I Have Don . . . much to Carrey on the Warr": Women and the Shaping of Republican Ideology After the American Revolution

"I Have Don . . . much to Carrey on the Warr" Women and the Shaping of Republican Ideology After the American Revolution* Linda K. Kerber I take my title from what I think is the most moving witness to the American Revolution left to us by a woman: the petition of Rachel Wells of Bordentown, New Jersey, to the Continental Congress.1 Wells faced the loss of the repayment of her war bonds due to a technicality. To the Honnorabell Congress 1 rachel do make this Complaint, Who ama Widow far advanced in years & Dearly have ocasión of ye Interst for that Cash I Lent the States. I was a Sitisen in ye jearsey when I Lent ye State a considerable Sum of Moneys & had I justice dun me it mite be Suficiant to suporte me in ye Contrey whear I am now. . . .Now gentelmen is this Liberty, had it bin advertised that he or She that Moved out of the Stat should lose his or her Interest you mite have sum plea against me. But I am Innocent, Suspected no Trick. I have Don as much to Carrey on the Warr as maney that Sett Now at ye healm of government. . . . god has Spred a plentif ull tabel for us & you gentelmen are ye Carvers for us pray forgit not the Poor weaklings . . . Why Not Rachel Wells have a Littel intrust? if She did not fight she threw in all her mite which bought ye Sogers food & Clothing & Let Them have Blankets. . . . Rachel Wells could not spell, but she had a high level of political consciousness. She had been deeply engaged in the war. She knew where her money had gone and for what it had been used. She had a clear sense of what was due to her. But the position she was forced to assume was that of a supplicant. The political community fashioned by the American war was a deeply gendered community, one in which all white adults were citizens but in which men's voices were politically privileged. For men, political institutions —the army, the militia, the state legislatures, the Continental Congress , organizations of artisans—facilitated collective experience. A notable male elite—its patriarchal character encoded in its identification as the Founding Fathers—articulated political republicanism and embedded it in successive manifestos and institutions, acting in the name, they said, of all Americans, though they certainly did not formally consult women of any race or class, any black men, and, only rarely, propertyless white men. There ©1990 JOURNAL OF WOMEN'S HISTORY, VOL. 1 NO. 3 (WINTER)__________________ *This is an abridged version of an essay to be included in Darline Gay Levy and Harriet Applewhite, eds, Womf« and Politics in the Age of Democratic Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990) 232 JOURNAL OF WOMEN'S HISTORY WINTER was no female counterpart of the Founding Fathers. American women shared many experiences but only occasionally formalized their collective response or articulated their reactions as a group or on behalf of more than one. It has not been easy for historians to say much that is reliable about American women in the revolutionary era—either about their behavior or about their understanding of what that behavior meant. Reading the history of the American Revolution from the perspective of women is a little like entering the world of Tom Stoppard's Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a world that has been turned inside out so that we can pay attention to voices that were present in the original telling but overpowered by the narrator's choice of central characters. There is much merit to thinking of the era as an "age of the democratic revolution" and to melding the French and American upheavals into a single set of shared events on a large scale. Lafayette's career alone may furnish all the proof we need of the merits of that approach. But there were also enormous differences between the political cultures of the two revolutions, differences that are underscored by the sharp differences in women's behavior. French women were early to claim their political tongues, beginning with the cahiers of the flower sellers of Paris and proceeding through Olympe de...