Isabelle Roughol: [00:00:00] 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.

All good things must come to an end, and we are closing the curtain on the Women of the American Revolution series today. We are back with Carol Berkin, who opened the series with us seven weeks ago.

Remember, she told us that the most radical thing about the Revolution was the sudden politicization of American women, who got involved in leading boycotts of British goods, weaving homespun cloth, raising funds, and sewing shirts for continental troops, cooking, washing, and nursing for the army, sometimes even picking up a musket or taking up their fallen husband's place at the cannon.

Women ran farms and businesses by themselves. They served as spies and couriers, some disguised as men in order to enlist. They wrote political pamphlets and plays, even a whole history of the Revolution. I wanted to know what became of all [00:01:00] that after 1783, the end of the war, or 1787, the Constitution.

What space was carved out for women in the new United States? To answer that question, here is again Dr. Carol Berkin.

[00:01:14] Start of interview

Isabelle Roughol: Dr. Carol Berkin. Hello and welcome back.

Carol Berkin: Hello, yes.

Isabelle Roughol: We had you on the first episode of the series sort of raising the curtain on the American independence, and we are closing that curtain today.

[00:01:28] The French won the American Revolution

Isabelle Roughol: So we've come to the end of the Revolutionary War. The Patriots win the decisive victory at Yorktown in 1781, and then the British Army of General Cornwallis surrenders and then Parliament kind of loses the will to continue.

And we have the Treaty of Paris in 1783 that seals American independence.

Funny enough, I'm a French woman who also went to school in America. And in America, when you take a history class, America starts in 1776.

Carol Berkin: [00:02:00] Yes.

Isabelle Roughol: And when you take a history class in France, America starts in 1783.

Carol Berkin: And also, by the way, the Americans did not win the American Revolution. The French won the American Revolution

Isabelle Roughol: Thank you for this. I appreciate

it

Carol Berkin: If the French Navy had not blockaded Cornwallis, I, just love it, my students are so stunned to hear that French money, Spanish money,Dutch money financed the war, and the French Navy won the war.

They go, wow, I never learned that in high school.

Isabelle Roughol: Well, it doesn't quite fit with the national narrative, does it? but yeah, it's, it, I mean, we talked in our first conversation about how the Revolutionary War is so interesting in being a revolution and, a war of independence and a civil war. It is also a great state sort of war, a global war in the same way that World War I and World War ii were for sure.

[00:02:54] The rise of girls' education

Isabelle Roughol: So men come home, 1781, 82, [00:03:00] 83, and it's been years and women haven't just, sat around waiting. And as we see in every war, there is the question of what happens next? Do we, do people crave a return to normal? What does normal even mean? Women have been running farms, running shops, running businesses, running families. What happens when the men come home?

Carol Berkin: It's complicated. In many cases, maybe the majority of cases? People do want to return to the pre-war life. There's yearning to get back to what was familiar. The war was so disruptive and so, so, chaotic that people, men and women? Just wanted to go home and be what they were before the war.

For some people that wasn't the case. For some, certainly for some women, [00:04:00] there were thoughts that, let's think about what the war taught us about women. Most of the women who felt that way were members of the elite. That is, they were articulate about what is the role of women, white women is who they meant, white women in a republic.

And this question was raised among what today we would call the intelligentsia. That is some men and many women sat down and thought. The revolution had decimated the old notion of women's capacity.

Women can't think rationally and make moral judgements? Here, they've done that in the American Revolution.

Women can't be brave? Here, they've done that in the American Revolution.

So the question was what function do they have in a republic, which is very different from a [00:05:00] world with a tradition of kingship. And they concluded that women needed to have a civic role. Now notice, not really a political role, but a civic role.

And after they had long discussions, the first thing that the women radicals wanted was an acknowledgement that they were intellectual equals to men, and that the reason they did not seem to be was that they were uneducated. Over and over again, they write, if women were schooled as men were schooled, you would see that they are as capable of high-minded thinking as men.

And so one of the things that they pushed for and that they achieved was the rise of young ladies academies. In every single state from Maine to [00:06:00] Georgia... well, Maine wasn't the state yet. From Massachusetts to Georgia, they set up these academies. It was for elite and upper middle class girls. And since they, I always say, since their administrators were as lazy as administrators everywhere, instead of creating a brand new curriculum, they took the curriculum from boys' prep schools, preps for college? and put them in the girls schools.

So here you have, political science, astronomy, math,history, everything that boys were learning, these girls learned. And it was life changing for these young women.

That's quite uniquely American, isn't it? Because I looked a bit at, at, girls education in Europe and it's very, it's extremely gendered. It's a little bit of English and math, but quite basic. And then it's drawing and music and sewing Well that, [00:07:00] that was in the girls school too. But the basic intellectual curriculum was vigorous. And the girls lived at the school. And if you remember college days, most of your learning was in conversation with other people. What's the meaning of life? Are men and women the same?

All those weighty questions, they had an opportunity to explore. And they were encouraged, in many cases.

[00:07:34] What Abigail Adams did not mean

Carol Berkin: A new idea of marriage had begun to emerge, called companion among the upper classes called companionate marriage, where you not only got married 'cause your wife could do household chores, because these women didn't have to do household chores, they had servants or slaves. But they should be your a male's companion. You should share a lot of ideas in [00:08:00] common. You should share tastes in common.

What we would today call romantic love had been emerging, and the revolution really hothoused that idea. And so women being educated seemed important to these upper classes.

But then what else were they gonna do with that education? They were still just gonna get married and they were still going to be domestic. No changes in the legal system took place.

When Abigail Adams said to her husband, and every school textbook has this, "remember the ladies" and nine out of 10 people in America think she was asking for the vote?

No, she wasn't asking for the vote. She was asking for reform of the laws that were imposed on married women. She wanted [00:09:00] women to have a legal identity. That was one of the principles that these women were after. And they didn't get it. Because if you read the exchange of letters between John Adams and Abigail Adams, there are four of them.

She says, remember the ladies? And he says, oh, how cute. we're not gonna be ruled by the Peco. And she writes back, John, I'm serious. And he, I'm paraphrasing. He writes back, shut up.

So women did not get those kinds of legal rights, but they did get this chance to be educated because of this idea of companion marriage.

[00:09:42] Republican or civic motherhood

Carol Berkin: And also because what was the role of women in Republic? They decided that the role of women was to raise up patriotic children. The next generation had to be [00:10:00] patriotic so that they would be willing to sacrifice their life, their wealth, their sacred honour, if they had to, to save America. That is, they weren't sure America was gonna last.

France was still around on one border. Spain and Indians on the other. England was still north of them. So what if they were invaded? What if there was another threat to the republic? The only thing that would save it was that the next generation rose up and defended America. And they decided that the person in the family, for the first time ever, who would socialise children to their political and social duties, civic duties, would not be the father, which it had always been in the days when they thought women didn't have the brains to do it, and the moral sense to do it. Now, it would be the [00:11:00] mother.

So women would stay in the house, they would remain domestic, but they would have civic duty to raise patriotic sons and daughters. And that's why I prefer to call it civic motherhood, because what they were saying was: " you have... the whole future of the republic is in your hands. You have the most important job there is, and that is to raise the next generation."

And some people call it Republican motherhood. They don't mean the current Republican party, they mean the Republic. Republican motherhood. Some people call it Republican wife hood. Some call it Republican womanhood. I call it civic motherhood.

But the idea was that women had weighty responsibilities to the society as a whole, but it [00:12:00] did not require them to come out of the household. And it did not require them to have legal autonomy, which meant it also didn't require that they have political, formal political power.

[00:12:15] Separate sphere ideology is coming back in the radical right

Isabelle Roughol: It hurts me to say this sounds incredibly current because it's exactly the discourse that we're hearing from the current crop ofparticular part of the American right who seem to think women don't need the right to vote anymore because their power and their influence is exercised in other ways, within their own separate sphere, right? Which...

Carol Berkin: The difference is also dramatic. The women in the early days of the republic were raising their sons and daughters to have a civic responsibility. Today it's to have a familial responsibility. And as you don't hear the [00:13:00] radical right saying, "raise up children who have a sense of responsibility to their community." You hear them saying, "to carry on the traditions of the family religion, to carry on the intensity of family contact."

It's much narrower than what Republican motherhood or civic motherhood ever was. But it entails taking away from women the disruptive political and economic rights that make them independent. You know, this is what leads to divorce. This is what leads to, you know, gay and lesbian life. This is what leads to women, saying, I can be an independent person."

Those things are bad today in to the radical right.

[00:13:52] "Femme couverte"

Carol Berkin: And one of the symbols of that is to go back to the idea that you are under the [00:14:00] protection of your husband, "femme couverte" in effect. That's what trad wife is, femme couverte. And this is a such a step backward for American women, should it come to pass for the majority. Should it become law, people like me... Yes, I agreed. Agreed.

Isabelle Roughol: We, we should mention, just for context really briefly, for people who don't know this, "femme seule", it's from the French, is the sort of the legal status of a single woman. "Femme couverte" is covered. She is covered by her husband essentially and she becomes the legal responsibilityof her husband,

essentially instead of of being her own entity.

Carol Berkin: Right. She loses all autonomy.? It's absolute. Blackstone, I think is the one who wrote, oh, men write about this with such lyric, uh, he says, oh, woman is like a [00:15:00] tiny stream that when merged with a mighty river, loses its identity, but becomes part of the mighty river. In other words, once you get married,

Isabelle Roughol: your husband takes over everything.

Funny how they never have any interest in being the tiny stream themselves.

Carol Berkin: Yes, yes. I did a very early piece on this ideology and I would read ministers and legal experts and everyone saying the same thing. Women don't need to be autonomous. They need to be under the protection and care of their, and I would go into the college library and see male graduate students, and I'd wanna beat all of them up.

I was so angry at, and people and friends of mine would say, "it's not us. It's not us." This was 17th and 18th century. and sadly, shades of it are coming back today. It worries me a [00:16:00] lot.

[00:16:00] From the Revolution to Seneca Falls

Carol Berkin: But this civic authority dies out after the war of 1812 when Americans. Men breathe a sigh of relief. And they say the republic is gonna last, which is ironic since the Civil War comes up just a few decades later.

But, you know, they couldn't, they can't read the future.

But the education of women remains, and it is the radicalising experience of the 19th century. Women not only go to school, some go to women's colleges. But they also become teachers in the primary schools. And so you see a kind of lasting impact of women able to think for themselves.

And in 1848, you have the Seneca [00:17:00] Falls Convention. And my students think, oh, so many years later, I said, you know, in the course of history, it's just a blip. It's a

Isabelle Roughol: just, yeah, it's just grandmother to granddaughter.

Carol Berkin: Yeah. Yeah.

And, and so what the revolution set in motion by acknowledging women's capacity to make moral and rational judgements takes hold in an, in the later era.

So people should not despair at the end of the revolution. Don't be so pessimistic because something is gonna happen later on.

[00:17:44] The exile of loyalist women

Isabelle Roughol: We'll, we'll get to that in a moment. I wanna go slightly back in time, to really just the end of the, of the revolution because, so we talked about what happened to, patriots and the newly minted American women. What happened to loyalists, to women who still thought of themselves as [00:18:00] British? And that would be white loyalists, and also, maybe Black or indigenous women who sought refuge, behind British lines.

Carol Berkin: yeah. The biggest block of loyalists went to Nova Scotia, went to Canada. The loyalists themselves called it Nova Scarcity. I mean, they, it, they had gone to a really, very alien, especially the Southern loyalists, a very, a alien environment. And most of them had gone, though they were given land there, they couldn't farm extensively, the way the growing season was different....

And I mean, the French who had controlled Canada took one look at it and said, fur trapping, fur trading is better than trying to plant. And so they experienced a kind of decline in their economic, positions.

Secondly, the homesickness [00:19:00] was just extraordinary. I wrote my first book about a Massachusetts loyalist who was a powerful attorney general in Massachusetts. And he wound up first taking his family to England, where he discovered that though he was a big fish in Massachusetts, he was a tiny, tiny fish in England. And it was so expensive, and they were so not part of the social elite in England that eventually he went to Nova Scotia.

And he writes so, so longingly of Massachusetts apples, you know, apple trees, and the things that he loved to eat in his native land. And most of the loyalists had that, that generation of loyalists had that longing to go home and those who [00:20:00] could did. The man I wrote about, Jonathan Sewell? Actually went insane and locked himself in his room for 18 months. And when he came out, he blamed the revolution on his wife, poor Esther Sewell. And she endured this abuse, not physical abuse, but this verbal abuse until he died. She was a Quincy. And as soon as he was buried, she went back to Massachusetts into the bosom of her family. And she was lived happily ever after.

And any loyalists who could after the war, you know, 10 years later, started trickling back to what was then the United States. And so there was a kind of disruption of their emotionalstate of mind and a disruption of their [00:21:00] economic opportunities. And so they were not a happy group of people.

Their children, for instance, Sewell had two sons, and they both became attorney generals in Canada. And they were happy to live in Canada. They never left. Their mother left, but they didn't leave.

But I think that you could in some ways think of the loyalists as a lost generation, as a just displaced people who, who did not enjoy their exile.

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah. Typical experience of political exiles and refugees of war. yeah.

yeah. The younger generations get used to the new country and, and the older don't.

Carol Berkin: Don't. Yes, it's true. Not to diminish the feeling of suffering, to say it was typical in all instances, but it is true that that's the feeling of [00:22:00] refugees in most cases.

[00:22:03] The betrayal of Black loyalists[00:22:03] Ad break

Isabelle Roughol: There is a group of women I wanna talk about, because their experience really stands out specifically and that's Black women, who were in most cases enslaved women at the time.

What was their experience of the revolution, which was clearly not about their emancipation, their freedom, but was there a door to freedom there, and how did they experience the war?

Carol Berkin: There's no such thing as all Black women, all enslaved Black women. But they were offered by the British Army from the very beginning, even before independence was declared, the Virginia Governor, Royal Governor, offered Black men their freedom if they would enlist in the British Army. And so those kinds of offers continued by the British Army. Everywhere it went, they said any African American, male or [00:23:00] female who made it to our camp, would be given their freedom. what they really got, and this is... This story has no good ending.

Here's what really happened. Black men who made it to the camp were given all the roughest, hardest. Manual labour jobs. They were under fed and under clothed, and many of them died. The women who made it were under fed, under clothed, and many of them died. Disease spread through their ranks.

So it wasn't that you got to the British army and everything was fine. Many of those who left the plantations never even made it to the encampment because British scouting troops would capture them, put them in irons and sell them to a ship captain who'd carry them to [00:24:00] the Caribbean and put them to work on the sugar plantations, which is automatic death.

Oh, the,

Isabelle Roughol: the treachery of, of asking them to flee and then.

Carol Berkin: Yes. And so, and in addition, and it's true, many women holding the hand of their children, with a baby in their arms, with an elderly mother, made the trek sometimes up 50 miles on foot to get to this promise of freedom.

But many women and Black men as well didn't leave the plantation. You know, there's an expression the devil you know is better than the devil you don't know. They didn't know what lay in store for them if they left. Their grandparents were buried on that plantation. Their elderly parents didn't wanna leave. They knew that world. Their friends were there, [00:25:00] so they stayed, stayed on the plantation.

They weren't cowards. They just didn't trust any white organisation or white man to keep their pledge. And it turned out they were pretty much right.

Isabelle Roughol: They were right. Mm-hmm.

Carol Berkin: When the war ended and the evacuation began of the loyalists, many of the loyalists were either free Black,a sizable proportion are free Blacks, or Blacks who had survived the experience of gaining their freedom.

What happened to them? Not a good story at all. The British didn't have enough naval ships to transport all these loyalists, 15,000 loyalists fromNew York, many from Charleston. And so they hired merchant marine, that is private ships, to take them. The private ships would load Black and white passengers [00:26:00] on, and as soon as they got three miles out into the ocean, the crew would clap the Black people in irons, put them below, deliver the white people, and then take the Black people to the Caribbean and sell them.

When Admiral Birch heard this, he was in charge of the evacuation. He's a very honourable man. The Black people who went to Canada called the main town, Birchtown in his honour. He said, this is dishonourable behaviour. He said, from now on, we are going to keep a record of every Black person who gets on a boat for evacuation. Their name, their description of them, what work they did, how old they were, and if they don't arrive, every one of them in Canada, in Nova Scotia is where they went, you will not be [00:27:00] paid.

As a result of this, ironically, we have something that is commonly known as the Book of Negroes, which is this record of every Black person who is a loyalist, who was evacuated.

And from this, we know more about what Black people did in slavery than practically from anything else. It's ironic that the war produced more, the aftermath of the war produced more information about slavery than practically anything else we have.

When they got to Canada, they had been given land by the British government. The British government behaved honourably to all loyalists. What had, what happened to them? The Episcopal White Church joined with the white loyalists in stealing [00:28:00] that land away from the Black loyalists. Black loyalists were in these ghetto towns, and when they tried to find work in Halifax, they were beaten.

Basically pogroms happened against them. I mean, it's, it's just a terrible, terrible story of racism, partly because remember, many of the loyalists were southern whites. Right. So in 17, I think 97, 98, 1500 Black loyalists from Canada boarded ships and sailed to Africa where they had never been most of them, sailed to Africa, to Liberia, to establish a community.

[00:28:52] The fate of Black Americans who stayed

Carol Berkin: It's such a sad story of the impact of racism. [00:29:00] Equally, it's a sad story about Blacks on the plantations because much tighter rules were passed about slaves ever leaving a plantation. White men on horses rode, uh, policing. If they saw a Black person off a plantation, they immediately captured him, assuming he was trying to run away.

So slaves in the South were under tighter regimes than they had been before. Before the American Revolution, often if your son had been sold to a neighbouring plantation, after the day of work, you could go to that plantation to visit. It was laxer than it was after the revolution. It's just a sad story.

What a terrible, terrible story that is.

[00:29:56] Indigenous women had so much more autonomy and American women knew it

Carol Berkin: Native Americans. It was interesting, most of the [00:30:00] tribes, eastern woodland tribes, because they were agricultural. And because they were agricultural, women had an enormous amount of autonomy because women were the farmers and men were hunters.

And male role in terms of providing food for the family was sort of, "oh, great, you killed a deer, we'll have meat." But it was not, that was not their basic diet. And so women had a lot of autonomy and you can see it. They were matrilineal. That is traced. You traced your legitimacy through your mother, not through your father.

And they were matrilocal, which meant when a couple got married, they went to live in the longhouse or thehome of the mother,not of the husband. The wife went back to live with her family, with her mother. And this led to some [00:31:00] interesting differences with the American patriarchal white women.

If a woman got tired of her husband, native American woman, or didn't like his behaviour, she just put his belongings outside the longhouse and that meant you are done. That's a divorce. And, and, and he had to, he had to go home to his, his people. It's just such a wonderful image when you think about how many Western patriarchal communities made it almost impossible for women to get a divorce.

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah. They would lose their children. They would lose their livelihoods. They,

yeah,

Carol Berkin: Whereas for these women, it was, you know, "go away. I'm tired of you." And women had a strong role in political decision making because if the men decided that they wanted to make a [00:32:00] war or get revenge for something, and the women elders did not think it was a good idea, they said, ""fine, you can go, but we are not giving you any food to take with you."

Isabelle Roughol: Hmm.

Carol Berkin: I mean, you are not being supplied.

Isabelle Roughol: See, they understood, unlike Washington, the importance of women supplying the logistics of war.

Carol Berkin: Exactly. And the proof of the pudding is when white women were captured by, in Indian raids, we have a lot of captivity narratives, and some of them said "it was horrible. They were heathens. I hated it. Thank you for rescuing me."

But many of them found that life among the Indians was a lot better. First of all, you worked in the fields. Yeah. You

Isabelle Roughol: worked

Carol Berkin: in the fields in community with other women. You had autonomy.

And [00:33:00] so when they were redeemed, that is the white community paid the Indians to get the women back from this horrible, captivity, and they would be travelling through the woods to go back to "civilization", and they'd spend overnight in the woods, when they woke up, all the women had gone back to the tribe they came from. They didn't wanna have anything to do with patriarchal society.

[00:33:28] Molly Brandt

Carol Berkin: But in the war, the majority of the Native Americans sided with the British. Just as the loyalists in the South, the white loyalists had said, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", that is, we hate the planters. They've oppressed us, so we want the British to win. So true too, the Native American said, the enemy of my enemy is my friends. And that their enemy was the [00:34:00] American colonists, who were land grabbers. I mean, that had been the whole history of the relationship right up until the Revolution and after of white people saying, we're taking your land and we'll kill you off. We'll massacre you. We'll cheat you, we'll do any. And Native Americans knew this, and they said to, you know, one another, we have to side with the British government because the British government honours treaties with us. The Americans are gonna steal our property blind. And they were right, of course.

They were absolutely right. The leader of the Mohawks, that is the, one of the major Iroquois groups, was a woman. It was Molly Brandt. Everybody knows about her brother, who was the leader of the Mohawksoldiers and warriors. And, but he didn't have anything to do with political decision, with [00:35:00] diplomacy.

It was Molly Brandt. The British negotiated, if you will keep, basically, the Iroquois group, either neutral or on our side, I will, the British government will promise you land in Canada. And she negotiated that treaty. And we have the accounts from British officers saying, oh, you wanna do X and Y? Don't ask him, ask Molly. She's the one who takes care of all of these things.

It was often also true with the, what Americans called the queens of the Choctaws or the queens of the Cherokees. The native tribes did not have queens or kings or even in most cases, chiefs. They had councils where men came to some kind of an agreement, or women came to some kind of an agreement.

[00:35:54] The Trail of Tears

Carol Berkin: But as soon as the Southern [00:36:00] white farmers could, they began to take Cherokee lands and Choctaw lands, just as the Native Americans knew they would. And it climaxed more or less in the Trail of Tears when the Native Americans in Georgia did everything to assimilate into white society. They men took over farming. The women were confined to the household. They developed a written language. They published a newspaper. And when the Georgia white population decided it wanted to take their land, took their land just like that, and sent them to reservations, a across the Mississippi River.

And so Native America, there were some Native Americans who sided, with the

Americans. But on the whole, native Americans knew that [00:37:00] white American victory in the war would be a disaster for them. And they were 100% right.

Isabelle Roughol: And so of course we know about, the loss of land and the forced migration and the disease and death and spoliation, all of it. within native and indigenous communities, the matrilineal and, and fairly equal in terms of gender role society that you describe, is that transformed by American Revolution? Do they become like very much impacted by white American culture? Yeah. Yeah.

Carol Berkin: Well, it's not that except for these Indians, for instance, in Georgia, who immediately complied with white gender roles, with white religion with, and you see what it got 'em, nothing. The Indians on the border were either massacred or driven farther west or cheated outta their land and [00:38:00] it disrupted Indian society completely.

Isabelle Roughol: So you get sort of that cultural destruction or cultural at the same time.

Carol Berkin: Thecultural destruction was pretty extensive.

[00:38:11] America's birth myth

Carol Berkin: And, and so you most people talk about something called the American Revolution, that's inaccurate. There were revolutions, it's like a Venn diagram. African Americans were fighting for exactly the same thing that white American... Liberty and freedom! African Americans were fighting for that often against the very people we call the Patriots, you know, slave owners, Patrick Henry, Thomas, Jefferson, James Madison, all owned slaves.

Isabelle Roughol: George Washington. Yeah.

Carol Berkin: George Washington.

You see that they're hoping for their liberty and freedom.

Native Americans are fighting to preserve [00:39:00] their culture for their liberty and their freedom and they're fighting against white Americans. And so you've got three... And loyalists who are white, are fighting for their liberty and their right to be loyal to the king.

So you've got four groups of people at odds with one another, all fighting for the same thing. That is the words,the principles, the ideology is the same. The outcome of it vastly different. And so it's such a complicated, complex episode in human history, and it defies the image of All the Americans fought for independence and freedom, and then they wrote a constitution and they lived happily ever after.

It defies reality and why that story [00:40:00] persists is just so surprising to me when the real story is so complicated and so rich and so filled with tragedy and with heroism and with blind luck and with international involvement. It's got everything.

Isabelle Roughol: You've got the history, I mean the, the history you're describing, and then you've got the national narrative that serves the purposes that it needs to serve.

Carol Berkin: I call it the birth myth. And I say every country has a birth myth. You know, Rome, Italy, twins raised by wolves, right? Romulus and Remus. Ireland has St. Patrick getting rid of all the rats. Germany has Frederick Barbarosa, I mean, all countries have them. But, this country is adamantly holding on to that birth myth that so, so [00:41:00] starves the American revolution of its complexity that, if I ruled the world, it would be different.

[00:41:09] The Revolution, 250 years on

Isabelle Roughol: Oh, if women ruled the world... well that's, a wonderful segue into sort of what I wanted to end this conversation on, because obviously, and that's the reason behind this series, we're celebrating the semi quincentennial, of the American Revolution in American Declaration of Independence this summer.

And of course, those celebrations really encapsulate that birth myth, if ever I've seen it. You know, we're, were really, were so far from actual history in some of the stories that we're hearing and obviously the way that those celebrations are being used politicallyby the current administration.

And so I wonder, how you think about that and why putting women back in the story of the revolution feels so important right now and sort of what the summer's celebrations evoke for you?

Carol Berkin: How I feel about it, [00:42:00] it makes me cry. I mean, if you're a historian of the 18th century, they're ripping your heart out with every, you know, with every.But I think what we can do, I mean, I can't overthrow the government and have no inclination to try, that is violently, certainly in the voting booth I try.

But I think what historians can do, what our sacred duty is to keep telling the story properly. Keep writing, keep talking. that's why I do shows like this. That's why I wrote Revolutionary Mothers. That's why I go to speak anywhere, libraries, schools. I do my best. And I know most historians, women's historians do their best, to try to [00:43:00] interject that complexity into the story wherever they can.

And that complexity, the entry point for us is the role of women in the American Revolution. And so I often quote to audiences, Alice through the Looking glass, she's on a chessboard with the white knight and they're running and running and running and they're not getting anywhere. And she says to him, we're running and running and we are not moving.

And he says, yes, sometimes you have to run twice as fast just to stay in the same place. And I think that's sort of where we are at the moment. We have to run twice as fast to prevent anything worse from happening. [00:44:00]

Isabelle Roughol: Well,

Carol Berkin: I hate to end on a depressing note, but.

Isabelle Roughol: no, no. Not at all. I think, I think you make a great point about the importance of continuing to tell the story. It, it's something I, I say often is, um, not every battle can be won, but they still need to be fought because you only lose when you stop

Carol Berkin: good.

Isabelle Roughol: So, um, thank you so much for giving us two hours of your time to tell that story properly. I am so grateful for your time.

Carol Berkin: so, and thanks for this show that you're going to do because we, we really, we really need it. We need every voice that is available to tell the world what really happened and what can happen. So thank you.

Isabelle Roughol: Thank you so much.

[00:44:50] Outro

Isabelle Roughol: That was the great Carol Berkin. Her book, "Revolutionary Mothers," is available like all the other books in this series in the Broad History bookstore. Both [00:45:00] US and UK links are in the show notes and at broadhistory.com.

We have come to the end, my friends, of this series. I think we've talked about the American Revolution quite enough.

I want to thank Carol Berkin for carrying two of these seven episodes, as well as our other guests who shared their expertise with such generosity: Woody Holton, Amanda Vaill, Errin Haines, Vin Carretta, and Rosemarie Zagarri. Thank you so much. I had such a blast exploring the Revolution with you all. I learned a lot, and I hope you did, too.

If you're watching this in video, which by the way, you can do now on Apple Podcasts or on YouTube, soon on Spotify, and you think I look tired, well, yes. This has been fun. Let's never do it again. Seven hour-long episodes in seven weeks produced entirely by myself outside my day job, that was a lot. I need a holiday.

In fact, with the magic of scheduling, as you're watching this, my two weeks are up and I'm back at my desk on Monday, hopefully more rested, and I'll be working on the [00:46:00] autumn series. I'm not telling you what that is yet, but I'm so excited about the topic. I think it'll be the best one yet.

If you've enjoyed Broad History, if you want to support this work, maybe help me commission an editor so I get more sleep, you can become a member or make a small donation at broadhistory.com/membership. It really helps me so much, and members will receive word of the new series first. They will receive the whole series, in fact, first, early, and ad free.

Even if you can't support right now, make sure to sign up for the newsletter at broadhistory.com. It's completely free, and you can follow me on Instagram. That's where I'll announce the next series, and I'll keep you in the loop of my work over the next few weeks as the podcast goes on hiatus and I prepare the next series.

I wanna take you along to the research and producing work. The podcast does go on a short hiatus, but it is coming back, so make sure to hit follow in your podcasting app so you don't miss the next drop. There will be several one-off episodes that I'm already preparing and scheduling [00:47:00] before the next big series, so I won't be gone very long.

Until then, this has been Broad History, and I've been your host, Isabelle Roughol. Music by Aaron Kenny. I'll talk to you very soon.

[00:00:00]

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.

We know from previous episodes in this series that it was complicated for women in colonial and revolutionary America to get involved in politics. There was no franchise, of course. There was no office they could hold. Several of the women we talked about, like Abigail Adams or the Schuyler sisters, are only remembered inasmuch as they were able to influence the political men they were married to.

But every so often, rarely, a woman would stand out expressing her political views in her own name publicly, just a little bit louder than was expected. And we're talking about one such woman today, Mercy Otis Warren.

Mercy was a published poet and a playwright, a Republican in Federalist Massachusetts, a mother of five, and a political wife who ended up much more famous a politician than her husband. She's also a [00:01:00] bit of a mascot to me, and probably to the early American historians who've been on the show these last few weeks, because she was the very first historian of the Revolution.

She published an epic three-volume "History of the American Revolution," which she wrote with access to the documents and the memories of all of her patriot friends.

To talk about Mercy Otis Warren, I reached out to Rosemarie Zagarri. She's a distinguished professor of history at George Mason University and the author of the essential Mercy Otis Warren biography, "A Woman's Dilemma."

Here's Rosemarie Zagarri.

[00:01:33] Start of interview

Isabelle Roughol: Rosemarie Zagarri, hello and welcome to Broad History

Rosemarie Zagarri: Hi, it's great to be here

Isabelle Roughol: Thank you for coming on to talk about Mercy Otis Warren, and I want to start by talking about sort of her origin story. I think she stands out as being someone who's unusually educated for a woman of her generation, and so I want to talk about her formative years and how she got access to that education that so few women of her [00:02:00] generation did.

[00:02:00] Mercy's unusual education

Rosemarie Zagarri: Yes. Well, she was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1728 to a very well-connected family politically. Her father was a farmer, and a merchant, but also was very active in colonial politics and as her brother and her father would later on be in revolutionary politics. But, she was educated, with a private tutor alongside her brother.

And what we think is that her family recognized from a very early age that she was precocious, and that even though women didn't tend to get a very highly sophisticated education at this time, they were willing to give her one.

Now, I should say that in Massachusetts, girls were eligible with boys to go to primary school, and this [00:03:00] is one of the only places, if not the only place in the colonies, where there was a free public education available at the primary level.

And I also should say that it was not uncommon for women in New England to read and write, and so she would have learned that whether or not she received her fancy education. But again, because she apparently displayed this early precocity and her brother, James, was being tutored to prepare to enter Harvard University, and that was the typical path for young men at this time of the upper classes to be tutored by an individual.

She and her brother were tutored by a neighboring minister. And here's where her education differed from that of many other New England women or young girls at the time. So she read classics in translation, the ancient Homer [00:04:00] and the histories of ancient Rome and Greece. And so she learned about that. She also read the greats of English literature, Pope and Dryden and, of course, Shakespeare. And so she mastered those and o- obviously was a very astute student because we know from her later writings that she constantly has references to them. She also learned to write, and what becomes clear is that she was an excellent author. And, she was a very good poetess, and that was common among women who were literate at this day to write poetry. But she also was a prolific letter writer, and then later on, of course, she became a very, important writer of political plays and pamphlets and poetry.

So,her early education prepared her in a way that was unusual, not just for girls at this time, but for most [00:05:00] white men. I mean, most white men did not have the sophisticated kind of education that she did.

And again, we think it's because her family recognized her, her, her genius, if you will. And, uh, this is like Phyllis Wheatley in a way, who the, the enslaved woman who received a very sophisticated education because, her mistress recognized her talent. And so that's how she became who she was.

[00:05:25] How she grew up in the anti-British resistance

Isabelle Roughol: Mm-hmm. And she seems to have been very much encouraged by the men around her to nurture that talent and to be educated and to write.

Rosemarie Zagarri: Yes. Although it was always her goal and the goal of her family for her to be a wife and mother, and she did marry, and she had five sons. And I think that is how, at least in her younger life, she saw her mission, she saw her goal. It was to be a good wife and mother. But she [00:06:00] did continue to write, and she wrote poetry for her family, and they would pass it around and read it to each other.

And she was very close to her brother, James Warren. James Warren became one of the earliest leaders of the, resistance movement in Massachusetts. So in 1760, there was a famous court case called the Writs of Assistance case, which he argued, and he argued against the Crown's ability to unilaterally, impose, or the, the, the Massachusetts government ability to unilaterally search businesses without the proper warrant.

And this is often regarded as the opening salvo of resistance in Massachusetts. she was very close with him. Even when he was away at Harvard, they corresponded. After she was married, her home in Plymouth became a kind of way station for people who were very engaged [00:07:00] in the resistance movement against Britain in the 1760s.

And so,people like John Adams, as well as her brother James Warren, would often stop by. And she talks about remembering many conversations about politics by the fireside.

And it's there that the Writs of Assistance case was discussed. It's there that the latest British policies against America were discussed.

She says that in the 1770s, the idea for committees of correspondence to communicate between and among the colonies was hatched there by her friends and family. So she, undoubtedly was reading the newspapers of the time, the pamphlets of the time, which were talking about these ideas of resistance, but she also had a sort of f- front row view to the developing ideas of the resistance.

[00:07:59] For a woman to be interested in politics was rare - and inappropriate

Rosemarie Zagarri: And as [00:08:00] I said, she was in communication with her brother even when he wasn't nearby. And she was, again, very thoughtful from the beginning about politics, very engaged in politics. And this in itself was unusual because politics was thought to be an exclusively male realm. Of course, only males could vote or hold public office.

But even the idea of women being interested in politics and the id- I think the idea that women would care about politics or want to know about politics was unusual and in some s- some circles regarded as forbidden. Now over in England,Catherine Macaulay was starting to break down those barriers because in the 1750s and '60s, she was publishing her "Histories of England," which not only, you know, were about the history, but included things about politics.

And her brother, James Warren, was in communication with [00:09:00] Catherine Macaulay. And Catherine Macaulay later became a kind of example, a role model for Mercy Otis Warren when it came to writing about politics. And later on, Mercy Otis Warren herself would,would be, in correspondence with Catherine Macaulay.

[00:09:15] How Mercy picked up her brother's mantle, encouraged by the men around herx

Rosemarie Zagarri: Now, that's a long way of getting around to say that,her family knew of and encouraged her interest in politics. And it was surrounding her in the 1760s and '70s. But then by the s- early 1770s, her brother had an unfortunate mental breakdown. He was actually beaten in a political fight with a cane in Boston, and he just became totally unstable after that and retreated to the countryside and was really never again, this is around 1770, a part of the revolutionary battle after that.

But in a way, she felt I think that [00:10:00] she had to take over for her brother. And John Adams, who had become a good family friend by that point, encouraged her interest in politics, and then began to encourage her to write for publication. So after the Boston Tea Party of 1772, he encouraged her to write a poem on the Boston Tea Party, and she wrote this very elaborate poem set in ancient times about the battle among the sea nymphs and the battle over tea and, the battle for freedom. And John Adams had it published.

Now, I should say it was not published on her, under her own name, as most of her pre-Revolutionary era writings were not published under her own name. They were published either under a pseudonym or anonymously. This was partly to protect her authorship as a woman, but it was also typical of the times.

The libel laws were very strict, and, talking about [00:11:00] political figures or political ideas could be dangerous. And so she just was not simply using her name when she published her works before the American Revolution. She would after the revolution, which is very significant. But before the revolution, she did not.

Still, that was the beginning of her publishing a series of political poems and plays in Boston newspapers, in pamphlet form. And these were poems and plays that were meant to stir up resistance against what they, the colonists, had come to perceive as British infringements on their rights and liberties, to warn people that their rights were being taken away, to encourage people to think about the need, if necessary, to take up arms against Britain, and to, to just inspire people to remind them that they are a free people and should not be [00:12:00] subjected to the whims of a foreign, foreign, uh, oppressor who was trying to strip them of their cherished rights and liberties.

[00:12:09] "A masculine genius"

Rosemarie Zagarri: So,her, her fa- her brother encouraged her. John Adams encouraged her, and her husband, James Warren, encouraged her to publish these things. I will say that her husband, as supportive as he, of he, as he was of her writing, talked about her as having, and this is a quote, "a masculine genius."

A masculine genius. And so the idea was that politics was still gendered male

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah. I'm fascinated with that quote because it's something that we do a lot as humans, you know, when we meet someone who belies the preconceived notions that we might have about a particular group, in this case women, rather than say, "Oh, you know, she's capable, a capable political thinker, therefore women are, can be capable political thinkers," we exclude her from the [00:13:00] group and it's like, "Nah, she's not really like women. she has masculine abilities," rather than admit that those abilities might be feminine as well.

Rosemarie Zagarri: Exactly. Exactly. But I just think it points to how radical what she was doing was, how she was kind of an exception that they were making because she could contribute to the revolutionary cause. And it's not as if they were saying, "Oh, welcome women to politics." They were saying, Mercy Otis Warren, you're useful to us, so please help us out."

Isabelle Roughol: Hmm, right. She is tolerated because what she's doing is useful to the revolution. So, so what are the ideas that she is defending? What is she telling the American people through her writing, and how is it received?

[00:13:45] Warning the colonists and encouraging sacrifice

Rosemarie Zagarri: Okay. I mean, she became a very prolific writer with many different kinds of writings. But in the pre-revolutionary period, she is writing this political poetry partly to encourage [00:14:00] people to support the actions of the, of the Continental Congress for the boycott against British goods.

And she especially addresses women and encourages them to give up the fripperies of life like lace, and buttons, and fancy hats, and fancy clothing, and tea, and porcelain, and silver, because they-- the colonists were trying to stop trading with Br- Great Britain to hurt them economically. And so she reached out especially to other women in her poetry to try and encourage them to support the cause of resistance.

But her message was broader. In her political plays, these are satires, and I should mention that they were not meant to be performed on stage. In fact, in Massachusetts, that was not even allowed at this time because of the Puritan heritage. But they were meant to be a-- read aloud, say, in a [00:15:00] parlor. And they were actually written in verse. They were written as poetry.

And they were satires in the sense that they were characters based on local politicians who were doing the bidding of Great Britain at the expense of the colonists. And one of her chief rivals and antagonists was Thomas Hutchinson, who was American-born but who was perfectly in thrall to the British and who was willing to trample on American rights and liberties in the service of Great Britain just to advance himself.

So she has some scathing satire about people who are willing to abandon all their principles and loyalties just to advance their own personal interests. and as I mentioned before, she's very interested in warning people about these encroachments, with British policies. I mean, that had begun in the 1760s with the Stamp Act but continued through the Tea Act that were an [00:16:00] attempt to,to diminish Americans' abilities to govern themselves through their legislatures, to take away their autonomy, to take away their right to self-government.

And there were many instances of this occurring, to the, to, to the alarm of those who were paying attention. And she just wanted to warn her fellow colonists that this was a problem and a growing problem, and it might need to be, their liberties might be de- need to be defended by taking up arms.

as I mentioned, her works were primarily published in Massachusetts, but especially the pamphlets began to circulate outside of Massachusetts. she was really trying to warn people to be vigilant and virtuous and to be willing to make the sacrifices they needed to make to protect their liberties.

[00:16:50] The quintessential female politician

Isabelle Roughol: Is she then, with all this writing, is she what they called a female politician? And we should probably explain what that word means at

the time

Rosemarie Zagarri: Yes. Yes. Well, that is a [00:17:00] word that emerged around this time, female politician. And, it meant simply a woman who was engaged in political, ideas and wanted to talk or write about politics. Sometimes it was used pejoratively, sometimes it was used positively. So you can't really generalize about that.

But I think what you see is that women are becoming more politically engaged at this time, and it's partly because male political leaders realized that if they were gonna be successful in their efforts to resist Great Britain, they needed to enlist the support of women. Especially, as I mentioned, in these pre-revolutionary boycotts, women were the great consumers and often the great purchasers of the family.

And male political leaders knew that they needed to get women on board to support these efforts. And so you start to see poems and [00:18:00] essays in newspapers, appealing directly to women to support these causes. So women, were reading this, and women were starting to get more politically engaged. And then with the coming of the revolution in 1775 and then 1776, more and more women found themselves, whether they wanted to be or not, engulfed in the, war, in the results of the war, especially if British troops were nearby.

They had to worry about whether the British would take their, crops or steal their animals or even, assault them personally, threaten them physically. and more More and more women, kind of out of necessity, started to become more interested in politics because it was affecting their daily lives.

And so this term female politician started to emerge as a term to refer to women who were interested in reading about, talking about, engaged with [00:19:00] politics. And I would say that Mercy Otis Warren was kind of the preeminent female politician.

[00:19:06] Defending natural rights

Isabelle Roughol: Mm-hmm. And, she's also writing about, this notion that we see in the American Revolution, right, of natural rights. Is that right? Yeah. What do we mean by that? What do we mean by natural rights? Might wanna define that.

Rosemarie Zagarri: Yeah. So I think like other Americans at this time, educated Americans at least, she had a strong sense of the way in which the tradition of British rights and liberties, particularly the tradition of self-government, representative government of the elected legislature being the voice of the people, was a long tradition in Great Britain, embodied most especially in the House of Commons in Parliament, and then transferred to these lower houses of the colonial assemblies.

So, you know, the lower house of the Massachusetts assembly was the bastion of resistance [00:20:00] to British policies in Massachusetts, as was true in many of the other colonies. Very vocal in sending petitions and, making declarations and, alerting the people to what was happening with Great Britain.

So they were in the forefront of that. And so I think her belief in rights was grounded in this tradition of Anglo-American rights. But then as the time for revolution became, came closer, it was clear that you can't really justify revolution, on the basis of British rights. You have to turn to John Locke, say, and his theory of government, and the idea that when a king becomes a tyrant, revolution is justified.

And you had people like Thomas Jefferson, even before the Declaration of Independence, writing about natural rights and how these rights are universal, grounded in nature, given by God to all people throughout the world, and that [00:21:00] what was being violated were the colonists' basic and fundamental natural rights, not just their rights as Englishmen.

And so this is the kind of tradition that emerged,that the colonists rallied around to help justify their resistance and then their revo- revolution against Great Britain. So yes, she was a part of that. This idea of universal rights became very important in terms of extending rights to other groups besides elite white males.

And so she,was part of that intellectual process.

[00:21:35] A woman who embodies women's rights -- but does not yet advocate for them

Isabelle Roughol: So she is obviously steeped in political philosophy, and she is a woman who writes about rights. But does she write about women's rights?

Rosemarie Zagarri: Not too much. Not really. I think what we could say is that her life embodied, the transformation for women that occurred [00:22:00] by her increasing engagement in politics and by her taking part in this male-gendered political activity of politics. She continued throughout her life to mostly see herself primarily as a wife and mother.

Those are the roles that she took the most pride in. but I think the Revolution changed her. I think that she saw the impact of her ideas on the revolutionary movement. Then when the War for Independence began, she began writing, with John Adams' support, a history of the American Revolution.

It wasn't published until 1805, but it was a, a sort of eyewitness account, but not first-person. It was very steeped, as you say, in philosophy and ideas and history. But she knew a lot of the participants, so she could actually use the letters they had sent [00:23:00] her, or ask for documents that she could consult as she was writing her history.

What you will see in this history that-- is that she doesn't really mention, women voting or the rights of women per se, but she does say in her introduction that all women had as much of a stake in the Revolution and in the outcome as men, that they participated in it, that they too suffered, that they too are reaping its benefits.

And so I think she's making a claim that women are political agents, political actors, and citizens really. She doesn't use that word, but citizens of this new republic, and should be treated as such, respected as such, and had a role to play in this new government. I will say also that whereas her pre-revolutionary works were published anonymously or pseudonymously, [00:24:00] her Revolution book was published under her own name. She published a collection of poetry and plays, in the 1790s, and that was under her own name. and so I think the Revolution kind of empowered her. It politicized her, made her a political being in a sense, but it also gave her confidence in her abilities. Early on, she was asking her husband and John Adams for permission to, and this, these are her words, "transgress the boundaries of my sex."

"Transgress the boundaries of my sex." But I think by the post-revolutionary period, she was confident about her abilities as a writer, as a political thinker, and she didn't have to ask anymore for permission. And I think she felt free enough to publish works under her own name and claiming the copyright, and she was very proud of the fact that she had the copyright to these works that she published after the revolution.

And there's a very touching [00:25:00] letter she has to her favorite son where she bequeathed to him the copyright of her works to him because it's-- she says, "It's the only thing I properly own as a woman." That is because she was a married woman. She didn't have the right to own real property, real estate, and yet this intellectual property was truly hers, and she could pass it along.

So, as I say, she didn't specifically advocate for women's political rights. I think she was not, in a sense, an activist in that way and mostly saw women in traditional roles, though she saw them as being political beings. I think she was very strongly in favor of education for women. I think she saw the need for education, more general education for women.

I would say her counterpart, Judith Sargent Murray, who was also from Massachusetts, was much more radical, if you wanna call it that, on, on the points [00:26:00] about the rights of women. She too did not openly advocate women voting, but she was much more strongly, dedicated to writing about women's education and increasing opportunities for women, the capacity of women to achieve as much, intellectually and in literature and philosophy as men.

I think she was part of a process of women trying and coming to terms with the fact that they should have certain kinds of equality with men. She herself, though, was not ready to fight for, what we would call true equality.

Isabelle Roughol: I think that's the thing when, when we do women's history, w- we always want these women to be so much more in advance of their time than is realistic to ask of someone, 250 years ago. They were, I think both her and Judith quite ahead of their time, but not i- not in a way y- that we, recognize [00:27:00] as feminists, say today.

We're gonna talk more about this, her post-revolution life, talk about the Constitution, talk about the publishing of the history. But we're just gonna take a quick break first. We'll be right back.

[00:27:13] Ad break[00:27:13] The first historian of the American revolution

Isabelle Roughol: And we're back with Rosemarie Zagarri. Rosie, so you mentioned her magnum opus, "The History of the American Revolution," three volumes, a, a huge piece of work. I wanna go back a little and talk about how this piece of work came together.

It is the first really history that we have of the American Revolution written almost contemporaneously to the events.

Rosemarie Zagarri: Yes, and certainly the first written by a woman. But it almost didn't see the light of day. A lot happened between the time she started writing it and the time she published it in 1805. She did begin writing it almost immediately in, in 1776, with the encouragement of John Adams, who I [00:28:00] imagine when he encouraged her initially thought he would feature prominently and positively in her account.

in any case,

Isabelle Roughol: Careful what you wish for, right?

Rosemarie Zagarri: Yes. Yes. So in any case, she began writing it then. She wrote a lot of it during the Revolution as it was happening. I think in the 1780s, she was distracted somewhat by personal tragedies, but also by the changing political situation. So after the war ended in 1783, this future of America was in question.

It was not clear whether the union would hold. The Articles of Confederation were very weak. The states were fighting each other. I mean, not physically or not, not on the field of battle, but they were not, not getting along. The government was very ineffective. The US government was not getting respect abroad, so it was [00:29:00] not clear whether the United States would survive.

And she started writing-- turning her attention more to writing plays, which, s- some of them set in ancient times, and she actually sent them to John Adams and asked if he could get them performed in London, and he said, "Nobody wants to see an American play at this point." and she continued to write poetry.

[00:29:25] Why she opposed the Constitution

Rosemarie Zagarri: So I think she kind of put the history of the American Revolution aside for a while. And then we know in 1787, there was the movement to write a whole new form of government, create a whole new form of government for the United States, the US Constitution. And, this new Constitution of the Philadelphia Convention, where James Madison presented the first draft of that Constitution, created a very different kind of government for these United States.

[00:30:00] Whereas the Articles of Confederation was a loose union among the states, where all of the states had a lot of autonomy to govern themselves. The US Constitution presented a strong, centralized national government, and gave it the power to tax, to call up troops, to regulate interstate commerce and to do the things that were proving to be so problematic during the 1780s and were pulling the states apart.

There were many people in these young United States who were in favor of the stronger central government because they thought without it, all the blood and treasure that had been spent during the Revolutionary War would be for naught, that the human union would collapse. and so there was strong pressure for this. But before the Constitution could be implemented, it had to be sent to each of the states for [00:31:00] ratification, for approval by the people of the states.

And as it turns out, Mercy Otis Warren and her husband were not fans of this new government. And they actually each wrote pamphlets opposing the ratification of the Constitution. And Mercy Otis Warren reverted once again to publishing her work under pseudonym, a Columbian Patriot, which I think is a really interesting way to style herself. Columbia was the symbol, the icon of America. And, she was a patriot because she thought she was defending the true principles of the American Revolution in this document.

What she opposed was this centralizing tendency, putting too much power in a government that she thought was distant and far away from the people, taking power away from the local state governments,and not according them the, power that [00:32:00] they needed and deserved.

And most especially, she opposed the Constitution because it lacked a Bill of Rights, a protection for individual rights and liberties. And she said, you're creating a strong new central government, and you're not providing written guarantees for the right to freedom of speech, for the right to be protected from unwarranted search and seizures, the right to trial by jury. You're not doing that?"

And she wasn't alone in this protest, I should assure you. There were many other people, and we call them Anti-Federalists, who were also making these pleas. But as far as I know, she was the only woman to write publicly against the Constitution or even write about the Constitution publicly, publish something on the Constitution.

So again, I think that's another way in which she was, as we were talking about before, a female politician. She felt entitled to inject her voice into this very public and [00:33:00] very important debate. And she did so.

But the Constitution did pass. It became the law of the land. And in 1789, George Washington became the first president.

[00:33:12] Publishing the history and falling out with John Adams

Rosemarie Zagarri: And th-this public opposition to the Constitution did not do her or her husband any favors. This kind of put them in, in, on, on the bad list, you know? They weren't on the winning side. it meant that it was very hard. She actually, when John Adams became vice president, asked Adams, wrote a letter pleading with him to give her son a patronage appointment, you know, an appointmentfrom the federal government, and he very, very ignominiously rejected her, rebuffed her and kind of scorned her, which was very unpleasant for her. Kind of a shock, really. Um-

He

Isabelle Roughol: had a bit of a temper, John Adams.

Rosemarie Zagarri: Oh yeah. Yeah, and he carried a grudge. He carried a grudge. but,I [00:34:00] should mention though that, they had corresponded throughout the entire American Revolution, but this was the beginning of a rift between her and John Adams.

So the fact that she had been an anti-Federalist w- really didn't sit well with a lot of people. But also, even though she reconciled herself to the new government, she was always a kind of critic, a dissenter, an outsider, in a way. And she only really felt comfortable once Thomas Jefferson was elected president in 1800.

And he represented a form of government that she could support at the national level, and it was a government that did devolve more power to the state governments, that was not intent on increasing the power of the national standing army or, the treasury, or taxing, all the American people. He was much more interested in [00:35:00] a decentralized, localized system of governing the United States.

And so she was just,yeah, rejoicing with his election. Her husband reentered politics at the state level. And it's about that time that she got interested again in her history of the American Revolution. She had basically put it in a desk drawer. I should also say, by this time she was... her eyesight was very bad. She was almost blind, and so she relied on other people to write for her.

But she began writing again, and she in- included sections on the presidencies of George Washington and John Adams. And with the help of a minister friend, she found a publisher for it, and it was published in 1805, this three-volume "History of the American Revolution" by Mercy Otis Warren.

And, at that time, to get a [00:36:00] book like that published, you had to have subscribers. So she had, you know, a couple hundred people who committed themselves to buying the book. But when the book came out, it flopped. I mean, it was just either ignored or reviled, and it was especially reviled by her old friend and mentor, John Adams.

Because even though she said very, very complimentary things about him during the revolutionary era in terms of how much work he did in the Continental Congress and as a diplomat abroad for the American cause, she was pretty negative about his presidency. And she attacked him for the Alien and Sedition Acts, which,stifled American free speech, and for what she saw as continuing the centralizing tendencies that had begun under Washington, strengthening the army.

The United States [00:37:00] almost went to war with France, during-- in 1798. Now, I should say, and she doesn't give Adams enough credit for this, he's actually the one who stopped that, but they actually did raise a standing army in case America was invaded by France. But, when the, "History of the American Revolution" came out and John Adams read about himself, he wrote her a series of letters that were just scathing, that were just ripping her apart.

Some of the criticisms were petty, some of the criticisms were more substantive, but what it basically came down to is, "You didn't give me enough credit." And she didn't sit there and take it. I mean, she gave as good as she got. She wrote back a series of letters defending herself, defending her choices.

But, this created a breach that lasted for over a decade between herself and Adams, John Adams. And privately, John Adams said to a friend of his, "History is [00:38:00] not the province of the ladies." I mean, he dismissed the very idea that a woman had the capability of writing a history. So it's really a full circle moment from become- being her mentor and supporter to being her greatest critic.

And I should say also that it-- the book was not well received. It was, as I say, either dismissed or, ignored or criticized, and it didn't sell very well. It was very unpopular in especially New England, which was highly Federalist, as opposed to the Jeffersonian slant that she had taken in the book.

So,she wrote this great book. It's there, and we can still read it. But for a long time, it kind of languished because her views, her take on the American Revolution, es- especially the post-revolutionary period, was not popular.

Isabelle Roughol: Hmm. Funny how the misogyny comes back about a woman's ability the second that she's not doing what you like.

Rosemarie Zagarri: [00:39:00] Exactly. Exactly. Yes

[00:39:04] Women had the right to vote in 1776 in ONE state

Isabelle Roughol: So I should, preface my next question by alerting our readers to your other book, which is called "Revolutionary Backlash." Well, one of your other books, called "Revolutionary Backlash," because I wanna ask you about, what happens sort of, what's the legacy of the work of Mercy Otis Warren and female politicians in the years that follow the Constitution, follow the Revolution?

We know that the franchise did not happen for women. Was it even considered and what is the situation with women's political rights? We often talk about the, the Seneca Falls Convention, 1848. That's a whole half century there before we get to Seneca Falls, so what happens, much closer to the Revolution and the Constitution?

Rosemarie Zagarri: Well, I'd first like to talk about one very interesting episode that is not well known, which is the fact that from 1776 to 1807, [00:40:00] women were allowed to vote on the same terms as men in one place, New Jersey. And that's

because

Isabelle Roughol: I Love New Jersey.

Rosemarie Zagarri: Each state was asked to write its own state constitution and define its own qualifications for voting.

And in New Jersey, they had a very general statement about qualified inhabitants who owned a certain amount of property being eligible to vote. Now, that use of what we would call gender language was not uncommon at this time. What was uncommon was that in 1790 and then in 1797, the New Jersey legislature actually passed enabling legislation that referred to voters as "he and she."

And so we know that the New Jersey legislature specifically enfranchised women, and we know now from poll records that have been recovered, that women actually did vote in New Jersey from [00:41:00] 1776 to 1807.

Now, I wanna hasten to add that the principle on which women were voting was different from the later expansion of the franchise or what was asked for it at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. The idea was, remember one of the major protests against Great Britain was no taxation without representation.

And as you know, married women could not own their own property, and that disqualified them from voting on the face of it. But widows and unmarried women could own property, and they were in a small minority, but they could own property, and they did have to pay taxes on that property. So on that basis, New Jersey extended the franchise to women who were eligible, that is, to widows and unmarried women who met the property qualification for voting.

This [00:42:00] also enfranchised the free Blacks in the state of New Jersey who met the property qualification for voting. And what you have then is this amazing episode in New Jersey from 1776 to 1807, where women and free Blacks who met the property qualification could vote and did vote. Now this, as you can imagine, caused an uproar.

It was extremely controversial from the beginning. And it wasn't as if all women were celebrating. This wasn't as if everyone was saying, "Oh, how great. Women are voting." There was a lot of discussion about women who voted becoming manly women. That was kind of the way they talked about. And they were-- the men were afraid of "the despotism of the petticoat", as they called it.

so there was a lot of debate. It was known outside of New Jersey. And perhaps not surprisingly, Abigail Adams more or less said, If I was in New Jersey, I would be voting, [00:43:00] too." But it was very controversial. And then in 1807, the New Jersey legislature passed a law that disenfranchised, women and free Blacks by specifying that only free white males could vote.

And this was the beginning of a trend that I l- call a backlash, where there is an explicit effort to limit political rights to men. This is the most vivid example, but there were other examples as well.

[00:43:30] The influence of the French revolution and the short-lived radical transatlantic conversation about women's rights

Rosemarie Zagarri: But to get to your broader question about what was happening with women in the post-Revolutionary era, I should say the French Revolution happened, and there was this amazing transatlantic debate about the roles and rights of women in the 1790s.

And this was occurring in Britain, in France, and in the United States. People were reading what was happening in France with the role of women in the French Revolution, their [00:44:00] activism, the brief period in which they received a lot of rights, which were then taken away, I should say.

Isabelle Roughol: The backlash was horrendous. I mean, Olympe de Gouges landed under the guillotine it.

Rosemarie Zagarri: Yeah. Right, right.

Isabelle Roughol: I should say I'm a French woman, so this is near to heart.

Rosemarie Zagarri: But I think this is actually, an amazing part of the story because there's this just brief period where people in the Western world, and I'm not saying all people, I'm saying elite, literate people who are reading newspapers and magazines and, essays, pamphlets,are engaged in this transatlantic discussion about women's rights. And they are actively considering whether women should be allowed to vote and hold public office.

And a, a Brit, Mary Wollstonecraft, published in 1792, "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman," which I think actually brought that whole discourse of the [00:45:00] rights of women into public, into the public domain, and, gave people a, a hanger on which to discuss these questions. And so the whole question was, well, did women have rights, and what rights were those?

And again, this is at the very same time women are voting in New Jersey. and so you have an example of women acting politically. This is the very same time that women are, you know, are marching on Versailles. Women can act politically in the same way as men. And of course, that was a very threatening proposition to many men.

It threatened the whole hierarchical structure of society, the gender roles, the idea that women should be wives and mothers, and men belonged in the public realm. And so it was a very contentious debate. It was a very, very fraught debate. But I will say, the ideas about women being allowed to vote and hold public office were being voiced in the 1790s on both [00:46:00] sides of the Atlantic, in Britain as well.

And,the fact that this doesn't come to fruition then, I think is just telling. I mean, I think, throughout the Western world, especially in the period after the French and American revolutions, you have a period of reaction. You have a period where there's a, a search for stability, order, retrenchment, going back to the previous way it was.

And I think that there's just a, a move to just clamp down on this debate. And so I think after, ugh, after about the 1820s in the United States, this i- idea of women acting directly in the political realm, it kinda gets pushed to the side. And actually, the idea of these female politicians gets to be reviled, gets to be dismissed and,and disparaged.

I think it, it's telling because I think that we go through periods throughout history where we have immense change, and somehow then [00:47:00] society can't incorporate all those changes, and there's a, a, reactionary moment. And I think that's what happened with the debate over women after the American Revolution.

so

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah. That's something I think the contemporary listener will recognize and can draw their own, parallels.

Rosemarie Zagarri: But the hope is, again, by the 1840s in the United States, a whole other generation was rediscovering the need for women to have political rights through the anti-slavery movement in particular, they realized they should have the vote if they really wanted to get rid of slavery. And you get this first Seneca Falls Convention, and they remember that women voted in New Jersey.

They remember that there was this example of women's political activism in the Revolution and in France. So the lessons were not for naught. It just didn't develop in a straight line in the kind of linear progress that we often so, so often [00:48:00] expect from people who lived over 200 years ago.

Isabelle Roughol: And, and to this day. Thank you so much for this wonderful conversation. I really appreciate your time and learning so much about our early female politicians. Thank you.

Rosemarie Zagarri: Thank you. Thank you

[00:48:16] Outro

​

Isabelle Roughol: That was Rosemarie Zagarri. Her book, books plural, "A Woman's Dilemma" and "Revolutionary Backlash" are both in the Broad History Bookshop. Link in the show notes and at broadhistory.com as always.

This concludes our revolutionary women's biographies. Go back if you haven't listened to them all. We met Abigail Adams, Eliza and Angelica Schuyler, Elizabeth Freeman, Phillis Wheatley Peters, and of course, Mercy Otis Warren. I hope that learning about their lives gave you a more complete picture of the American Revolution, it certainly did for me, and that from now on, you'll be able to rattle off their names and their accomplishments just as you might Washington, Jefferson, or Hamilton.

We [00:49:00] have one more episode in this series before we leave the American Revolution behind, and that's the second part of my conversation with Carol Berkin, who opened the series back on the 4th of July. We'll be looking at the end of the American Revolution and its consequences for women, particularly Black and Indigenous women, as well as the fate of Loyalists who didn't have a place in the United States, and then what political space the new country carved out for women.

If you've never heard of Republican motherhood and separate sphere theory, that's the episode you want to be listening to. And let me tell you, there are a lot of parallels with 2026. And that's all next week. Until then, this has been Broad History, and I've been your host, Isabelle Roughol. Music by Aaron Kenny.

I'll talk to you next week.

[00:50:00]

Lo! Freedom comes. Th’ prescient Muse foretold,
All Eyes th’ accomplish’d Prophecy behold:
Her Port describ’d, “She moves divinely fair,
Olive and Laurel bind her golden Hair.”
She, the bright Progeny of Heaven, descends,
And every Grace her sovereign Step attends;
For now kind Heaven, indulgent to our Prayer,
In smiling Peace resolves the Din of War.
Fix’d in Columbia her illustrious Line,
And bids in thee her future Councils shine.
To every Realm her Portals open’d wide,
Receives from each the full commercial Tide.
Each Art and Science now with rising Charms,
Th’ expanding Heart with Emulation warms.
E’en great Britannia sees with dread Surprize,
And from the dazzling Splendor turns her Eyes!
Britain, whose Navies swept th’ Atlantic o’er,
And Thunder sent to every distant Shore:
E’en thou, in Manners cruel as thou art,
The Sword resign’d, resume the friendly Part!
For Galia’s Power espous’d Columbia’s Cause,
And new-born Rome shall give Britannia Law,
Nor unremember’d in the grateful Strain,
Shall princely Louis’ friendly Deeds remain;
The generous Prince th’ impending Vengeance eye’s,
Sees the fierce Wrong, and to the rescue flies.
Perish that Thirst of boundless Power, that drew
On Albion’s Head the Curse to Tyrants due.
But thou appeas’d submit to Heaven’s decree,
That bids this Realm of Freedom rival thee!
Now sheathe the Sword that bade the Brave atone
With guiltless Blood for Madness not their own.
Sent from th’ Enjoyment of their native Shore
Ill-fated — never to behold her more!
From every Kingdom on Europa’s Coast
Throng’d various Troops, their Glory, Strength and Boast.
With heart-felt pity fair Hibernia saw
Columbia menac’d by the Tyrant’s Law:
On hostile Fields fraternal Arms engage,
And mutual Deaths, all dealt with mutual Rage;
The Muse’s Ear hears mother Earth deplore
Her ample Surface smoak with kindred Gore:
The hostile Field destroys the social Ties,
And ever-lasting Slumber seals their Eyes.
Columbia mourns, the haughty Foes deride,
Her Treasures plunder’d, and her Towns destroy’d:
Witness how Charlestown’s curling Smoaks arise,
In sable Columns to the clouded Skies!
The ample Dome, high-wrought with curious Toil,
In one sad Hour the savage Troops despoil.
Descending Peace the Power of War confounds;
From every Tongue coelestial Peace resounds:
As from the East th’ illustrious King of Day,
With rising Radiance drives the Shades away,
So Freedom comes array’d with Charms divine,
And in her Train Commerce and Plenty shine.
Britannia owns her Independent Reign,
Hibernia, Scotia, and the Realms of Spain;
And great Germania’s ample Coast admires
The generous Spirit that Columbia fires.
Auspicious Heaven shall fill with fav’ring Gales,
Where e’er Columbia spreads her swelling Sails:
To every Realm shall Peace her Charms display,
And Heavenly Freedom spread her golden Ray

​[00:00:00]

[00:00:05] 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.

I was wrong. I had a few lines about Phillis Wheatley Peters in a viral video through which many of you found this podcast, and they were imprecise and incomplete, which really all adds up to inaccurate.

It's not that I didn't read up before recording, it's that I didn't read deeply or recently enough to catch the latest developments in scholarship. Because a lot of what we know, or what we thought we knew, about Phillis Wheatley Peters has changed quite recently, and a lot of what you'll find online about Phillis, including her Wikipedia page, is outdated, especially when it comes to the last few years of her life.

It's an important reminder that everything we know in history, even when it comes from serious work, is open for reinterpretation, for additions and corrections as research evolves, [00:01:00] and that is the collective endeavor of very many scholars.

Hopefully, today's episode with one of those scholars, Phillis' biographer Vin Carretta, helps us get a fuller and more accurate picture of a woman who was the first published African American poet, arguably one of the first American international celebrities really, and a literary sensation who took a distinctly American voice and culture to the world stage just as the colonies were starting to agitate for their liberty.

A tremendously impactful life tragically cut way too short. And it all started in transportation and slavery.

[00:01:45] How Phillis got from Africa to Boston

Isabelle Roughol: Vin Caretta, hello and welcome to Broad History

Vin Carretta: Hello, thank you for inviting me.

Isabelle Roughol: My great pleasure. I'm very excited to talk about, Phillis Wheatley Peters today.And I think something that gets probably, uh, a [00:02:00] bit glossed over in the 250th commemorations that, that we're going through at the moment, is that this era of the Revolutionary War is also the peak of the transatlantic slave trade.

And, in those years, or shortly before those years, we have a young girl who is transported to America, and that's kinda where I, I want to start. Obviously, spoiler alert, she's gonna turn out to be Phillis Wheatley Peters. What do we know about Phillis at that point?

Vin Carretta: Well, actually, surprisingly, we know much more about how she got to, Boston than we do about any other person of African descent in the 18th century. And that's really quite extraordinary because we have the manuscript correspondence between the owner of the slave ship that brought her from Africa [00:03:00] to America, and, the letters that he wrote to his-- the captain of the slave ship, directing him, in this case, for the voyage that brought Phillis to Boston.

The owner tells the captain, "Do not do what you did on the last voyage. Do not bring little children and girls. Do not buy them because they have very little market value here."

So this is actually significant, I think, when we're talking about where Phillis probably came from in Africa and how she arrived in Boston.

So she arrived in Boston in the summer of 1761. She was about seven or eight years old. We know that because she was missing her front teeth, and she was purchased by Susanna and John Wheatley.

[00:03:58] Phillis's cxhildhood with the Wheatleys

Vin Carretta: John Wheatley was a [00:04:00] transatlantic merchant. Susanna Wheatley was a very active, evangelical Christian who had transatlantic connections, which is extremely important in enabling Phillis to be published.

And she was purchased by the Wheatleys almost to the day,about 10 years after the Wheatleys had lost one of their children, a daughter who died. And remarkably, on the tombstone of the daughter who died, , whereas we're used to seeing, birth date, maybe month, day, year, then death date, in this case, the daughter's tombstone gives the year, the month, and the number of days that she lived.

So she was clearly a very dear daughter to the Wheatleys, [00:05:00] especially to Susanna. And what I suspect happened is that for Susanna, Phillis was something of a substitute for this lost daughter who had died at almost exactly the same age. She'd died at about seven, seven years and nine months, and I figure, I think it was something like 21 days old.

And so this is, I think, significant again for the relationship that developed between Susanna and Phillis, who Phillis in private letters after Susanna's death referred to her as what we would call virtually a foster mother. She said, "I've, I've lost a parent here."

And again, this is not psychologically that surprising when you think that Phillis came as, you know, s- right, as, as seven, eight years old.

She was well-treated, relatively speaking. she was [00:06:00] enslaved, but as a child that young, she wouldn't have had, any more agency as a white child as she did as an enslaved child to someone who from both sides of all the records that we have and their own private comments, had a virtually a quasi-familial relationship.

Isabelle Roughol: Right. It's almost like, not that any of this excuses kidnapping a child from her country and her family, they're treating it almost as an international adoption, it sounds like.

Vin Carretta: That's a good way of thinking it from Susanna Wheatley's perspective probably. And we don't even know... We assume that Phillis was kidnapped as a small child, but that's not necessarily so.Some children who were enslaved in Africa were sold to pay debts. [00:07:00] So the parents could have voluntarily, to the extent that, you know, you voluntarily, you know, when you have no, no real-- really you have no real choice.

She could have been a debt payment, and we don't know that. I think the default is that she was kidnapped as a child.

But as I say from those letters from the owner of the ship to the captain of the ship, as a small child, she would've been classified as what they called in the 18th century, a refuse slave, someone who had very little market value. Of course she had very little labor value.

And so she would've been one of the last purchases for this captain as he went down the coast of Africa to pick her up, to fill his cargo. It's terrible to talk about people in this way, [00:08:00] but, that's the way they thought of enslaved people.

And the newspaper account of the arrival of the ship says the ship arrived from the Windward Coast, which is much farther down.

That's of the area of, present day Guinea in Africa, which is much farther down the west coast of Africa than Senegal and Gambia.

[00:08:25] The meaning of a name

Isabelle Roughol: Her name reflects that, her first name, Phillis, is the name of the ship that she's transported on.

Vin Carretta: Correct. Right

Isabelle Roughol: and Wheatley obviously is her enslaver's last name.

She is marked with that story.

Vin Carretta: Which is one of the reasons that a number of us are now preferring to refer to her as Phillis Wheatley Peters, because as you say, Phillis is the name of a slave ship. It's almost like having a tattoo. Wheatley, the name of her owners. And Peters, though, comes from the man that [00:09:00] she married, who himself had been born into slavery in America. The name he was given was Peter. And once he gained his freedom, he played with various surnames, and he eventually chose Peters. And so those of us who have taken to referring to her as Phillis Wheatley Peters do so because his was a freedom name, as we would call it, and as was so-called in the 18th century, a name that he chose for himself.

So by marrying him, Phillis comes as close as she ever did to choosing a freedom name, one step away or something.

Isabelle Roughol: Yes. And we'll talk about John Peters and her marriagein a bit. We'll go back to her childhood. But it's true that she neverrenamed herself in the way that Elizabeth [00:10:00] Freeman did.

Vin Carretta: Correct.

Isabelle Roughol: Right

So we don't have any other name but her enslaved name to, to refer to her besides Peters, which we'll absolutely use.

[00:10:09] Phillis's exploitation as an intellectual curiosity

Isabelle Roughol: So you mentioned her, um, her enslavers, her owners, the Wheatleys, are evangelical,

and,

Vin Carretta: well especially Susanna.

Isabelle Roughol: Susanna. okay.

Vin Carretta: We're not so sure about John.

Isabelle Roughol: Right. And so that plays a role in the education that they give Phillis, and even choosing to educate her. Is that right?

Vin Carretta: Absolutely. As an evangelical, Susanna believed that she was obligated, to expose anyone,within her circle to Christianity. And in New England, that meant to give them access to the Bible, which meant give them access to literacy. And Phillis very quickly [00:11:00] demonstrated that she was a quick study.

I mean, within four years she was attempting to write poetry in English.

Isabelle Roughol: Not her native language, mind you.

Vin Carretta: Not her native language. We can pre- we can be absolutely certain of that. and so she not only showed herself to be a quick study, but think of, Susanna and John Wheatley's interest in educating Phillis was not completely selfless.

She soon became what we would call the secretary for John Wheatley. A number of his business letters are written in her hand, in Phillis's handwriting. So she was obviously taking what we would call taking dictation for him. So she had, a profit value for him.

And on Susanna's side, yes, she had this obligation to teach her, give her access to literacy, but also it reflected well on [00:12:00] the Wheatleys, their own religiosity, to have this um, child prodigy, uh, and publicly display her.

So it was like a public display of their own, and especially Susanna's, uh, religious beliefs. Uh uh,

Isabelle Roughol: There is that sense, I felt in her early fame of,her being a, a curiosity. You know, there's her literary talent, but there's also, the the package it comes in, as a young Black girl that was perhaps unexpected. It seems to add to the interest perhapsin her work.

Vin Carretta: Sure. And, and she becomes, in that sense, I mean, if we're talking in the materialistic way that people talked about enslaved people in the 18th and 19th centuries, that Phillis becomes almost like the, the Mercedes-Benz or the super [00:13:00] Tesla that you park in your driveway so everyone can see.

You know, as, as a reflection on you, the owner, in multiple ways, that you have the leisure to give such a person access to literacy. I mean, people who came and visited the Wheatleys' house to see Phillis, to give her poetic assignments, to see if she can write the poem, to test her, comment on things like she had a Bible. She was given access to a Bible and a dictionary. Now, how many enslaved children do you think were given dictionaries in the 18th century?

So this is all a way of, um, uh, you know, I d- I don't want to deny the selfless, motivation of someone like Susanna, but we need to keep in mind that these are [00:14:00] practical people, and they were actually s- like us in being human beings, and so they had complicated motives for doing good and doing well by doing good.

Isabelle Roughol: Mm-hmm. Yes, there's definitely-- a lot piled into that relationship and those people.

[00:14:19] Phillis' publishes her first poems as a young teen

Isabelle Roughol: So we mentioned her, her fame,as a young prodigy. So when does she start, actually publishing poems and how quickly does fame come when she starts writing?

Vin Carretta: The word publish, when we talk about in the 18th century, we need to keep in mind that it covers not only print but circulation. Most people circulated, published their work, especially women, in the 18th century through manuscript circulation. And so we know that Phillis is writing.

This is another extraordinary thing about Phillis, is that we have copies of her manuscript [00:15:00] poems, poems that were never published, but that people during her lifetime are talking about having seen copies of. So they were published in the sense of manuscript circulation and

Isabelle Roughol: How does that work? Does she hand copy her poems, you know, 10, 20, 100 times? How does that work?

Vin Carretta: Well, we have instances of several of her poems. And again, this is extraordinary. We don't have this, this kind of record for most people, certainly not in America at this time. A number of her earliest poems, there are several versions of the same poem, right? And so we can assume that those circulated separately, but it's also possible that the same poem was circulated. Now remember, Boston is pretty small, it's got about 15,000 people, and when you subtract the children and you're talking about [00:16:00] a fairly small number of, people among whom these would circulate.

And again, we have examples of women who copied Phillis' poems and circulated them, their own copies. And these are of poems that were never printed ultimately.

Her first manuscript circulation that we know of, it was, circulated when she was about 10, 11, 12, something in that age range.

So we know that she was writing poetry that early.

The first published poem was published in 1767 when she was about 14 years old. And, when I teach this to students or talk to students about this, "Now would you all-- how many of you have published a poem when you were 14? Please raise your hand." And

Isabelle Roughol: Not a lot of hands, I

Vin Carretta: No, not [00:17:00] a lot of hands. It's not overwhelming. And so that was published in a newspaper in Newport, Rhode Island, almost certainly through Susanna's evangelical contacts,that she was able to get that published. And of course, that is a, a religious poem. So that was the first one.

[00:17:24] Gaining a patron and transatlantic fame

Vin Carretta: The one that really gives her transatlantic and ultimately international reputation is in 1770 when George Whitefield, the, very famous, evangelical Methodist minister, died in, on his seventh preaching tour to America. And he had recently just preached several times in Phillis' church. He may well have stayed with the Wheatleys when he was in Boston. [00:18:00] And She wrote a poem, published a poem, an elegy on the death on his death, and she sent a copy to his patron in England, the Countess of Huntingdon. Outside of the Queen of England, she was probably almost certainly the wealthiest woman in England because she had the virtue of having had her husband die.

And,

Isabelle Roughol: Always a convenient way to get rich.

Vin Carretta: it,it was the, the only way

Isabelle Roughol: Yes, for a woman,

Vin Carretta: for a woman in this period.

And so she gained all of his wealth. She was at the center of a missionary network. She sent missionaries to America, and throughout England as well. And so Phillis, at this point, she's about 17 years old.

Again, I can ask my students, and you'd get [00:19:00] about the same number of hands. But to think about, here was this enslaved girl. She sends a poem and a letter to the Countess of Huntingdon. This is not done. You know, you don't, you don't...

Isabelle Roughol: that's, that's pretty bold. That

Vin Carretta: It-- Yes.

Isabelle Roughol: and courage and,

Vin Carretta: yes. Now f- now Susannah was a correspondent of the countess, she had that connection.

But still, Phillis sends this on her own. She's not sending it via Susannah. She's apologetic, but again, that's conventional. Um,

Isabelle Roughol: Yes, it's in a social hierarchy to be very subservient

Vin Carretta: And so she sends this, this poem to the countess. The poem was published first in Boston,

just a few weeks after, Whitefield's death, and then republished in London.And so Phillis gained at least [00:20:00] transatlantic, if we don't wa-want to call it international reputation from that. So she's on her way,

Isabelle Roughol: She's on her way,

Vin Carretta: as a teenager.

Isabelle Roughol: because that's when she,

Vin Carretta: travels to England. So she crosses the Atlantic again in the other direction.

And one thing we tend to forget that by doing that, I think we can argue she is the, becomes the most famous American poet in the 18th century, certainly up to that point.

[00:20:33] The first poet laureate of the United States?

Isabelle Roughol: I wanna talk about her, her style and, what she writes and as you say, very much steeped in evangelical Christianity. I've seen you speak about her using the words "we Americans."

So it's like it's claiming an American identity for the colonies and then for Black Americans as well to be part of that group of Americans. Is that new? [00:21:00] Is that something that she pioneers in her writing? Can we say that, she represents something about American identity at that point, or-

Vin Carretta: Her identity, is complicated. I should have qualified, suppose, and said that she's the most famous poet from America, writing, writing in America. because at this point, Americans are all British.

Isabelle Roughol: Yes, we're before the Declaration of

Vin Carretta: right before the Declaration.

But we have to keep in mind that people of African descent in this period are denied a national identity, especially people who are enslaved. So when we talk about her identity in a national sense, we have to consider, at what point is she claiming an American identity?

And she's writing through personas. She creates voices. Even in as [00:22:00] early as the "Whitfield Elegy," she uses "we" to talk about we Americans, but sh- she also uses the "we" to talk about we people of African descent in that poem. And she'll do this in a number of poems.

Eventually, what I argue is she makes, she's making a claim to being, in effect, the unofficial poet laureate of the new United States by the time of her late poem, "Liberty and Peace," that's in 1784, when there is now a United States of America, and she's still expressing hope that people like her will be fully accepted and that this, this revolutionary ideology, will be extended to everyone.

[00:22:54] Her views on slavery

Isabelle Roughol: Does she, express views on slavery itself in her writing?

Vin Carretta: She does, and, [00:23:00] and again, I'll keep saying you know, I have to keep qualifying. it depends on the context, the time that she's writing. There's a difference between when she's writing as an enslaved person and after she gains her freedom in 1773. And this is, a big issue for literary critics and, and historians too, are-- who are looking for intimations of resistance in her poetry, how indirectly she may be making comments or commenting on slavery and demonstrating opposition, which she has to be very careful about, would have to be very careful about while she's still enslaved.

A very clear turning point is in early 1774. Her book is published in 1773, published in London, does not get distributed in, [00:24:00] Boston until early 1774 because the copies came over and just as the Tea Party, they arrived in time for the Tea Party.

Lucky they didn't land in the arbor Right, right. That they didn't confuse the boxes or

the, bales or whatever. but so Susanna Wheatley dies in the first week of March of 1774, and the next week a newspaper or, actually a lot of newspapers in New England publish part of a letter from, Phillis to Samson Occom, who was a Presbyterian Native American minister, in which Phillis directly attacks slavery. and, and it's one of the few examples, in which she uses sarcasm, [00:25:00] a-accusing enslavers of being modern Egyptians and how can they possibly reconcile their calls for freedom for themselves with their enslaving others.

She ends by, I'm paraphrasing, she says, you know "doesn't it seem obvious that there's a problem here?"

Isabelle Roughol: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That's, that's interesting. That's like maybe getting a, a glimpse of the private person when she's not being, as careful in the way that her published writings might have had to be careful.

Vin Carretta: I think the timing is at least interesting that, she doesn't do this or it doesn't happen until Susanna dies. And so it's, it's-- if it had happened sooner, it could've been seen as a reflection of criticism of her enslaved state, enslaved to Susanna, whereas, waiting.

maybe it's all [00:26:00] coincidental. with so many things about Phillis's writing, we can't be sure whether there are causal connections or coincidental events that we're dealing with. But I like to think.

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah.

Vin Carretta: My

Isabelle Roughol: first time that a writer, chooses to wait and protect,a parent, parental figure, to publish certain things,

[00:26:23] Vin's Phillis

Vin Carretta: Right. Right. And biographers tend to, and I'm certainly guilty of this, I've written s- more than one biography now, that you start to think of this as my ex, as, as opposed to your ex, your version of someone. And so my Phillis is very calculating, in the positive sense, that she's very careful, she's very conscious of her audience and the personas that she's presenting. And [00:27:00] when she's doing it, where she's doing it, to whom she's doing it, for whom she's doing it. She's a marketing genius, for example, to me, the way I see her operating. And all, all under constraint. She's always under constraints. When she's enslaved, she's obviously under constraint. When she's married, she's under constraint. She's under legal constraints, because she's legal property, if you will, of her husband in this period

Isabelle Roughol: Every episode in this series we have bumped against coverture since,since we're talking about women of the revolution.

So she goes to England meets some powerful people there, gets her book,funded and published, comes back to Boston and is, as they say, manumitted, so is freed.

And we're gonna take a quick break, and then we're gonna talk about her life in freedom after, after that time. So we'll be right back.

[00:27:55] Ad break[00:27:55] How Phillis won her freedom

Isabelle Roughol: We're back with Vin Carretta talking about Phillis [00:28:00] Wheatley Peters. So we've talked about,her fame. She publishes her book. She comes back from London and is freed.

She returns from London she gets back in September of 1773. October 18th of 1773, she writes a letter, this is my favorite letter by her, in which she tells someone, about her trip to London.

Vin Carretta: And the first half of this letter, she sounds like the kind of overwhelmed, young girl that she was. She was maybe 20 years old at this point. Goes to London. She tells them about, "Oh, I saw the, went to the British Museum, and I saw this, and I saw that, and I went to the Tower of London."

She doesn't mention that when she was at the Tower of London, they had a, a small zoo, and there was a wolf named Phillis. [00:29:00]

Isabelle Roughol: Oh.

Vin Carretta: zoo.

Um, another, another captive.

Isabelle Roughol: London is a massive city at the time compared to America's, its small towns. Even the biggest towns in America are quite small.

Vin Carretta: Boston's about 15,000. London's about 700,000. so here's this, small town girl going to the big city, and she's dazzled by it. The whole first half of the letter is written in the passive tense almost exclusively. "They brought me here. I was taken there, da, da, da."

All these things happened to her. And she lists a number of these places that she saw, most of which are still major tourist attractions in London.

And then suddenly in the second half of the letter, the transition she makes is that since she's returned, and this is just a few weeks between this, her arrival and this letter, she says, "I have been freed at the desire of my friends in [00:30:00] England."

And after that point, she goes to the active voice. "I did this. I'm doing this. I'm selling my books. You need to sell, help me sell my books. I've autographed the ones here so you know that I will get the profits from them. I have sent a copy of my freedom papers," what we would call freedom papers, "to the agent in London representing New England so that they have a copy."

And she says, "To protect whatever I make, any profits I make from my owners, from my former owners," now former owners.

And what happens in London when she goes to the the Tower of London, the tour guide that she has there is Granville Sharp, because he has an office at the Tower of London.

And Granville Sharp is the man who had [00:31:00] brought the court case that resulted in the Mansfield decision of 1772, almost exactly a year before he's meeting Phillis, in which the court ruled that no enslaved person brought to England could be legally forced back to the colonies as a slave.

Phillis is like the example he's been living for. And it's inconceivable to me that the, case didn't come up, the implication, the fact that, all she has to do is say, "No, I'm not going back, unless you guarantee that I'm going to be freed if I do so, and I'm gonna leave a copy of, that agreement here," et cetera, et cetera.

So that she's demonstrating agency and control at a very young age. And I think this accounts for why we go from the passive teenage voice to the [00:32:00] active businesswoman voice in the second half. I mean, it's like watching someone turn from child to adult in a letter. And so it's

Isabelle Roughol: Clark Kent to Superman or something.

Vin Carretta: Right. so that's what happens there.

[00:32:17] New revelations about Phillis's marriage to John Peters

Vin Carretta: And then, as far as the marriage, and as, Cornelia Dayton has demonstrated, the, the marriage of, John Peters is really very significant in helping us understand something more about Phillis, as well as...

in, in my earlier versions of my biography, I had come up with a really elegant explanation for why Phillis disappears from the record for several years in, in the early 1780s.

And it was wonderfully eleg- elegant, except that as Cornelia Dayton's research [00:33:00] discovered, my elegant explanation is completely wrong. So

Isabelle Roughol: That's the beauty of research,

Vin Carretta: That's it. That's it. That's it. You know, when people ask me, "Well, what would happen if someone proved you wrong?" I'd say, "Thank you." This is, this is a group project, recovering people's lives.

So what happens in, in March of 1778, John Wheatley dies. Apparently Phillis had been living with him, either, I assume working for him, either salaried or getting room and board for doing so. He dies in March. In April, John Peters and Phillis Wheatley announce their intention to marry. They don't marry until Thanksgiving day of 1778.

At one point, they're sharing the same address. It's a boarding house, so we don't know whether they were [00:34:00] living together, shockingly would be living in sin, or they simply were both in the same boarding house. Anyhow, they do marry.

And John Peters, like many people or most people in the 18th century, has multiple occupations. He calls himself at various times a physician, a lawyer. He calls himself a gentleman, which is really significant as he becomes a property owner eventually. And,he had a very negative image from a 19th century biographer of Phillis.

Martha Margaretta O'Dell infamously calls him a, kind of a Snidely Whiplash kind of character, you know, this evil person who oppresses Phillis. And Phillis is, [00:35:00] O'Dell's Phillis is sort of the opposite of my Phillis. O'Dell's Phillis is this passive figure who is, under the thumb of John Peters.

But John Peters was a hustler in the best sense of the word. He was always trying to get ahead, always trying to, make a name for himself, which meant, especially in the 19th century, he w- he was looked as, on as being arrogant, or in the 19th century term, uppity. That wasn't a term that was used in the 18th century.

But, so we have a, a couple of neutral descriptions of him, contemporaneous descriptions of him in the 18th century, one of which says he was tall, well-built, virile, manly. Things that...

Isabelle Roughol: Sounds like an attractive husband.

Vin Carretta: Well, it gives us a different possible way of looking at Phillis herself as, not this simply [00:36:00] ethereal poet, or certainly not O'Dell's, " Oh, he's just gonna control me," as opposed to saying, "Eh, this guy's, a go-getter."

To me, Phillis and he are both ambitious, both self-confident, both want to exercise as much agency as they can, that they're psychologically well-balanced. There's not a, a dominance here. she's not this, passive, under his thumb kind of person. And so their marriage, initially seems to be prosperous. He's traveling around. He's a, what we would call a, a retail merchant. The problem is that he gets into a lot of debt, and th- this is very common in the 18th century for people to go into debt, go in and out of debt in, in, [00:37:00] in this period.

[00:37:01] Success and resentment

Vin Carretta: And in 1780, he has a remarkable opportunity that comes up. His former owner, the man, dies. His widow, then invites John Peters to come back and essentially take over the land and the house, as long as he takes care of her and her disabled daughter while they're alive.

And he and Phillis move back in. He rearranges the house. Again, he's seen by those who, are inclined to do so as arrogant.

Phillis moves in with him. He insists that they be treated, and especially his wife, be treated as a lady. This is a Black woman in a overwhelmingly white little town, and

Isabelle Roughol: You can tell-- And [00:38:00] I think, Cornelia Dayton writes this very, very well, that you can tell that there is, resentment at the idea of a successful, Black couple, an educated famous woman, a man who knows his own worth,showing up as propertied people in the town now,

that, that probably did gain them a few enemies

Vin Carretta: And she's not only educated, but she is far more famous than

anybody in the town. and, Here they are expected to treat them as their social superiors, which they were, but, at this time they couldn't be. They both were, but couldn't be. And yes, as you say, it aroused a lot of resistance, so much that eventually they're driven out of the town.

[00:38:50] Debt and dying

Vin Carretta: They go back to Boston, not that long after John Peters is arrested for debt, for the debts that he [00:39:00] had before they left Boston.

And, Phillis dies in December of 1784. John Peters had been jailed for debt, certainly in September of 1784. He was almost certainly in-- you know, O'Dell says he abandoned her. Well, he abandoned her in the sense that he was jailed for debt.

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah. Again, a very common thing, right?

debtors prison, both in England and in the colonies

Vin Carretta: He was in and out for years after Phillis died until he finally really got on his feet, years afterwards.

[00:39:41] Why Phillis never published again

Isabelle Roughol: And Phillis, she had made some money from her first book.

Vin Carretta: Mm-hmm.

Isabelle Roughol: I assume. She, she still had her, her pen to support herself, but it seems like all the people who had marveled at her talent and supported her first book just did not continue their [00:40:00] support for her literary career once she was a free woman, and an adult, it seems.

Vin Carretta: She addresses this in a, a letter to an English correspondent who had warned her that, people may leave you, when you're no longer enslaved, because supporting you is also a way to curry favor with your owners. And she acknowledges that some people have left her.-

I take the title of my book from one of her Black British, critics or commentators, Ignatius Sancho, who in 1778 was given a copy of her book. He didn't know at this time that she had been freed in 1773, and he calls her "a genius in bondage", which is where I get my title from. And he compares these Boston people who had supposedly supported her [00:41:00] as Pharisees who have abandoned her since. Now, how he knows this, I'm not sure, but, he's dead on. We also have to keep in mind that what happens in 1773, already all this tension is developing between Britain and America. And when Phillis tries to get a publisher in Boston in 1779 for her second volume of, poetry and letters, she was going to include letters, they can't find a publisher. But it's very hard to find a publisher in the middle of a war.

Isabelle Roughol: The, the, the American economy is, is in really bad shape right by the end of the Revolutionary War as well. I imagine even just having the paper to print and the ink

would be a challenge.

Vin Carretta: Right, and, and they're kind of preoccupied.

Isabelle Roughol: Yes.

Vin Carretta: People are preoccupied at the time. The war has started to turn in, the [00:42:00] rebels', the revolutionaries' favor after, you know, the Battle of Saratoga in '77, and the French come in in '78 on, on the American side

so the tide has started to turn, but, it's... Yorktown is still, it's late 1781, so we have years to go. And there are a number of reasons why f- they couldn't find, a publisher. One of the reasons I think is they make the mistake, and I think John Peters is probably responsible for this, as advertising the book as to be published by Phillis Peters.

No mention in this, in the first, advertisement of her as the former Phillis Wheatley.

Isabelle Roughol: So people don't recognize maybe the the person.

Vin Carretta: And interestingly, when Peters is in, presumably in, debtor's jail in late [00:43:00] 1784, the next time she advertises this book looking for subscribers, it identifies her as the formerly Phillis Wheatley, Phillis Peters formerly. So that's why, again, my Phillis is this marketing genius who realizes, "Okay, we gotta let them know,"

Isabelle Roughol: Yes.

Vin Carretta: "that this is not some

Isabelle Roughol: to go

Vin Carretta: new Phillis," you know.

Um,

Isabelle Roughol: And so she dies in 1784. I think she had a, a couple children, neither of whom survived, and she really goes in a few short years from worldwide fame or international fame at least, to, dying in poverty, right?

What we know about her final days, we have to rely on O'Dell.

Who is

Vin Carretta: O'Dell is an unreliable, witness. O'Dell says she had three children. Cornelia [00:44:00] Dayton has pretty much confirmed that she's found the records that indicate that they had at least one child who presumably died early.

And the way I read Phillis' last published poem is that it's about the death of that child.

It's an elegy that it's very much less optimistic than any other elegy that she writes, and it is about, the, the title says it's about the death of an infant.

So whether she died in poverty, that, that may well be the case, since John is in debtors' jail.

[00:44:47] Phillis's literary legacy

Vin Carretta: Now her reputation after her death, that's a whole, other story. Her reputation in overseas is actually pretty good. For example, [00:45:00] in, she dies in '84. In '86, an Austrian, John Retzer, publishes a multi-volume anthology of-- He calls it "A Choice of the Best English Poets."

And of course, it's Shakespeare and, all these familiar names. One American poet named Phillis Wheatley. She's the only one in there. She-- Of course, she's the only Black author as well. and she's the only one he has a little biography of, talking about it's remarkable what, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Wouldn't, wouldn't expect this.

So she had that reputation. She dies just as the transatlantic movement to abolish the transatlantic slave trade is building up.

Isabelle Roughol: Mm-hmm.

Vin Carretta: And in England, she is [00:46:00] cited all over the place by people arguing that she demonstrates that, people of African descent did not deserve to be enslaved, that they are intellectually as capable of,a literary achievement as any white person. In fact, one of these people says, If the absence of poetic ability justifies enslavement, then there are an awful lot of people here in England who ought to be enslaved."

And it's in America that she gets much more grief. Of course, the whole situation in America involving slavery is very different. And the most notorious example is Thomas Jefferson in Notes on, the State of Virginia, where he has a brief comment on Phillis Wheatley, and he says that "religion could create a [00:47:00] Phillis Wheatley,

but could not create a poet." And, Totally dismissive of her.

Isabelle Roughol: I wouldn't trust Thomas Jefferson's opinions,on women for what, from what I've seen of him, so far or on, on slavery. so

Vin Carretta: He was extraordinarily influential though,

Isabelle Roughol: Of

Vin Carretta: as you might imagine, especially in, 19th century and in the 20th century as Henry Louis Gates Jr. points out, in the 1970s during the Black Power movement when we have a number of Black authors who were condemning Phillis in kind of neo-Jeffersonian terms.

Some of them are calling her having a white mind, selling out to whiteness, and,d- denying her Blackness, her Africanness. now all of that has been as, as you can [00:48:00] imagine, Gates i- in some ways has led the charge against that. You don't hear that today.

I don't-- I guess I'm not in touch with the real far right-wing MAGA movement. I'm not sure how they deal with Phillis.

Isabelle Roughol: They probably don't at all. Well, actually,and that's how I came across Honorée Jeffers, who I want to acknowledge here because she pointed out a lot of this more recent scholarship to me. Phillis Wheatley Peters is one of the only four women who are portrayed on the Freedom 250 website, you know, which is the MAGA website for the semiquincentennial.

They made these horrible AI portraits of a number of figures, of all the people who signed the Declaration of Independence and four lonely women. And Phillis Wheatley Peters is one. So there you go. they have claimed her somehow with a, a horrible A- and inaccurate AI portrait.[00:49:00]

Vin Carretta: Well, as you reminded us, Honorée Jeffers is, the sort of fountainhead of the call for renaming Phillis

Honorée Jeffers, really raised the profile of, that movement or this movement. I think we're winning.

Isabelle Roughol: Not yet on the Wikipedia page, unfortunately.

Vin Carretta: no, I don't know whether or not...

Isabelle Roughol: on a l- but on a lot of the scholarship, most of the scholarship, yes.

Vin Carretta: Well, sh- legally her name was never Phillis Wheatley Peters. It was either Phillis Wheatley or Phillis Peters. We say Phillis Wheatley Peters because Phillis Wheatley is the way she's known

Isabelle Roughol: Yes, for the same reason she put formerly Phillis Wheatley on the advertisement

for that second book, right?

Vin Carretta: Good point. Yeah.

Isabelle Roughol: I think we've had a wonderful overview of her life and her influence.

Thank you so very much for your time today.

Vin Carretta: Thank [00:50:00] you. I enjoy spending time with you, and I always enjoy spending time with Phillis.

[00:50:04] Outro

Isabelle Roughol: This was Vin Carretta. His book, 'Phillis Wheatley Peters: Biography of a Genius in Bondage', was re-edited in 2023 to reflect all of this new research. He's also edited her complete writings and written lots more about great Black literary figures of the 18th century, such as Olaudah Equiano and Ignatius Sancho.

If you're up for something a bit different from the traditional biography, you can also read Honorée Jeffers. She published 'The Age of Phillis', a National Book Award longlisted collection of poems imagining the life of Phillis. And I want to acknowledge her here again and thank her for pointing me to all of this great scholarship. You'll find both books in the Broad History bookshop, as always.

The link is in the show notes, as well as in the newsletter, which you should absolutely sign up for if you haven't yet at broadhistory.com. And there, you can also choose to support this independent podcast with a membership or small donation of your choice. [00:51:00] It's at broadhistory.com/membership.

I'll be back next week with a final biography in this series on the Women of the American Revolution. We'll talk about Mercy Otis Warren, another great literary figure, but also a political figure, and we'll talk about political rights, political philosophy, the contribution of women to the ideas of the Revolution, and whether the franchise was something that was even ever considered for us. So come back next week.

Until then, 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]

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.

Here's a stat I'm gonna insist on you knowing in this episode and next week's. Just as the Founding Fathers and many patriots were talking about freedom from tyranny and writing such self-evident truths as "all men are created equal", the transatlantic slave trade was at its peak.

The slave trade to the Americas started in the mid-16th century, and famously the first arrival to Jamestown was in 1619. But it is between the years 1780 and 1806, 1807, when the slave trade was abolished, first in England and then the United States, that historians estimate nearly half of all people transported from Africa to the Americas arrived on the continent, mostly to the Caribbeans, but also many to [00:01:00] North America.

Some were transported, like Phillis Wheatley Peters, who we'll talk about next week. Others were born into slavery in what would become the United States, and today we will talk about one such person, Elizabeth Freeman.

Arguably, and I will argue, and you'll see why as you listen to the episode, the most impactful woman of all the women I've introduced to you in this series.

Because while Elizabeth's life starts in slavery, it certainly does not end there. And the grit and smarts and strength that she's able to demonstrate and the impact that she has, well, you'll just have to see

To talk about Elizabeth Freeman, I'm joined by the wonderful Errin Haines, the co-founder and editor-at-large of this incredible American news site called The 19th, which covers women in politics. Definitely check them out.

Errin writes her own series about the 250th anniversary of the United States, in [00:02:00] which she featured Elizabeth Freeman, and we had a wonderful conversation about Elizabeth's life, her legacy, and what she means to America today.

Without further ado, here's Errin Haines.

[00:02:12] Why Elizabeth Freeman matters

Isabelle Roughol: Errin Haines, hello and welcome to Broad History

Errin Haines: Oh my gosh, Isabelle, thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited

Isabelle Roughol: Me too. We met on social media, the, the magic of Instagramwhen I had this video go crazy viral and you reached out to tell me about your own series about the 250th anniversary of the United States and its significance. And you told me that you started with Elizabeth Freeman, which amazing coincidence 'cause she had been on my list of people I definitely wanted to talk about.

So I'm curious what made you think, "You know what? This is the woman that I need to start with if we're gonna tell the story of America and the 250th."

Errin Haines: Yeah. Well, listen, Isabelle, first of all, thanks for going viral because it gave me a chance to find you and to find Broad History and the wonderful work that [00:03:00] you are doing. And, I certainly h- I had to reach out because I felt like Elizabeth Freeman absolutely fits into, just kind of the narrative that you were trying to tell around America at 250, and frankly, the people who were left out of that history, which is obviously what your work is all about and so much of what the work that I do at The 19th is all about.

And that was something that I was thinking about kind of going into our country's 250th anniversary. We know that there were people who the Founding Fathers did not mean t- to be included in those founding ideals, specifically women, right? Enslaved people, Indigenous people. But all of those people were present at the founding of our country.

All those people have been the people that have been helping to shape our democracy to be more free and more fair and more equal ever since. And I knew that, that we c- I couldn't start, um, you know, just to try to, to start unpacking that without telling the story of Elizabeth Freeman, because she was one of the first people to really [00:04:00] see the Declara- that she hears the words of the Declaration of Independence, and she knows that even though these Founding Fathers did not mean to include her, she knew that those words absolutely applied to her, and that she was somebody who tried to make them real not only for herself, but what she did laid the foundation for so many other people to also assert their freedom and equality in our new nation.

Isabelle Roughol: Absolutely, yeah. I mean, she, she saw that there was like a giant asterisknext to, you know, all men are created equal, and she was like, "Well, I'll show you."

[00:04:31] When Mumbet overhears the Massachussetts Constitution

Isabelle Roughol: It's incredible. And so we're going to get into all that, somewhat chronologically. So let's start with who is Elizabeth? What do we know about where she comes from and her childhood?

Errin Haines: Yeah. So Elizabeth Freeman, she is enslaved. She's in Sheffield, Massachusetts, and by-- at that time she was going by the name of Mumbet. She is an enslaved woman in Sheffield, and she's working for the family of Colonel John Ashley and Hannah [00:05:00] Ashley. So they own Mumbet. She's doing work in, in, in her, in their home as an enslaved woman. And, because she's doing that, she is somebody who is kind of moving around this house. She's hearing things. She's seeing things that are happening in the colony of Massachusetts, in thistown of Sheffield.

these patriots that are talking about the, what is happening, how they're being taxed but not represented. How they are wanting-- they're feeling oppressed by, the British regime, and they want to do something about that, right? And so she is hearing talk about this Declaration of Independence.

She's hearingnot just in 1776, but a few years later when the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 is written. She's also hearing those words. and the Massachusetts Constitution borrows heavily from the words of the Declaration of Independence, saying, "All men are born free and equal, and they have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights, among which may be reckoned the right of [00:06:00] enjoying and defending their lives and liberties, that of acquiring and possession and protection of property, of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness."

Sounds very similar to the words of the Declaration of Independence, right? And so Mumbet, this is somebody who can't even read or write, but she understands that those words, "All men are born free and equal," that should apply to her. Even as an enslaved person, she understands that those words have meaning in her own life.

[00:06:26] The heated shovel episode

Errin Haines: And so while she is an enslaved person, as the story goes, there's also another, there's an enslaved girl on the property. Her name is Lizzy. And, Hannah Ashley, the mistress of the Ashley home, is known to be, somebody who was a pretty violent,slave owner. she, was not kind to, to the enslaved people in that home.

And Lizzy is accused of stealing a piece of bread. And so in retaliation for that, Ashley attempts to [00:07:00] strike Hannah with a hot shovel, like from the fire. Mumbet puts herself in between that child and her mistress, and as a result is wounded. she gets hit in the arm with this hot shovel and has a wound that she has for the rest of her life.

But as a result of that incident, that is when she decides... 'Cause she's been the words of the declaration, the words of the Massachusetts Constitution are in her mind at this point. That incident happens and that is, that along with those words prompts her, because the thing about her overhearing these conversations in the Ashley home...

[00:07:40] Theodore Sedgwick

Errin Haines: The Ashleys had a friend, Theodore Sedgwick. He's a lawyer. He also lives in the town of Sheffield. He is one of the people that helps to write the Massachusetts Constitution. He is one of the people that helps to write those very words that Mumbet hears and understands have meaning for her own life, right? And so what does she do in that moment after that [00:08:00] exchange with Lizzy and Mistress Ashley?

Mumbet walks to the h- the office of Theodore Sedgwick, which is a few miles away from the property that she is enslaved on, walks to Mr. Sedgwick's office and says to him, "Listen, based on what you wrote, would you plead my case for freedom? If the words that you wrote are true, if you believe those words, I want you to help me."

Now, this is something that she's doing. I mean, there's extreme risk in that, right? Theodore Sedgwick is friends with her master.

Isabelle Roughol: He could have gone to the Ashleys and be like, "Hey, like, get this under control."

Errin Haines: He could have told on her. She could have been sold away or worse. Who knows what could have happened as a result of her going to Theodore Sedgwick's house and asking him to take her case on and to ask him to help her gain her freedom. But what happens instead is that Theodore Sedgwick says, "Yes, I will take your case." Right?

He goes to court and he [00:09:00] argues, that slavery is unconstitutional under the Massachusetts Constitution on Mumbet's behalf. And on August 21st, 1781, Mumbet becomes the first enslaved woman to have her independence validated in a court of law. This is huge. This is huge. She even changes her name, from Mumbet to Elizabeth Freeman to reflect her new status.

[00:09:24] The hypocrisy of Massachussetts slavery

Isabelle Roughol: Mm-hmm. So there's a lot to unpack there. That story of the, of the heated shovel, I read that as well, and there's something I love about it, and it really shows her character, is that she never hid the wound on her arm. And when people would ask her about it, and what had happened, she would just say, "Ask missus."

Errin Haines: Yes

Isabelle Roughol: And that is, like, the cheek on her. I love it, and, and it shows, what a strong woman she is I think it tells us something about that sort of revolutionary era Massachusetts society, because that is humiliating [00:10:00] to her enslaver, because there's this we- it's this weird society where people are still keeping other people in bondage, but at the same time, it's quite uncouth to be seen to be violent or to be seen to beoppressive towards the people you enslave.

It's, like, such a hypocrisy. So, so yeah, you have to be the nice, the good master. And so she is like, "I'm not gonna shy away from telling you how horrible this is."

Errin Haines: Yes. And Isabelle, you're making such a good point because I do think, there, there is this narrative, right? That enslavers in colonies like Massachusetts, right? Those northern colonies where they absolutely also did own slaves, that those slave owners were somehow, more genteel, kinder to their slaves, as if that is a thing, right?

Keeping people in bondage. that, that is wrong on every level, full stop. But, but yes, there was a, there was this idea that slave owners in Massachusetts somehow were different, were somehow better, so to [00:11:00] speak. And so, for Mumbet to have this visible evidence that was not the case for her,I think that does, contradict...

it exposes the brutality of slavery no matter where it was happening.

But you're right, Isabelle, it also exposed Mumbet's revolutionary spirit. She was no less revolutionary than any of the patriots that were involved in, you know, forming this country, of signing the Declaration of Independence. What she does is as patriotic, is as brave as anybody else who was present at the founding of our country, if not more so, because she had so much more to lose, right?

[00:11:41] Her separation from her parents in childhood

Isabelle Roughol: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And speaking of the cruelty of slavery, yes, even in the North,even earlier in her life, so she's actually born in New York, not in Massachusetts. And she is given as a present, by her sort of original enslaver, who is [00:12:00] Hannah Ashley's dad. And they live in New York, and she's 12 years old, and her younger sister is, I believe, 9, when they are sent to live in Massachusetts with her owner's daughter and separated from her parents, who, as far as we know, she will never see again.

Talk about cruelty.

[00:12:20] Elizabeth's thriving life after slavery

Errin Haines: Yeah. Yeah. This is somebody who begins as property and is property for much of her life, but that's not how her story ends, right? She gains her freedom in 1781 and is a working woman in the same community where she had formerly been enslaved for the rest of her life.

She actually goes to work for the Sedgwick family. She's a midwife. She's taking care of the Sedgwicks and their family. She's delivErring the children, right? This is how much of a part of that family she becomes.

She's able to buy her own home, right? she gets married and she's able to acquire things. and, what's really remarkable [00:13:00] about that is, that by the time-- she becomes a distinguished member of the Sheffield community, especially the Black community in Sheffield, because they all know her story. Her story was news, at the time, what happens to her. And so she is a respected member of the community and by the time Mumbet dies in December of 1829, she leaves a will that shows us that despite the fact that she never learned to read or write, she is able to accumulate property and she has a will, where she is bequeathing her things, to,to, to family members and to the Sedgwick family.

So, she bequeaths her land to the, estate of Charles Sedgwick, who is Theodore Sedgwick's son. She dictated that she wanted half of the, her real estate, because again, you still, at this time, you would need a, a white person to help facilitate things on behalf of Black people who,slavery was still the law of the land in much of the, in, in the country at this time, right?

So [00:14:00] she dictates that one half of her real estate goes to Lizzy, who,was regarded as her daughter, and Lizzy's heirs, and then the remaining half was designated for her great-grandchildren. So she's thinking even beyond her immediate family that is here now. you know, her children's children's children

Isabelle Roughol: Mm-hmm

she's

Errin Haines: thinking about as inheriting, as, as, as being part of her inheritance.

And then,she's talking about her debts being paid. She had,she, she had personal items that,that she gets to list in this will. And so this is somebody who, you know, sh- she acquires things over the course of her life because she is able to work. So you think about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

This, these are things that Elizabeth Freeman is able to have as a result of her freedom status that she fought for and won. There is no more American story than that to me.

[00:14:53] A true founder

Isabelle Roughol: Mm-hmm. Absolutely. So I want to go, I want to go back a little bit, i- in her life into, the moment of that, that famous case that [00:15:00] she wins, and, the way that,she stands up for herself, but she's really a protector of others, right? As we hear in the story, with Lizzy and the shovel.

But, as we hear throughout her life, and I read that actually a big motivator for her to go to court to get that, that freedom. I mean, there's a famous quote from her, that if she could have a second of freedom and then die in the next moment, she would take it just to taste freedom.

but the big,thing that really motivated her is that she's actually already a mother. She has a daughter. We don't know anything about her husband, unfortunately. We just know, it seems like he, he might have been a free man actually, because he went and fought actually in the Revolutionary War, sadly never came back.

And so she is a widow with a six-year-old child, and we know, that in slavery, you know the famous saying, "The child," the, "The child follows the womb," so a child born to an enslaved woman is enslaved. And so she's also fighting for her [00:16:00] daughter, right? Which so beautiful.

Errin Haines: Yes. She absolutely was not only thinking about herself. She's thinking about, her daughter. She's thinking about other people in the Ashley household, who are also enslaved. You think about the idea of a founder, right? The people that we usually regard as, as the founders are the people that signed the declaration.

We know that those were white male landowners, but those were not the only founders of our democracy. it's not just about declaring, equality or the right to freedom. it is about holding accountable anybody that claims to believe in those words and to compel them to go beyond just making a declaration.

Like, you have to make those words real in word and deed. And so that is what, Mumbet is doing in that moment, on behalf of herself, obviously yes, but also because she understands what her victory could mean, not only for her, but for everyone [00:17:00] that is in, that, that is in her same, living under the same conditions

Again, the Declaration of Independence, when that is signed, much of these colonies, many of the people that were living in these colonies, th-they also can't read or write. And that's whether they are, enslaved or not. Like, a lot of the country was was not, literate.

And so what that means is that you have the declaration being read in town squares, in public places, all o- all across the colonies. And so that means that pe- all kinds of people, whether they were meant to be included or not, are hearing those words. And that included many enslaved people who heard those words and immediately asked, "What does that, what does this mean for me?

Th-th- these words, don't these words apply for, to me too? They said all men are free and equal. That means that I should be free and that I should be equal." But Mumbet is somebody that goes, not only sh- does she declare that for herself in her own heart, but she [00:18:00] goes to Theodore Sedgwick and says, "I need you to make this real for me.

I need you to help me to argue that these words should apply to me also."

[00:18:09] Elizabeth's double whammy as an enslaved person and a woman

Isabelle Roughol: Mm-hmm. And she is doubly,limited in her rights, both as an enslaved person and as a woman, right, as we've seen in several of the conversations in this series.

What I find fascinating about her legal case is her lawyer, Thomas Sedgwick, ends up adding a man to the suit, another enslaved person, an

Errin Haines: From the Ashley home

Isabelle Roughol: o- on the Ashley Home, right?

Because the suit would be too weak if it was fought by a woman alone because of the limited rights that a woman has. He also has her declared a spinster, which means... She is probably actually married, but her husband is missing, and so she's declared a spinster, which makes her not covered under the laws of coverture, so she actually has legal rights that a married woman wouldn't have, including the right to sue, which is also a right that [00:19:00] apparently,it was, it's somewhat lucky, which is a weird word to use, but somewhat lucky that she was moved to Massachusetts, right?

She wouldn't have been allowed to sue as an enslaved person in New York, but in Massachusetts she could.

Errin Haines: Yeah, I mean, first of all, the number of circumstances that have to come together. But and not to undermine Mumbet's agency whatsoever because, I mean, she has, she has to initiate, this act,at great risk to herself. But to your point, Sedgwick does have to get creative, right?

In, in, in how he is able to even, make this case viable,in a Massachusetts court. It is very interesting to think about that. and also to your point about,the, two things that are working against her, right? Her enslaved status, but also her being a woman, which we also know at the founding of this country is some-- women are also thinking about their status and what the founding ideals are going to mean for them.

In your viral post, I mean, you're talking about Abigail Adams, somebody who says to her husband, [00:20:00] right, John Adams, one of the signers of the Declaration, "Remember the ladies," right? She's thinking about women as being part of this new nation, this new idea of America that is being formed, because she knew, she understood what it would mean, for women to not be included, what that would say about their ability to participate fully and equally in this democracy.

And so, Mumbet, somebody who, to your point, is a mother, somebody who, but for her spinster status, may not have even had rights because of coverture,to even advocate for herself. It is remarkable to think about, her still kind of asserting her rights in challenging the contradictions of our emerging democracy even in that moment.

Isabelle Roughol: Mm-hmm. There's something else that I find, very powerful and very typical and symbolic in her life in freedom, her life after the court [00:21:00] decision. So she is freed. Her daughter is freed. interestingly, Hannah Ashley asks her to work for her, and like, "N- no, thank you."

Errin Haines: The Ashleys want them, want her to come back and, and, know, Colonel Ashley had initially considered appealing that ruling. But eventually, he ultimately decides not to do that. But yes, they wanted Mumbet to come back and obviously the woman that wounds Mumbet pretty badly, asking her to come back and work for her.

She's a free woman now. She doesn't have

for Hannah Ashley anymore. Exactly. Exactly. And if anything, she's going to go and work for the family that helped her to gain her new status.

[00:21:36] Raising the Sedgwick children

Isabelle Roughol: And the incredible thing I think about that second half, or actually two-thirds of her life 'cause she lived to quite a, quite an old age, is her life with

the Sedgwick family. And so there's something, that we see then and throughout American history, because Pamela I think is her first name, Pamela Sedgwick, has debilitating depression. And she's, like, very disabled and unable to care for her family. [00:22:00] And so, Elizabeth steps in.

And so Mum Bet is actually the nickname that the Sedgwick children gave her because they called her Mum, essentially. and so you have a Black woman raising wealthy white children, which we see again and again in, in American history, right?

Errin Haines: Yes. No, listen, the history, caregiving in America, y- traces directly back to slavery, right? But now, Mumbet is Elizabeth Freeman, and she is working for this family. She's being paid for her caregiving labor, and I think that is also something that's important to name.

She took, by all accounts, excellent care of Pamela Sedgwick. and not only of Pamela, but because of the care that she's able to give Pamela, th-this makes, Theodore Sedgwick, you know, he's able to work and, carry on with his career because Mumbet is taking care of this home life with,his debilitated wife, but also these children, that, that need someone to take care [00:23:00] of them.

And so she's doing all of that work in this home. Her work makes his work possible. It makes their lives possible, because of what she is able to do for that family for many years, to your point.

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah. While also raising her daughter and children, and even her great-grandchildren that, that she gets to me- meet, and they all live on that, on that farm that she,

Errin Haines: Yes, the farm

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah. And the Sedgwick children, I mean, absolutely revere her and love her. When Pamela dies, one of the boys just starts calling Elizabeth Mom, and she just becomes the mother.

[00:23:36] Catharine Maria Sedgwick

Isabelle Roughol: And I think there's something that's incredibly poignant also. One of the children that she raises is Catharine Maria Sedgwick. She is one of the most popular bestselling novelists of, the first half of the 19th century.

So you have this illiterate woman who freed herself from bondage, who ends up raising this incredible female [00:24:00] novelist, who by the way, writes novels with very strong female characters who are said to be inspired by Elizabeth.

Errin Haines: I was gonna say,

Isabelle Roughol: lives on. Yeah

Errin Haines: yes. I was gonna say she abs- I mean, Mumbet absolutely inspires, Catharine to y- some of Catharine's characters, and I, I believe Catharine is one of the main people that's, that, captures Elizabeth Freeman's story for us, for the rest of us to know uh, which, which also feels very, very important

Isabelle Roughol: Yes, Catharine wr- writes a biography.So most of what, we're sharing now, most of what we're, we know of Mumbet because she was not able to write, and because there were so few, even, records besides the court case is, Catharine Sedgwick that wrote a book. And then also there's, I, I'll put that in the show notes,

there is actually a, a, a full book biography of Elizabeth Freeman fairly recent, and that's all through the correspondence of the Sedgwick family mostly that she is seen. Thankfully seen through the eyes of people who really loved her, [00:25:00] because often those stories are hard to tell because the people who write about them don't like them.

So you don't get a sense of a real person.

Errin Haines: Right. and I believe-- I mean, Catharine's asking Elizabeth Freeman about her life as well. It's not just,

you kind of telling her story for her. she is part of that storytelling, even though she,is not somebody that can read or write for herself, but she's telling her story, and Catharine is capturing that story.

That also feels really important to name, and again, is k- is kind of proof of her, using the agency that she has, and Catharine recognizing that her story is something that is important and one that needs to be documented.

[00:25:40] Buried on the Sedgwick family plot

Isabelle Roughol: Mm-hmm. And so at the end of her life, which is well into her 80s, good genes that family, her daughter also lived into her 80s, Elizabeth is actually buried on the Sedgwick family plot. She's the only non-related person, non-genetically, I guess, related person who [00:26:00] is on the Sedgwick family plot.

If people are curious, by the way, Sedgwick is, is Kyra Sedgwick is a descendant, the actress. It's the same family.

Errin Haines: Today I learned. That's incredible.

Think about this though. This is somebody who She is enslaved. She is the property of one family that, abuses her, treats her badly. She gains her freedom and goes on to work for this family that pays her, that sees her dignity and humanity, literally helps her gain her freedom. She is indebted to the Sedgwick family, but they are also absolutely indebted to her, and she truly does become a member of that family, right?

Like we see that. That she is buried on the familial plot shows just how much she also means [00:27:00] to the family. It's not just that they mean a lot to her because of what Theodore Sedgwick is able to do on her behalf, right? But she also means so much to them. She plays such a role in the lives of each and every one of them, from Theodore Sedgwick to Pamela Sedgwick to their children, and the children that she helps them deliver, right, as a midwife.

She is a part of this family, in, in every way

[00:27:28] Everybody should know her name

Isabelle Roughol: Mm-hmm. I, I'm ready to say, uh, and, and people can fight me on it, I'll say it that, of all the women I'm profiling in this series, I think she's the most impactful. Easy. And she's from, you know, she's from the poorest background. She is probably the least known of all the women that I talk about.

But in terms of the impact she had, both through the court case, very obviously, 'cause she inspired then generations of abolitionists, and the impact she had in the [00:28:00] community

Errin Haines: Massachusetts eventually, abolishes slavery because of this case.

Isabelle Roughol: Mm-hmm

Errin Haines: One of the, first states to abolish slavery because,so what, she's able to do, as far as I'm con- I'm with you, Isabelle. As far as I'm concerned, Elizabeth Freeman is a founder.

She's a revolutionary. Everybody should know her name. Everybody should know. People like Elizabeth Freeman, Black women in particular, have challenged America to become her truest self, have claimed freedom that was denied, not just for themselves, but for other people.

that is the, that is really,the promise of this declaration. It's not enough that the declaration exists, right? But for us to claim the declaration for ourselves, that the founding words be made real for every American, like that's Elizabeth Freeman's legacy. She insisted that our founding words be made real, and she didn't wait for permission to belong.

She claims her place by testing the idea of our [00:29:00] country against her reality. And so that's what all of us can still do today as, we think about where we are as a democracy 250 years later. She gives us that language. She gives us those tools.

Isabelle Roughol: I want to read actually the inscription on her tombstone because it is beautiful. It tells us who she is. It tells, It tells us how loved she is.

I, I just wanna read this. Um, "Elizabeth Freeman, also known by the name of Mumbet, died December 28th, 1829. Her supposed aged was 85 years. She was born a slave and remained a slave for nearly 30 years. She could neither read nor write, yet in her own sphere she had no superior or equal. She ne- neither wasted time nor property. She never violated a trust, nor failed to perform a duty. In every situation of domestic trial, she was the most efficient helper and the tenderest friend. Good mother, [00:30:00] farewell."

Errin Haines: No superior or equal

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah, I mean, if people could talk about me like that when I go, that's a life well-lived

Errin Haines: Absolutely.

[00:30:10] Errin's 250th series

Isabelle Roughol: I want to talk about your series a little bit just to, to conclude. Um, tell, tell me about it. Tell me what it, what you're writing, who else you're writing about.

Errin Haines: Yeah. mean, so listen, like I said, I came into this country's 250th anniversary really thinking about America being on this journey from exclusion at our founding to belonging, which is where I hope we are headed, in, into our next 250 years. Like I said, I start with the story of Elizabeth Freeman, but, there are others that I'm talking about who help to make the promise of America, the promise of democracy, more real for more Americans.

And that has really been the responsibility of so many of those people that were initially, [00:31:00] initially left out, right? So, I talk to, a woman in Philadelphia, right? the crucible of our democracy, the birthplace of our democracy. 250 years later, there is a woman who came to this country as a caregiver, becomes a US citizen, and then becomes an activist on behalf of caregivers who we know are so essential to not only American democracy, but really the fabric of our society.

They do the work that makes all other work possible, and she is doing the work of democracy on their behalf. And so her story, really just feels so, so important.

I talk about the resilience of Black women as revolutionary. Not only, again, to Elizabeth Freeman's example, that resilience is not just for themselves, but it is on behalf of all of us.

and their resilience is what has made our democracy more free and more fair and more equal. and that is community by community, state by state, and across the [00:32:00] country. So I tell that story through the story of a librarian, that is in South Carolina who is doing that work, under sometimes very challenging circumstances, right?

I talk about the-- I mean, you can't talk about the people that were excluded from our founding without talking about Indigenous people, Indigenous women, right? "The 19th" is named for the 19th Amendment of the Constitution, right? Which we know guaranteed the right to vote for white women, but Native Americans were not even recognized as citizens in 1920 when the 19th Amendment is passed.

And so what does it mean to think about the role of Native Americans? I mean, Native Americans had democratic societies even before we have a Declaration of Independence, before we have a Constitution. Indigenous tribes in this country were operating democratically.

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah, the rights of women, Indigenous women in indigenous, nations were s- had so much more autonomy

Errin Haines: They were matriarchal

Isabelle Roughol: American women.

Errin Haines: matriarchal societies. And [00:33:00] the,colonists who came to this country, they see how these indigenous tribes are operating, like them operating democratically. That helps to give them some of the ideas for how we want to run this country, and yet they were excluded.

We know that Native Americans have fought in every war in this country, including the Revolutionary War. They were there. And so for Native American women, like what thinking about their role is also kind of, I, I just felt like I couldn't write this, write this series without addressing that.

And then obviously, as I was writing, "Revolutionary," that's the project,the name of the project,that we did at The 19th, the Voting Rights Act was gutted in the midst of, those few months. And so, I knew that I had to kind of bookend as we are looking ahead towards where we go from here as a democracy at our 250th anniversary.

Voting is the thing,it's the so- soul of our democracy. And so, if the future of voting rights for every American, can still be in [00:34:00] question at our 250th anniversary, what does that say about the health of our democracy? What does that say about the future of our democracy and peoples, those same people, same kinds of people that were excludedat our founding?

the idea is that we are attempting to perfect the union, and that has to mean, making sure that more and more people are, are y- that the promise of citizenship is there for more and more, Americans, and voting is central to that promise in so many ways.

[00:34:27] The next 250 days

Isabelle Roughol: Mm-hmm. And as we're talking, and we're talking on the 17th of July, this will go out probably in a week. And so as we were talking, we heard a, I don't even know how to qualify it, a speech from the president last night.

again, questioning election integrity, and seems like setting the stage for interference in the midterm possibly. Yeah, it's easy for me to comment as a as an outsider. I, I have... breaks my heart, but I have less skin in the game than, than you do and a lot of my majority American listeners do.

So I wonder how do you [00:35:00] feel about the, the next 250 years or the next 250 days for that matter in-

Errin Haines: Y- uh, hello. I mean, I think that that is where we are, right? The next 250 days are in question. I mean, you hear a speech like the speech that we heard last night where the President of the United States is literally, questioning the integrity of our elections. I mean, this is a system that was put in place at our founding, right?

And 250 years later, that system, as complicated as it is, is still secure. We know that. We know that our elections are safe and secure, and they are accurate. And so, for the president to continue to raise the unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud in this country, that undermines, the, the covenant that we have as Americans in, in the process of voting.

The thing about Election Day is that everybody is supposed to be equal, and everybody gets to participate. And if people are [00:36:00] feeling less confident in their ability to do that,what does that mean for the future of our democracy? not just the future of voting or the next election.

Like, what does that mean for the health of our democracy if people do not believe in or can have less confidence in, the very system by which our democracy is built on

Isabelle Roughol: So with, with that in mind and with that fight ahead, what is the message you wish people would take away from Elizabeth Freeman's life and fight

Errin Haines: Look, I, I, I thinkthat we are in a moment where we do still see, like, this tension between freedom and power and equality that is still shaping and defining our democracy in a lot of ways. The Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, these are not fixed documents. I think we're seeing that more than ever.

But how they are continuously interpreted to either force [00:37:00] inclusion or, or exclude people,that, that just feels like a struggle that we are still grappling with as a nation. I like to remind people that the American Revolution is not a fixed event in our history. Like, the American Revolution is playing out every single day.

It's playing out across our democracy, whether that's in courtrooms or classrooms or, movements, in communities. Like, the American Revolution is ongoing. And at no point in our 250 years have people not been repeatedly excluded from our promise, but they are also people who are continuing to insist on what their rightful and equal place is in our country based on the founding ideals that were put to paper 250 years ago.

So, I also say that, our country has had many foundings. Our country is still being founded, not by people, who invoke the declaration, but by the people who are testing its meaning over and over again every single day.[00:38:00]

Isabelle Roughol: Thank you so much. They're beautiful words to conclude on. Thank you so much for your time today, Errin.

Errin Haines: Isabelle, thank you again for having me.

[00:38:09] Outro

Isabelle Roughol: This was the wonderful Errin Haines, editor-at-large at The 19th. You can actually read her article about Elizabeth Freeman on the Broad History website right now, and if you're signed up for the newsletter, you'll have already received it. Make sure to sign up so you get more great stuff like this in the future.

Hopefully, this will give you a taste for Errin's wonderful writing, and you can sign up for the rest of the series on her newsletter for The 19th. All the links will be in the show notes as always. There is also a biography of Elizabeth Freeman if you wanna know more about her. Again, link in the show notes and in the Broad History Bookshop.

As always, this show is produced, researched, edited, hosted, everything by me, and it cannot exist without your support. If you wanna receive the episodes early and ad-free and support me in making the show, you can sign up at [00:39:00] broadhistory.com/membership for a small monthly membership or a one-time donation. All help is greatly appreciated.

Welcome this week to new members Elizabeth, Mojra, Jennifer, and Cindy. Thank you so much for your support. Join me again next week for a conversation on Phyllis Wheatley Peters.

Until then, this has been Broad History, and I've been your host, Isabelle Roughol.

Music by Aaron Kenny. I'll talk to you next week. [00:40:00]

[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]