A Colonial Woman’s Perspective on War

14 Sunday Feb 2021

Answering Liberty’s Call: Anna Stone’s Daring Ride to Valley Forge (Fidelis Publishing, 2021) blends family lore, fact, and fiction into a gripping tale of a woman who risks her life for family and country in the winter of 1778.

In 1778, war may be men’s business, but that doesn’t stop Anna Stone from getting involved in the fight for liberty. When her soldier husband and brothers face starvation at Valley Forge, Anna is not content to pray and worry. She gets on her horse and strikes out alone over two hundred miles of rough roads to bring them life-sustaining supplies.
Eighty miles from her destination, Anna learns of a plot to overthrow General Washington and replace him with a commander who will surrender. With the fate of the American Revolution in her hands, she agrees to carry a message of warning and races to reach Valley Forge before one of the conspirators, who is in hot pursuit, can intercept her.

Women played no formal role in the American Revolution, yet they were hardly passive observers in the conflict. They took part in public demonstrations against British policies alongside their husbands and brothers and were elemental in the most important protest of all—boycotting British manufactured goods.

The American Revolution changed these women’s lives irrevocably. With their men off to battle, many shouldered the responsibility of running family farms and businesses. They managed their homes, raised children, and mobilized on the home front.

Eschewing manufactured cloth from England, women brought their spinning wheels out of storage, and spinning bees became so popular that they drew spectators. The Boston Evening Post reported on one such event, saying, “the ladies…may vie with the men in contributing to the preservation and prosperity of their country and equally share in the honor of it.”

If honor and glory drove men to the battlefield, the fight for independence must also have ignited women’s pride, tempered thought it was by the pain of loneliness and loss.

Anna Stone, the protagonist of Answering Liberty’s Call, dislikes the long separation from her soldier husband, Benjamin, even as she shares his desire for independence. It is her faith in him, in the cause of liberty, and in the military’s leadership that bolster her sense of duty and patriotism:

I didn’t protest when Benjamin joined the Culpeper Minutemen in the fall of 1775, for it was every able-bodied man’s duty to serve in the militia. He was delighted—far more than I, to be honest—when the Virginia Assembly called the Minutemen to defend the arsenal at Williamsburg just before Christmastide. When he returned three months later, he was restless. Even though Governor Dunmore’s expulsion from the colony restored peace to Virginia, Benjamin would not be content until the unrest in all the colonies was resolved.

Though he spent long days in the fields or the orchards, he often rode off after supper to spend a few hours at Edwards’ Ordinary in nearby Fauquier Court House. There, he and his fellows followed the news of the continuing rebellion in the north and rejoiced in the daring exploits of the Sons of Liberty.

Unsure how to make him understand my worry, I settled for pointing out it did not look well when a preacher spent more time in the ordinary than in church.

Between Benjamin’s return from the Culpeper Minutemen’s triumph at the Battle of Great Bridge in December 1775 and his departure with the Third Virginia in October 1776, the focus of the conflict shifted. Once the Continental Congress declared the colonies’ independence from Great Britain, a return to the status quo was no longer an option. The prospect of fighting to establish an independent new nation must have been both exhilarating and terrifying. In the novel, Anna recalls her range of emotions on the Sunday Benjamin read the Declaration of Independence aloud to his congregation:

“Brothers and sisters, surely there is more that binds us as Americans than drives us apart. I ask you, what would you be willing to sacrifice to secure a future free from Crown rule for yourselves and your children?

“It is written, in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, ‘For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ.’

“In Thomas Paine’s Epistle to the Quakers, he asserts that all men dislike violence and want peace, but there comes a time when violence is inevitable.”

He unrolled the parchment. “This is a copy of our Continental Congress’s Declaration of Independence. The original is on its way to England and King George. I am privileged to be the one to share this message with you.

“‘In Congress, July 4, 1776. The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen United States of America: When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another …’”

As he read, I scanned the faces of the people in the congregation and saw the dawning excitement I experienced a few months before. But now, fear overshadowed my excitement. What would independence from England and Crown rule mean? What would it cost to gain it?

As I watched my husband stand before his congregation, I could almost see the fresh flames burst forth from the smoldering coals of his ideals.

Now, as then, a military spouse clings to a sense of patriotism to make a loved one’s service and sacrifice more tolerable. Anna journeys from her home in Virginia to Valley Forge and witnesses firsthand the disorganization and corruption within Congress and the army, forcing her to confront complex issues that threaten her sense of patriotism and her support for the cause.

***

In the novel, Anna sees the war from both sides. On the home front, she chafes at the lack of news and communication and worries about hers and her children’s futures should Benjamin not return.

But when she hears of the privations at Valley Forge, and then receives word that her brothers are ill–possibly with smallpox–she cannot remain at home.

Anna’s actions have been immortalized in Stone family lore–and though we know her name, she represents the countless unsung women who took action in defense of their country during the fight for American independence.

Anna Asbury Stone, my 6x-great grandmother, is counted among Ohio women because her family moved west from Virginia after the American Revolution, eventually settling in Harrison County. A Daughters of the American Revolution chapter in Cambridge, Ohio is named in her honor.

Think you might be a descendant of Anna and Benjamin? It’s highly possible! They had eleven children, and many of them settled in Ohio. My research, both genealogical and historical, is available on my website.

Buy the book.

Eliza Hill Helps Settle the Ohio Frontier

09 Wednesday Oct 2019

Posted by Tracy Lawson in Ohio Women

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History, Ohio, Ohio History, Ohio Women, Ohio Womens History, Pioneers, Women, Women's History

While researching and writing my book Pride of the Valley: Sifting through the History of the Mount Healthy Mill, one of my goals was to profile each of the six generations of families that owned the business during its one hundred thirty years of operation.

I discovered many discrepancies and the understandable muddling of facts that happens over time, and felt compelled to set the record straight wherever possible–and especially when it came to the women in the story. Of course the women of the first two generations–Eliza Hendrickson Hill and Rachel Maria Hill Rogers–were the hardest to get to know.

It saddened me when the names of the women were incorrectly reported, for the women I mentioned in my book didn’t hold jobs that distinguished them in the community. They didn’t leave wills or journals, and the first surviving photograph of one of them dates to 1866. Their mention in historical records is seldom more than a report of to whom they were married. I figured the least I could do was make sure their names and their spouses were sorted properly.

Throughout much of history, a young woman’s first duty was to marry; her family often wielded more influence over the choice of husband than she did. Eliza Hendrickson was eighteen years old when she married Jediah Hill in 1815. Rachel Maria Hill, Jediah and Eliza’s only child, was a mere sixteen years old when she married Henry Rogers, who was ten years her senior. I’ve often wondered if that marriage came about because Jediah decided Henry, who was his hired hand, was the man he wanted to take over operation of his mill one day, and offered Rachel’s hand as part of the deal.

As it turned out, I would locate much more detailed information about the women in the four subsequent generations, but in this article, I’d like to focus on Eliza Hendrickson Hill, the family’s matriarch.

When Jediah and Eliza migrated to Ohio with their three-year-old daughter, Rachel, in 1819, Eliza made the first essential contribution to establishing the little family’s home and business. They left a well-established community in New Jersey and started from ground zero on the frontier.

While we may marvel at Jediah Hill’s acumen in siting and building a water-powered sawmill, women like Eliza were no less skilled. Trained in household management from an early age, by the time a woman was old enough to marry, she had vast stores of practical knowledge essential to their family’s survival.

Though they lived only a mile from the town site, Eliza likely would have been responsible for managing all her daily tasks—food preparation, laundry, planting a garden, minding their toddler, and more—without help.

On a typical day, Eliza may have set out to accomplish one major task—perhaps laundry. But she would still have to begin that day by stirring up the fire, cooking breakfast, washing dishes, airing bedding, and caring for her child and the stock—perhaps horses, chickens, cows, pigs, and sheep—before tackling the larger job. Laundry required hauling buckets of water to heat, scrubbing the clothing with homemade soap, and then boiling everything to kill any lice or fleas in the fabric.

There was no spin cycle, so everything had to be lifted, dripping wet, from the rinse water, wrung out by hand, and hung up to dry. Depending on the size of the family and the number of hands to help, this labor-intensive enterprise could take all day, bearing in mind, of course, that the lady of the house must budget the time to cook the midday meal for her family.

Should she finish before it was time to start supper—one wonders what she might choose to do with her leisure time. A bit of mending? Adding a few lines to the letter she was writing to the home folks? Helping one of the children learn their letters? Weeding the kitchen garden? Drying herbs to use for seasoning and for treating illness?

The old saying, ‘Man’s work is from sun to sun, but women’s work is never done’ surely rang true for nineteenth-century women everywhere.

Once the supplies she had brought from New Jersey ran out, Eliza would have needed to grow or make more—not just to sew the family’s clothes, but likely to grow the flax and raise the sheep that would provide the raw materials, spin the thread, and either weave the cloth herself or take it to the nearest webster.

As the community grew, the division of labor allowed both men and women to specialize in what they did best. What a blessing it must have been to be able to purchase items in a general store!

There is evidence that Jediah took his wife’s needs into consideration when building the large family homestead, which was likely completed in time for their daughter Rachel’s wedding in 1832. In the stone-floored cellar, Jediah dug a well so it was not necessary for his wife to go outside to fetch water.

As the family’s business prospered, Jediah and Henry, his son-in-law, sought to expand the sawmill to grind flour and cornmeal. In August 1838, all four family members took a working vacation to New Jersey. Though travel in antebellum America was distinctly unpleasant, I am so glad Eliza and Rachel went along on the trip, for it would have been a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Henry kept a journal of the trip, and mentioned someone in the family having an upset stomach or headache nearly every day. Traveling in a wagon, they suffered through both the heat of late summer and cold temperatures as summer turned to fall.

Thankfully, the trip was not all misery. Henry mentioned seeing the sights in Columbus, Zanesville, Philadelphia, and Trenton, and paying extended visits to family in three different cities. He noted that Eliza and Rachel had written ahead to a dressmaker in the city to have new gowns made, and that they had taken their bonnets to the milliner’s to have them trimmed in the latest fashion. Everyone in the family enjoyed shopping at the extensive market in Philadelphia.

You can learn more about the family’s experiences on their trip. Henry’s journal is the subject of my book Fips, Bots, Doggeries, and More: Explorations of Henry Rogers’ 1838 Journal of Travel from Southwestern Ohio to New York City.