[On December 19th,
1776 Thomas
Paine’s pamphlet The Crisis was published
in Philadelphia. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy The Crisis and other American Revolutionary writings, leading up to
a special weekend wish for the AmericanStudies Elves!]
On the relatively nondescript home that served as both prison and liberation
for the Revolutionary writer Judith Sargent.
I’ve often thought that to be far ahead of one’s time, especially when it
comes to one’s own rights and freedoms, likely feels both confining and
liberating—a combination of recognizing things which one is frustratingly denied
and yet seeing a broader and more open world beyond them. Certainly we can feel
both sides to that coin in “On the Equality of the Sexes” (1790), the poem and essay written by Gloucester’s own Judith Sargent
Murray. Like her close contemporary (English)
feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, Murray was extremely intelligent, and she ironically but crucially opens
“Equality” with an argument for why people are not equal—for why, indeed, certain minds are far more destined for
greatness than others. Seeing herself in that light (as she seems to have, and
deservedly so) would, again, have likely made Murray feel both good and
bad—like part of a Talented Tenth of sorts, but one arbitrarily held back due solely to the biological
accident of gender.
The (at the time; over the next century the waterfront was significantly shifted) waterfront Gloucester home built in 1782 for Sargent and her first husband, Captain John Stevens,
served first as a direct remainder of such arbitrary and frustrating
limitations. Stevens was at the time enjoying a brief period of prosperity as a
local merchant, but his fortunes would shortly and permanently decline (thanks
in part to the Revolution and in part to his own shortcomings as a
businessman); by 1785 Stevens was so deeply in debt that the house was turned
into a debtor’s prison, one in which both Stevens and Judith (who was of course
literally married to his debt and legally powerless to control her own finances
in any way) were held as collateral for those debts. A year later Stevens fled
the city and tried to start fresh in the West Indies, but he ended up similarly
indebted and imprisoned there, and died in prison. It was during these same
years that Judith began to write her articles and essays (under the pseudonym “Constantia”), and such efforts reflect quite literally the only way that she could
escape the prison into which her husband’s failures had cast her.
Yet the same period, and the same house, also contained a man who would, on
multiple levels, help Judith achieve a far freer and happier existence. John
and Judith were among America’s earliest supporters of Unitarian
Universalism, the controversial new
religion that represented a direct challenge to New England’s ruling
Puritanism; they expressed that support by, among other things, providing a
home for John Murray, the founder of the
religion’s American church and its most prominent preacher. Murray and Judith
developed a close friendship and relationship, and by the time of her husband’s
death it was clearly something more; a few years later they were married and
began a new life together, in the same Gloucester home. Judith’s final years
were marked by a series of tragedies, culminating in the 1820 deaths of Judith,
her daughter, and her grandson; but for the thirty years prior to those
tragedies she had lived in a home and marriage—and philosophy—that were far
closer to the social, political, and human ideals she espoused in her writings.
Gloucester’s Sargent House contains and --interprets all those sides to her
life—and also includes some paintings and pictures donated by her most famous
descendent, John Singer Sargent!
Special post
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Revolutionary writings or writers you’d highlight?
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