Transcript for 380 The Tory's Wife

Ben Franklin's world is a production of Colonial Weemsberg Innovation Studios because she wrote so many letters to her husband, John, who was away from home. If John and Abigail had lived together during the American Revolution, Abigail Adams would probably be a historical nobody because we wouldn't have the letters.

Well, it's a pleasure to be here, Liz.

Sure, well, they were born in Maryland in the 1730s. They were both of English, ethnic origin. In fact, Williams' father had come over from England as convict labor as a young man and settled in Maryland. James family origins were a little bit more respectable than that. Jane and William married also in Maryland sometime in the early 1750s and then they came to the North Carolina backcountry specifically Rowan County by around 1757 and when they went there they were among the thousands of people who travel from places like Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, down what was known as the Great Wagon Road to settle in the Carolina backcountry and they went there mostly because land was cheaper. They often traveled in neighborhood groups or in family groups, and that was certainly the case with Jane and William. Her brothers came, his brothers came, both of them had parents who were living who came as well. And they had one child born when they left Maryland. And by the time everything was set and done, and they were finished with their family, they had 13 children in all. The last two of whom were born during the war, the last one was born in 1780.

Yeah, that's right. And in the Spurgeon's case, when William's father died, there were three sons, the father left all the land to William, who was the eldest son. And at some point, not long thereafter, the family decided that if they all moved together, all three of the brothers could get land and they could get more of it. William ended up with three times as much land in North Carolina that he had in Virginia. I mean, the problem was, of course, that it was land that needed to be cleared. So there's a lot of, you know, labor investment on the front ends. But I think that that's one of the reasons why people might have traveled in family groups because they would work together to clear the land. The terrain in the Carolina backcountry was hilly, but it was good for farming, mostly wheat. And as many of your listeners probably know, wheat was a really important cash crop in the 18th century. And that's what these people had grown in places like Pennsylvania and Maryland. and they came to North Carolina and to South Carolina to do kind of the same sort of agriculture. So these aren't people who are settling in the east and growing things like rice and tobacco, they're settling in what today would be called the Peabon region and they're growing grain at this point for the most part.

No, not to any great extent at all, particularly initially. So these are mostly people who they're not poor, but they're, I guess what we would call middling or middle class sort of people who only end for the most part in places like Pennsylvania and Maryland in Virginia, where they're doing this kind of mixed agriculture. that they would have been doing, but if they had remained back in England or Scotland or kind of wherever they came from. So the area was populated with these people who were used to doing that kind of agriculture where you would have grown crops, both for subsistence and for trade, you also would have had livestock If you were particularly wealthy or had capital to invest, you might have had a mill for grinding grain, you might have had a soil mill because obviously they're cutting down all these trees. They need to use them to build their houses. But the kind of agriculture that they're doing is not as, quote unquote, labor intensive as rice or tobacco. They're doing orchards. They're doing dairying. They're doing all of these other sorts of things. There is a fairly small, I mean, very small by the standards of the Southern colonies and slave population in Roan County at the time of the American Revolution and that would go for the other back country counties of Anston and Orange as well. And in the case of the spurgeons, the record is a little bit sketchy, but it looks like at some point they may have had one or possibly two and slave men working for them. It's not at all clear to me whether they were working for them sequentially or simultaneously. There are some wealthier men in the area who do acquire a larger and slave workforce, but by larger, quote unquote, we're talking maybe about five or six people, nothing at all on the scale that you would see in the rice plantations in the eastern Carolina, is there even on the larger plantations in Virginia to be a member of the quote unquote wealthy class in the Carolina backcountry looked very different than it would have looked in say, typewater Virginia at this time.

Basically, the culture that developed is the one that had developed maybe decades earlier and places like Pennsylvania and Maryland in Virginia. And here I'm talking about the parts of Pennsylvania, Maryland in Virginia that coincide with, you know, more or less interstate 81 today, right? So on the east side of the mountains, But still west of places like Williamsburg and Richmond in Baltimore and places like that. And the culture is, I guess, first and foremost, really ethnically diverse, even if you're just talking about white people. There were English people or people of English extraction like the Spurgins. There were lots of Germans, most notably the Moravians who have big settlements in both Pennsylvania and in North Carolina. And there were also lowland scots who historians tend to call the Scotch Irish or the Scotch Irish. So these were not the highland scots who settled in the eastern part of North Carolina, but rather these are the scots from the lowlands who are Presbyterian who come in large numbers to Pennsylvania in particular And then successive generations migrate southward into Maryland, Virginia, and then eventually into the Carolinas. So it's an ethnically diverse population. It is an agricultural population, but it is a population also. that is very much connected to the market society of the larger world. So one of the first things that happens when they set up a county government in row and county is they're like, okay, we need roads. If we're going to make a living growing wheat, we can't just like sit around eating wheat. We got to sell it to people and the way that we do that is we have roads that are going to connect us to places like Wilmington and Charleston, which are the ports that can send this wheat down to the British Caribbean islands where they're growing sugar and they need to import their food or send it to Europe. So they are connected with the larger world in that way. It's a society and a culture that is less connected to the larger world in terms of what we would think about as print culture. I mean, a newspaper might trickle in now and then mostly actually from Williamsburg because there's not any newspaper anywhere in North Carolina. until the mid-1760s, and it's pretty spotty. It kind of comes and goes. It's not a consistent source of news or information. So there is this connection with the larger world that the connection is mostly by trade. The other thing that I guess is significant about this culture, and this is related to the ethnic diversity, is the enormous religious diversity. Again, white Protestant, but still, you know, with under that umbrella, a very diverse population, but at the same time, largely unchurched. So there are maravians and they have their ministers, but there are Baptists, there are Presbyterians, there are Church of England people. And for quite some time, most of these denominations are sort of tending to religion on their own, which would not have been the case when they were living in places like Maryland and Virginia. So in that way, when they moved to North Carolina even though you know arguably they're trying to replicate the world they left behind only with more land for everybody. There are some distinctions and I think that the sort of relative lack of connectedness and relative lack of religious authorities would be two sort of distinctive aspects of that culture.

So the regulators were farmers in the backcountry who resented the corruption of local officials. And by local officials, I mean primarily the justices of the peace who were like the magistrates and really besides being the judges on the local court kind of ran all of the local government in the area as would have been the case in any rural area in colonial America. And these justices of the peace in Rowan County were for the most part of kind of middling social origins. And they had come to the backcountry like William Spurgeon had to get ahead. But some of them were just incredibly ambitious, ruthless in terms of how they were going to get ahead and how they were going to accumulate properties. So they would impose fraudulent fees on farmers. They would take money to register land titles and then never register the land titles. They would impose high and very inequitable sorts of taxes, which again hit these kind of poor and middling farmers kind of hardest. The farmers who became disgruntled and who became regulators also resented the fact that the Western parts of North Carolina, which was, in other words, the back country, had minimal representation of the colonial assembly. And part of the reason for that was that the population of the area grew so rapidly that there was no real attempt to sort of reallocate representation and make a commensurate with the areas quickly growing population. So the regulators were angry. So what do you do when you're angry? Well, first you try doing things sort of pieceably, you petition, you protest. And when that doesn't work, you occasionally stage a small riot. There was one instance in which the county authorities were going to take this farmer's cow because he hadn't paid his taxes. So there's a small uprising to sort of protect the farmer and protect his cow. This did not sit well with the local authorities this kind of violent protest. It certainly didn't sit well with Governor William Trienne, who is the governor of the colony and part of his job as governor of the colony, is to keep the peace. So what Trienne does is he calls out that Colonial militia, both locally and from other parts in North Carolina, to sort of turn out to suppress the regulators. And what happens is there is a battle at Alamance. It's called the Battle of Alamance in 1771, and the regulators are suppressed by The colonial militia and several of them are actually tried and found guilty and executed as a result of that. How does this relate to the revolution? Historians have long debated the relationship between the regulators and the revolution. And in fact, a lot of people say that, oh, well, the regulators were super mad at the governor and therefore, of course, they're going to support the revolution. You know, the problem with that is that it's not really true. And my opinion, the most convincing interpretation is that most people who supported the regulators actually did not support the revolution. because the revolutionary movement was being led in the back country by the exact same people who had opposed the regulators, namely those corrupt justices of the peace and other corrupt local officials like sheriffs and constables and things like that. And I came to this conclusion actually through my very sort of specific study of the Spurgeons and of Rowan County in particular. how this sorted out might have been different in say Orange County or Answer County, but in rowing County of all of the justices of the piece and there were like over 20 of them. William Spurgeon was the only one who did not support the revolution or at least go along with it in some way. And although he was pretty quiet about it, he kind of had to be because of his position. He was also probably the only one of the justices of the piece who didn't hate the regulators. So at least for Rowan County that connection between the regulator movement and the revolution is mostly a negative one. I mean, my sense is really that most of the people who had been regulators just wanted to be left alone. But if they were forced to choose, they were not going to support the movement that was being led by these men who they had hated for a decade or more once the Revolution finally started.

There's a great quote, a really good book about colonial North Carolina is an old book called Poor Carolina by Roger E. Kirch. And he's got a quote in that book that he gets from John Adams, like the John Adams, who obviously knows a fair amount about revolutionary politics. And John Adams is hanging out in the continent of Congress with like all the people who were there, some of whom are from North Carolina. And in 1775 or 1776, John Adams comes to the conclusion that North Carolina was the only one of the colonies in which ordinary people were unlikely to support the revolutionary movement and it's because of the regulation.

Well, we don't know for sure, but Jane and William, I suspect, may have been sympathetic to the regulator. So two of Jane's brothers were involved in the movement. One of them was slated to be executed for his involvement, though he somehow escaped that fate. But William had to keep his feelings to himself because of his position as a justice to the peace. So we don't really know where he stood. But I mean, one thing I did figure out is that he was not one of the justices that the regulators routinely complained about. I mean, there are certain guys that they complained about like all the time. They never mentioned William. Another thing that I kind of figured out is that William didn't get wealthy as a result of his position as a justice to the peace unlike many of his colleagues. So he was prosperous, but he wasn't like wealthy. And a lot of the men who were on the bench did get wealthy. And from the regulators view, they got wealthy because they were engaging in these fraudulent practices. So we don't really know exactly how they fit into the regulator movement, although if I had to guess they were quietly sympathetic to it. In terms of the choices that they had to make in 1776 and that William and particular had to make in 1776, he was very successful in keeping quiet about where he stood on the whole regulator issue. When the revolution came, if you were a white man, the people who were running the revolution really wanted to sort of confirm that everyone was behind them and to punish people who weren't. And so in 1775, 1776, William had to choose and he had to choose publicly and kind of the way you did that, which you took a loyalty oath. and William repeatedly refused to do that. Why? Well, he might have remained loyal to the crown because of his previous oath of office, which was to uphold the King's laws, though that certainly didn't stop most of his colleagues as justice of the peace from sort of switching sides. And in fact, Although people took oath very seriously back then, they also did allow for the possibility of one oath superseding another. In dire circumstances, and clearly this would have qualified as circumstances that met that criteria or that definition. He might have remained loyal to the crown because he thought the colonies didn't stand a chance of winning. Surely people did that. Or he might have seen remaining loyal to the crown as his best chance for upward mobility. Here was a guy who came from Maryland. And it had really sort of risen somewhat in society by being appointed as a justice to the peace. One of the things that happens in late 1775 is North Carolina's last royal governor, whose name was Joan Siam Martin, offered William a military commission in the loyalist militia, which he accepted. When the governor basically said, go out, find some guys, and let's fight for the king. And he might have viewed this as an avenue of upward mobility. And in fact, he ended up serving for the duration of the war and he rose to the rank of Colonel. So I think for most people making these political choices was probably a combination of sort of principle and kind of what's going to be the best for me and my family, although in this case, I mean, at least eventually, Shane really disagreed with the choices that he made.

I think that's true. I love the idea of writing about obscure people who are not already sort of part of our story or our meta narrative of the American revolution. But of course one of the downsides of this is that it's even harder to know what these people were thinking, right? Because we don't have letters, we don't have diaries, we don't have anything like that. We have a couple of documents for William, a couple of documents for Jane, and we don't really know why he made the choice that he did. So I think the main trend in the literature on the American Revolution is to sort of step back and say, look, what we really need to consider is the fact that this was a brutal civil war. If you want to make that case, there are a lot of places that qualify, but in some ways the North Carolina backcountry is kind of at the head of the pack, because even though there are no major battles in the area until 1780, which is kind of incredible, right, because the war starts five years earlier. But even though there are no major battles in the area, there are skirmishes, there are raids, and we can see that the population is horribly divided, that there are people who are tourists, there are people who are wigs, there are arguably even more people who just want to be left alone, and people switch sides. They switch sides a lot. William didn't switch sides, which kind of makes him interesting, not unique, but interesting in this area.

Yeah, we mostly know about her political ideas because when the war was over and done with she was pretty angry for reasons we can get into. I think most historians study the views of men mostly because those views are so well documented, comparatively speaking. even if we're not talking about someone like Jefferson or Hamilton who left behind these huge collections of letters and even published material where they write about their political views. The revolutionary committees, as I said, forced all white men to take loyalty oaths. So even if we don't have documents from these kind of obscure white men, we at least knew where they stood, Women didn't have to go on record with their political views in that way because the authorities either assumed that women didn't know or didn't care about politics or they assumed that if women did care they would simply agree with their husbands or I guess if they weren't married they would agree with their fathers or brothers or whatever but that men were doing the leading and women if anything would be doing the following. So, at least until relatively recently, when people wanted to talk about women and politics in the American Revolution, Abigail Adams was their go-to lady. And the reason for that is obvious, right? Abigail Adams became the representative of female patriot because she wrote so many letters to her husband, John, who was away from home. If John and Abigail had lived together during the American Revolution, Abigail Adams would probably be a historical nobody because we wouldn't have the letters. So, for less famous women, or women who lived with their husbands, it's even harder to get out their political voices. And that's why I would make an argument that legislative petitions are a really good way to begin that process. I'm not the first person to make this argument, but I will say that I know about Jane because she submitted three petitions to the North Carolina legislature after the war was over. And I know about Jane because people who submit petitions generally do so because their dissatisfied angry you don't petition you don't ask for favors if you're like comfy and everything is wonderful and cool and so forth. When you submit a petition and you ask for favors or compensation or consideration or whatever, you have to articulate a reason why you are deserving of that consideration on the part of the legislature. So these documents are a good way to get at the sort of sense of political identity of ordinary women. Most of whom I have to say, don't give us a lot to go on. They're smart enough to realize that if they're asking for assistance, They are much better off telling the legislatures, oh, I'm a poor frail week woman with like 15 children and you got to help me. One of the reasons why I was so drawn to Jane is she doesn't do that. I mean, she does. She says, look, you know, I've got all these kids. I need your help. But she also articulates a kind of view of which she understands the new revolutionary political system to be in her place in it. So I would say that it's not that historians aren't interested in women and I think historians are and in fact A much better place to look for women is actually in the post-revolutionary period where people like Jane are petitioning to tie up the loose sense of revolution. Where you have this kind of explosion of print culture that includes like more magazines and newspapers than ever before, and where people actually write about, well, okay, what does the revolution need for women? Where women begin to write about what does the revolution mean for women? the petitions are a really good way to get out the experiences and the political views of women who in some cases aren't even literate because they'll dictate their issues, their problems early to a clerk or to a scribe and then they may or may not be able to sign their names. They're just a treasure trove of interesting stories. And I think a lot of us who are interested in history are kind of in it for the stories.

Well, I think certainly if the man leaves home, either to serve in Congress or serve in the military and women are left on their own, they are sort of left to figure out, okay, the British army is marching through the area. How do I deal with this? How do I protect my farm and my children and so forth and so on? Oh no, now the American army is moving through the area. What do I do? So a lot of these women, particularly in rural areas, where they would have been quite isolated from other people who might have been able to assist them in some way, they need to figure out things for themselves and I'd be willing to bet that in a lot of cases, their political allegiance or professed political allegiance was situational. This is one of the reasons why you have people changing sides during the American Revolution when in a lot of other wars as well. And if you're just kind of sitting there saying, yeah, I think the revolution is a cool thing. I'm for it. And then the British troops show up with their guns and everything and threaten all kinds of horrible things. It's like, you know, God saved the king. You know, I'll go along with that. So I think that's part of it. I think that for a woman like Jane who clearly decides at some point that, okay, he's a Tory, but I'm a wig and I am going to invite Nathaniel Green to my house and I am going to volunteer one of our sons to be his scout. That can signify one of many things. It can signify really on her part. the fact that, you know, oh my god, my husband's a Tory and therefore the wigs are messing with me. They're bothering me. What a great way to sort of safeguard my farm and my family by having the fanial greens stay with me. That's pretty airtight. No wigs are going to attack you if Nathaniel Green is staying at your house. No Tories are going to attack you because William is a major or a colonel by this point in the Tory militia. In fact, People have asked me, and how do you know that she just wasn't doing that, that she wasn't switching sides to serve her own interest in those of her family? And I would have various pieces of circumstantial evidence to support my view that at least by 1781, when she welcomes Nathaniel Greene to her house, she is very much a supporter of the revolution. The first piece of evidence comes from the mid-19th century history written by this guy named EW Carothers. Really interesting man. He's writing in the 1850s and he is an anti-slavery clergyman in North Carolina, which probably wasn't an easy thing to be in the 1850s. But he decided that he was from Rowan County and he wanted to write local histories about the revolution and the way he did it was what we would today call oral history. So he basically goes around the county and talks to all the old people he can find and say, what do you remember about the revolution? Because government records whether they're state or federal records or the archives of famous wealthy dead people, clearly aren't going to get at the kind of social history that E.W. Carothers is interested in writing. And people tell him that William Spurgeon was a big Tory and his wife was a big wig, like a big supporter of the revolution. So there's that sort of historical memory oral history. Carothers would have called them reminiscences. The other piece of evidence that I would present were comparing the language of the petitions that Jane presents after the revolution. And the ones that William presents to the royal governor of Upper Canada where he eventually ends up living and they suggest a really different political worldview. James petitions are legalistic and assertive and she ends up in her last one claiming what she calls the common rights of other citizens, which Thus, today might not sound like a big deal, but for a woman to make that assertion in public to the state legislature, the most powerful men in the state, it actually was a big deal. When William goes to Canada, he petitions the royal governor there for land. Basically saying, look, I'm a loyalist. I fought here and here and here. Give me land, please. It's this very sort of survival, your excellency, I beg you. I mean, he clearly still has that idea that the monarchy matters, that the empire matters, that there is a hierarchy, and although I'm sure he sees himself as above a lot of people in that hierarchy, he very much sees himself as being below the governor and below certainly the king as well.

Well, it was tough, and we know this mostly from her petitions, and then again, in the larger sense about the backcountry from EW Carothers Books, and he wrote two of them. Like most places in the United States, there were enormous scarcity of goods of every kind due to the British blockade and the disruption of trade and also due to military demands for provisions. So the scarcity would have been things that you couldn't buy from other people or other places. But even if you had a farm that was incredibly productive in terms of grain in terms of products from the dairy, from the orchard, from poultry, whatever. The military had huge demands for these commodities. Jane at one point says in one of her petitions that those demands were so intense that sometime her and her children were near starving, which might have been a little bit hypervaly, but maybe not. If you sold provisions to the military, you got paid in your worthless paper currency because of course this is the way the United States is running. It's war taxes were incredibly high. I mean, people in colonial America don't really pay much in the way of taxes. That changes like astronomically during the war. And in fact, in North Carolina, at least if you were a Tory or the family of a Tory, You paid quadruple taxes, or you were charged with quadruple taxes as one of the penalties of you're not being a supporter of the Revolution. Even though Janus, we know, was a supporter of the Revolution. The property was William's William was the one on the tax list, so she was required. to pay quadruple taxes and apparently that was just impossible for her at the end of the war. William appears as one of the county's tax delinquents and installments and so that's obviously not a good thing. In terms of the violence There's tons of violence in the area, even though as I said, there aren't really any major battles before 1780. So at the very beginning of the war, there's a battle in Eastern North Carolina called the Battle of Wars Creek Bridge. William is involved in that battle. The Tories lose that battle, and then everybody sort of scurries off and hides from the Patriots, so they don't get captured and he didn't get captured. After Moore's Creek Bridge, it's really not until 1780 that the kind of battles that appear in capital letters and histories of the revolution. There just aren't any. There are a lot of smaller raids. So the Tory guy living on the farm next door to you really hates you and so he's going to go steal your livestock and terrorize your family just because you know he can get away with it because of the war or vice versa right it goes both ways. There are also skirmishes. And again, in the sort of big military histories of the war don't really qualify as battles. So for anyone who's interested in military history, my book doesn't have a lot of the famous battles in it. What it has is a lot of these confrontations that in many cases don't even have names, but often pit neighbor against neighbor in ways that are really quite horrifying. So this idea of the revolution as a brutal civil war is one that most certainly applies to the Carolina backcountry and to Jane's experiences. So it's ugly.

Okay, in North Carolina and in all the other states, state governments tried to suppress dissent or convert dissenters to the side of the revolution by penalizing people who wouldn't support independence and then later the war effort. So the statutes did several things. I mean, at least on paper, one of the things that I would argue is that it's really important to know what the laws say, but that it's really important to look at the people affected by them because very often these laws weren't enforced for various reasons. So the laws number one banished people. In other words, kick them out. If you are not a supporter of the revolution, you need to leave North Carolina within X amount of time. Confiscated their property and had provisions saying that not only would the property be confiscated by the state, but then it would be sold to help finance the war. The confiscation statutes are interesting because they usually had the provision that if The man left, and the wife stayed behind, one-third of the property would be preserved for her use, which kind of echoes the common law of marriage, the English common law of marriage, which was used in colonial America and in post-revolutionary America, which said that ordinarily when a man died, his widow got the use of one-third of his property, so that's being preserved in these anti-tory laws. So it's really three things, banishment, confiscation of property and the sale of that property. One of the really interesting things is that William Spurgeon, although nobody has ever heard of him today, even in North Carolina, while until they read my book. is that it was actually an incredibly notorious story. So these anti-tory laws, they would sketch out the general provisions of the law and then they would have a list basically saying, and these are the guys that we specifically really, really, really want to punish. And William is on all of those lists. He is one of three men from Rowan County, who is consistently on all of those lists. And the list included maybe a total of 60 men in each case. So we're talking royal governors judges of the Supreme Court. All of these really important people and William makes the list. Yet, he's banished in 1777. He actually stays in North Carolina until 1790. His property is confiscated again in 1777, but yet the state never actually acted on the confiscation. He loses his property, but not to the state. He loses his property to creditors who go to court to sue him. And it's not because he's got debt. That doesn't make him a poor man. Other people probably owed money to him as well. But because he was an outlaw, he could not go to court and sue the people who owed him money. So his creditors could make him pay up. He couldn't make the people who owed him money pay up, and so these creditors got his land instead. So there are all these sort of economic penalties that are sort of employed to get people to move over to the revolutionary side, but it's really, really important to realize that the laws aren't always enforced, as I said, for various reasons, and a lot of the recent scholarship on loyalism, talks about not about North Carolina specifically, but in other states, talks about how a lot of these loyalists actually were able to return home and kind of patch things up and kind of resume their lives in their communities, which I think is really quite surprising given how nasty this war turned out to be, but apparently it was not uncommon for that to happen.

Well, I have no evidence that they did reunite actually. Certainly, they were together from time to time during the war. William spends the war basically running around with Tory militia and hiding out in the woods after they lose battles. So he doesn't get captured. And he never does get captured. But we know that he is home at least a bit because the Spurgins have two more children during the war. Two sons, the first of whom they actually name after the last royal governor of North Carolina, Josiah. And then the third one is born in 1770. But when Jane first petitions the legislature in 1785 and of course the war ends in 1781 for all intents and purposes. When Jane petitions the legislature in 1780, she says, my husband hasn't been home since the war and I don't expect him to come home either. So they didn't really reunite after the war. They lived separately. And in fact, William took up with a much younger woman who was also married by the way. So William is a father yet again in 1787 and Jane is not the mother of that new child. So they're certainly estranged by then. And we don't know exactly what happened in the kind of interim period. And I guess more importantly, we can't really know if politics drove them apart. In other words, if it's some point during the war, Williams, like, I'm a Tory and James, like, well, I'm a wig get out of here. Or on the other hand, we don't know if their relationship was already strained even before the war, and their different politics just became another expression of a pre-existing arrangement.

Oh my god, I've thought about these petitions for years. I first discovered these petitions like in the 1990s and they really stood out from all the others that I was reading because she is not saying I'm a frail weak woman with 13 children. Please help me otherwise all perish and die. She's actually making an argument eventually for her rights as a citizen and for her membership in this political community that is the state of North Carolina. I'd like to think that in a lot of ways Jane is the tip of the iceberg that a lot of women are maybe thinking these things, but they're not necessarily saying them are putting them in writing. Anyway, the three petitions she had to overlapping goals in the 1780s. Number one to prevent Williams creditors from taking the property, which was roughly 700 acres total. And number two to get the state to give her that widow's third of his estate, which the anti-Torylowe said that why should get if they stayed in the state when their husband's left, which she of course did. So in her first petition in 1785, she was very restrained, very legalistic in her language. And I think she assumed that the legislature would read her petition, they would read their law, and they would say, oh, yeah, a change to get one third of Williams property. That's what the law says. So my guess is that she was pretty shocked when they rejected her petition. I mean, that didn't happen. So three years later, in 1778, she was a bit more assertive, a bit more indignant. And she basically said, look, I've lost the family land. I'm going to be homeless. This is awful. And all of my problems are the result of Williams' bad conduct. So one of the things she says to the legislators is that she couldn't believe that the lawmakers intended to, and these are her words, make the wife and small children miserable on the account of the husbands and father's transgressions. And in other words, she is expecting the state to step in and basically say, look, this was William's fault. It wasn't Jane's fault. She's a mother with young children we need to step in and make sure that they don't become homeless and suffering as a result of his stupid political choices. She actually gets a whole bunch of men in her neighborhood to sign this petition in supportive her position. And it's interesting that the men who sign it some of the mortories, some of them are wigs, some of them probably had no politics at all, but this petition was also unsuccessful. So it's the third petition that the language to me is just so incredibly striking. It was really quite remarkable. In 1791 and her third petition, she explicitly disavowed William. In other words, she didn't just say, well, he made some bad choices. She said, I'm not like him. He was a Tory. I was always a faithful supporter of the Revolution. I was always a faithful supporter of North Carolina's war and the Patriot government. And on the basis of her loyalty and allegiance in this petition, she now claimed what she called the common rights of other citizens. Which again, that might not seem like a big deal, but it was a very bold and very unusual statement for women to make at the time, especially in public. And I have read all the revolutionary war petitions for Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, although there was a fire that destroyed most of them from Georgia. But basically, Jane is the only one to use this kind of language. And interestingly, no one remarked on her unusual language at the time. My guess is that it probably didn't win her a lot of fans. These guys are probably like, what is this woman doing? And actually, this last petition was not granted by the legislature. It wasn't rejected, but it also wasn't granted. Yet, a few months later, the state land office in North Carolina did grant her title to 400 acres in the area Abbott's Creek in Rowan County, where her and her family had lived. That land title was in her name, not Williams, and it included the land on which her house had been built, so she was not homeless as a result of that.

She was unsuccessful in the petitions, but she got what she wanted. She even got more than she wanted. 400 acres is more than a third of 700. So that's pretty cool. I don't know exactly why things worked out that way and why the situation was resolved. So quietly in other words, there's no explanation of why she got the land. There's just evidence that it in fact happened. Her story after that ends pretty quietly. She gets her land grant in 1792. She lives another 11 years and she dies in Rowan County in 1803. The story of the extended family is absolutely fascinating and kind of bizarre. So William goes off to Canada with his new woman and they had four children together and they lived in Canada as man and wife. And when William died in 1806, Anne and her sons, her sons, by William. migrated south and settled in south eastern Indiana. By then, most of William and Jane's sons had left North Carolina and they had settled in exactly the same area. And not long after that, Anne's estranged husband Solomon, in other words, the guy she left for William, also settled in South Eastern Indiana with his new woman whose name was Amy, that's all we know about her and his and Anne's four sons. So there are basically three different sets of sons who either had Anne or William as a parent all living in close proximity to each other which the super weird.

I don't think it's the coincidence. You started out talking about people migrating after the revolution and going to places like Ohio or wherever. I mean, I think a lot of historians have written about post-revolutionary migration as people being in search of economic opportunity. I actually think that's true, but that the chaos of the war and the chaos of the anti-tory laws kind of made it easier for people in bad marriages to dissolve them. So I can't prove this, but why would all of these young men, most of whom had been abandoned by their father or their mother of all the places they could choose to settle? Why would they all settle in the same area? On some level, I think they saw each other as family. They saw each other as support to kind of help clear the new land and all of that. And what I would deduce from that is that By 1790, maybe Jane and William were done, and they're kind of, well, you know, this was fun, but I'm out of here now. Maybe Anne and Solomon were as well. And free women at a Petersburg many years ago, Suzanne Levsock used to term do it yourself divorce. I think that's maybe what might be happening here. I can't prove it, but I'd like to think that all these people ending up in South Eastern Indiana was a happy ending rather than a traumatic one.

Well, there are two possibilities, I guess. Either William would have come home after the war and tried to quietly reintegrate himself back into his community, which as I said was more common than you might think. Alternatively, Jane and William would have left together for Canada. or somewhere else in Great Britain or its empire. I mean, we now know that after the revolution, there is this kind of loyalist diaspora where people end up in all sorts of places. So I guess that would have been a possibility. But from my perspective as someone who wrote this book with very limited sources, the really important thing that would have happened had Jane and William both been loyalist and had they stayed together. Is the Jane never would have submitted those petitions? And since they were the only documents that she ever generated and the only evidence of her voice without those petitions, my book could have happened and I wouldn't be talking to you and you wouldn't have asked that question. So that's to me is the really important thing that would have happened. We wouldn't know about her. There would be no reason for us to know about her. Yeah, we would have lost Jane's version's voice. We would have indeed.

Two, one of which might be of interest to your listeners, the other one probably not so much. So the one that is an early American project, when George Washington was on his way to New York City to officially take up the presidency in 1789, he did this sort of progress from Mount Vernon to New York. And one of the stops was in Trenton, New Jersey. And a lot of your listeners may have seen the career in Ives, print, and other prints of George Washington and the ladies of Trenton. If they haven't seen it, they can Google it and find it. It's really easy to find. What I'm writing is a sort of collective biography of the ladies of Trenton and also the way this particular event has been portrayed in visual culture over time right up to the 20th century and also the historical memories surrounding the event of that reception because it is the only place where the ladies or the ones in charge are receiving George Washington in their community and there are a lot of interesting reasons for that. My other project is a biography of another notable American woman, the one from the 20th century, which is like super weird for me. Lots of sources on 20th century topics. And her name was Joan Whitney Passen. She was a Whitney who was a philanthropist in New York and art collector, a venture capital, and founding owner of the New York Metz.

Pass him off, but it was a rough year.

There you go. There you go.

The best places through the Mason Web site. Email. I'm an email maniac. Love it. Answer quickly. Big fan of the empty inbox. So if anybody wants to get in touch with me, that would probably be the best way of doing it.

It was my pleasure, Liz. Fun talk. Thank you.