1. Chase, Amos, On Female Excellence, Or, A Discourse, in which Good Character in Women is Described; And the Worth and Importance of Such Character, Contemplated (Litchfield: Collier and Buel, 1792), p. 1Google Scholar. Chase (Dartmouth, 1780) was a disciple of Bellamy, the so-called “pope of Litchfield County,” who died in 1790. Chase inherited a large portion of Bellamy's library. For more on Chase, see Dexter, F. B., ed., The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles (New York: Scribner's, 1901), vol. 3, p. 361.Google Scholar

2. Judah Champion (Yale, 1751), with the support of Governor Wolcott, successfully resisted Bellamy's attempts to evangelize in the town of Litchfield. Champion served as minister of Litchfield's First Church from 1753 to 1798, and died in 1810. See The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, vol. 3, p. 419Google Scholar. Champion and his predecessor, Timothy Collins, had given Litchfield a pronounced antirevivalist reputation (see The Autobiography of Lyman Beecher, ed. Cross, Barbara M. [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961] vol. 1, p. 153)Google Scholar; the first revivals in Litchfield occurred in 1798, the year that Champion was succeeded by Dan Huntington (see the Connecticut Evangelical Magazine and Religious Intelligencer 1 [1808]: 313).Google Scholar

3. Chase, , On Female Excellence, p. 12.Google Scholar

4. Quoted by Elihu Hubbard Smith in his biographical sketch of Croswell; see Cronin, James E., ed., The Diary of Elihu Hubbard Smith (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1973), p. 41Google Scholar. Smith (1771–98), a minor Connecticut Wit, was a native of Litchfield, the brother of Mary and Abigail Smith, and a close friend of Sarah Pierce.

5. For Strong, see Smith, , Diary, p. 5Google Scholar; Kilbourne, Payne K., A Biographical History of the County of Litchfield, Connecticut (New York, 1851), pp. 193–95Google Scholar; Stiles, Literary Diary, vol. 3, pp. 404–5Google Scholar; and Kerber, Linda K., Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), pp. 223 and 235Google Scholar. For the Litchfield Temperance Society, see Krout, John Allen, The Origins of Prohibition (New York: Knopf, 1925), p. 68.Google Scholar

6. Smith, , Diary, p. 42Google Scholar. Ruth Croswell organized a Temperance Society in Catskill, and led the fight. See Vanderpoel, Emily Noyes, Chronicles of a Pioneer School, ed. Buel, Elizabeth C. Barney (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1903), p. 329.Google Scholar

7. There is no satisfactory biography of Reeve, the author of, among other things, The Law of Baron and Femme (New Haven, 1816)Google Scholar; see the Dictionary of American Biography. On the doctrine of coverture in the 18th-Century American context, see Fisher, Marguerite, “Eighteenth-Century Theorists of Women's Liberation,” in “Remember the Ladies”: New Perspectives on Women in American History, ed. George, Carol V. R. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1975), p. 40Google Scholar: “Wives were regarded in the law as the chattels of their husbands and prohibited from claiming either their own property or their own earnings.” Fisher goes on to cite, in a footnote, Blackstone's Commentaries: “By marriage the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband.” Coverture was the law in the United States until the Married Women's Property Acts began to be passed in the various states, beginning with Mississippi in 1839. Coverture remained in force in Connecticut until 1877 when the reform movement, inspired by Reeve and led by Chief Justice Charles B. Andrews, also of Litchfield, finally succeeded: see White, Alain C., The History of the Town of Litchfield, Connecticut, 1720–1920 (Litchfield: Enquirer Press, 1920), pp. 152–53Google Scholar. On the legal position of women in early America, see also Benson, Mary Sumner, Women in Eighteenth-Century America: A Study of Opinion and Social Usage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935), pp. 173–74 and 223–42Google Scholar; Flexner, Eleanor, Century of Struggle (New York: Atheneum, 1970)Google Scholar, passim, and Kerber, , pp. 119–55.Google Scholar

8. Smith, , Diary, pp. 112–13Google Scholar. Smith's report of the scene was recorded two years after the fact.

9. Smith, , Diary, p. 113.Google Scholar

10. Much feminist scholarship has centered on letters and diaries since Caroll Smith-Rosenberg's groundbreaking essay, “The Female World of Love and Ritual” was published in Signs 1 (Autumn 1975): 1–29Google Scholar. These genres seem to have been chosen not only because they were the main literary forms for women, but also because Smith-Rosenberg assumed that, since they were written without an expectation of being published, they were therefore especially artless and unstudied. The fact, however, that Smith-Rosenberg's evidence does not extend before 1760 at least makes room for the suspicion that the form and content of women's correspondence was largely authorized and determined by the conventions of English epistolary novels, and those of Richardson in particular. Similar points have been made without reference to Smith-Rosenberg's work by Moers, Ellen, Literary Women (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976), pp. 114–16Google Scholar; and by Karlsen, Carol F. and Crumpacker, Laurie, in their introduction to The Journal of Esther Edwards Burr, 1754–1757 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 22–23Google Scholar. This interest in letters and diaries (along with sentimental novels) as prototypically female genres has diverted critical attention from women's poetry, a consequence lamented by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar: see their introduction to Shakespeare's Sister: Feminist Essays on Women Poets (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), esp. p. xvi.Google Scholar

11. On Murray, see Field, Vena Bernadette, Constantia: A Study of the Life and Works of Judith Sargent Murray, 1751–1820 (Orono: University of Maine Studies, 2nd ser., no. 17, 1931).Google Scholar

12. See Kessler, Carol Farley, ed., Daring to Dream: Utopian Stories by United States Women, 1836–1919 (Boston: Pandora Press, 1984), pp. 1–14.Google Scholar

13. Slaves born after the emancipation act of 1784 would be free at the age of twenty-five. On the black population of Litchfield, see Dwight, Timothy, Travels in New England and New York, ed. Solomon, Barbara Miller (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), vol. 2, p. 259Google Scholar. The first federal census (1790) shows 233 slaves resident in Litchfield County. When Hawthorne visited Litchfield in 1838, he saw the gravestone of a slave who had belonged to the Rev. Judah Champion: see The American Notebooks, ed. Simpson, Claude M. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1972), p. 150Google Scholar; and White, , History … of Litchfield, pp. 152–53Google Scholar. Unlike Champion, with whom Sarah Pierce had little to do, Tapping Reeve was widely known for his assistance to runaway slaves, including, most famously, “Old Grimes,” subject of a popular poem by Albert Gorton Greene: see White, , History … of Litchfield, pp. 153–54.Google Scholar

14. In addition to Benson, , pp. 136–71Google Scholar, and Kerber, ch. 7, see Cott, Nancy F., The Bonds of Womanhood: “Women's Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), esp. pp. 112–15Google Scholar; and McAlexander, Patricia Jewell, “The Creation of the American Eve: The Cultural Dialogue on the Nature and Role of Women in Late Eighteenth-Century America,” Early American Literature 9 (1975): 252–66.Google Scholar

15. Reading the poem without the title, or without a knowledge of the occasion, one is led by the conventions of “invitational poems” to imagine a male speaker; this requires of the reader a number of interpretational contortions and frequently leads to a sense of “false notes.” If one succeeds in getting to the end of the poem on this mistaken theory, the concluding revelation restores a good deal of sense to one's reading. Whether this special kind of irony is accidental or calculated, the poem is a good example of the difference that gender makes in literary presentation.

16. The precise date of the composition of the poem is in doubt only because the phrase “the Winter of 1792” might as easily refer to January as December. Wollstonecraft's book, published in England in 1792, was no doubt read in the United States before the first American edition in 1794. Smith's Diary, however, gives evidence that it may not have been available in Litchfield until January of the latter year, when it was enthusiastically and intelligently read by Susan Bull Tracy, another friend of Sarah Pierce. She was the wife of Uriah Tracy, Federalist Senator from Connecticut and confidante of Adams and Hamilton. Mrs. Tracy's lengthy letter commenting on the book (pp. 109–11) reveals much about the latent feminism of Litchfield's closely knit female society. Under the date of June 6, 1798, Smith notes that he is “sorry to find [Mrs. Tracy] converted, by the French Revolution, to Christianity. Yet such is the fact. And it is probably the fact also of many others” (Diary, p. 448).Google Scholar

17. Vanderpoel, , More Chronicles of a Pioneer School (New York: The Cadmus Bookshop, 1927), p. 7Google Scholar; White, , History … of Litchfield, p. 92Google Scholar, makes the same assertion. The claim is debatable, since it clearly turns on the meaning of “higher education.” Certain Quaker and Moravian schools were established in Pennsylvania (including one led by Anthony Benezet) as early as the 1750s. Andrew Brown's school in Philadelphia, with a hundred students in 1787, was patronized by Dr. Benjamin Rush, whose highly derivative and conservative Thoughts Upon Female Education (1787)Google Scholar made him by default the country's leading theorist. In Connecticut, Timothy Dwight offered coeducational instruction at his Greenfield Academy, and Jedediah Morse taught geography to girls in a day school as early as 1783. The first regular academy for girls in New England seems to have been established by William Woodbridge in Medford, Massachusetts, in 1789. It did not prosper, however.

18. Vanderpoel, , More Chronicles, p. 4Google Scholar. He gave $40. The construction of the larger school was no doubt influenced by the fact that Litchfield was at just this time becoming an important center of travel with the organization of several turnpike companies and the consequent introduction of four-horse stage coaches. Prior to 1798 Litchfield was relatively isolated: see White, , History … ofLitchfield, pp. 94–95.Google Scholar

19. Among those who at one time or another resided in Litchfield and attended the law school were Noah Webster, Aaron Burr, John C. Calhoun, Horace Mann, George Catlin, John Pierpont, and Augustus B. Longstreet.

20. Quoted by Koch, Adrienne in the “Introduction” to The American Enlightenment: The Shaping of the American Experiment and a Free Society (New York: George Braziller, 1965), p. 19.Google Scholar

21. Vanderpoel, , Chronicles, p. 6.Google Scholar

22. Stiles, , Literary Diary, vol. 3, pp. 247–48.Google Scholar

23. See Vanderpoel, , Chronicles, p. 46Google Scholar, for the reading of Wollstonecraft.

24. Smith's Diary for 1798 contains many references to his work on Alcuin; a letter of February 15, 1798, to Mary Smith Mumford refers to Alcuin as the work of “our friend Charles B. Brown” (Diary, . p. 425).Google Scholar

25. Sketches of Universal History Compiled from Several Authors for the Use of Schools (New Haven: Joseph Barber, 1811)Google Scholar. Subsequent volumes appeared in 1816, 1817, and 1818. It is interesting to note that several of the most prominent early female educators were also published historians: Emma Willard and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, for example, both wrote history texts.

26. Quoted by Vanderpoel in Chronicles, p. 51.Google Scholar

27. For Brace's conversion, see Vanderpoel, , More Chronicles, p. 120Google Scholar; for the other matters, see Vanderpoel, , Chronicles, pp. 259, 322.Google Scholar

28. Vanderpoel, , More Chronicles, pp. 167–68.Google Scholar

29. Pierce's interest in the drama was strongly shared and supported by her friend from childhood, Elihu Hubbard Smith, who was in turn a close friend of William Dunlap and an habitue of the New York theatrical scene in the 1790s. Pierce's earliest experiment with biblical drama of which any record survives predates Beecher's arrival; it is an 1801 composition meant for student performance, entitled “Ruth,” which may have been occasioned by the death in that year of Pierce's unmarried sister Nancy, with whom Pierce lived. A portion of Naomi's speech may allude to this circumstance: “No husband's tears will fall upon my grave: / No child will lodge me in the silent tomb: / No friend will weep for sad Naomi's fate” (Quoted in Chronicles, p. 85Google Scholar). I do not wish to argue that Beecher's powerful influence was the only source of the development in Pierce of a religious and moralistic temper. The revivals of 1798 might have been instrumental, just as the influence of Dan Huntington and Susan Bull Tracy might have been.

30. Vanderpoel, , More Chronicles, p. 199.Google Scholar

31. Vanderpoel, , Chronicles, p. 171Google Scholar. See also Sklar, Kathryn Kish, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (1973; rept. New York: Norton, 1976), p. 21.Google Scholar

32. Vanderpoel, , More Chronicles, p. 166Google Scholar; and Chronicles, p. 169.Google Scholar

33. John Pierce Brace: “It is strange that Aunt Sarah has such an ear for rhythm in poetry, and writes tragedy blank verse so well, when she has no ear for music, and says she cannot distinguish one tune from another except as they vary in loudness.” Quoted in Vanderpoel, , More Chronicles, p. 158.Google Scholar

34. Vanderpoel, , Chronicles, p. 246.Google Scholar

35. Vanderpoel, , Chronicles, p. 177.Google Scholar

36. Catharine Beecher's Hartford Female Seminary was begun as a day school in 1823; see Sklar, , Catharine Beecher, pp. 59–104Google Scholar. Sklar does not particularly address the influence of Pierce on Beecher's educational ideas. Catharine Beecher's estimate of Pierce is given in The Autobiography of Lyman Beecher, vol. 1, pp. 164–66.Google Scholar

37. Vanderpoel, , More Chronicles, pp. 294–96, 335Google Scholar; and Cott, , Bonds of Woman hood, pp. 116–25Google Scholar. Idea Strong figures prominently in Smith's Diary. Kerber, , Women of the Republic, pp. 278–79Google Scholar, suggests the possibility that the “Ladies Declaration of Independence,” prepared by the students of Pierce's academy on July 4, 1839, might have had some influence on the Seneca Falls Declaration less than ten years later.

38. See Vanderpoel, , More Chronicles, p. 232Google Scholar; Catharine Beecher had gone to Cincinnati with the family. Brace eventually won a modest reputation as a journalist and writer of regional fiction.