The delegates are enjoying their usual Sunday recess, many using the time to write letters to friends and family back home. Still under the rule of secrecy, there is little they can report. Richard Spaight wrote to his friend Richard Iredell that the Convention has “agreed on the outlines of a plan of government,” but could reveal nothing more. James Madison simply told his inquiring father which States are and are not in attendance and sent him a few newspapers, “not because they are interesting but because they may apply the want of intelligence that might be more so.”
Personal letters are a rich source of material for historians, providing candid windows into the past and offering deeper, personal understanding of the people who wrote them and the times in which they were written. Elbridge Gerry’s letters to Ann, his young wife of less than two years, are delightful and reveal the happiness he has found with “my lovely girl.” They also reveal to some extent the relationship between Elbridge and Ann and the role of women in today’s society.
All of the delegates to the Convention are men. Most are married, many married for the second time following the death of their first wife. Men generally marry in their mid-twenties and women near the age of twenty. Women are expected to manage their household and children, but that simple description devalues both the role of wife and mother as well as women themselves. Their impact is much greater. Nevertheless, the legal status of women is not equal to that of men. In fact, Sir William Blackstone, the great English jurist, wrote in 1765 that “when the man and woman are married, they are considered one person…the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage.”
The prolific exchange of letters between Abigail and John Adams is not only a treasure trove for historians, it reveals Abigail’s loftier view of both marriage and the law. As the colonies were edging closer to breaking with Great Britain, on March 31, 1776, Abigail wrote to her husband from their home in Braintree, Massachusetts, “I long to hear that you have declared independence – and 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 of representation.”.
The reality of women’s lives is often much richer, frequently more dreary, and certainly more complicated than the law presupposes. Women were active in the revolution, managing businesses and farms when the men were fighting, leading boycotts of British goods, sewing uniforms, melting down metal for bullets, spying, and even taking up arms. Ester de Berdt created the Daughters of Liberty to protest the Stamp Act and later British impositions, boycotting British tea and drinking “liberty tea,” brewed from leaves of raspberries. Kate Barry, the “female Paul Revere,” warned the American militia the British were approaching before the Battle of Cowpens. Debra Sampson served in the Continental Army disguised as a man while others manned the cannons when their husbands fell wounded or killed. Hundreds of women and their children followed their men to the battlefields and encampments to cook, nurse and provide whatever support they could.
Women work in their husband’s occupations operating ferry boats, keeping boarding houses, managing merchant businesses, printing, and even managing prisons. Few women work outside the home to support themselves and their children, but among those who do are teachers, preachers, writers, storekeepers and doctors. On the farm, there is little that the wife does not do in the home and in the fields.
The lives of most women are bound closely to their husband’s, including those of the wives of the delegates to the Convention, but they bring their own special contributions to the marriage partnership. Rebecca Minot Prescott is the second wife of Roger Sherman. Sherman’s first wife, Elizabeth Hartwell, bore seven children before dying in 1760. Together, Rebecca and Roger had eight more children, bringing the brood to fifteen. Rebecca’s close friend is Betsy Ross who let Rebecca sew three of the stars on the original United States flag. Rebecca was later chosen to make the first official flag of Connecticut.
Susanna and William Livingston of New Jersey have a family of thirteen. Married in 1745, they built an estate named Liberty Hall, appropriate to the narrow escapes from the British Susanna and their adult daughters managed in the latter days of 1776. Two years earlier, their eldest daughter, Sarah, married a young New York lawyer named John Jay who will eventually be appointed Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.
The marriage between Elizabeth “Eliza” Schuyler and Alexander Hamilton is a true love match as well as a boon to Alexander’s social standing. Eliza takes interest in philanthropic endeavors, supporting orphanages and relief for poor widows and children. They met and married in the throes of the Revolutionary War and their family will grow to eight children.
Elizabeth Mullen’s marriage to New Jersey’s David Brearly had a very different beginning. Elizabeth’s father died when she was young, and she was raised by a single mother. At the age of eighteen, Elizabeth eloped with the son of the Earl of Carhampton. Henry Lawes Luttrell, and they ran off to England. Because they were both underage, the marriage was not legal. Her mother pursued them and brought Elizabeth back to New Jersey, but Luttrell continued on to England. Months later, Elizabeth gave birth to a daughter. When she married David Brearly, he raised the child as his own. Together they had four other children.
The lives and stories of colonial women and those living through the Confederation period are as varied and interesting as those of the men, just not as well-known and less understood. Abigail Adam’s advice to “remember the women” can serve us well.