In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

12 The Edenton Ladies Women, Tea, and Politics in Revolutionary North Carolina Cynthia A. Kierner    In October 1774 fifty-one women from the town of Edenton and its environs resolved to support the suspension of all trade to protest the latest in a long line of unjust imperial policies. The women’s seemingly unexceptional intent—to support their men and their country—belied the novelty of their actions. By the 1770s many women knew of the colonies’ ongoing disputes with Britain, and some had participated in nonconsumption efforts to secure the repeal of objectionable laws and taxes. In Boston, women initiated a tea boycott in 1767, and some three hundred unnamed “Mistresses of Families” publicly pledged to continue to “abstain from the Use of tea” in 1770. But the Edenton women’s actions were more daring: their patriotic statement was published, along with its signers’ names, in at least two contemporary newspapers. As the first recorded case in which a group of women asserted their political principles in writing and in their own names, the Edenton episode was a pivotal moment in the history of women’s relationship to public life. Known popularly as the “Edenton Ladies’ Tea Party,” this episode is famous but also oddly elusive. Modern accounts reiterate the story of fifty-one “ladies” gathering in the home of Elizabeth King to renounce their favorite beverage by signing a statement penned by the attractive and socially prominent Penelope Barker. That handwritten document has not survived, however, and no one left letters, memoirs, or other firsthand evidence of the women’s activities. In fact, only four contemporary sources acknowledged the incident. A brief notice in the Virginia Gazette included the text of the women’s statement and a complete list of signers, as did a subsequent item that appeared in a London newspaper. The Edenton Ladies 13 Arthur Iredell, an English clergyman who read the London report, mentioned it in a letter to his brother James, who lived in Edenton. Philip Dawe, an obscure English artist, also presumably read the published account of the Edenton meeting , because he soon produced an unflattering caricature of it. This essay reconsiders these four contemporary sources, along with tax lists and other records, exposing errors in the traditional story and placing Edenton ’s female patriots in their broader historical context. While the traditional narrative presents the Edenton women as exemplars of spontaneous and genteel domestic patriotism, a careful reassessment of who they were—and what they did and said—shows that their actions were organized and purposeful and that their campaign to mobilize support for their political agenda led them to forge contacts beyond their households, even far beyond their familiar circles of family and friends. Despite their later commemoration as housebound tea-drinking ladies who stood by their men, these colonial women were assertive, adventurous , and well informed about the crisis that increasingly engulfed North Carolina and its twelve sister colonies in British America. In 1774 as the marquee events of the imperial crisis unfolded in Boston and Philadelphia, what happened in the port town of Edenton attracted little attention , at least outside the pages of the Virginia Gazette. Neither of the two Charleston newspapers mentioned the Edenton women, and it also seems unlikely that the North Carolina Gazette included coverage of their activities. Most issues of the North Carolina Gazette for 1774 have not survived, but Janet Schaw, a Scottish visitor who probably read the local paper, did not mention the Edenton women in her journal, where she often commented on local politics, including the fact that “the Ladies . . . burnt their tea in a solemn procession” in Wilmington the following spring. At any rate, though Edenton was isolated compared to Charleston and Norfolk—the busiest ports in the southern colonies —and downright rustic compared to major northern cities, it was only about eighty miles from Williamsburg, a hotbed of pre-Revolutionary activism , where the Virginia Gazette was published. Goods and people often passed between the two towns, and at least one of the signers of the women’s manifesto had personal connections in Virginia’s colonial capital. Penelope Johnston, the orphaned daughter of North Carolina governor Gabriel Johnston, resided in Williamsburg with the family of Virginia governor Robert Dinwiddie before she eloped with John Dawson in 1758 and returned to North Carolina. If Penelope Dawson retained her Williamsburg contacts, perhaps she sent the story to the editors of the Virginia Gazette, who printed the women’s entire statement on November 3...

Share