Sometimes it was a girl’s youth, sometimes a woman’s old age that made her invisible to an enemy who assumed that women, being women, were passive onlookers rather than Revolutionary participants. Not infrequently, however, American forces made the same mistake. One of General Henry Clinton’s most dependable spies, Ann Bates, spent three years visiting American army camps as a peddler, counting men, supplies, and artillery as she sold her wares.

  Most of these women spies acted on their own initiative, unable to resist or to avoid the opportunity and what they saw as their obligation to sabotage the enemy. But there were organized spy rings as well. The most elaborate of these, the Culper Ring, was based in New York, where fighting in the first year of war was fierce and the British occupation of the area was long. The ring established itself in 1778 on the strategically located Long Island Sound, which linked Connecticut and New York. At the center of the operation was a Mrs. Anna Strong, whose property, at Strong’s Neck, Long Island, lay near several inlets where supply boats from American-held Connecticut might land and remain overnight undetected. Mrs. Strong acted as a signal woman, employing the most mundane domestic chores to fulfill her assignments. When the coast was clear of British patrols, she went to her clothesline and hung her black petticoat along with an agreed-upon number of white handkerchiefs. Although the head of the ring was a man, the majority of its operatives were women, for they were better able to enter and leave occupied New York City without raising suspicion. The domestic tenor of the Culper Ring activities—its baskets of fruit and food carried to city relatives, its laundry-line messages—belied the dangers of participation. In 1779 one of the women, known to us only by her code number, 355, was captured and imprisoned on the British prison ship Jersey. Like most of the prisoners of war crammed into the ship’s hold, agent 355 did not survive.

  In 1781, General Lord Cornwallis surrendered to General George Washington and the British abandoned their efforts to restore the rebellious colonies to the empire. Sporadic fighting continued for months, but Americans and their former rulers understood that independence had been won. If defeat was a blow to English pride and to British power at home, it was far more intimately experienced by Loyalist women and men, whether European, African-American, or Indian.

  Throughout the war, much of white Loyalist women’s experience was a mirror image of patriot women’s experience. During the pre-Revolutionary protests, some Loyalist women had been drawn into political activism, defending their rights to sell or consume British goods as they saw fit. Some had stood beside the windows of their homes, watching patriot crowds gather, waiting to see if their houses would be destroyed, their possessions looted, their husbands and fathers harmed. When the war began, Loyalist women served as spies, saboteurs, and couriers for the British; they flocked to British army camps; and they died or were wounded during battle. Like patriot women, some made self-conscious and autonomous choices to preserve their political loyalty. Among them were the newspaper editors Margaret Draper and Anne Catherine Greene, who fully and publicly asserted their loyalism, and three New York property owners—Margaret Inglis, Susannah Robinson, and Mary Morris—who were cited in the 1779 New York Act of Attainder and who lost their entire estates as a result. Some came to Loyalism as a consequence of their familial or marital ties. Even then, a woman might feel the pull of conflicting loyalties. Esther Sewall, for example, was a daughter of the patriotic Quincy family and sister-in-law to John Hancock, but the wife of Massachusetts’s leading Crown propagandist. Marital loyalty carried her into exile in 1775.

  For African-American women, the choice of loyalties was based on different considerations than those of white women. In a search for their own freedom, enslaved women took advantage of any opportunity the divisions between patriot and loyalist offered. Some supported an American victory, in hopes that the confiscation of their Loyalist master’s estate might make their emancipation possible. But Loyalism was more often the best choice. The British had courted black support from the beginning of the war, promising freedom to all slaves who deserted rebel masters and benefits to black men willing to enlist with the British Army. With conscious irony, black Loyalist troops had marched to battle under the banner “Liberty to Slaves.” Thus, when the British evacuated Loyalists from New York City at the end of the war, 3,000 African Americans boarded the transport ships headed for Canada. Over 900 were women, usually accompanied by children. Most of these former servants or slaves did not think of their departure as an exile but as a chance for a new beginning. Yet for many the costs were high: permanent separation from family members who had not won their freedom, who had been captured or seized as booty by Revolutionary forces, or whose Loyalist masters took them to another location. When Phillis Halstead, for example, boarded a transport in New York Harbor, she carried with her a two-year-old daughter born free behind British lines, but if this thirty-five-year-old woman had a husband or older children they did not make the journey with her.

  Native American women of the coastal regions also participated in a struggle to retain their independence that intersected with but was not joined to the colonists’ struggle for nationhood. The conflict between Crown and colonies left the Indians few and limited choices: American independence meant certain and immediate white expansion into tribal territories, while a British victory promised only a delay, a pause in the struggle to preserve their own autonomy. Most tribes chose to support the British, although some, like the Cherokee and two tribes of the Iroquois Confederation, cast their lot with the colonists. Thus, Indian women became Loyalists through diplomacy rather than direct commitment to the Crown.

  The defeat of the British drove both white and black Loyalist women from their homes in the newly independent nation. War veterans of both races were given land grants in Canada, and British transports carried the refugees to Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. Here, African Americans experienced such intense racism, including physical violence and abuse of their legal rights, that a contingent left their land behind and relocated in Liberia. Other African Americans were less fortunate; viewed as captured booty by the officers and crew of the transport ships they boarded, these men and women were frequently resold into slavery in the Caribbean.

  For white Loyalists, Canada was not refuge but exile. Leaving behind family, friends, neighbors, and familiar landscape and climate, they started new lives in the sparsely populated, forbidding land they called “Nova Scarcity.” Their despair was captured in the words of one woman, who wrote: “I climbed to the top of Chipman’s Hill and watched the sails disappear in the distance, and such a feeling of loneliness came over me that though I had not shed a tear through all the war, I sat down on the damp moss with my baby on my lap and cried bitterly.”

  The women who took refuge in England fared no better. Even the wealthiest and most prominent Loyalist men and women who began their exiles in England soon found themselves struggling to make ends meet. As their money or credit ran out, families moved frequently, each time to smaller, shabbier quarters. Husbands and fathers grew melancholy or morose, for they realized that their exile was permanent and their careers disrupted forever. Like Grace Galloway, these Loyalists had lost their place in society.

  Loyalist widows in both England and Canada faced the complex and confusing task of filing claims with the British government for their pensions and for compensations for their husbands’ loyalty or service and often for their own. These claims are riddled with worries of poverty and isolation, and the same anxiety over their children’s futures that Grace Galloway felt. If widowhood left one Boston woman unhappy, she was certain that “what adds to my affliction is, my fears for my Daughter, who may soon be left a Stranger and friendless.” And begging assistance from the British treasury, a New Jersey woman wrote of “the inexpressible mortification of seeing my children in want.” For these women, and for all those like them, the struggle continued long after peace was declared.

  Had the war ended for patriot women? In the decades after the Peace Treaty of 1783, the answer appeared to be this: The war was over, but the impact of the Revolution upon the roles, behaviors, expectations, and identity of American women was just beginning.

  EPILOGUE

  FAIR DAUGHTERS OF COLUMBIA: WHITE WOMEN IN THE NEW REPUBLIC

  THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION ENDED in 1783. But for most ordinary Americans, war did not segue smoothly into peace. Economic crises, both regional and national, marred the first decades of the new republic. In New England, wartime markets for local farm products contracted and farm families found themselves struggling to meet mortgage payments. British restrictions on the American carrying trade brought New England shipbuilding to a standstill, leaving whole communities without livelihoods. In the nearby middle states, urban artisans and laborers were out of work and merchants struggled to collect the debts owed to them. In the Southern states, the devastation brought by two British campaigns and local civil war was evident everywhere—crops had been ruined, barns and stables burned, and many white families suffered from the loss of their most valuable asset: slaves. Backcountry settlers remained braced for warfare despite the peace treaty with England, for they knew Indian resistance to American sovereignty was likely. These regional problems led one historian to call the postwar decades the “critical period in American history.” But many groups within American society had other crises to grapple with. For example, African Americans who had won their freedom through service to the military or in the emancipation programs that followed the Revolution in Northern states sought to establish their own community services and institutions and find employment in still-hostile environments. And in the West, Native Americans prepared for the inevitable encroachment upon their lands by white settlers. For some tribes this meant migration; for others, new warfare.

  There can be little doubt that the immediate concerns of family. survival, of rebuilding, restoration, and creation of communities preoccupied most women and men in postwar America. Under these circumstances, did anyone stop to consider the impact of the war on women’s roles in the family or in society at large? There were, of course, Americans who did. For if the postwar decades were a critical period in reconstructing the everyday life of Americans, they were also an era of sustained debate over many critical political and social issues, among them the structure of the national government, the definition of citizenship, the role of slavery in the new nation—and the role women could and should play in a republic.

  The women and men who took up the question of women’s place in the new republic subjected customary assumptions about women’s “nature” and women’s role in the family and society to careful scrutiny. In speeches, sermons, novels, and essays, they reflected on the lessons of the Revolution for women of the next generation and argued the need for a new definition of womanhood suitable to a republic. This public discussion on women was intense, but it was relatively brief, and its impact is difficult to measure. Nevertheless, the arguments given voice by critics such as Susannah Rowson, Judith Sergeant Murray, Charles Brockden Brown, and Dr. Benjamin Rush tell us much about the legacy of the war. For if these critics did not speak for the majority, they addressed issues and analyzed ideas that were current and compelling in their society.

  The women and men who chose to scrutinize gender roles and gender ideals came, not surprisingly, from the privileged classes. Educated, with time to devote to intellectual issues, they spoke for and of a “womanhood” they believed to be universal, although that womanhood was more often a reflection of their own social class. The social authorities to whom they addressed their arguments and with whom they debated or allied themselves were also members of the nation’s elite. This fact influenced, in subtle but evident ways, the problems they defined, the solutions they proffered, and the scope of the changes they envisioned. Nevertheless, their demand for reforms in the laws restricting married women’s rights, their insistence on the rational capacities and intellectual potential of women, and their effort to create a political space for women in the new republic went beyond the boundaries of their own social position. When, for example, Abigail Adams pressed her husband and his colleagues in Congress to ameliorate the dependency of married women by extending their property rights, she may have been thinking of problems facing a woman of her own circle—a “lady.” But had such reforms been implemented, their impact would have reached every level of the American social hierarchy.

  These reformers began with the assumption that women, no less than men, were capable of reasoned, moral behavior and thought. In this, they were the daughters and sons of the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on human beings’ capacity to learn, to develop their intellect, and to refine their moral sense through nurturing instruction. From this assumption came an insistence that women’s apparent intellectual inferiority and the frivolity or irrationality that opponents claimed to be innate were in fact the products of educational neglect. As Judith Sergeant Murray, a leading advocate of women’s education, crisply put it: “Will it be said that the judgment of a male of two years old, is more sage than that of a female of the same age? But … as their years increased, the sister must be wholly domesticated, while the brother is led by the hand through all the flowering paths of science.”

  But if Enlightenment theory helped dispel the notion of women’s natural limitations, experience proved an equally compelling basis for their arguments. During the Revolution, women had shown themselves capable of political commitment, of patriotic action, and, in the nonconsumption of British goods, of political morality in eschewing luxury and abandoning frivolity. Thus, reformers’ arguments about women’s capacities were made that much more convincing in light of their generation’s recent experiences.

  Reformers drew heavily upon what they believed to be the lessons of the Revolution: the need for both sexes to be resilient, flexible, and equipped with the skills to survive in times of crisis. They did not stress, however, what many ordinary women frequently stressed in their wartime recollections: that the Revolution had proved women could rise to the occasion in crises and tap hidden resources and abilities. Instead, the reformers read the Revolution as a warning that women must be carefully prepared for a crisis before it occurred. As the novelist Charles Brockden Brown put it, the desire to prepare for the future reflected “the common sense of a revolutionary era in which the unexpected was very likely to happen, in which large numbers of people had lived through reversals of fortune, encounters with strangers and physical dislocation.”

  How did Brown and his colleagues suggest that the survivors of one crisis prepare for the next? By nurturing personal independence. Yet if the reformers all agreed that independence was crucial, they did not always define it in the same manner. In her influential essays, collected in 1789 under the title The Gleaner, Judith Sergeant Murray defined independence in economic terms. “I would give my daughters every accomplishment which I thought proper,” she wrote, “and to crown all, I would early accustom them to habits of industry and order. They should be taught with precision the art economical; they should be able to procure for themselves the necessaries of life; independence should be placed within their grasp.” But others seemed to place less emphasis on practical preparation and more on the molding of a character that could withstand adversity. The dangers, they believed, lay in an upbringing that encouraged, or allowed, the development of a feminine character defined by frivolity, vanity, love of luxury, and reliance on charm and beauty. The antidote was a regimen encouraging such virtues as intelligence, good judgment, competence, economy, and modesty. Sometimes the formula called for both the practical and the moral. In works of fiction such as Charles Brockden Brown’s 1799 novel Ormond, for instance, the heroine survived the unexpected loss of her father’s fortune by an easy renunciation of “every superfluous garb and trinket,” coupled with a skill at needlework that allowed her to earn a meager but honest living.

  In the end, the balance tipped in favor of molding women’s moral character rather than promoting their economic self-sufficiency. The ability of women to earn their livelihood faded from the discussion and independence became an issue of character. Thus, programmatic suggestions quickly narrowed. Reformers made few demands for changes in the law that might allow women greater control over property in their married years and in widowhood. They made few calls for expanded vocational opportunities. And on the issue of direct exercise of political independence, they were largely silent. Instead, the institutional deus ex machina of women’s independence they endorsed was formal education. Murray, Brown, Rush, Timothy Dwight—all were staunch supporters of schooling for young women.

  The emphasis on education and the refinement of moral character developed in the context of a broader but sometimes less clearly articulated debate over the nature of women’s citizenship in a republic. That women had acted with political consciousness and as patriots in their own right was a fact of the Revolution few could ignore. But what political role was appropriate for women in peacetime? The question was not simply one of women’s entitlement, although that surely was important. It was also a question of what contribution they could make to the survival of what many believed was a great, and potentially fragile, political experiment: a republic.