Sharon M. Harris - Womens Early American Historical Narratives

Table of Contents

WOMENS EARLY AMERICAN HISTORICAL NARRATIVES

Sharon M. Harris is the Lorraine Sherley Professor in Literature at Texas Christian University, co-editor of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, and president and founder of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. Her publications include American Women Writers to 1800: An Oxford Anthology ; Rebecca Harding Davis: Writing Cultural Autobiography; and Selected Writings of Judith Sargent Murray. She has contributed numerous articles to journals and books, among them Legacy, Early American Literature, and The Oxford Companion to Womens Writing in the United States. Professor Harris previously taught at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and at Temple University.

Introduction

I mean never to forget, Eliza Yonge Wilkinson declared in a letter she wrote about her experiences during the British invasion of Charleston in 1779. In a series of twelve letters, Wilkinson recorded in what she termed my historical manner her transformation from a young woman who had romanticized the English to one who had to flee them as the approaching enemy! Whether in private documents or formal public records, history writing was integral to the formation of the new republic in the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary years. Histories were taught in schools and read widely among the literate class, in published books and in the burgeoning periodical literature published in the United States. The writing and reading of historical narratives was considered essential in the construction of an American identity, as the ancient and recent pasts became the interpretive field upon which the integrity of the new nation would be built.

The ten women writers in Womens Early American Historical Narratives, who published historical narratives between 1790 and 1830, were instrumental in changing a field that had long been dominated by male authors. In subsequent years, womens historical texts would proliferate. In the early federal period, when the subject was America itself, most historians focused on the New England region. Histories of New England by Samuel Purchas (1625), Nathaniel Morton (1669), Thomas Prince (1735-1736), John Callender (1739), and John Winthrop (1790) were the most prominent histories available to early-nineteenth-century readers. Thus Hannah Adamss A Summary History of New England (1799) contributed to an important but certainly not yet crowded field of study. With the movement toward independence, the countrys leaders felt a great need to articulate the United States place in world history. Calls for an American literature as a means of distinguishing the accomplishments of North Americans are well known, and history writing was an important part of that response. Throughout the Revolution and in the years immediately after, histories of the United States and its struggle for independence from England began to emerge, including texts such as Jeremy Belknaps History of New Hampshire (1784-1792), David Ramsays History of the Revolution of South-Carolina (1785), William Gordons The History of the Rise, Progress and Establishment of the Independence of the United States of America (1788), Benjamin Trumbulls Complete History of Connecticut (1797), and John Marshalls Life of George Washington (five volumes, 1804-1807). While such texts certainly influenced the women who were entering the field of history writing, and who cited many of them in their narratives, it was a British woman historianCatharine Macaulaywho had the greatest influence on women historians both English and American. The mid-century publication of Macaulays monumental eight-volume History of England from the Accession of James I to That of the Brunswick Line (1763-1783) was a model for the comprehensive historical tome, and it was highly regarded on both sides of the Atlantic. While all of the authors included in this collection would most likely have known Macaulays work, Mercy Otis Warren actually corresponded with her British counterpart, benefitting from an exchange of ideas about history writing and about the progress of republicanism at the end of the eighteenth century.

History writing offered women a way to express both their intellectual abilities and their opinions on religious, cultural, and political events without risking the condemnation that women novelists sometimes faced for engaging in too imaginative endeavors. It is no coincidence that women novelists (some of whom were also writing histories) almost without exception proclaimed their work to be based in fact or a true story. The very writing of such an intellectual endeavor as a historical narrative placed women within the realm of the rational, intellectual being so important to the Enlightenments vision of the ideal citizen.

But for women, it offered something equally important: the right to express publicly their opinions on the controversial issues of the era. Some did so with trepidation, but others reveled in the freedom to articulate their positions, to use interpretations of the past to comment on their beliefs about the present and the future. None of the historians included herenor many of their male counterpartswere writing traditional military histories. It was an era in which history was intended to define a new nation through character, actions, and a vision for the new republic.

If Hannah Adams follows the traditional pattern of apologizing for coming before the public, some of the best histories are those in which the authors do define their own positions, and do so without apology. Judith Sargent Murrays four-part Observations on Female Abilities (1798) traces womens contributions to world culture from ancient times to the present. In her concluding comments, she connects the merit earned by women in history to her contemporaries. This connection allows Murray to bring to fruition her real purpose in writing the historical essays: to argue for female independence in the present age. The Sex, she asserts, should be taught to depend on their own efforts, for the procurement of an establishment in life (85). Mercy Otis Warren, whose History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution (1805) is one of the most philosophical histories of her time, did not hesitate to assert her anti-Federalist position, even though she was writing in the heyday of New England Federalism. She moves beyond the specifics of the Revolution to contemplate the nature of a republic and the character traits necessary in its citizens if it is to survive. For Warren, history is a study of the vagaries of human nature (of character) and the reason why people act as they do. Though she recognizes noble feelings are evident at certain times, she envisions tyranny, ambition, and avarice as the primary instigators of human action. Whereas Murray, like most of the writers included herein, looked to the near future as a time of progress and hopeespecially in terms of womens opportunities in the new nationWarren writes from a seat of concern over the corruption and pursuit of wealth that seemed to characterize the newly freed states. Thus she venerates those pious and independent gentlemen who settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony not as adventurers for wealth or fame, but for the quiet enjoyment of religion and liberty (115). It is the consequences of recent history that constitute Warrens greatest concern. For Sarah Pogson, history writing allows her to present in