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FTER AMERICA FOUGHT the Revolution and formed a new nation, the really hard work began. It was easier for people from the different parts of the country to come together when they were fighting a common enemy— Great Britain. But once the original thirteen states were on their own, with a government to form and a country to run, the arguments started. One argument got settled pretty quickly: the question of where the nation’s capital would be. A new city would be built on the banks of the Potomac River. It came to be called Washington, District of Columbia, and when the government moved there everyone was a newcomer. The politicians and their wives left family and friends to settle this strange new place, and some of them wrote lots of letters about the experience. That’s one way we know about history, from letters. And women’s letters are especially good at giving us the whole picture—not just what was happening in politics but also what the children were up to and what everyone was wearing: “her arms were uncovered,” clucked Rosalie Calvert about a daring younger woman. The letters women wrote could be pretty funny in their remarks about the important men they knew as husbands and sons, fathers and friends, men we know as the Founding Fathers. “Mr. Madison was a very small man,” according to John Quincy Adams’s wife, Louisa, “with a very large head.” But we also learn about the past from the records people kept as they organized societies or opened schools. Women did much of that work. Mother Elizabeth Seton, for instance, started the parochial school system in America. Reform-minded women like Eliza Hamilton and Rebecca Gratz understood that even as the country was growing and many people were thriving, not everyone was doing well. So they protected widows and orphans, and they fed the hungry and found jobs for the needy. Happily for us, they recorded what they were doing, so we can learn about their activities more than two hundred years later. Journals also teach a great deal about the women who came before us. Women who traveled west often kept diaries of their difficult journeys. Nineteen-year-old Margaret Dwight described one inn where she spent the night: “it serves for a tavern, a store & I should imagine hog’s pen, stable & everything else.” And the most famous journals, the ones kept by the explorers Lewis and Clark, introduce us to the remarkable Native American teenager Sacagawea, who greatly contributed to the success of the expedition across the continent. And then there are the books written by the women of the time. Some were fun to read: bestselling novels like Hannah Foster’s The Coquette. Others like Hannah Crocker’s Observations on the Real Rights of Women were less fun but still interesting because women were starting to discuss their proper place in this new country. These women were not allowed to vote. Married women could not own property. Even their clothes and jewelry belonged to their husbands. So women started thinking about their rights, while some of them also worked for the rights of the men and women trapped in the system of slavery. In this book you’ll meet a few of the women who helped keep the brand-new United States together, working to make it a nation where everyone could pursue the happiness promised when America declared independence and proclaimed its freedom from tyranny. That’s why I call them Ladies of Liberty.
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1727 The Ursuline nuns
arrive in New Orleans from France and establish the first school for girls in America, which was also the first Catholic school in what would become the United States. They also teach African and Native Americans.
1806 Eliza Hamilton works
with Isabella Graham to form the Orphan Society Asylum in New York, which is still helping children today.
1809 James Madison
1746 Native American
raid on white settlers in Massachusetts inspires Lucy Terry Prince to compose the first African American poem, “The Bars Fight.”
1810 Margaret Dwight
becomes president, and Elizabeth Seton establishes the first American order of nuns, who run schools, hospitals, and orphanages.
travels by wagon to Ohio as one of the women helping settle the West.
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1790 Judith Sargent
Murray’s On the Equality of the Sexes starts people talking about women’s rights.
1814 The British invade
Washington, frightening letter writers Sarah Seaton and Rosalie Calvert. But the American victory a few months later in New Orleans cheers Louisa Livingston.
1797 Isabella Graham
starts the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children, and Hannah Foster publishes the bestselling novel The Coquette. Both aim to better women’s position.
1817 James Monroe
becomes president after a career in politics, including ambassador to France. There his wife, Elizabeth, helps get Madame de Lafayette out of jail.
1799 Hannah Adams’s New England history adds to her reputation as an author and helps make her the first woman in America to support herself by writing.
1818 Sacred
Heart nun Philippine Duchesne opens the first free school west of the Mississippi River, Hannah Crocker publishes her views on the real rights of women, and Fanny Wright shocks the country.
1801 Thomas Jefferson
becomes president and makes friends with Margaret Bayard Smith, who writes about Washington for more than forty years. Jefferson’s daughters come to visit the next year.
1819 Rebecca Gratz
starts a society for Jewish women, one of her several social service agencies, many of them aimed at helping fellow Jews.
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1805 Sacagawea helps Lewis and Clark on the expedition across the country to find out what Jefferson bought in the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.
1821 Emma Willard
opens her academy for girls; Daughters of Africa do good works in Philadelphia, where Lucretia Mott also comes to preach against slavery.
1825 John Quincy
Adams becomes president after his wife, Louisa, works for his election. She has helped her husband succeed throughout his political and diplomatic careers.
Lucy Terry Prince “In this remarkable woman there was an assemblage of qualities rarely to be found among her sex,” one newspaper said about Lucy Prince after she died. It was unusual for newspapers to write about women at all in 1821. It was even more unusual for a woman who was a former slave. Brought from Africa when she was a tiny child, Lucy witnessed a raid by Native Americans on the white settlers of Deerfield, Massachusetts. Her verses about that event, called “The Bars Fight,” make up the first known poem by an African American. Lucy recited the poem out loud instead of writing it down, and she became known as a “singer of history.” The poet married Abijah Prince, was freed from slavery, and moved to Vermont, where the couple raised six children. At least one of their sons fought in the Revolutionary War. Written records tell us those facts. Other stories about Lucy’s speaking skills have been handed down over the years. When her family’s land had been illegally claimed by a neighbor, Lucy won it back in court, and some history books quote Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase saying that Mrs. Prince “made a better argument than he had ever heard from a lawyer in Vermont.” In another often-told tale, Lucy tried to convince Williams College to accept her son as a student. Supposedly she talked to the men who ran the college for three straight hours, quoting many verses from the Bible, but they still rejected her son because he was black.
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H
ere are some verses from “The Bars Fight”:
Eunice Allen see the Indians coming And hoped to save herself by running; And had not her petticoats stopped her, The awful creatures had not cotched her.
The words are spelled the way they were when the poem was published in 1855, more than one hundred years after Lucy first composed it. Before then, people spoke it aloud and memorized it. Lucy Prince was a widow for twenty-seven years before her death at age ninety-seven. Every year until she died she traveled by horseback to visit her husband’s grave. The newspaper story about her life said, “She was much respected among her acquaintance, who treated her with a degree of deference.”
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