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Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation

Address by

Cokie Roberts

Political Analyst, ABC, NPR, Author, Founding Mothers

April 21, 2004

I am very glad to be with you and it is a treat to be back at the World Affairs Council where I have not been for several years.  I must say it’s a good thing that I like talking about this book because I’ve been doing a lot of it, but I do like talking about it because I love these women and I love telling their stories.  There are many, many more in the book than I can tell in a setting like this.

I’ve been asked over and over, “Why did you write this?  Why did you write this instead of something contemporary?”  There are lots of answers to that question, but basically I have spent the last several decades covering Congress and government and politics, my mother and father were both in politics, and I knew in the eras that I covered that men were not doing these things alone—that their women were very, very influential and powerful, both in front of the scenes and behind the scenes. 

My mother, who’s been on both sides of that, is actually quite interesting, because when my father was in Congress she was his campaign manager, and when he went into the leadership she ran his district office, and then she took a seat in Congress and was on the very powerful Appropriations Committee.  She could make the case that there were times when the behind-the-scenes power was greater than the on-the-scene power.  Of course, she did find that when she went to the Vatican at the age of 81 it was the most challenging job of all, because she was in the position of representing Bill Clinton to the Pope.  If anybody could do this my mother could, but it was definitely a challenge.  She’s now 88 and safely home on Bourbon Street where she lives.  She lives smack dab in the middle of all the honky-tonk on Bourbon Street.  When my children were small I used to walk past the strippers and the other interesting denizens of the neighborhood:  through the woods and over the hills to grandmother’s house we’d go.  Then she moved from Bourbon Street to the Vatican, and I teased her that the costumes didn’t change.  But as I say, I watched her through the years, and in addition to the fact that I knew what a role she and the women of her era played, she also was a huge history buff, so she was always getting me interested in the time that went before because, as she says—maddeningly accurately—the more things change, the more they stay the same, and she keeps being right.

So when I thought about the history of this period, I know a good bit about what happened in that time and the charter that was written, the Constitution is something I deal with in my work all the time.  I was very admiring of the men who wrote it and the lead-up to that period of the Declaration, and the war, and the Constitution, and the new government.  I started thinking about the women, and realized I knew nothing.  In school you learn about Betsy Ross and the flag and Martha Washington and Valley Forge, and that’s about it.  And then there are others who want to debunk Betsy Ross and the flag, but I actually believe she did it—there’s good evidence of it.  Then in the ‘60s and ‘70s, when the modern feminist movement resurfaced, everybody passed around Abigail Adams’ advice to John to remember the ladies, but that really was the extent of my knowledge, which, when I thought about it, was quite shocking.

A couple of years ago, Steve and I wrote a book together on marriage, called From This Day Forward, where we wrote about marriages in American history.  We included a chapter on John and Abigail Adams, so I read through all of their letters and realized how incredibly hard it was.  She was alone for years and years and years at a time.  First for months at a time when he was in Philadelphia and she was back in Braintree, but then when he was on diplomatic missions, it was years at a time.  She had to do everything.  She had to run the farm, she had to try to keep his legal business alive to some degree, she had to, of course, raise the children and take care of his family and oh, by the way, the British were coming.  At one point when it was quite dangerous and John was in Philadelphia being wined and dined he writes her a letter saying, “If it gets really dangerous take the children and run to the woods.”  Thank you very much!  I really appreciate that, dear. 

So I decided to learn more about the rest of them.  I discovered quickly that Martha Washington’s winter at Valley Forge was one of eight winters that she spent in camp with the soldiers.  Year in and year out she went back at George’s request, because the soldiers were in terrible shape through most of the Revolutionary War.  There was many a year when they were unhoused, unfed, unclothed and unpaid.  Desertions were rampant and threats of more desertions were greater.  Martha Washington would arrive at camp and she would be cheered into camp by the soldiers because she would bring bolts of cloth and food from Mt. Vernon.  She and the other generals’ wives would set up a sewing circle and they’d make clothes for the soldiers, they would feed them, they’d nurse them when they were sick, they’d pray with them and they would dine and entertain them.  They had song fests and they had dances, and they were really crucial to morale.  As I say, George felt that so strongly that he begged her every year to come even though she thought she was derelict to her duties in Virginia, where many members of the family needed her, she always decided the greater duty was to join the General.  She had another reason to do it, which is that George could be indiscreet.  There was one night at camp in New Jersey when he and the very pretty and flirtatious young wife of General Nathaniel Greene, Kitty Greene, danced together for three straight hours.  So it was probably wise of Martha to show up time after time.

The real heroine, however, of the winter at Valley Forge was probably not anybody at camp but rather a woman in Philadelphia.  The British had occupied Philadelphia, they had driven out the Continental Congress and all patriots.  Some loyalist families stayed in town and the British soldiers were having a wonderful time.  They were having parties, and they were eating and drinking while the soldiers at Valley Forge were freezing and starving.  At any moment the British could have just rallied the troops, marched on Valley Forge and wiped out the Continental Army, but instead Sir William Howe, who was the commander of the British troops, was taken with one Betsey Loring.  He was having way too good a time to go to war, and it was written about.  There were all these ditties about it: “Sir William, he’s snug as a flea, laid all this time asnoring…as he laid warm in bed with Mrs. Loring.”  While I would love to say she did this as a patriot, it would be a lie.  She exchanged her favors for a good job for her husband in the British army, and maybe she liked Sir William. 

There were also many, many, many women who were incredible patriots in this period leading up to the war and then during the war.  They were enlisted in the cause.  The newspapers of the time, the Committees of Correspondence, the broadsides tacked to trees, asked the women to participate in the cause of independence and, of course, the main way was through the boycott which they did quite adamantly.  The women really suffered from the boycotts, considerably more than the men, because if you weren’t importing goods from England and you had to make them in America that meant the women had to make them.  So they set up spinning bees up and down the colonies, usually in a parson’s parlor, and they would spin and gossip and talk politics and they were very, very proud, very dedicated to the cause.  One woman, Mercy Otis Warren, was a propagandist who was published at the time.  Her poems and plays were in all the newspapers – not under her own name – later in her life that happened.  It would have been shocking at that point but she was highly influential with the founders in Massachusetts, John and Sam Adams, and at one point was really as influential a propagandist for the cause for revolution as Tom Paine—and I had never heard of her.

Benjamin Franklin was someone whom I always felt kind of warm and cozy about—until I got to know his wife and daughter.  He was off in England representing Pennsylvania to the English, and the build-up to the war and the boycotts and taxes were all happening, and the Pennsylvanians, the Philadelphians, decided that Ben was not sufficiently opposed to the Stamp Act, so a mob marched on the Franklin house and Deborah was left upstairs to fend them off with a gun.  Ben wrote to her and said, “Thank you.  That was good of you.”  She ran everything.  She ran the post office, she ran his real estate ventures, she ran the printing shops, which were really franchise shops up and down the colonies, and, as I say, he was grateful to her for doing this, he would write accolades.  But he abandoned her for the last 17 years of their marriage.  He would not come home.  She begged him to come home.  Their only daughter got married and he wrote and said, “Keep it cheap.”  But he wouldn’t come home.  Finally, she died and he came home because, as he said, he had to come home because “my wife, in whose hands I had left the care of my affairs, died.”  Poor man.

Franklin came home, signed the Declaration, went back to Paris and did wonderful work for our country, and forged the alliance with the French that won the war.  But meanwhile his daughter, Sally Franklin Bache, was in Philadelphia and, as I said, the British occupied Philadelphia so she had to escape.  These women were refugees year in and year out, and that was often the best thing that could happen to them.  Some were taken prisoner because, of course, the signers of the Declaration were all marked men.  They were traitors to the Crown.  So, anyone related to them was in danger.  Sally wrote to her father that she had gotten his library out of town, gotten his papers out of town, and then she took the baby and ran.  She had to move several times as the British troops moved, and finally the Americans retook Philadelphia and she moved back.  There was a big party, a big ball, to celebrate and she asked her father to send her some finery from France to wear to the ball.  He’s sitting there in Versailles with the King and Queen – I would like to point out – while she’s moving around from place to place with her children trying to escape the British.  He writes to her when she asks for lace and feathers and says, “If you wear your cambric ruffles as I do, and take care not to mend the holes, they will come in time to be lace; and feathers, my dear girl, may be had in America from every cock’s tail.”  Isn’t this just awful?  She had the last word, however, because Louis XVI gave Franklin, when he left France, a miniature of the king with 408 diamonds around it.  Then willed it to Sally with the proviso that she not make it into jewelry for herself or any of her daughters because he didn’t want her to countenance the expensive, vain, and useless fashion of wearing jewels.  So she didn’t.  She sold it and she took the money and ran, and went to England where he had abandoned her for so much of her young life and had a wonderful time.

These stories of women having to escape were happening all up and down the colonies, as I say.  In the South, particularly, the war was very harsh and the British soldiers were coming through and rampaging and raping.  In South Carolina Francis Marion – remember the Swamp Fox?  It’s one of those elementary school things you remember – again enlisted the women to stay on the plantations and to be the eyes and the ears for the Continental Army as British troops came through.  They also were able to hide American soldiers, so they were enlisted in the cause and very often put in positions of danger. 

Several of them were fascinating women, and I’ll just tell you about one quickly because I don’t want to take up too much time, but Eliza Pinckney was the mother of two founders, Thomas Pinckney and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney.  She had come to America in the early 1700s as a young girl, 16 years old.  Her father was a Royal functionary on the island of Antigua.  He left her at age 16 in charge of three plantations in South Carolina and, because she had to write to him to apprise him of the business, she was in the habit of keeping a copy of her letters – thank you, Eliza.  We have so few of these women’s letters.  So much was destroyed.  So little kept and what has been kept is so hard to find.  So Eliza was a great heroine.  She was a very smart girl, and to show you how little things change, there was an older woman in the neighborhood who thought Eliza was way too smart for her own good and she was never going to get a husband that way.  The woman threatened to throw Eliza’s copy of Plutarch’s Lives into the fire.  But she soldiered on with her studies and her reading and her experiments in agriculture, which she was fascinated with.  She ended up introducing the planting of indigo into the United States of America, which, of course, was a huge cash crop in the Carolinas in the time before the Revolution.  She did it as a teenager.  Then she raised these patriots and she was a great patriot herself through the war.  At the end of her life she went to Philadelphia to be treated for breast cancer because the best doctors were there.  She died there, and George Washington insisted on serving as a pallbearer at her funeral because of the service that she had rendered the nation. 

In the North, there were lots of other women like that as well, running from the British and with wonderful stories to tell.  The Schuyler family in Albany – General Philip Schuyler, of course, was at Saratoga but he was also a prominent politician, and they had houses at both Albany and Saratoga.  As the British and their allies, the Indians, started marching into Saratoga there were hordes of refugees coming out.  Catherine Schuyler goes the other way – against the refugee traffic—and goes to the house in Saratoga, set the wheat fields afire so the British can’t harvest the wheat and then goes back to Albany. The battle of Saratoga happened, the British lose, and Philip Schuyler brings John Burgoyne, the defeated British general, home to Catherine and asks her to feed him.  He’s the general, he needs to be taken care of and, until there can be a prisoner exchange, she has to house him and his officers.  He’s just burned down her house in Saratoga, but she’s a polite lady doing this.

There were several times in the course of the war when soldiers tired to capture Philip Schuyler. Again, each one of these men was a prize target for the British, and because Albany was right on the frontier, it seemed like an easier place to get to him.  The family was huge, just millions of children, and at one point the families are all there, and Schuyler had security guards guarding them and they were armed.  His oldest daughter, Angelica Church, was visiting with her two-year old and she hid the guns so that her little boy wouldn’t hurt himself.  There was a raid on the house and the soldiers were unarmed.  So the family runs upstairs to try to alert towns-people to come to their rescue.  They leave the youngest baby downstairs, forgetting her.  It was easy to do, and one of the daughters, Peggy Schuyler, went tearing down the steps, grabbled her baby sister just as a tomahawk comes flying at her and there is still a gash in the banister in the Schuyler mansion in Albany where the tomahawk hit. 

At the house at that point was another married daughter, Betsy Schuyler Hamilton who visiting as well.  She was married to Alexander Hamilton and again, in telling you how little things change, later in Hamilton’s career when he had a notorious affair and was accused of using government treasury funds for blackmail purposes, he had to admit that he had not cheated his country, he had cheated his wife.  Betsy she stood by her man, and his political career was saved.  Where have we heard that before? 

Sally Livingston Jay is another one of my absolute favorites.  She was married to John Jay who was, of course, our first Chief Justice, but before that he was a politician in New York and she was a kid when she married as a teenager.  She, again, because the British occupied New York, and occupied New York City until several years after Yorktown, she was having to escape and she would write John the funniest letters about “Oops, here they come again.  Wherever I am they seem to show up.”  But he was then made President of the Continental Congress, which was the highest office in the land, and she was really ticked off because she learned about it in the newspapers. Then he was made ambassador to Spain, and she’s the only one who went on a diplomatic mission that early.  It was, again, very dangerous.  Not only was the crossing dangerous for anybody, but the British were intercepting ships trying to capture these prominent patriots and they got one of them, a co-negotiator with Jay for the Treaty of Paris, Henry Lawrence. They put him in the Tower of London for a year.  So this was very dangerous for Sally to do.  They were shipwrecked and had to limp into Martinique, get another ship, and ended up in Cadiz.  Then they had to take this unbelievably miserable trip across land and, of course, she’s pregnant, and they get to Madrid and the Spanish won’t receive them, because the Spanish did not yet recognize the United States.  Big surprise there was a lot of game-playing going on among the French, and British, and they were not fully clueing in the United States of what they were up to.  Very little changes.

Sally, though with all of this hardship, and this was true for all these women, Sally because she was abroad did write home, and her family saved her letters.  With all those hardships her baby died and she was heartbroken but she was still such a patriot and that’s just what I keep coming back to. 

I think I might have said at some point along the way, “Can’t you guys figure this out?” Because after all, as Abigail Adams said to John in one letter, “We women aren’t going to get anything out of this.  We’re not going to be able to hold office.  We’re not even going to be able to vote.  So I think we’re the best patriots of all,” she said.  And it’s true, their letters are full of dedication to the cause.  Sally at one point after all these hardships mentions, writes back home to her sisters about what’s happening politically in Europe. These women are deeply political.  Then she compares it with what’s happening politically in America, and she says then, realizing because even though all these women do is talk politics all day and all night, they realize they’re not supposed to, so she says, “ my pen are you harrowing me? what have I to do with politics?  Am I not myself a woman and writing to ladies?  Come thou ye fashions to my rescue.” 

There is story after story like this.  There was a women’s political movement in Philadelphia at the radius of the war when it looked like we were going to lose.  The French fleet had not yet arrived and many American cities were in British hands; and the soldiers at this point are threatening desertion by regiments and the women of Philadelphia align with women in other states.  But it was mainly the women of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania who put together a fundraising drive for the soldiers where they went door-to-door and raised in the space of a couple of weeks $300,000, in 1780, in a very specific women’s political movement.  To give you some sense of comparison, the National Bank was started that same year with the finance years of the Revolution, and over a period of months they had just been able to raise $380,000.  So, it’s a great story which I won’t go into here, but she and Esther Reed, the woman who organized it, and George Washington just got into a battle royal over what to do with the money and the letter is great fun to read.

Not every woman was a great patriot, however.  Benedict Arnold’s wife, Peggy, was in it from the start and she was the person who actually wrote the letters to Major Andre, writing literally between the lines with invisible ink as well as other letters that seemed quite harmless.  All the women in Philadelphia knew Andre because he had been there for the occupation.  When Arnold was captured, Peggy Arnold threw this hysterical fit – she wept, she wailed, she throws a fit.  Washington believed her, Hamilton believed her, Lafayette believed her. She was very pretty.  And most of the 19^th century historians believed her.  But then in the mid-20^th century – it took that long – the British papers were finally released and there it was, right there, her letters to Andre, his letters to her, how the whole scheme had been established with her right in the middle of it.  We probably should have figured it out a lot sooner, since when she and Benedict moved back to England the British gave her a very healthy pension for the rest of her life in thanksgiving for the services to the Crown.

But finally the war was over and then there was a country to raise.  Again the women came to the fore in Philadelphia while the men were there writing the Constitution and then when the new government was formed after the cause of independence was won, the war was won, the new charter, people had come together in the name of federalism to write the new charter.  As soon as that all happened, they immediately broke into partisan bickering.  The country was way too young and fragile for this, and it really appeared at times that it was going to completely fall apart.  Several of the women were quite explicit in their determination to make the men from different political parties come to dinner at night and drink together and eat together and be polite to each other so that the animus could not get too horrible so that the country would survive. 

But still it was very shaky and everyone agreed that the only way it would survive would be if George Washington would agree to serve a second term.  He didn’t want to do it.  He hated the newspapers—I’m telling you, nothing changes—they were mean to him, and he had served long and hard and he didn’t want to do it anymore.  Hamilton and Madison begged him to do it. They at this point were bitter enemies of each other.  All the leaders of both parties begged Washington to run again, but he really wasn’t going to do it.  As late as November of 1792—election year—he was saying, “I’m not going to.” 

Then a woman, whom he respected, a friend of his in Philadelphia who had no self-interest, she wasn’t going to hold office in the second Washington administration, wrote him a letter that most historians agreed is the reason he decided to run again.  Her name was Eliza Powel and she appealed to his patriotism, to his sense of duty, to his sense of history.  She asked him if he was sure that his judgment was sound, questioning it, but then, of course, since it was a letter from a woman to a man, she appealed to his pride and said, “At this time you are the only man in America that dares to do right on all public occasions.  Your very figure is calculated to inspire respect and confidence in the people.”  It worked, he ran, the country survived.  It survived in large part because of these women and what they had done to help create the country and then to carry it forth.   Washington paid tribute to them in letters that he wrote to one of the great poets of the Revolution, who was the wife and mother-in-law of a signer, Annis Boudinot Stockton, and he was writing to her after the new government started. He said, “I think you ladies are in the number of the best patriots America can boast.”  But I think the best compliment actually came from the enemy.  Lord Cornwallis who as you know surrendered in Yorktown, said in the course of the war, “We may destroy all of the men in America and we shall still have all we can do to defeat the women.” 

I really have given you such a tiny glimpse.  The stories are legion, they’re wonderful, I loved learning them and I know you will, too.

Thank you very much.

Views expressed are not necessarily those of the World Affairs Council, which pays neither honoraria or expenses to its speakers.