USA > Massachusetts > Commonwealth history of Massachusetts, colony, province and state, volume 3 > Part 30
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50 | Part 51 | Part 52 | Part 53
322
WOMEN OF THE REVOLUTION
Byles, the only loyalist Congregational parson in Boston, whose humor and good temper preserved his place for him.
WOMEN IN THE SIEGE (1775 - 1776)
For the patriot women it was a different story. Guards of red-coats were stationed round the city, which none left without a permit from the commanding general. An inspec- tor provoked many of the inhabitants "by his meanness in searching the pockets of women and men to see that they carried out no more money than Gage allowed."
Among those who hurriedly left Boston was Anne Swift. She wrote a pathetic letter in June, 1775, from "the woods" to the British officer who had secured her a pass, to ask of him a like favor for her "dear husband, who I hear is in a very weak state of health." Notwithstanding her appeal her husband "died in Boston."
Those who could get out fled to the neighboring towns, to Springfield, to the Nashua Valley, to Connecticut. "The money that has been paid for passes is incredible," wrote Abigail Adams. Those left in Boston, women as well as men, were under strict military supervision. A count of the population showed that about five thousand inhabitants remained. The day before the battle, someone saw Dr. Mather's daughter wandering over Charlestown looking for carts to transport her precious possessions. She was obliged to leave without them; and her father's famous books and manuscripts collected by himself, his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather were destroyed.
Disease and death did not put a quietus on Tory gaiety. Beginning in January, 1776, a series of subscription balls was announced to take place once a fortnight. It is probable that they grew a little rowdy. Perhaps some of the ladies were not all they should be. In the advertisement of sub- scriptions for the fourth ball, gentlemen were requested to be so good as to comply with the rules-particularly with that for "having the names of the ladies Wrote on the back of their Tickets." In March shortly before the British were at last forced out of Boston, all the milliners and mantua makers in town were busy making masks for the masked ball to be held on March 11. And on that day,
323
WOMEN IN THE WAR
which was to become in future years a great national holiday in America, February 22, the Tory ladies must have read with zest in the Boston papers: "We hear ten capital cooks are already employed in preparing supper for the masquer- ade, which is to be the most brilliant thing ever seen in America."
PARTICIPATION OF WOMEN IN THE WAR
To say that war is solely the affair of men is contrary to human experience. War cannot be solely an affair of men in a world of men and women. The responsibility for creating or permitting a situation to develop which makes war inevitable, the burden of sustaining it, the sacrifice which it involves, the glory or the odium of it, must be shared by women as truly as by men.
In the archives of Massachusetts, state, local and private, are recorded the sufferings and the voluntary contribution of women to our Revolutionary War, though secondary writ- ers have strangely neglected that heroic sacrifice and partici- pation. Even in such respectable series as the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, sketches of revolu- tionary males abound, but rarely more than dates of a woman's birth, marriage and death, the names of her par- ents and her husband, and the number of their children.
Some eulogistic references occur as the tribute to Justice Story's mother. We learn that she was a woman of sense and energy, of active mind and cheerful spirit, and that on being left a widow with many children and a small income, "She showed an admirable tact and method in the conduct of her household and the education of her children." In the Historical Collections of the Essex Institute Daniel White's memoir records that his father married twice; that the first wife died leaving six children, and that the second bore eleven, one of them being Daniel. Doubtless Daniel thought he was supremely honoring her when he testified to his father's "handsome suit of snuff-colored cloth which my mother caused to be annually manufactured for him;" and again when he wrote: "My mother burdened with the care of a numerous and increasing family, manifested a devo- tion to her duties in the relation of wife and mother above all praise. Though so much younger than my father, she
324
WOMEN OF THE REVOLUTION
seemed to me to be exactly suited to him in all respects and he to her."
Thus, with the externality of one composing epitaphs for expensive tombstones, have men disposed of women who lived through the Revolution, and gave as much in suffering and sacrifice in their lives as the men of their families.
REVOLUTIONARY SEWING FOLK
In positive material fashion the Massachusetts women did a work which contributed to the Revolution. Three days after the battle of Concord, the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts passed the famous Coat Roll Resolution which called for thirteen thousand bounty overcoats, one coat for each private and non-commissioned officer in the Massa- chusetts Army. At the ratio of the last provincial tax whichi each town or district had paid, the legislators apportioned the bounty coats on all towns and districts except Boston and Charlestown. Men tailors could be found in the towns, but in this Revolutionary State, where females outnumbered males and where one-seventh of the males were in the army, the bounty coats must have been chiefly the work of women.
The Regulating Act of 1777 fixed prices for the making of coats, for wool, tow and cotton cloth, for flax, yarn stockings, and all varieties of spinning and weaving. A woman, born soon after the war, remembered an old lady's saying that with her baby in her lap she could make a man's coat in a day. In June, 1776, Abigail wrote: "Living is double what it was one year ago," and in August of the same year, "As to provisions there is no scarcity." But "one hundred pounds, two years ago, would purchase more than two will now."
In 1776, the General Court called on the towns to furnish four thousand blankets, stockings, and shirts to equal in number one-seventh of the males sixteen years old and over. In 1779 the quota was shirts and stockings to equal one sixth of the males; and in 1780, one tenth. Finally in 1781 more blankets, stockings and shirts were demanded. Women made these articles, and though some of the workers were professional spinners, tailors and mantua makers, accustomed to move from family to family to perform their diurnal
325
WOMEN IN MEN'S PURSUITS
tasks, many must for the first time have grasped the mean- ing of economic independence.
Even little girls had a chance to imitate their elders in constructive patriotism. Ten year old Nabby Crafts, a colo- nel's daughter, not only helped her mother to make shirts for soldiers, but when Manchester's needles gave out, secured a supply from Boston. Like St. Christopher of old, she had to be ferried over rivers and streams, and to get into the besieged town she had to outwit a towering figure in a scarlet uniform. The guard admitted her, she secured her needles, and returned as she had come.
That youthful ardor which melts obstacles must have heartened many a mature woman. The fourteen year old daughter of a member of the Massachusetts Assembly, John Locke, of Townshend, found her mother in tears, because John, Junior, had been unexpectedly drafted to march in two days and she was unable to send him away equipped with winter trousers. The girl herself later told the tale, which gives the student some realization of the obstacles that Revolutionary women had to overcome.
"'Oh, if that is all', said I, 'we will spin and weave him a pair before he goes.'
" 'Tut', said my mother, 'the wool is on the sheep's backs, and the sheep are in the pasture." ... But the wool, . .. obtained, was duly carded and spun, washed, sized and dried; a loom was found a few doors off, the web got in, woven and prepared, and the pantaloons were cut and made, two or three hours before my brother's departure; that is to say, in forty hours after the commencement, without help from any modern improvement." No doubt many mothers and daughters privately fitted out husbands, sons, and brothers; and unattached Daughters of Liberty continuously met "to make riflemen's frocks, spatterdashes for the cavalry, shirts and gaiters for the infantry."
WOMEN IN MEN'S PURSUITS
Research has not yet substantiated the tradition that women labored in the fields while the men were at war, though so great was the rage for privateering that Abigail Adams wrote: "If it is necessary to make any more drafts
326
WOMEN OF THE REVOLUTION
upon us, the women must reap the harvests. I am willing to do my part." Nevertheless in other ways many women certainly performed the work of men. Women innkeepers in Massachusetts had been conspicuous since the seventeenth century. It is possible that women proprietors became even more numerous during the Revolution. The most conspicu- ous of them in Massachusetts was Dorothy Coolidge, who inherited her husband's proprietorship on his death in 1770. Over her famous tavern at Watertown swung consecutively the portraits of two farmers, His Majesty King George III and His Exellency, George Washington. Here both American and British officers feasted. And it is maintained that on the day of the battle of Lexington, Dorothy fed her cele- brated golden johnny-cake hot to the volunteers. Certainly the town records show that the town paid her twelve shil- lings and eight pence for rum served to men who were in the battle of Lexington and Concord. Two months later the newly appointed commander-in-chief from Virginia breakfasted at her tavern, and the following winter the Washington coach and four with negro postilions in scarlet and white, and a guard of honor attending her, came rumbling up to the door with Martha Washington inside.
Before and during the Revolution there were not only many women merchants, but many women carrying on busi- nesses which were usually considered the peculiar province of men. Women were horse-shoers, cutlers, tallow chan- dlers and soap makers, tanners, netweavers, owners of whal- ers, and coach-builders. Presumably women were propor- tionately more active and had more freedom in business affairs in the colonial era than they were to have again until a century later.
Woman's limited education restricted her in the field of teaching. Still women taught in the elementary schools of nearly every town, and the Dedham records between 1757 and 1775 list by name nineteen women teachers. In the intellectual field of editorship apparently there was but one woman in Massachusetts, Margaret Draper, a Tory widow, who in 1774 succeeded her husband, Richard Draper, as editor of the News-Letter, the first and last paper in colonial
327
WOMEN SOLDIERS
Boston. Richard turned the paper into a partisan loyalist journal. When the British occupied Boston, Margaret, backed by the reigning authorities, acted as the military editorial mouthpiece. Her star set when Washington forced Howe to evacuate Boston. She fled to Halifax and died a few years later in England.
WOMEN SOLDIERS
Only one Revolutionary woman soldier is recorded in Massachusetts; but she has become an historic figure. Ro- mantic tradition has been busy with her career, but credita- ble records establish the following facts. From a spirit of adventure, patriotism, or disappointment in love, Deborah Sampson, aged twenty-one, descendant of William Brad- ford, left her home in Middleboro in May, 1782. In man's attire, as Robert Shurtliff, she enlisted for three years in the Continental Army. Mustered in at Worcester, she joined the active forces at West Point. She fought in several engagements, and proved herself alert, gallant, and fearless under fire. After nearly a year and a half of serv- ice, she was wounded; her sex was discovered in the hospital at Philadelphia. Returning home, honorably discharged, she found herself "excommunicated" from the First Baptist Church at Middleboro. She married Benjamin Gannett, lived in Sharon, had children, was pensioned by Massachu- setts, and in 1805, by order of the Secretary of War, was placed on the pension list of the United States. Deborah died in 1827. A decade later her husband Benjamin, who had not fought, petitioned the United States for a pension and received it on the ground that he was the relict of a Revolutionary soldier.
Other women aided the patriotic cause in methods no less militant. The United States treasury records reveal the names of thirty-four Massachusetts women who not only held bills of the emissions of May 20, 1777, and of April 11, 1778, but later exchanged them for United States bonds. One fearless patriot having bought bonds on previous occasions, deposited twenty-three thousand dollars in the federal treasury in a single day.
328
WOMEN OF THE REVOLUTION
A STATEMAN'S WIFE
The intangible contribution of women to the success of the Revolution was as significant as their material aid. To this the leading Massachusetts statesman testified. John Adams, a lover of truisms-when he himself uttered them- in 1777 reminded Abigail how he had often remarked to her "that upon examining the biography of illustrious men you will generally find some female about them in the relation of mother, or wife, or sister, to whose instigation a great part of their merit is to be ascribed. . A smart wife would have put Howe in possession of Philadelphia a long time ago." When Abigail had withstood the shock of bom- bardment, the siege of Boston, the scourge of dysentery, and, on a shortage of labor and funds, had successfully run the farm and fed and clothed her household, she wrote October 25, 1777: "This day, dearest of friends, completes thirteen years since we were solemnly united in wedlock. Three years of this time we have been cruelly separated. I have patiently, as I could, endured it with the belief that you were serving your country."
In four months she was asked to consent to his departure as an American Envoy to France; and both thought that eleven-year-old Johnny Quincy should accompany him. For four months she had no word of their safe arrival. After a year and a half she wrote: "Six months have already elapsed since I heard a syllable from you or my dear son." It was a joyful day when the two came home in August, 1778. But John was ordered to return immediately to France, and this time he took with him John Quincy and Charles. Though Abigail abetted their going, John had hardly left before she sat down to pour out her heart to him:
"Dearest of Friends,-My habitation, how disconsolate it looks! My table, I sit down to it, but cannot swallow my food! Oh, why was I born with so much sensibility, and why possessing it, have I so often been called to struggle with it. ... I cannot resign more than I do unless life itself were called for."
When the separation had lengthened to three years and the date of reunion was still unsure, she rose to the height of patriotism. Some one asked her if she would have con-
329
LOYALISTS AND PATRIOTS
sented to Mr. Adams's leaving her if she had known how long he would have to remain abroad.
"If I had known, sir," she replied, "that Mr. Adams could have effected what he has done, I would not only have submitted to the absence I have endured, painful as it has been, but I would not have opposed it, even though three years more should be added to the number (which Heaven avert!)"
Her ideal, if not her experience, was that of scores of Massachusetts women. Thus Mercy Warren wrote James Warren :
"If the public service can be promoted by your making a journey to Connecticut, I will not make the least objec- tion to your going. I need not say how tedious is your absence, but the Great Lessons of self-denial and resigna- tion are what the present generation are admonished to learn." And Mrs. Farley, with two soldier sons, watched her sixteen-year-old boy, Robert, enlist, helped him buckle on his equipment, and bade him, "Behave like a man."
WOMEN LOYALISTS AND PATRIOTS
Today American women are organizing to bring about permanent peace in the world. Possibly independent of Whig or Tory sentiment, an anti-war feeling existed in Revolutionary Massachusetts. Certainly the Massachusetts women in the Revolution were the very opposites of pacifists. Their militant ardor is the more remarkable in that the war, because it was a civil war, brought an additional burden of sorrow and sacrifice. No one may read Hannah Lincoln's vigorous letter to her brother, Samuel Quincy, the loyalist, without freshly realizing the anguish of soul caused by a challenge to political principles. Love of parents, brothers, sisters, even exile from wife and children and from a life- time's association were minor items in human experience. What plumbed the depths of men and women was: "Shall it be loyalty to the King? Or loyalty to Liberty and the rights of man?"
Hannah Lincoln before her marriage had been the able, thoughtful, Hannah Quincy, whom John Adams at twenty- three admired and believed he might have married but for an
.
330
WOMEN OF THE REVOLUTION
interruption to a solitude à deux which he thought would have ended in courtship. Her brothers, Edmund, Samuel, and Josiah, like John Adams were stars in the galaxy of bril- liant young Massachusetts lawyers. Edmund and Josiah, in laboring for the patriot cause, burned out like candles. Sam- uel, Solicitor of the Crown, astonished his friends by siding with the King. Before July, 1775, he cast his wife and their two young sons upon her brother's generosity, and fled to England. The Massachusetts Act of Banishment of 1778 included him, and he never came home. His wife died in Massachusetts before the peace was signed.
Meanwhile, Josiah's name was on the patriot tongues for his brilliant speech in Old South Meeting House, in 1773, the last formal speech made by anyone before the tea was de- stroyed. Years later an old man told how he saw Josiah's young widow and her little son drive past the British troops in their "scarlet uniforms sprinkled with gold" in the last carriage which General Gage permitted to pass over the neck of Boston. The old merchant, Josiah Quincy, the father of them all, was obliged to take refuge with his daughter Han- nah in the Nashua Valley. The history of his family was no nine days' wonder, and Hannah's impassioned letter to her loyalist brother probably voiced the emotions of scores of other Massachusetts women, whose families the Revolu- tion tore apart forever.
FRIVOLOUS WOMEN
Some investigators into Revolutionary conditions fail to find in Massachusetts the conventional "lady" of the eighteenth century. Even in seventeenth-century Massa- chusetts Margaret Winthrop was not the only woman well born, gently bred, who had never labored for hire, nor even considered permitting her daughters to go out in service. If when actively engaged in managing her household she lent a hand in the work, she was not deviating from the practice of the Southern plantation mistress, universally ac- cepted as "the lady," though one of the hardest worked figures in the aristocratic system of Virginia. To be sure, Sewall, a member of a leading Massachusetts family, in his famous diary, wrote that his eighteen-year-old sister Jane
331
FASHIONABLE AMUSEMENTS
was planning to leave Newbury to serve as maid in a Bos- ton family. Whatever the earlier situation, when Abigail Smith and her contemporaries came on the stage, prosperous commercial Boston had a group of women who might almost have come within the English definition of lady.
According to an English visitor in Boston in 1740, the mothers of many Revolutionary women were taught music and dancing as well as sewing "and every other qualification that might render them agreeable." A few families kept a coach and four, several drove a pair of horses, but in the number of chaises and saddle horses they "outdid London."
FASHIONABLE AMUSEMENTS
In 1756, a New Yorker, Captain Francis Goelet, while awaiting the repairs of his ship, spent the autumn in Boston or its neighborhood, and he painted a "very rosy picture" of Boston society. "He was a guest of the Wendells, and he takes pains to state that the Company, on the various out- ings in which he disported himself were the first people in the town. There were dances, whist parties and rides to nearby towns for supper."
A young Massachusetts gentleman, a few years later, in exalted mood wrote: "Let others waste the bloom of life at the card or billiard table, among rakes and losses, and when their minds are sufficiently fretted with and influenced by wine, ramble through the streets, assaulting innocent people, breaking windows, or debauching young girls."
This same young man (our venerated John Adams) could not resist the frivolities which the times offered to a promis- ing bachelor of twenty-two. "Here are two nights and one day and a half spent in a softening, enervating, dissipating series of hustling, prattling, poetry, love, courtship, mar- riage," he groaned on January 3, 1759, after the New Year's frolicking at the gay Quincys', the daughters of a substan- tial retired merchant who lived in Braintree. Eighteenth-cen- tury Massachusetts was not wholly Puritan, nor even wholly English, and the non-Puritan English stock, as well as the French and Irish strains, may help to account for the fri- volity which certainly existed in the Province and in the Revolutionary Commonwealth.
332
WOMEN OF THE REVOLUTION
Even an inland town, like Leicester, might have its gay set of men and women. A note copied from a private diary and quoted in Historical Sketches of Leicester gives this startling information: "In January, 1772, the Club met at -Tavern and drank and played cards and quarrelled all night. They met again in February and carried on the same game; and in March they met and staid till Tuesday night; and they gave D's wife a mug of flip to kiss B. The names of some of these are W. B. R. and others. And on 23d May there was fiddling and dancing kept up in said tavern; and in July 5, the same again: all which is against law."
We have already noticed how Abigail Smith when hardly out of the nursery made up her mind that it was the pos- session of wealth which made a girl a belle. When priva- tion and death ravaged Boston, the Tory ladies did not resign their balls. And when the patriot ladies inherited the town they did not abandon the Tory social tradition, though their opportunity for exercising it in war time might be limited. "Piety is not the only motive that brings the American ladies in crowds to the various places of worship," wrote the Abbé Robin of Boston women in 1781. "Deprived of all shows and public diversions whatever, the church is the grand thea- tre."
The virtuous abbé was mistaken in thinking that the Boston ladies of this period had no diversions. On October 29, 1778, John Rowe wrote in his diary: "General Han- cock invited all the gentlemen of the French fleet to a grand ball at Concert Hall. Many gentlemen and ladies of the town were there and made a good showing." The Han- cock ball was the return courteous, perhaps, for the "ele- gant" dinner which the Count D'Estaing had given Boston society on board the Languedoc. Certainly balls and din- ners were given in Boston, and informal parties, including wedding feasts.
THE MASSACHUSETTS GIRL
When that young prodigy, John Quincy Adams, came back to America to finish his academic training at Harvard, he wrote long letters to his sister Abby, still in Europe, in which
333
WOMEN IN POLITICS
one gets an interesting picture of the frivolous Massachu- setts girl of 1785: "I have been grieved," wrote the sopho- more, "to see the education given to numbers of young ladies. They talk of the follies and fopperies of Europe, but I think we go much farther than they do, we have no theatres and masquerades, I own, but there are assemblies, concerts, and balls and visits, which appear to me the most ridiculous method of killing time that was ever invented. . . . [Girls] think it beneath them to know anything but to dance and talk scandal! In this last particular they have attained great perfection. They are carried into company when they are far too young; and are taught if they can talk nonsense very fluently, and sit very straight and upright five hours together in one chair, they will be most accomplished women."
As to the beauty of these frivolous Massachusetts girls, there was but one opinion. A cosmopolite, an intimate of Thomas Jefferson, watched the dancing in the assemblies in Boston Concert Hall, and thought that in no other city in the world would one meet as many charming women on one occasion. And young Adams saw so much beauty that he grew blasé over it. "Many of them [at a dancing party at Mystic] were handsome," he wrote Abby, "but fe- male beauty is so universal in this country that I pay little attention to it."
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.