Stripped and Script: Loyalist Writers of the American Revolution by Kacy Dowd Tillman (review)

Comprising five chapters with an introduction and an afterword, Kacy Dowd Tillman’s Stripped and Script reads letters and manuscripts of eight women from the Mid-Atlantic region, generally described as “Loyalists” during the American Revolution: Grace Growden Galloway, Sarah Logan Fisher, Elizabeth Drinker, Margaret Hill Morris, Anna Rawle, Rebecca Shoemaker, Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, and Deborah Norris Logan. As Tillman (associate professor of English at the University of Tampa) pointed out in a 2012 book review, “unlike scholars of French, Italian, and British literature, critics of American literature largely have overlooked letter writing as an important means of authorship worthy of study in its own right.”¹

Tillman’s book shows the power women exercised through their letters. Based on extensive archival research, particularly in the Pennsylvania area, Stripped and Script capably depicts ways gender molded how her subjects perceived sources of authority and the threats around them, as well as the ways in which their womanhood allowed them to work in ways men could not. The book also includes a fascinating description of the physical realities of letter-transport in wartime, and the important role women had as conveyers of information across enemy lines.

Tillman’s subjects demonstrate clear political sentiments and agency in their writings, crafting a unique perspective on the war. Through study of their writings, Tillman seeks both to expand our understanding of who constituted the Loyalists, and to tell these women’s stories in their own words. She shows how her women could use their compositions to craft identities for themselves, even swaying public opinion. This is clear in her discussion of Anna Rawle’s efforts to smuggle wartime information across enemy lines in her letters to her mother, and Loyalist Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson’s successful efforts, through her letters and a 788-line poem, to recast herself as a tragically abandoned Patriot wife. Tillman also shows different gradations political allegiance could take, particularly among women never provided the opportunity to make (or forced into making) men’s clear statements of allegiance.

Via vivid details, the book succeeds in truly humanizing its subjects. The chapter openings are particularly charming, recapturing odd moments from Tillman’s quest to track down the lives of her women, such as her foiled attempt to gain access to Grace Growden Galloway’s house, or the moment when, as an undergraduate, Tillman first noted ellipses in a published letter, and how her curiosity at what was missing ultimately led her to archival research and her subsequent career.

While Tillman has a deep and evocative understanding of her subjects, an overall understanding of the historical context would assist her descriptions of their experiences. Joseph Galloway was not merely an “intelligence officer” during the British occupation of Philadelphia; he was the civilian commander (26). While the “Spanktown Yearly Meeting” letter was a hoax, it is unlikely “Congress fabricated the hoax,” as Tillman claims (49). Numerous legal cases involving rape during this period contest the assertion, “most people in the eighteenth century assumed that women could not be raped because sex did not require their consent” (62). British troops were winning, not “retreating,” from New York at the end of 1776 (78–79). When, on December 17, 1777, Elizabeth Drinker was told by a British major that she should accept him and his men as boarders, lest she wind up with “Foreign Troops” in her house (67), the major didn’t mean the “rebels,” he meant the Hessians; the Continental Army was not present during the British occupation.

Occasionally, Tillman appears to exaggerate the physical danger her subjects faced. While noting that Loyalists, like Patriots, used “rhetoric of rape—of the violated house and of the people in it—to frame the rebels, their supporters, and their cause as dishonorable, dangerous, and immoral” (3), she fails to note that it was also often overblown and hyperbolic. In several places (including the title), the book...