if I send them home, [00:50:00] guess what will happen? The men will desert." So he put them to work, they cooked, they cleaned, they nursed the sick, they gathered the wood. It was actually cow uh, deer pies. They, Hmm. for, fuel. But they did one critical thing that, I think, saved the American army.

[00:50:27] How laundresses saved Washington's army

Carol Berkin: The men were mostly young boys. 17, 18, 19. They'd never been away from home before. What are teenage boys like? They assume their mother does the laundry. My son could take a computer apart, right? But he couldn't figure out how to work the washing machine. So the boys arrived in whatever clothes they were in and they just stayed in them.

And they stayed in them and they stayed in them and they got lice. [00:51:00] Did this inspire them to wash their clothes? No, this inspired them to scratch. So they scratched and scratched and scratched. And the person in the regiment who was supposed to tell Washington, how many people were battle-ready said I, got a whole group of young boys.

they're not battle-ready they're covered with scars. That is scabs. The boys also were bored 'cause they didn't have video games or anything like that. So they invented competitive games. What was their favourite competitive game? Throwing hot tar at the lice and then seeing who killed the most. So now they had burns and scabs.

Isabelle Roughol: Not, the sharpest tools in the shed, are they?

Carol Berkin: No. So Washington seeing this told the wives of individual soldiers, you not only have to wash your husband's clothes and the officers clothes, you have to wash the [00:52:00] clothes of all the soldiers in this regiment And so you had women and, and of course I always have a freshman student who said, where'd they get the washing machines?

I said, I mean, it's amazing how presentist kids are. So I said, they had great big pots of boiling water and they washed the clothes and rinse them in the, yeah, and then put 'em on rocks to dry. So you had women who were washing 50, 60 men's clothes. And that's why these boys no longer had lice, and that's why they were battle-ready If it hadn't been for washer women, Washington wouldn't have had the sizable army that he had. And we know that they understood that because every place an American army went, a branch of the army went, the first sign they put up [00:53:00] was "Washer women wanted." I mean...

Isabelle Roughol: The things things a war hinges on...

Carol Berkin: Yeah. Yeah. It just how people don't wanna, don't know how the funny and the horrible and the, the, the amazing stories is just amazing.

[00:53:26] Molly pitchers and women in combat

Carol Berkin: And, and we should last cover the women in the, fort by the way, these women who followed the army, when it came time in the spring to March, many of them marched with the army and they were sent out on the battlefield in the midst of battle to pick up, uh, boots and coats and arms and ammunition from the dead and dying.

And many of them were wounded. And we know that women were wounded on the battlefield because at the end of the [00:54:00] war, when it was over, some 250 women asked for veterans payment. You know, they didn't get

it.

Isabelle Roughol: Did, yeah. Did they?

[00:54:09] Molly Pitcher Myth

Carol Berkin: But, so in the forts where a fort is set up with barracks here, then a big empty space, then the cannon over here.

So if the cannon exploded, it wouldn't kill people in the, in the, uh, barracks. So the men would fire the cannons. The Indians would be firing fiery arrows over the British would be firing, uh, uh, cannon balls. The men in the fort had to reload the cannon. And the cannon was very hot, so they would shout out Molly pitcher.

Now Molly was a popular nickname for Margaret and by Molly Pitcher. I [00:55:00] thought they were bringing water when I first started this research. For the men to drink that they were hot. No, they were bringing water to cool down the

Isabelle Roughol: Oh, pour on the

cannon.

Carol Berkin: so Right. So the men could reach in and reload it without burning up their hand.

The women had to run across this open space. Cannon balls, uh, arrows coming over. Some of them were wounded and many women took over if their husband who was a cannonier, you know, uh, I don't think that's a real word, but, you know, firing

Isabelle Roughol: it might be.

Carol Berkin: Yeah. Took over their place. And people think there was a person named Molly Pitcher.

There was no such person. Bless their hearts in New Jersey. They have a rest stop on the highway called the Molly pitcher. Rest. stop There was no, that's like Rosie the Riveter in [00:56:00] World War ii.

There was no person whose name was Molly Pitcher Right. Every woman in the forts who carried water to the cannon was a Molly pitcher.

And we have accounts of individual women who were wounded, who asked for veterans, uh, uh, payment, and a couple of them got it. And we have traced these women. So, you know, women were in the midst of the battles, is what I'm trying to say. And in some cases, women dressed as men and fought as men the most.

And, and we don't know how many there were because if they got away with it, the only record we have is of them with a male name.

[00:56:48] Deborah Sampson Soldier

Carol Berkin: But we have one very famous woman, uh. Oh, why am I having a, I'm having a senior moment. Uh, Deborah Sampson. [00:57:00] Deborah

Isabelle Roughol: Yes. Yes.

Carol Berkin: right? Most many people know her story. She was this big, tall, strapping woman who had been indentured as a household servant when she was five years old.

And she knew she was gonna live her whole life that way because she'd never have a dowry. And she heard that in Connecticut they were offering a signing bonus bonus to anybody who signed up in the military. She said, Hmm. So she put on, covered up her hair, she put on a man men's clothes, and she went to Connecticut and she signed up and she got a signing bonus.

And then she left and went back to Massachusetts and she said, Hmm, that was pretty good. So she signed up in Massachusetts and for reasons we really are not clear on, she stayed as private Robert Shirtliff, and she was in the Army for three and a [00:58:00] half years. She was wounded in the thigh. Nobody knew she was female until when the war was over a, a piece had been declared.

She got Camp Fever, she was in Philadelphia, and she got Camp Fever and the doctor finally opened up her shirt and he said, oh my. And she served admirably. And so they gave her, uh, honorary discharge, and Paul Revere heard about her. She was from Massachusetts and he supported her appeal for a veteran's pension.

And she got it. She got payment. She went back and she worked as a man for a, a while. I don't know how long in the fields, 'cause of course men got paid more than domestic [00:59:00] servants who were women. And then one day, as she describes it, the birds were singing, the flowers were out. Spring had come and I went into the house and put on my bonnet and put on my apron.

And she got, became a woman again. She got married, she had five kids. So her name is Deborah Sampson Gannett and here's the clincher. When she died, her husband, Mr. Sampson, sued for a veteran's pension and got it. And got it. So.

Isabelle Roughol: Oh, might be the, the first case of a man getting a

woman's

pension

Carol Berkin: Women's pension. Yes. Yes. And, and she was just a character. She was illiterate, but she told her story to a Massachusetts man and it's written, and it's, it, I mean, she's just a larger than life figure. And, and she took her show on the road at one one point, [01:00:00] and she would appear on a stage dressed as a soldier, and she would go through little routines with her gun, you know, and then she would leave the stage and she would come out as a woman in a bonnet and apron in a dress.

And she said, why did I enlist as a man? Because I wanted to fight for American Liberty. And she passed the hat to the audience.

Isabelle Roughol: Well, that's an American show woman, if I've

ever seen one.

Carol Berkin: yes. I, she really is.

[01:00:30] Women Everywhere Except Politics

Carol Berkin: So my, my point from all of this is that women were there at every phase and in every place in the American Revolution, there's nothing except high politics.

They weren't at the signing of the Declaration of Independence. They weren't at the writing of the Constitution. They weren't in the First American government because they did not have [01:01:00] formal political rights. But in every other regard, they were active contributors to the American Revolution.

Isabelle Roughol: This was Dr. Carol Birkin. Her book, revolutionary Mothers is really accessible, fun, and quick to read. It's not an academic text, so I really recommend it. You'll find it in a broad history bookshop. Another way for British and American listeners to support the show, support the authors who kindly give us their time and expertise, support independent bookstores, not big, bad billionaires, and get great books at a discount.

You'll find links in the show notes and at broadhistory.com if you are hankering for more. From Carol Birkin, she is coming back at the end of the series to talk about the consequences of the revolution for American women. We also talked at length about the fate of black and indigenous women at Independence.

I think I like that [01:02:00] episode even more than this one, and you can listen to it right away. If you sign up as a supporting member, it's at broad history.com/membership. This has been broad history, a podcast about the history you think you know with women in it this time. This episode was research produced, hosted and edited by me, Isabel Hoal, music by Aaron Kenny.

I'll talk to you next week.

Until then, this has been Broad History, a podcast about the history you think you know with women in it. This time. This episode was research produced, hosted and edited by me, Isabel Hogar, music by Erin Kenney. Next week we'll talk about perhaps the most famous woman in the American Revolution, Abigail Adams.

I'll talk to you then.

Isabelle Roughol: Hello, and welcome to Broad History, a podcast about the history you think you know with women in it this time. I'm your host, Isabelle Roughol.

When you think about the American West, what images come to mind? Probably a cowboy. Maybe a family in a covered wagon moving west. Maybe a railroad baron or a Native American man on a horse. A little girl in braids running down a hill covered in wildflowers?

The imaginary of the American West is so powerful, and my guest today is here to tell a different story.

Megan Kate Nelson is a historian of the American West and the US Civil War. She taught at many prestigious universities, has written wonderful books, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and her latest work, The Westerners, looks at myth-making and belonging in the American West through the lives of seven people who did not at all fit the mold of who you might think of when you think of an American pioneer.

Of course, you know how this show works by now, in our [00:01:00] case, that means looking at the life of full, complex, messy, interesting fascinating women.

Our conversation was so fascinating I could not end it, it actually went on much longer than a typical episode. So I decided to break it up into two parts. Conveniently for our purposes, if not for the American people, the Civil War is kind of a natural historical break between the two parts of the American 19th century.

So today we will look at the first half/two-thirds, pre-Civil War. On the next episode we will look at post-Civil War, Reconstruction, and those are two quite different American Wests.

If you are a member of Broad History, you can binge both episodes right away in your members' feed.

If you are not a member of Broad History, well, this is your cue.

Join today at broadhistory.com/membership, and you will get immediate access to both parts of the episode, and you will also, on an ongoing basis, get early and ad-free access to every episode of the [00:02:00] podcast, including multi-part series, which I will start releasing this summer, as well as more benefits as we grow and I'm able to provide more.

And more importantly, you will get that fuzzy, warm feeling inside that you are supporting independent publishing and podcasting. I cannot do it without you, and I am so grateful to the members who have already joined.

This week in particular, thank you and welcome to Louise.

Go to broadhistory.com/membership to sign up right now.

And then you can feast on Megan Kate Nelson's wonderful stories of the American West. Here she is.

Start of interview

Isabelle Roughol: Megan Kate Nelson, welcome. Thank you so much for joining me.

Megan Kate Nelson: Thank you so much for inviting me to be on.

Isabelle Roughol: I'm very excited to have this conversation because I'm actually, I'm-- I love the American West, I mean, American history in general,~ uh,~ a bit of a soft spot for me. ~Um, and, and this, like, completely, like, changes it and, and resets it in my mind, so it's wonderful. Uh, I think ~Before we spend the next hour debunking the myth, we should probably define it first.

~Um, ~Especially for a lot of listeners who are not American: What is the frontier? What does that [00:03:00] mean?

The imaginary of the American Frontier

Megan Kate Nelson: Okay. Yes. So the frontier is generally kind of accepted to mean, in this context of American history, this sort of place where civilization is kind of pushing up against wilderness,~ um, you know, ~wild animals, wild people,~ uh,~ and there's a real struggle there to survive and to persevere. ~Um, ~And in some accounts, including the very famous~ uh,~ 1893 frontier thesis, which was proposed by a historian at the University of Wisconsin, the frontier is a bit of a moving target in the United States.

So the frontier early in US history is ~the, ~the Appalachians, and then it moves progressively west as Americans move progressively west. And they keep pushing the frontier and pushing it and pushing it until they get to the Pacific. And this is a process~ uh,~ that Frederick Jackson [00:04:00] Turner, this historian, identified as a fundamentally American process, that this is how American institutions came to be.

~Uh, ~This is the heart of America. We did not?~ Uh,~ get all of our institutions and our kind of democratic mode from Europe,~ uh,~ but instead~ uh,~ got it in this experience of Americans fighting both nature and then indigenous peoples, ultimately succeeding and establishing themselves along this frontier line.

~Um, ~So that's ~kind of ~one of the major elements of it. And then the whole idea of the frontier will probably be familiar to your listeners, even if they're not familiar so much with the United States, just because the images are so resonant and so sticky. ~Um, ~The frontier image usually involves~ uh,~ a white frontier family ~ha- ~that has come from the East in a covered wagon. ~Uh, ~They're moving progressively westward, establishing [00:05:00] themselves,~ uh,~ and settling in the West, persevering, overcoming all the challenges in their path, and,~ uh,~ creating basically Western culture ~and, ~and American culture. So it brings together all of these major ideas in American history, major narratives, Manifest Destiny, the American Dream,~ uh,~ rugged individualism...

It's extremely important?~ Uh,~ to this notion of the frontier that ~the, ~the white Americans there do it all by themselves. They have no help from anyone. ~Um, And they, uh, especially,~ This is embodied in the American cowboy who enters the kind of frontier myth a little bit later in the 19th century and becomes ~this, ~this major icon.

~Um, ~So those, yeah, those are the fundamentals, and I think we see them everywhere in all kinds of imagery and advertising and film and TV,~ um,~ all kinds of~ uh,~ different elements of American and then also global culture.

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah, I mean, it's an incredibly powerful image, [00:06:00] right? ~I, I mean, ~I was a little girl growing up in France, and I devoured every single volume of, I think there's eight, of "Little House on the Prairie" that I borrowed from my local library. It's just, it, the, the imaginary ~of, ~of the American West is just so powerful to everyone around the world, ~I think, ~I think to this day.

Megan Kate Nelson: Absolutely, yes. And you know, I too went through my Little House phase. I have some delightful class photos of me with my braids. I have my braids and my prairie dress, ~uh, of course, ~of course, because you know, that story hooked~ uh,~ young~ uh,~ girls, because it did have a young girl as a protagonist. And ~so, um, you know, ~that kind of drew you into this space, but still all of the Frontier imagery was there and promoted, and this vision of white American culture moving progressively westward~ um,~ in a kind of conquest ~of, ~of space and people,~ uh,~ is enduring.

What is Manifest Destiny?

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah. And ~you, ~you dropped a phrase there that we should probably _ex- [00:07:00] explain as well,~ uh,~ manifest destiny. ~Um, ~What does that mean?

Megan Kate Nelson: ~Yeah. So that is-- ~This is the conviction that many white Americans had, that it was~ uh,~ the United States' destiny to overtake the continent, to take up all of those lands and make them productive,~ uh,~ and settle all of these growing numbers of people on them. _And,

And officially, that term came into being in 1845 in an edit- a newspaper editorial. But the idea had been in place even at the founding of the country. ~Uh, ~Thomas Jefferson was a huge proponent of manifest destiny. This is part of the reason that he was eager to acquire~ um,~ first New Orleans and then all of Louisiana Territory,~ uh,~ because he also believed, ~you know, the, ~the US population was growing by leaps and bounds, and he and most Americans were convinced ~that ~that population needed to spread out. And given that they were all established on ~the, ~the Atlantic [00:08:00] coast, the only way to spread was westward. ~Um, ~So ~they would, ~they would make it over that first mountain chain of the Appalachians, and then they would move into the Ohio Valley and then the Mississippi River and then further on into the West, and that this was ordained by God. ~That, uh...~

_Yeah.

Isabelle Roughol: And very much ~that, ~that east to west travel, right? ~Like sort of ~Single direction, right of the picture to left of the picture, even in the, in the paintings that you see ~of, ~of the time, right? Sticking to that, that east to west?~ Um,~ vision. ~Uh, ~which also~ um,~ presupposes or requires that all of that land to the west ~is, ~is virgin territory, is free ~of, ~of people and of anyone that matters or anyone at all, right?

Megan Kate Nelson: Exactly. And if they do exist, then it's ~you know, ~the conviction was that it would be quite easy to get rid of them. ~Uh, ~That either they would just take up~ uh,~ indigenous lands by force or that indigenous peoples would just kind of naturally vanish from the [00:09:00] landscape,~ uh,~ and keep moving westward ~kind of ~in front of that compelling, insistent, propulsive movement ~of, ~of white Americans in that one linear direction.

The West before it was the American West

Isabelle Roughol: ~Mm-hmm. ~And so, _uh, contrary to that~ uh,~ mental image that,~ um,~ Americans in the East ~at, ~at the time, you depict ~a different, uh,~ a West that looks? ~You know, ~quite different ~from, ~from that imagination. ~Um, and so that's, ~That's what we're gonna be~ uh,~ looking at today. ~What, what does the... And, ~And we're gonna travel sort of the, the wide 19th century in America, right?

And so what does the West look like at the start of the 19th century? ~You know, ~We're about a generation after ~the, ~the American Revolution

Megan Kate Nelson: ~Yes. And this is, you know, ~This is what's interesting. It makes it a little tricky to write about because the American West was not really the American West in this moment. ~Uh, ~It was indigenous territory. It was northern Spain. ~Uh, ~In some places ~it was, ~it was still French or Spanish, ~uh, ~and it did not belong to the United States at all.

~And, ~[00:10:00] And to say the American West, of course, suggests that there is an East,~ uh, then~ that this space is ~kind of ~west of~ um,~ an American kind of central~ uh,~ politi.

And so early in the,~ you know, kind of ~late 18th century, early 19th century,~ uh,~ the West did not yet exist,~ uh,~ as we know it today. ~Um, ~But its components~ uh,~ existed. Its, its fascinating elements, especially what I'm most fascinated by, and one of the major arguments in the book, is that there's constant movement throughout the American West in all different directions. And people are moving from north to south, from west to east, from,~ uh,~ south to north,~ um,~ in addition~ uh,~ to from east to west.

And they had been doing so for hundreds, if not thousands of years. And there were already trails and roads that were connecting people together. ~Uh, ~People had very far-flung networks [00:11:00] of trade, of kinship,~ um,~ and of warfare also. ~Uh, ~That this was a space that had its own history. This was ~a, ~a kind of vast,~ uh,~ indigenous and then a little bit later ~in, _in like,~ the 17th century,~ um,~ a kind of Spanish world.

And so Americans were really late arrivals. They didn't really enter the scene until the early years ~of the, ~of the 19th century. And the American West as a whole concept in and of itself, as we think of it today, did not exist until the mid-19th century. ~Um, ~But it still retained that kind of dynamism and that movement, and people did not settle in the way that we think of them settling during this period.

~Uh, ~In fact, the entire region was unsettled really until ~the, ~the late 19th century for ~a num-~ a number of reasons.

Sacajawea's superhero origin story

Isabelle Roughol: ~Mm. ~A- and two men who are very famous~ um,~ in American history for [00:12:00] opening up that space to the United States, again, not discovering it, it was plenty discovered by other people,~ but,~ but ~opening it, ~opening it up to~ uh,~ United States, the government and the culture of the United States,~ uh,~ were Lewis and Clark, right?

And they were guided ~uh, you know, ~helmed, directed almost, by a woman who~ uh,~ knew very much what she was doing and very much knew the land, ~um, ~Sacajawea, I'm hoping pronounce~ correc-~ correctly, ~um, ~and her life starts... It's like a superhero origin story, ~the way, ~the way that her life begins. ~Can you, ~Can you talk us through that a bit?

Megan Kate Nelson: Yes, absolutely. I wanted to start~ uh,~ the book with an Indigenous voice and a woman's voice because,~ uh,~ this rarely happens in ~kind of ~large, sweeping, popular histories of the American West. ~Uh, ~Women are almost always just erased or marginalized or not even present,~ uh,~ in a lot of those accounts.

And so I felt really strongly I wanted to do that, and Sacajawea was, you know, instantly came to mind as someone to ~kind of ~start [00:13:00] this book. And it was a little intimidating to write about her because she is so mythologized. She's probably the most famous person in the book, and the one person people may know,~ uh,~ when they start to read it.

And,~ um, she-- I--~ It was really interesting 'cause when ~I, ~I went into the research, I didn't know much more about her than that mythic history either, that I had learned in school way back in the day, that ~she just, you know, ~her life is most important when she meets Lewis and Clark, and she goes with them ~on this, uh,~ on this journey to the Pacific and back from the Missouri River. ~Um, ~But she had a whole life before that, and she had a whole life after that.

She's born in~ um,~ the northern Rocky Mountains,~ um,~ to,~ uh,~ what is now known as the Lemhi Shoshone band, which is a Northern Shoshone band. And pretty early on,~ uh,~ in her life, she is stolen from her people in a raid~ um,~ by ~the, ~the Hidatsa, who are a tribal nation who live along the upper Missouri River Valley.

So she ~you know, ~had been living with her family. They had traveled around, the Shoshone were a [00:14:00] mobile band. ~Um, and~ So her first movement through the West was eastward. So she is a, she's a war captive, ~and, ~and this was very common. The Indigenous world,~ uh,~ was full of warfare and raiding, and the captive trade was part of that~ uh,~ whole process and that whole tradition.

So she moves eastward first and~ uh,~ lives with her captors initially, and then is married off to a French trader named Toussaint Charbonneau,~ uh,~ when she's still a teenager. And,~ um, you know, ~it's important to think about her as a woman in an Indigenous world who's having experiences that many women had.

~You know? Like, ~She's an exceptional person,~ um,~ and we think of her as exceptional, but she also~ uh,~ was in many ways a kind of ordinary,~ uh,~ woman living in this particular life. She~ uh,~ learned to farm. She learned to~ um,~ process buffalo hides. She,~ uh,~ learned all of these skills from other [00:15:00] women~ uh,~ in the Knife River villages in the Upper Missouri Valley.

Sacajawea, an explorer in her own right

Megan Kate Nelson: And by the time Lewis and Clark got there, ~you know, ~she was a married woman, she was pregnant,~ um,~ and she was,~ uh,~ if not fully integrated into Hidatsa society, she had,~ uh,~ learned the language and she had established connections there on her own. ~Um, ~~And~

But what Lewis and Clark really wanted her for is that she still had command of the Shoshone language. And Lewis and Clark didn't know very much about what they were going to encounter on this~ uh,~ journey, but they did know that at some point they were going to have to stop traveling by boat and start traveling on horseback. And they knew that the Shoshone were big horse traders in the Northern Rockies.

~So they...~ This was a very important logistical element~ uh,~ of the Corps of Discovery, and this is why initially she was valuable. Although I, upon ~you know, ~reading the Lewis and Clark diaries, it's really remarkable. They talk about her [00:16:00] more than 150 times. They call her by a number of names,~ um,~ and sometimes just describe her as a wife or ~you know, ~give her new names entirely.

~Um, ~But when they describe her, she is always doing something or saying something. And this is what we don't get from traditional accounts. ~Um, ~She is even more than a translator. She is a guide. She's ~a to-~ a topographer. She helps them to map this whole area of the West from the Upper Missouri Valley to the Pacific.

And she is a botanist. She is constantly ~kind of ~pulling roots and plants from the soil, not only to eat,~ uh,~ but also to show Lewis and Clark. She understands that they are on a botanical exploration as well, and she contributes several specimens~ uh,~ to the Lewis and Clark Expedition's collections. ~Um, ~She saves their lives multiple times.

~Um, ~I think because, ~you know... ~I think she saves them from scurvy for [00:17:00] sure because of her knowledge of the landscape. ~Uh, ~She successfully translates and helps to negotiate?~ Uh, with her,~ with the Shoshone, with her people when they get there. And then ultimately, I really do think she becomes an explorer in her own right.

~Um, ~There's a remarkable moment on, in the Pacific where they've left her behind.

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah, I love that scene. I was gonna bring it please share

Megan Kate Nelson: I know. Oh, it's so good. She, you know... They, they know they're gonna have to stay in this area over the winter. And so they leave her behind in camp,~ um,~ which is a couple miles away ~from the, ~from the ocean. And they go to the ocean, Lewis and Clark and Toussaint Charbonneau,~ um,~ and a couple other members of the corps, and they've, they come back with stories of the Pacific Ocean and the beach, and there had been a huge whale that had been beached ~on the, you know, um, ~and ~the, ~the local indigenous band was breaking it up.

They were taking it apart and using the blubber and the bones. And everyone writes about this in their [00:18:00] journals. She goes to Clark and she says, "You're gonna take me to the Pacific because I did not come all this way not to see it. I wanna see the ocean and I wanna see the big fish," you know, that they had been talking about because, I mean, it's hard for us, I think, to access this?~ Uh,~ today because, you know, we know what a whale looks like even if we've never seen a, a live whale.

But they did not. They had no idea what this looked like. This seemed just unbelievably remarkable, and then to also see the ocean for the first time. So she demands this for herself, and Clark agrees, and he takes her.

And I just-- I love this moment because I think it's really where you see her taking something for herself and valuing this experience for herself in a way that we never see [00:19:00] her. We never see her that way in other accounts. She's usually just helping Lewis and Clark and pointing the way,~ um,~ being a mother to Jean Baptiste,~ uh,~ who she had given birth to just a couple months before they left.

Exploring as a postpartum mother and how Clark ended up raising Sacajawea's children

Isabelle Roughol: I feel like we have to say she takes on this entire journey as a postpartum teenage mom,~ uh,~ breastfeeding an infant the entire time. ~Like, ~That is pretty impressive as well.

Megan Kate Nelson: Yes, and they both are-- they both become very ill also at separate times during,~ uh, the, ~the expedition. And of course, Lewis and Clark have all these outmoded notions of medicine. ~I mean, it's a,~ It's~ u~h, remarkable they didn't kill her, actually, ~with their-- But, ~you know, they were trying to bleed her.

They were probably giving her something like mercury. I mean, It was just, you know, just terrible, and she m- she managed to survive. And what I think is really interesting about that, ~you know, ~every single visual depiction that we have of Sacajawea, and we-- no one sketched her or made any kind of visual representation of her during her [00:20:00] lifetime,~ um,~ so we only have guesses as to what she actually looked like.

But all of the images we have of her now depict her with Jean Baptiste, with him on her back,~ um,~ and either walking or on horseback. And- I think today we think of that as,~ like,~ just incredibly remarkable. And I think it is given the distance that she traveled. But also Indigenous women carried their kids around all the time, ~you know, ~and they were in constant movement.

They were always moving between camps for hundreds of miles, ~you know, ~according to the seasons and what they were going to hunt. And so in many ways, ~I mean, ~I think it would have struck Sacajawea as totally bizarre not to do that, right? And, and she would not have left him behind. ~That is, that is definitely, uh,~ That would not have entered her mind. ~Um, ~she would not have abandoned him.

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah, and in fact, at one point,~ um, at, ~at, after the expedition where Clark, who's taken ~a, ~a liking to the kid,~ uh,~ suggests,~ uh, you know, ~adopting him essentially ~and, ~and taking him to school, and she's like, "Mm-mm. That's, that's [00:21:00] my kid." ~Um, she does, ~She does later on~ um,~ leave him to go to school in, this is a few years later,~ um, and, ~and live with the Clark family.

~Um, ~And I'm gonna fast-forward a bit here, but unfortunately she dies quite young. ~Um, ~She dies around 25, I think. ~Um, ~and ~Lewis, uh, sorry, ~Clark has her boy, and she has just given birth to a daughter who also ends up living with Clark. ~I find that, ~I find that quite moving, right? That Clark ended up raising both her children after she passed.

Megan Kate Nelson: Yes. And that-- And, ~you know, ~we're not really sure what happened to Lisette. I think we-- there is some contention ~that, ~that she died quite young,~ um,~ which would have been k- again, ~kind of ~consonant with the time. ~I mean, ~Infant mortality was quite high. And if she did not have her mother and she? ~You know, ~was not able to breastfeed, this was gonna be,~ um,~ very difficult.

~Um, ~but yes. And this-- But this also-- I mean, part of the reason that Sacajawea left him with Clark a little later on is that he was older. And there were these practices ~where, um,~ among many tribal [00:22:00] nations that you could be adopted into other families or you, you kind of sent one of the children to go live with a relative,~ uh,~ usually an uncle,~ um, for, ~for boys to learn all sorts of skills, to learn to be a warrior.

So she definitely felt more comfortable because Jean Baptiste was older. ~Um, ~And, ~you know, _earlier, um,~ she didn't feel comfortable because he wasn't done yet. She hadn't weaned him yet. So he was-- She was like, "He's way too young to go and be on his own." But she felt more comfortable with it later, and that, too, was a, an Indigenous tradition.

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah. I know there's quite a few stories?~ Um, of, ~of children, actually with the next woman we're gonna be talking about,~ of, ~of, uh, children sort of being~ uh,~ raised quite communally or, like, between different families and not just by~ um,~ birth parents,~ which,~ which I think is also interesting to that sense of community that-- And rather than, ~you know, ~that rugged individualism,~ uh,~ that is the image of the West ~that, ~that we have.

Megan Kate Nelson: Yes. Yes. [00:23:00] Absolutely.

How Sacajawea became a suffrage icon

Isabelle Roughol: ~Um, and, ~And just to, to finish ~on, ~on Sacajawea,~ um, she was, ~she was ignored, right, for most of the 19th century. ~Um, ~Her story was ~you know, ~resurrected somewhat later,~ um,~ which I find interesting because it seems like, ~you know, Clark-- ~Lewis and Clark did appreciate her and did appreciate her contribution and helped her family? ~You know, ~settle and get some land after that, right? Like, they recognized her contributions and her expertise, right?

Megan Kate Nelson: They did indeed. And they, again, they all wrote about it. ~Um, ~And Lewis and Clark and then other members of the expedition who kept diaries,~ they're,~ they're remarkably consistent actually in their accounts of her and everything that she did. ~Um, ~But it took an, a new edition of the Lewis and Clark journals that was published~ uh,~ in the 1890s,~ uh,~ to really emphasize her and what she had done.

And~ um,~ one of the other scenes along the Pacific Coast,~ uh,~ where she _lit-- quite literally makes her voice heard,~ uh,~ she is the one who chooses the winter [00:24:00] campsite. ~Um, ~and ~you know, ~again, that is Indigenous tradition. Women always did that. ~Um, ~She argued for it, she lobbied for it, and then the whole Corps of Discovery voted on the location of the campsite.

So she voted, and then also York, who was~ um, enslaved,~ a Black man who was enslaved by William Clark. He also voted. So there's this kind of extraordinary moment, and that moment is emphasized in these 1890s~ uh,~ journal that, that edition in the 1890s in a way that it hadn't been before. And- It's important that at this moment, American suffragists are gaining in power and really starting a campaign to get the women's vote.

So they take up Sacajawea as the first woman to vote in the United States of America, which is, you know, strikes us as kind of funny, obviously. But,~ um,~ that is one of the major reasons that she ~kind of ~bursts [00:25:00] into the American imagination. ~Um, ~Suffragists take her up. They commission~ um,~ a statue of her, a sculpture of her for the 1904 St. Louis Exposition, which is the first visual image we have of her. And then, ~you know, ~attention to her just takes off, and she has become one of the most recognizable and also the most depicted women in American history. And a lot-- along with Pocahontas, is probably one of the two Indigenous women that most schoolchildren can name.

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah, I certainly heard about her, I was an exchange student in American high school.

Megan Kate Nelson: Ah.

Isabelle Roughol: In New Jersey,~ uh,~ twen- ~mm, ~25 years ago. ~Um, and, uh,~ And yes, I did. I took my AP US history, ~you know, um, ~and I learned about Manifest Destiny, and I learned about Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea, absolutely. Who is, she really is ~ um,~ a figure.

~But, ~but again,~ um,~ and I think we see that with a lot of the people ~you, ~you talk about in the book who are all,~ um, you know, ~all have some level of fame in the story of the American West, they end up [00:26:00] mythologized or you don't get the full person, right? You get the cliché,~ the, the, the, ~the caricature of the person that you can depict and just have that exceptional individual that does not contradict the sort of ~you know,~ white pioneer man myth of the frontier, right?

Megan Kate Nelson: Exactly. ~Act- They,~ They become either supportive of it as a kind of wife and mother, or they become ~kind of, um, ~a sort of saucily~ uh,~ depicted antagonist, usually in the form of ~a, ~a madam of a brothel,~ uh,~ or a sex worker in her employ. And ~this, ~this happened to Sacajawea, too. There were a lot of~ uh,~ depictions of her and Clark as possibly having had an affair and all of these things.

How Gertrudis Barcelo made a fortune at Spanish monte

Megan Kate Nelson: ~Um, ~but yeah, most, most white Americans could not conceive of a successful woman in the American West if she was not a prostitute, which [00:27:00] is just insane.

Isabelle Roughol: Insane. And so they're not gonna like ~our next, ~our next character

Megan Kate Nelson: No.

Isabelle Roughol: Who, whose name is gonna be even harder for me to pronounce, but I'll try. Gertrudis? Gertrudis Barceló.

Megan Kate Nelson: Bar-Barceló. Yeah.

Isabelle Roughol: So Spanish, Spanish woman, or New Spain, to become Mexican, to become I think maybe American at the end of her life.

Megan Kate Nelson: Ultimately American.

Isabelle Roughol: she, yeah, a lot of... She goes through all of the different~ uh,~ evolution of the nationalities of the land that, that she's on. ~So, um, what is,~ Who is she? What is her story?

Megan Kate Nelson: Yeah, you know, I, I really love her. She may be my favorite protagonist. I know we're not supposed to have favorites, but um, but she is my favorite. And I had actually learned her story when I was researching a previous book, "The Three-Cornered War." ~Um, ~but she died in 1852, and so she predated the American Civil War, which is what I was writing about in that moment.

So-- But I [00:28:00] always had remembered her story, and I kinda kept it in my pocket and hoped that I could write about her one day. And so when I conceived of this book project, I was like, "Okay, we're writing about Barceló." Because, yes, she is born in Sonora as a New Spanish citizen. She moves with her family northward during the Mexican Revolution,~ um,~ against New Spain, where they secure their independence~ um,~ in the early 19th century.

And she's living in Albuquerque and Santa Fe ~by the, ~by the 1820s and 1830s, and she's a Mexican citizen at that point.

And one of the important things to remember is that Spanish law and Mexican law,~ um,~ gave a lot more rights and freedoms to women than the US did. And I'm not sure about France, actually.

I haven't studied that specifically. But,~ um,~ but yeah, the-- they could own land in their own

Isabelle Roughol: This was Napoleon era, so France was horrible. Napoleon was a terrible misogynist. _Uh,

Megan Kate Nelson: There we go. There we go. Asked and answered.

Isabelle Roughol: You'd [00:29:00] have been better off being Spanish, I think,~ uh,~ at that point.

Megan Kate Nelson: Yes. So women could own land. They could inherit it. They could own it in their own names. They could get divorced, although divorce was rare. ~Um, ~And they could keep their own names. They could sue and be sued in court. ~Uh, and~

So Barceló ~kind of ~grew up without the kind of restrictions on her ambition that I think,~ uh,~ a lot of white American women in this moment may have had. And she got married in, in the 1820s, and her husband taught her to play this card game called Spanish monte, which is a...

It's a betting game on suits, and it's from a-- You play it with a 40-card Spanish deck. And- It-- she was just really good at it. She had ~a, ~a mathematical mind, she had a quick mind, she had a really good memory. And so she started to play, and she won some money, and then she started to deal Spanish monte. And it was a [00:30:00] very...

It's one of these games that you can just set up a table in an alley, and people will come and bet ~and, ~and you can make a lot of money. Because what I discovered, I was trying to figure out how she could have made so much money in her life, and so I learned to play. I lear- I learned to play and to deal Spanish monte.

~Uh, and I, ~I got a 40-card deck, and I learned to do it, and I gave my husband 20 poker chips, and I was like, "All right, let's play." And I took all of his money in six hands.

Isabelle Roughol: Well, you've got an alternative career that's open to you.~ Uh,~

Megan Kate Nelson: I know, a side hustle. A si- I know, I'm trying to figure out how to work this into my book tour. ~Like, ~Can I sell them a book and then take more of their money, um, at the, at the gambling table?

~Um, ~But yeah, so she, she started off just with ~a, ~a table of her own, and then she made so much money that she ultimately moved to Santa Fe and opened a gambling saloon.

And was the wealthiest woman in New Mexico territory when the Americans arrived in 1846. [00:31:00] And she had so much money, in fact, that she invested in currency, she invested in mules. She sent really huge wagon trains along both the Chihuahua Trail south~ uh,~ to ~Mexico, ~Mexico City, and then also on the Santa Fe Trail, which had opened in 1821,~ uh,~ to the United States.

And she was famous. She had the kind of opposite trajectory ~of, ~of Sacajawea. She was very famous in her lifetime, and many American travelers knew about her ~and, ~and sought out her saloon so they could go see this bizarre phenomenon of this woman dealing~ um,~ monte in a saloon and making so much money.

~And, um, yeah, so she was, ~She was pretty amazing. ~When, ~When people maligned her, she took them to court. When she loaned money to Anglo businessmen and they didn't pay her back, she took them to court. And this is part of the reason we know about her, is that those court records generated documents.[00:32:00]

Isabelle Roughol: Historians love, love courts. They're

Megan Kate Nelson: God bless the courts. Yes.

Isabelle Roughol: A court and a bureaucrat is what you need for history to be written.

Megan Kate Nelson: Yes. Yes.

Isabelle Roughol: And she's a, she's wonderful 'cause she is, again,~ like,~ like all of your characters really, she is like this broker between the different cultures ~of, ~of the South, right? ~And like ~The Spanish and Mexican and Indigenous and then the Am- ~the, ~the United States coming in. I always hesitate to say Americans 'cause I know in that... It's, it's, uh, contentious. ~But, um, yeah, it's, um... You know, like~ Reading about her and about Sacajawea and sort of all of that first half of the 19th century, 'cause this really feels like, well, it's technically it's more like two-thirds and one-thirds, but it really feels like ~the, ~the 19th century is split ~with, you know, ~with the Civil War in the middle.

And that first, that first half or that first two-thirds, you almost,~ you,~ you get an image of, ~you know, what, ~what other America could have been, what America could have looked like ~if, ~[00:33:00] if that West ~sort of ~is the one that prevailed...

Megan Kate Nelson: mm-hmm. Yes. Mm-hmm. Yes,~ or,~ or even if that West were one that white Americans even respected

Isabelle Roughol: Mm.

Megan Kate Nelson: and

Isabelle Roughol: And remembered.

Megan Kate Nelson: Yes, and thought about ~in a, ~in a different way, you know? _Their... That they would see indigenous peoples as? ~You know, ~polities in their own right~ uh,~ to be established in the country and,~ uh,~ find a way to survive together, ~you know, ~instead of this relentless violent campaign against them.

And,~ um, you know, ~not instituting racist and misogynist laws that took power away from someone like Barceló. ~Uh, ~She did not live very long,~ um,~ after she became an American in 1848,~ uh,~ in the wake of the Mexican-American War. ~Um, ~She died in 1852, but I think she would have seen her empire fall. ~Um, ~I think ~the, ~the US officials, as much as they appreciated her salon and ~they, they.. I mean, ~they went there, and they gambled, and [00:34:00] they lost a lot of money to her. ~Um, ~But ~the, ~the restrictions on her and her property would've been such that I think,~ uh,~ she would've~ uh,~ lost a lot of her land and a lot of her property in the end. _Um...

The epitomy of the Western pioneer man -- in a Hispanic woman

Isabelle Roughol: ~uh, ~And ironically, I mean, she is probably ~the, ~the character that?~ Like,~ most represents ~the, ~the pioneer, ~you know, the, _the, uh,~ the iconoclast,~ the, the, the, the, ~the person that you imagine as ~like, you know, uh, ~plucky, perseverant, savvy, smart, no-nonsense, entrepreneurial. ~Uh, ~But she's a woman and she's Hispanic, and those are the only two ways in which she doesn't fit the mold because the exact same story~ uh, you know, uh, of a, ~of a white man is exactly the image of the West that you have, right?

Megan Kate Nelson: Exactly. Exactly. And this is what I found through most of my research, is that ~you know, ~all seven people in "The Westerners", the women and the men, exemplified a lot of what we have come to think of as that pioneer spirit, right? ~Um, ~But they undermined it in other ways.

And for the women in particular, ~in order to be... they, ~they were either [00:35:00] marginalized and then erased completely. ~You know, ~Barcelo in the years after her life, no one marked the site of ~her, ~her gambling saloon as a historic space. ~Um, ~No one really wrote about her until~ uh,~ women's historians ~kind of ~recovered her in ~the, ~the 1970s and '80s. And even now today, there, there is-- I have heard that there is now a tour you can take.

Isabelle Roughol: Oh.

Megan Kate Nelson: ~Uh, ~Yeah, I know. ~Going to... And, ~And Borough Alley still exists, the place where she had her saloon. ~Um, ~And I think that I-- whoever is leading that tour must have looked into the land records to find where her house was and then where her saloon was ~and, ~and you can take a tour of those sites. But this is a very recent phenomenon.

And, ~you know, ~she is not ~kind of ~lauded or emphasized in the greater tourist infrastructure of Santa Fe. ~Um, ~And often when people speak about her or write about her, again, she [00:36:00] is depicted ~as, ~as possibly maybe a prostitute. ~Um, ~And ~this is, ~this is a commonality ~you know, ~that women can't possibly have power unless it is in this one very narrow profession.

~Um, ~And that is ~the, ~the vision of a woman that persists ~in, ~in the pioneer myth today, Because,~ uh,~ otherwise you would have to make room for the possibility that, ~you know, ~women and in, in this region in particular, Mexican women were badasses ~and, ~and

Isabelle Roughol: And were more than, than their relationship to, to the men and to their sexuality.

Megan Kate Nelson: Exactly. Yes, and that ~they were, ~they were canny businesswomen, and they knew their rights, and they asserted themselves, and they built lives for themselves without men almost entirely.

So yeah. ~Um, ~and that ha- has seemed impossible~ um, for, ~for white American men to really embrace.

Isabelle Roughol: ~Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. ~And so as we jump into ~the second, ~the second part of the 19th century, so we have, ~you know, ~the Civil [00:37:00] War for, again, for non-Americans, that's 1861 to '65 or '60 to '64, one of those. Uh, '61 to '65. Okay. ~And, um,~ And so after the Civil War... The, the thing that I think is maddening when you look at the Civil War is that it feels like it should be a victory for a freer, more liberal, more progressive America, because after all, it is the defeat of slavery, and yet everything that comes after feels more segregationist, more~ um,~ racist,~ more,~ more of all the things ~that we, ~that we don't like about American history during ~the, ~the Reconstruction Era.

And this is the terrible cliffhanger I leave you on. Join me and Megan Kate Nelson on the next episode to talk about this post-Civil War, Reconstruction Era American West, and even into the early 20th century, and see if it delivered on that promise of a freer, more liberal, more progressive America.

I'm afraid I kind of spoiled that [00:38:00] already, didn't I?

Remember, if you are a member of Broad History, you can binge that second part of the conversation right away. Sign up at broadhistory.com/membership. Again, broadhistory.com/membership. And you can listen to the rest of my conversation with Megan Kate Nelson.

If not, it will be on the feed in two weeks. We're going fortnightly. Several of you have told me you couldn't keep up with weekly releases, and you know what? Neither can I.

Part 2 teaser

And to entice you into that membership, which is the only way that this work is possible, here is a little bit of a taster of what you're missing.

Isabelle Roughol: Five women in town?

Megan Kate Nelson: Five women in town.

Isabelle Roughol: This is crazy. I don't know how many men, but, like, hundreds and five women.

five women.

Megan Kate Nelson: This is how powerful the frontier myth is. It has always been used as a way to marginalize and erase people from a national story. It makes it much easier to take their land, to take their dignity, and to take their civil rights [00:39:00] away.

Isabelle Roughol: There are still women being sold and traded after Abolition.

Megan Kate Nelson: My mother texted me and said, "Your father has just finished that chapter, and you have broken his heart."

Isabelle Roughol: I'm, I'm with your dad. I... My heart was broken too.

Megan Kate Nelson: A journalist is totally shocked to find this older Chinese woman living in the middle of Idaho. Chinese people have been erased by that point from all of Western history.

Isabelle Roughol: It made me think of the "Yellowstone" show quite a bit, if people watched it. It looks pretty, but it's really a mafia.

Megan Kate Nelson: This push among far-right conservatives that women don't need to vote. They just need to stay home and have babies. They are using the pioneer woman to bolster that policy.

Isabelle Roughol: Every time that you complicate that story,~ um,~ it messes with their plans.

If that sounds like something you wanna hear now, go to broadhistory.com/membership.

This has been Broad History, a One Lane Bridge production, researched, produced, edited, and hosted by me, Isabelle Roughol.[00:40:00]

Talk to you next time.

Isabelle Roughol: Hello, and welcome to Broad History, a podcast about the history you think you know with women in it this time. I'm your host, Isabelle Roughol.

When you think about the American West, what images come to mind? Probably a cowboy. Maybe a family in a covered wagon moving west. Maybe a railroad baron or a Native American man on a horse. A little girl in braids running down a hill covered in wildflowers?

The imaginary of the American West is so powerful, and my guest today is here to tell a different story.

Megan Kate Nelson is a historian of the American West and the US Civil War. She taught at many prestigious universities, has written wonderful books, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and her latest work, The Westerners, looks at myth-making and belonging in the American West through the lives of seven people who did not at all fit the mold of who you might think of when you think of an American pioneer.

Of course, you know how this show works by now, in our [00:01:00] case, that means looking at the life of full, complex, messy, interesting fascinating women.

Our conversation was so fascinating I could not end it, it actually went on much longer than a typical episode. So I decided to break it up into two parts. Conveniently for our purposes, if not for the American people, the Civil War is kind of a natural historical break between the two parts of the American 19th century.

So today we will look at the first half/two-thirds, pre-Civil War. On the next episode we will look at post-Civil War, Reconstruction, and those are two quite different American Wests.

If you are a member of Broad History, you can binge both episodes right away in your members' feed.

If you are not a member of Broad History, well, this is your cue.

Join today at broadhistory.com/membership, and you will get immediate access to both parts of the episode, and you will also, on an ongoing basis, get early and ad-free access to every episode of the [00:02:00] podcast, including multi-part series, which I will start releasing this summer, as well as more benefits as we grow and I'm able to provide more.

And more importantly, you will get that fuzzy, warm feeling inside that you are supporting independent publishing and podcasting. I cannot do it without you, and I am so grateful to the members who have already joined.

This week in particular, thank you and welcome to Louise.

Go to broadhistory.com/membership to sign up right now.

And then you can feast on Megan Kate Nelson's wonderful stories of the American West. Here she is.

Start of interview

Isabelle Roughol: Megan Kate Nelson, welcome. Thank you so much for joining me.

Megan Kate Nelson: Thank you so much for inviting me to be on.

Isabelle Roughol: I'm very excited to have this conversation because I'm actually, I'm-- I love the American West, I mean, American history in general,~ uh,~ a bit of a soft spot for me. ~Um, and, and this, like, completely, like, changes it and, and resets it in my mind, so it's wonderful. Uh, I think ~Before we spend the next hour debunking the myth, we should probably define it first.

~Um, ~Especially for a lot of listeners who are not American: What is the frontier? What does that [00:03:00] mean?

The imaginary of the American Frontier

Megan Kate Nelson: Okay. Yes. So the frontier is generally kind of accepted to mean, in this context of American history, this sort of place where civilization is kind of pushing up against wilderness,~ um, you know, ~wild animals, wild people,~ uh,~ and there's a real struggle there to survive and to persevere. ~Um, ~And in some accounts, including the very famous~ uh,~ 1893 frontier thesis, which was proposed by a historian at the University of Wisconsin, the frontier is a bit of a moving target in the United States.

So the frontier early in US history is ~the, ~the Appalachians, and then it moves progressively west as Americans move progressively west. And they keep pushing the frontier and pushing it and pushing it until they get to the Pacific. And this is a process~ uh,~ that Frederick Jackson [00:04:00] Turner, this historian, identified as a fundamentally American process, that this is how American institutions came to be.

~Uh, ~This is the heart of America. We did not?~ Uh,~ get all of our institutions and our kind of democratic mode from Europe,~ uh,~ but instead~ uh,~ got it in this experience of Americans fighting both nature and then indigenous peoples, ultimately succeeding and establishing themselves along this frontier line.

~Um, ~So that's ~kind of ~one of the major elements of it. And then the whole idea of the frontier will probably be familiar to your listeners, even if they're not familiar so much with the United States, just because the images are so resonant and so sticky. ~Um, ~The frontier image usually involves~ uh,~ a white frontier family ~ha- ~that has come from the East in a covered wagon. ~Uh, ~They're moving progressively westward, establishing [00:05:00] themselves,~ uh,~ and settling in the West, persevering, overcoming all the challenges in their path, and,~ uh,~ creating basically Western culture ~and, ~and American culture. So it brings together all of these major ideas in American history, major narratives, Manifest Destiny, the American Dream,~ uh,~ rugged individualism...

It's extremely important?~ Uh,~ to this notion of the frontier that ~the, ~the white Americans there do it all by themselves. They have no help from anyone. ~Um, And they, uh, especially,~ This is embodied in the American cowboy who enters the kind of frontier myth a little bit later in the 19th century and becomes ~this, ~this major icon.

~Um, ~So those, yeah, those are the fundamentals, and I think we see them everywhere in all kinds of imagery and advertising and film and TV,~ um,~ all kinds of~ uh,~ different elements of American and then also global culture.

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah, I mean, it's an incredibly powerful image, [00:06:00] right? ~I, I mean, ~I was a little girl growing up in France, and I devoured every single volume of, I think there's eight, of "Little House on the Prairie" that I borrowed from my local library. It's just, it, the, the imaginary ~of, ~of the American West is just so powerful to everyone around the world, ~I think, ~I think to this day.

Megan Kate Nelson: Absolutely, yes. And you know, I too went through my Little House phase. I have some delightful class photos of me with my braids. I have my braids and my prairie dress, ~uh, of course, ~of course, because you know, that story hooked~ uh,~ young~ uh,~ girls, because it did have a young girl as a protagonist. And ~so, um, you know, ~that kind of drew you into this space, but still all of the Frontier imagery was there and promoted, and this vision of white American culture moving progressively westward~ um,~ in a kind of conquest ~of, ~of space and people,~ uh,~ is enduring.

What is Manifest Destiny?

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah. And ~you, ~you dropped a phrase there that we should probably _ex- [00:07:00] explain as well,~ uh,~ manifest destiny. ~Um, ~What does that mean?

Megan Kate Nelson: ~Yeah. So that is-- ~This is the conviction that many white Americans had, that it was~ uh,~ the United States' destiny to overtake the continent, to take up all of those lands and make them productive,~ uh,~ and settle all of these growing numbers of people on them. _And,

And officially, that term came into being in 1845 in an edit- a newspaper editorial. But the idea had been in place even at the founding of the country. ~Uh, ~Thomas Jefferson was a huge proponent of manifest destiny. This is part of the reason that he was eager to acquire~ um,~ first New Orleans and then all of Louisiana Territory,~ uh,~ because he also believed, ~you know, the, ~the US population was growing by leaps and bounds, and he and most Americans were convinced ~that ~that population needed to spread out. And given that they were all established on ~the, ~the Atlantic [00:08:00] coast, the only way to spread was westward. ~Um, ~So ~they would, ~they would make it over that first mountain chain of the Appalachians, and then they would move into the Ohio Valley and then the Mississippi River and then further on into the West, and that this was ordained by God. ~That, uh...~

_Yeah.

Isabelle Roughol: And very much ~that, ~that east to west travel, right? ~Like sort of ~Single direction, right of the picture to left of the picture, even in the, in the paintings that you see ~of, ~of the time, right? Sticking to that, that east to west?~ Um,~ vision. ~Uh, ~which also~ um,~ presupposes or requires that all of that land to the west ~is, ~is virgin territory, is free ~of, ~of people and of anyone that matters or anyone at all, right?

Megan Kate Nelson: Exactly. And if they do exist, then it's ~you know, ~the conviction was that it would be quite easy to get rid of them. ~Uh, ~That either they would just take up~ uh,~ indigenous lands by force or that indigenous peoples would just kind of naturally vanish from the [00:09:00] landscape,~ uh,~ and keep moving westward ~kind of ~in front of that compelling, insistent, propulsive movement ~of, ~of white Americans in that one linear direction.

The West before it was the American West

Isabelle Roughol: ~Mm-hmm. ~And so, _uh, contrary to that~ uh,~ mental image that,~ um,~ Americans in the East ~at, ~at the time, you depict ~a different, uh,~ a West that looks? ~You know, ~quite different ~from, ~from that imagination. ~Um, and so that's, ~That's what we're gonna be~ uh,~ looking at today. ~What, what does the... And, ~And we're gonna travel sort of the, the wide 19th century in America, right?

And so what does the West look like at the start of the 19th century? ~You know, ~We're about a generation after ~the, ~the American Revolution

Megan Kate Nelson: ~Yes. And this is, you know, ~This is what's interesting. It makes it a little tricky to write about because the American West was not really the American West in this moment. ~Uh, ~It was indigenous territory. It was northern Spain. ~Uh, ~In some places ~it was, ~it was still French or Spanish, ~uh, ~and it did not belong to the United States at all.

~And, ~[00:10:00] And to say the American West, of course, suggests that there is an East,~ uh, then~ that this space is ~kind of ~west of~ um,~ an American kind of central~ uh,~ politi.

And so early in the,~ you know, kind of ~late 18th century, early 19th century,~ uh,~ the West did not yet exist,~ uh,~ as we know it today. ~Um, ~But its components~ uh,~ existed. Its, its fascinating elements, especially what I'm most fascinated by, and one of the major arguments in the book, is that there's constant movement throughout the American West in all different directions. And people are moving from north to south, from west to east, from,~ uh,~ south to north,~ um,~ in addition~ uh,~ to from east to west.

And they had been doing so for hundreds, if not thousands of years. And there were already trails and roads that were connecting people together. ~Uh, ~People had very far-flung networks [00:11:00] of trade, of kinship,~ um,~ and of warfare also. ~Uh, ~That this was a space that had its own history. This was ~a, ~a kind of vast,~ uh,~ indigenous and then a little bit later ~in, _in like,~ the 17th century,~ um,~ a kind of Spanish world.

And so Americans were really late arrivals. They didn't really enter the scene until the early years ~of the, ~of the 19th century. And the American West as a whole concept in and of itself, as we think of it today, did not exist until the mid-19th century. ~Um, ~But it still retained that kind of dynamism and that movement, and people did not settle in the way that we think of them settling during this period.

~Uh, ~In fact, the entire region was unsettled really until ~the, ~the late 19th century for ~a num-~ a number of reasons.

Sacajawea's superhero origin story

Isabelle Roughol: ~Mm. ~A- and two men who are very famous~ um,~ in American history for [00:12:00] opening up that space to the United States, again, not discovering it, it was plenty discovered by other people,~ but,~ but ~opening it, ~opening it up to~ uh,~ United States, the government and the culture of the United States,~ uh,~ were Lewis and Clark, right?

And they were guided ~uh, you know, ~helmed, directed almost, by a woman who~ uh,~ knew very much what she was doing and very much knew the land, ~um, ~Sacajawea, I'm hoping pronounce~ correc-~ correctly, ~um, ~and her life starts... It's like a superhero origin story, ~the way, ~the way that her life begins. ~Can you, ~Can you talk us through that a bit?

Megan Kate Nelson: Yes, absolutely. I wanted to start~ uh,~ the book with an Indigenous voice and a woman's voice because,~ uh,~ this rarely happens in ~kind of ~large, sweeping, popular histories of the American West. ~Uh, ~Women are almost always just erased or marginalized or not even present,~ uh,~ in a lot of those accounts.

And so I felt really strongly I wanted to do that, and Sacajawea was, you know, instantly came to mind as someone to ~kind of ~start [00:13:00] this book. And it was a little intimidating to write about her because she is so mythologized. She's probably the most famous person in the book, and the one person people may know,~ uh,~ when they start to read it.

And,~ um, she-- I--~ It was really interesting 'cause when ~I, ~I went into the research, I didn't know much more about her than that mythic history either, that I had learned in school way back in the day, that ~she just, you know, ~her life is most important when she meets Lewis and Clark, and she goes with them ~on this, uh,~ on this journey to the Pacific and back from the Missouri River. ~Um, ~But she had a whole life before that, and she had a whole life after that.

She's born in~ um,~ the northern Rocky Mountains,~ um,~ to,~ uh,~ what is now known as the Lemhi Shoshone band, which is a Northern Shoshone band. And pretty early on,~ uh,~ in her life, she is stolen from her people in a raid~ um,~ by ~the, ~the Hidatsa, who are a tribal nation who live along the upper Missouri River Valley.

So she ~you know, ~had been living with her family. They had traveled around, the Shoshone were a [00:14:00] mobile band. ~Um, and~ So her first movement through the West was eastward. So she is a, she's a war captive, ~and, ~and this was very common. The Indigenous world,~ uh,~ was full of warfare and raiding, and the captive trade was part of that~ uh,~ whole process and that whole tradition.

So she moves eastward first and~ uh,~ lives with her captors initially, and then is married off to a French trader named Toussaint Charbonneau,~ uh,~ when she's still a teenager. And,~ um, you know, ~it's important to think about her as a woman in an Indigenous world who's having experiences that many women had.

~You know? Like, ~She's an exceptional person,~ um,~ and we think of her as exceptional, but she also~ uh,~ was in many ways a kind of ordinary,~ uh,~ woman living in this particular life. She~ uh,~ learned to farm. She learned to~ um,~ process buffalo hides. She,~ uh,~ learned all of these skills from other [00:15:00] women~ uh,~ in the Knife River villages in the Upper Missouri Valley.

Sacajawea, an explorer in her own right

Megan Kate Nelson: And by the time Lewis and Clark got there, ~you know, ~she was a married woman, she was pregnant,~ um,~ and she was,~ uh,~ if not fully integrated into Hidatsa society, she had,~ uh,~ learned the language and she had established connections there on her own. ~Um, ~~And~

But what Lewis and Clark really wanted her for is that she still had command of the Shoshone language. And Lewis and Clark didn't know very much about what they were going to encounter on this~ uh,~ journey, but they did know that at some point they were going to have to stop traveling by boat and start traveling on horseback. And they knew that the Shoshone were big horse traders in the Northern Rockies.

~So they...~ This was a very important logistical element~ uh,~ of the Corps of Discovery, and this is why initially she was valuable. Although I, upon ~you know, ~reading the Lewis and Clark diaries, it's really remarkable. They talk about her [00:16:00] more than 150 times. They call her by a number of names,~ um,~ and sometimes just describe her as a wife or ~you know, ~give her new names entirely.

~Um, ~But when they describe her, she is always doing something or saying something. And this is what we don't get from traditional accounts. ~Um, ~She is even more than a translator. She is a guide. She's ~a to-~ a topographer. She helps them to map this whole area of the West from the Upper Missouri Valley to the Pacific.

And she is a botanist. She is constantly ~kind of ~pulling roots and plants from the soil, not only to eat,~ uh,~ but also to show Lewis and Clark. She understands that they are on a botanical exploration as well, and she contributes several specimens~ uh,~ to the Lewis and Clark Expedition's collections. ~Um, ~She saves their lives multiple times.

~Um, ~I think because, ~you know... ~I think she saves them from scurvy for [00:17:00] sure because of her knowledge of the landscape. ~Uh, ~She successfully translates and helps to negotiate?~ Uh, with her,~ with the Shoshone, with her people when they get there. And then ultimately, I really do think she becomes an explorer in her own right.

~Um, ~There's a remarkable moment on, in the Pacific where they've left her behind.

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah, I love that scene. I was gonna bring it please share

Megan Kate Nelson: I know. Oh, it's so good. She, you know... They, they know they're gonna have to stay in this area over the winter. And so they leave her behind in camp,~ um,~ which is a couple miles away ~from the, ~from the ocean. And they go to the ocean, Lewis and Clark and Toussaint Charbonneau,~ um,~ and a couple other members of the corps, and they've, they come back with stories of the Pacific Ocean and the beach, and there had been a huge whale that had been beached ~on the, you know, um, ~and ~the, ~the local indigenous band was breaking it up.

They were taking it apart and using the blubber and the bones. And everyone writes about this in their [00:18:00] journals. She goes to Clark and she says, "You're gonna take me to the Pacific because I did not come all this way not to see it. I wanna see the ocean and I wanna see the big fish," you know, that they had been talking about because, I mean, it's hard for us, I think, to access this?~ Uh,~ today because, you know, we know what a whale looks like even if we've never seen a, a live whale.

But they did not. They had no idea what this looked like. This seemed just unbelievably remarkable, and then to also see the ocean for the first time. So she demands this for herself, and Clark agrees, and he takes her.

And I just-- I love this moment because I think it's really where you see her taking something for herself and valuing this experience for herself in a way that we never see [00:19:00] her. We never see her that way in other accounts. She's usually just helping Lewis and Clark and pointing the way,~ um,~ being a mother to Jean Baptiste,~ uh,~ who she had given birth to just a couple months before they left.

Exploring as a postpartum mother and how Clark ended up raising Sacajawea's children

Isabelle Roughol: I feel like we have to say she takes on this entire journey as a postpartum teenage mom,~ uh,~ breastfeeding an infant the entire time. ~Like, ~That is pretty impressive as well.

Megan Kate Nelson: Yes, and they both are-- they both become very ill also at separate times during,~ uh, the, ~the expedition. And of course, Lewis and Clark have all these outmoded notions of medicine. ~I mean, it's a,~ It's~ u~h, remarkable they didn't kill her, actually, ~with their-- But, ~you know, they were trying to bleed her.

They were probably giving her something like mercury. I mean, It was just, you know, just terrible, and she m- she managed to survive. And what I think is really interesting about that, ~you know, ~every single visual depiction that we have of Sacajawea, and we-- no one sketched her or made any kind of visual representation of her during her [00:20:00] lifetime,~ um,~ so we only have guesses as to what she actually looked like.

But all of the images we have of her now depict her with Jean Baptiste, with him on her back,~ um,~ and either walking or on horseback. And- I think today we think of that as,~ like,~ just incredibly remarkable. And I think it is given the distance that she traveled. But also Indigenous women carried their kids around all the time, ~you know, ~and they were in constant movement.

They were always moving between camps for hundreds of miles, ~you know, ~according to the seasons and what they were going to hunt. And so in many ways, ~I mean, ~I think it would have struck Sacajawea as totally bizarre not to do that, right? And, and she would not have left him behind. ~That is, that is definitely, uh,~ That would not have entered her mind. ~Um, ~she would not have abandoned him.

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah, and in fact, at one point,~ um, at, ~at, after the expedition where Clark, who's taken ~a, ~a liking to the kid,~ uh,~ suggests,~ uh, you know, ~adopting him essentially ~and, ~and taking him to school, and she's like, "Mm-mm. That's, that's [00:21:00] my kid." ~Um, she does, ~She does later on~ um,~ leave him to go to school in, this is a few years later,~ um, and, ~and live with the Clark family.

~Um, ~And I'm gonna fast-forward a bit here, but unfortunately she dies quite young. ~Um, ~She dies around 25, I think. ~Um, ~and ~Lewis, uh, sorry, ~Clark has her boy, and she has just given birth to a daughter who also ends up living with Clark. ~I find that, ~I find that quite moving, right? That Clark ended up raising both her children after she passed.

Megan Kate Nelson: Yes. And that-- And, ~you know, ~we're not really sure what happened to Lisette. I think we-- there is some contention ~that, ~that she died quite young,~ um,~ which would have been k- again, ~kind of ~consonant with the time. ~I mean, ~Infant mortality was quite high. And if she did not have her mother and she? ~You know, ~was not able to breastfeed, this was gonna be,~ um,~ very difficult.

~Um, ~but yes. And this-- But this also-- I mean, part of the reason that Sacajawea left him with Clark a little later on is that he was older. And there were these practices ~where, um,~ among many tribal [00:22:00] nations that you could be adopted into other families or you, you kind of sent one of the children to go live with a relative,~ uh,~ usually an uncle,~ um, for, ~for boys to learn all sorts of skills, to learn to be a warrior.

So she definitely felt more comfortable because Jean Baptiste was older. ~Um, ~And, ~you know, _earlier, um,~ she didn't feel comfortable because he wasn't done yet. She hadn't weaned him yet. So he was-- She was like, "He's way too young to go and be on his own." But she felt more comfortable with it later, and that, too, was a, an Indigenous tradition.

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah. I know there's quite a few stories?~ Um, of, ~of children, actually with the next woman we're gonna be talking about,~ of, ~of, uh, children sort of being~ uh,~ raised quite communally or, like, between different families and not just by~ um,~ birth parents,~ which,~ which I think is also interesting to that sense of community that-- And rather than, ~you know, ~that rugged individualism,~ uh,~ that is the image of the West ~that, ~that we have.

Megan Kate Nelson: Yes. Yes. [00:23:00] Absolutely.

How Sacajawea became a suffrage icon

Isabelle Roughol: ~Um, and, ~And just to, to finish ~on, ~on Sacajawea,~ um, she was, ~she was ignored, right, for most of the 19th century. ~Um, ~Her story was ~you know, ~resurrected somewhat later,~ um,~ which I find interesting because it seems like, ~you know, Clark-- ~Lewis and Clark did appreciate her and did appreciate her contribution and helped her family? ~You know, ~settle and get some land after that, right? Like, they recognized her contributions and her expertise, right?

Megan Kate Nelson: They did indeed. And they, again, they all wrote about it. ~Um, ~And Lewis and Clark and then other members of the expedition who kept diaries,~ they're,~ they're remarkably consistent actually in their accounts of her and everything that she did. ~Um, ~But it took an, a new edition of the Lewis and Clark journals that was published~ uh,~ in the 1890s,~ uh,~ to really emphasize her and what she had done.

And~ um,~ one of the other scenes along the Pacific Coast,~ uh,~ where she _lit-- quite literally makes her voice heard,~ uh,~ she is the one who chooses the winter [00:24:00] campsite. ~Um, ~and ~you know, ~again, that is Indigenous tradition. Women always did that. ~Um, ~She argued for it, she lobbied for it, and then the whole Corps of Discovery voted on the location of the campsite.

So she voted, and then also York, who was~ um, enslaved,~ a Black man who was enslaved by William Clark. He also voted. So there's this kind of extraordinary moment, and that moment is emphasized in these 1890s~ uh,~ journal that, that edition in the 1890s in a way that it hadn't been before. And- It's important that at this moment, American suffragists are gaining in power and really starting a campaign to get the women's vote.

So they take up Sacajawea as the first woman to vote in the United States of America, which is, you know, strikes us as kind of funny, obviously. But,~ um,~ that is one of the major reasons that she ~kind of ~bursts [00:25:00] into the American imagination. ~Um, ~Suffragists take her up. They commission~ um,~ a statue of her, a sculpture of her for the 1904 St. Louis Exposition, which is the first visual image we have of her. And then, ~you know, ~attention to her just takes off, and she has become one of the most recognizable and also the most depicted women in American history. And a lot-- along with Pocahontas, is probably one of the two Indigenous women that most schoolchildren can name.

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah, I certainly heard about her, I was an exchange student in American high school.

Megan Kate Nelson: Ah.

Isabelle Roughol: In New Jersey,~ uh,~ twen- ~mm, ~25 years ago. ~Um, and, uh,~ And yes, I did. I took my AP US history, ~you know, um, ~and I learned about Manifest Destiny, and I learned about Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea, absolutely. Who is, she really is ~ um,~ a figure.

~But, ~but again,~ um,~ and I think we see that with a lot of the people ~you, ~you talk about in the book who are all,~ um, you know, ~all have some level of fame in the story of the American West, they end up [00:26:00] mythologized or you don't get the full person, right? You get the cliché,~ the, the, the, ~the caricature of the person that you can depict and just have that exceptional individual that does not contradict the sort of ~you know,~ white pioneer man myth of the frontier, right?

Megan Kate Nelson: Exactly. ~Act- They,~ They become either supportive of it as a kind of wife and mother, or they become ~kind of, um, ~a sort of saucily~ uh,~ depicted antagonist, usually in the form of ~a, ~a madam of a brothel,~ uh,~ or a sex worker in her employ. And ~this, ~this happened to Sacajawea, too. There were a lot of~ uh,~ depictions of her and Clark as possibly having had an affair and all of these things.

How Gertrudis Barcelo made a fortune at Spanish monte

Megan Kate Nelson: ~Um, ~but yeah, most, most white Americans could not conceive of a successful woman in the American West if she was not a prostitute, which [00:27:00] is just insane.

Isabelle Roughol: Insane. And so they're not gonna like ~our next, ~our next character

Megan Kate Nelson: No.

Isabelle Roughol: Who, whose name is gonna be even harder for me to pronounce, but I'll try. Gertrudis? Gertrudis Barceló.

Megan Kate Nelson: Bar-Barceló. Yeah.

Isabelle Roughol: So Spanish, Spanish woman, or New Spain, to become Mexican, to become I think maybe American at the end of her life.

Megan Kate Nelson: Ultimately American.

Isabelle Roughol: she, yeah, a lot of... She goes through all of the different~ uh,~ evolution of the nationalities of the land that, that she's on. ~So, um, what is,~ Who is she? What is her story?

Megan Kate Nelson: Yeah, you know, I, I really love her. She may be my favorite protagonist. I know we're not supposed to have favorites, but um, but she is my favorite. And I had actually learned her story when I was researching a previous book, "The Three-Cornered War." ~Um, ~but she died in 1852, and so she predated the American Civil War, which is what I was writing about in that moment.

So-- But I [00:28:00] always had remembered her story, and I kinda kept it in my pocket and hoped that I could write about her one day. And so when I conceived of this book project, I was like, "Okay, we're writing about Barceló." Because, yes, she is born in Sonora as a New Spanish citizen. She moves with her family northward during the Mexican Revolution,~ um,~ against New Spain, where they secure their independence~ um,~ in the early 19th century.

And she's living in Albuquerque and Santa Fe ~by the, ~by the 1820s and 1830s, and she's a Mexican citizen at that point.

And one of the important things to remember is that Spanish law and Mexican law,~ um,~ gave a lot more rights and freedoms to women than the US did. And I'm not sure about France, actually.

I haven't studied that specifically. But,~ um,~ but yeah, the-- they could own land in their own

Isabelle Roughol: This was Napoleon era, so France was horrible. Napoleon was a terrible misogynist. _Uh,

Megan Kate Nelson: There we go. There we go. Asked and answered.

Isabelle Roughol: You'd [00:29:00] have been better off being Spanish, I think,~ uh,~ at that point.

Megan Kate Nelson: Yes. So women could own land. They could inherit it. They could own it in their own names. They could get divorced, although divorce was rare. ~Um, ~And they could keep their own names. They could sue and be sued in court. ~Uh, and~

So Barceló ~kind of ~grew up without the kind of restrictions on her ambition that I think,~ uh,~ a lot of white American women in this moment may have had. And she got married in, in the 1820s, and her husband taught her to play this card game called Spanish monte, which is a...

It's a betting game on suits, and it's from a-- You play it with a 40-card Spanish deck. And- It-- she was just really good at it. She had ~a, ~a mathematical mind, she had a quick mind, she had a really good memory. And so she started to play, and she won some money, and then she started to deal Spanish monte. And it was a [00:30:00] very...

It's one of these games that you can just set up a table in an alley, and people will come and bet ~and, ~and you can make a lot of money. Because what I discovered, I was trying to figure out how she could have made so much money in her life, and so I learned to play. I lear- I learned to play and to deal Spanish monte.

~Uh, and I, ~I got a 40-card deck, and I learned to do it, and I gave my husband 20 poker chips, and I was like, "All right, let's play." And I took all of his money in six hands.

Isabelle Roughol: Well, you've got an alternative career that's open to you.~ Uh,~

Megan Kate Nelson: I know, a side hustle. A si- I know, I'm trying to figure out how to work this into my book tour. ~Like, ~Can I sell them a book and then take more of their money, um, at the, at the gambling table?

~Um, ~But yeah, so she, she started off just with ~a, ~a table of her own, and then she made so much money that she ultimately moved to Santa Fe and opened a gambling saloon.

And was the wealthiest woman in New Mexico territory when the Americans arrived in 1846. [00:31:00] And she had so much money, in fact, that she invested in currency, she invested in mules. She sent really huge wagon trains along both the Chihuahua Trail south~ uh,~ to ~Mexico, ~Mexico City, and then also on the Santa Fe Trail, which had opened in 1821,~ uh,~ to the United States.

And she was famous. She had the kind of opposite trajectory ~of, ~of Sacajawea. She was very famous in her lifetime, and many American travelers knew about her ~and, ~and sought out her saloon so they could go see this bizarre phenomenon of this woman dealing~ um,~ monte in a saloon and making so much money.

~And, um, yeah, so she was, ~She was pretty amazing. ~When, ~When people maligned her, she took them to court. When she loaned money to Anglo businessmen and they didn't pay her back, she took them to court. And this is part of the reason we know about her, is that those court records generated documents.[00:32:00]

Isabelle Roughol: Historians love, love courts. They're

Megan Kate Nelson: God bless the courts. Yes.

Isabelle Roughol: A court and a bureaucrat is what you need for history to be written.

Megan Kate Nelson: Yes. Yes.

Isabelle Roughol: And she's a, she's wonderful 'cause she is, again,~ like,~ like all of your characters really, she is like this broker between the different cultures ~of, ~of the South, right? ~And like ~The Spanish and Mexican and Indigenous and then the Am- ~the, ~the United States coming in. I always hesitate to say Americans 'cause I know in that... It's, it's, uh, contentious. ~But, um, yeah, it's, um... You know, like~ Reading about her and about Sacajawea and sort of all of that first half of the 19th century, 'cause this really feels like, well, it's technically it's more like two-thirds and one-thirds, but it really feels like ~the, ~the 19th century is split ~with, you know, ~with the Civil War in the middle.

And that first, that first half or that first two-thirds, you almost,~ you,~ you get an image of, ~you know, what, ~what other America could have been, what America could have looked like ~if, ~[00:33:00] if that West ~sort of ~is the one that prevailed...

Megan Kate Nelson: mm-hmm. Yes. Mm-hmm. Yes,~ or,~ or even if that West were one that white Americans even respected

Isabelle Roughol: Mm.

Megan Kate Nelson: and

Isabelle Roughol: And remembered.

Megan Kate Nelson: Yes, and thought about ~in a, ~in a different way, you know? _Their... That they would see indigenous peoples as? ~You know, ~polities in their own right~ uh,~ to be established in the country and,~ uh,~ find a way to survive together, ~you know, ~instead of this relentless violent campaign against them.

And,~ um, you know, ~not instituting racist and misogynist laws that took power away from someone like Barceló. ~Uh, ~She did not live very long,~ um,~ after she became an American in 1848,~ uh,~ in the wake of the Mexican-American War. ~Um, ~She died in 1852, but I think she would have seen her empire fall. ~Um, ~I think ~the, ~the US officials, as much as they appreciated her salon and ~they, they.. I mean, ~they went there, and they gambled, and [00:34:00] they lost a lot of money to her. ~Um, ~But ~the, ~the restrictions on her and her property would've been such that I think,~ uh,~ she would've~ uh,~ lost a lot of her land and a lot of her property in the end. _Um...

The epitomy of the Western pioneer man -- in a Hispanic woman

Isabelle Roughol: ~uh, ~And ironically, I mean, she is probably ~the, ~the character that?~ Like,~ most represents ~the, ~the pioneer, ~you know, the, _the, uh,~ the iconoclast,~ the, the, the, the, ~the person that you imagine as ~like, you know, uh, ~plucky, perseverant, savvy, smart, no-nonsense, entrepreneurial. ~Uh, ~But she's a woman and she's Hispanic, and those are the only two ways in which she doesn't fit the mold because the exact same story~ uh, you know, uh, of a, ~of a white man is exactly the image of the West that you have, right?

Megan Kate Nelson: Exactly. Exactly. And this is what I found through most of my research, is that ~you know, ~all seven people in "The Westerners", the women and the men, exemplified a lot of what we have come to think of as that pioneer spirit, right? ~Um, ~But they undermined it in other ways.

And for the women in particular, ~in order to be... they, ~they were either [00:35:00] marginalized and then erased completely. ~You know, ~Barcelo in the years after her life, no one marked the site of ~her, ~her gambling saloon as a historic space. ~Um, ~No one really wrote about her until~ uh,~ women's historians ~kind of ~recovered her in ~the, ~the 1970s and '80s. And even now today, there, there is-- I have heard that there is now a tour you can take.

Isabelle Roughol: Oh.

Megan Kate Nelson: ~Uh, ~Yeah, I know. ~Going to... And, ~And Borough Alley still exists, the place where she had her saloon. ~Um, ~And I think that I-- whoever is leading that tour must have looked into the land records to find where her house was and then where her saloon was ~and, ~and you can take a tour of those sites. But this is a very recent phenomenon.

And, ~you know, ~she is not ~kind of ~lauded or emphasized in the greater tourist infrastructure of Santa Fe. ~Um, ~And often when people speak about her or write about her, again, she [00:36:00] is depicted ~as, ~as possibly maybe a prostitute. ~Um, ~And ~this is, ~this is a commonality ~you know, ~that women can't possibly have power unless it is in this one very narrow profession.

~Um, ~And that is ~the, ~the vision of a woman that persists ~in, ~in the pioneer myth today, Because,~ uh,~ otherwise you would have to make room for the possibility that, ~you know, ~women and in, in this region in particular, Mexican women were badasses ~and, ~and

Isabelle Roughol: And were more than, than their relationship to, to the men and to their sexuality.

Megan Kate Nelson: Exactly. Yes, and that ~they were, ~they were canny businesswomen, and they knew their rights, and they asserted themselves, and they built lives for themselves without men almost entirely.

So yeah. ~Um, ~and that ha- has seemed impossible~ um, for, ~for white American men to really embrace.

Isabelle Roughol: ~Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. ~And so as we jump into ~the second, ~the second part of the 19th century, so we have, ~you know, ~the Civil [00:37:00] War for, again, for non-Americans, that's 1861 to '65 or '60 to '64, one of those. Uh, '61 to '65. Okay. ~And, um,~ And so after the Civil War... The, the thing that I think is maddening when you look at the Civil War is that it feels like it should be a victory for a freer, more liberal, more progressive America, because after all, it is the defeat of slavery, and yet everything that comes after feels more segregationist, more~ um,~ racist,~ more,~ more of all the things ~that we, ~that we don't like about American history during ~the, ~the Reconstruction Era.

And this is the terrible cliffhanger I leave you on. Join me and Megan Kate Nelson on the next episode to talk about this post-Civil War, Reconstruction Era American West, and even into the early 20th century, and see if it delivered on that promise of a freer, more liberal, more progressive America.

I'm afraid I kind of spoiled that [00:38:00] already, didn't I?

Remember, if you are a member of Broad History, you can binge that second part of the conversation right away. Sign up at broadhistory.com/membership. Again, broadhistory.com/membership. And you can listen to the rest of my conversation with Megan Kate Nelson.

If not, it will be on the feed in two weeks. We're going fortnightly. Several of you have told me you couldn't keep up with weekly releases, and you know what? Neither can I.

Part 2 teaser

And to entice you into that membership, which is the only way that this work is possible, here is a little bit of a taster of what you're missing.

Isabelle Roughol: Five women in town?

Megan Kate Nelson: Five women in town.

Isabelle Roughol: This is crazy. I don't know how many men, but, like, hundreds and five women.

five women.

Megan Kate Nelson: This is how powerful the frontier myth is. It has always been used as a way to marginalize and erase people from a national story. It makes it much easier to take their land, to take their dignity, and to take their civil rights [00:39:00] away.

Isabelle Roughol: There are still women being sold and traded after Abolition.

Megan Kate Nelson: My mother texted me and said, "Your father has just finished that chapter, and you have broken his heart."

Isabelle Roughol: I'm, I'm with your dad. I... My heart was broken too.

Megan Kate Nelson: A journalist is totally shocked to find this older Chinese woman living in the middle of Idaho. Chinese people have been erased by that point from all of Western history.

Isabelle Roughol: It made me think of the "Yellowstone" show quite a bit, if people watched it. It looks pretty, but it's really a mafia.

Megan Kate Nelson: This push among far-right conservatives that women don't need to vote. They just need to stay home and have babies. They are using the pioneer woman to bolster that policy.

Isabelle Roughol: Every time that you complicate that story,~ um,~ it messes with their plans.

If that sounds like something you wanna hear now, go to broadhistory.com/membership.

This has been Broad History, a One Lane Bridge production, researched, produced, edited, and hosted by me, Isabelle Roughol.[00:40:00]

Talk to you next time.