Vocabulary for Midterm

Abigail Adams
Wife of John Adams, second president of the United States, Abigail Adams was among the most remarkable women of the Revolutionary period.
Her father, the Rev. William Smith, was for more than forty years minister of the Congregational Church in Weymouth, Massachusetts. Her mother, Elizabeth Quincy, was the great-great-granddaughter of the eminent Puritan divine, Thomas Shepard of Cambridge.
Abigail was alone at home for ten years while Mr. Adams was away as a delegate to the Continental Congress and later on diplomatic business in Europe. Over time Abigail Adams became extensively acquainted with the best English literature, and wrote in a terse, vigorous and often elegant style.
Two volumes of her letters were published by her grandson under the titles "Letters of Mrs. Adams, the Wife of John Adams" and "Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife Abigail Adams During the Revolution." Her letters provide valuable background material on the life of the times, especially of the era during wartime.
She shared the intense interest of her husband in the political disputes that were to culminate in war. Later, when Mr. Adams became President, opposing political contemporaries argued that she exerted undue political influence over her husband.

Anne Bradstreet
Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) is one of the most important figures in the history of American Literature. She is considered by many to be the first American poet, and her first collection of poems, "The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, By a Gentlewoman of Those Parts", doesn't contain any of her best known poems, it was the first book written by a woman to be published in the United States. Mrs. Bradstreet's work also serves as a document of the struggles of a Puritan wife against the hardships of New England colonial life, and in some way is a testament to plight of the women of the age. Anne's life was a constant struggle, from her difficult adaptation to the rigors of the new land, to her constant battle with illness.

Catherine Ferguson
Born a slave, Catherine Ferguson was eight years old when her mother was sold. She never saw her mother again. That permanent separation undoubtedly impressed upon her the needs of desolate children, and they became the great care of her life.
When she was sixteen years old, a lady friend purchased Catherine's freedom for $200. Catherine married at eighteen and had two children but both died in infancy.
Although she herself never learned to read, Catherine gathered the poor and neglected children of the neighborhood, white and black, for religious instruction every Sunday at her modest dwelling on Warren Street in New York. A minister who heard of her work convinced her to move her school to the basement of his new church on Murray Street. Thus, Catherine Ferguson's Sunday school was the first to be established in the city of New York.
But her benevolent labors did not end with her Sunday school duties. Twice a week she held prayer meetings for the children and adults in her neighborhood. She continued that work for over 40 years in every neighborhood in which she lived.
Over the course of her life she took in under her wing a total of 48 children from the streets or from unfit parents. She raised them or kept them until she found suitable homes for them.
Of Catherine Ferguson a biographer wrote: "The example of such a life ought not to be lost...to perpetuate the memory of Katy Ferguson and her deeds for the benefit of posterity. She was a philanthropist of truest stamp."

Anne Hutchinson
Anne Hutchinson was an important figure in the early history of American Christianity. She challenged many of the prevailing ideas of the Puritan leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and, because of that, would become a symbol both for religious dissenters and for women in America.
She and her husband emigrated from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony as members of a Puritan. Soon after her arrival, she began to hold religious meetings in her home. Her views were not in line with the Puritan doctrine and she was charged with heresy and questioned before a court and then a religious tribunal - but, unfortunately for them, she was more knowledgeable than they and was very able to counter every argument and accusation.
Finally, she gave up trying to defend herself on legal grounds and began to tell about revelations she had received directly from God. This gave the tribunal an easy excuse to condemn her and sentence her to be banished. She first moved to Rhode Island, the destination of many religious dissenters, but after her husband died in 1642 she went on to Long Island with her ten children. There all were killed in a raid made by native Indians.

Dolley Madison
Dolly Madison was a granddaughter of John Payne, an English gentleman who migrated to Virginia early in the 18th century. After her first husband Philadelphia lawyer John Todd died in the yellow-fever epidemic of 1793, she was introduced to and eventually married James Madison, who was then Secretary of State.
Dolly served as unofficial first lady to President Thomas Jefferson, who was a widower. Later, she became the official First Lady as the wife of President Madison. Her enormous popularity as a hostess is credited with Madison's re-election to a second term.
Raised as a Quaker, Dolly did not acquire such "graceful and ornamental accomplishments" as music, dancing, painting and foreign languages, considered then as the most important parts of female education. Nor in her early life did she enjoy the advantages of wealth or rank. It was her great personal charm, abundant warmth and generosity that won her a host of friends and admirers. It has been said that Dolly never forgot a name she heard or a face that she had seen.
During the burning of the White House by the British in 1814, confronted by confusion and terror, she removed the portrait of George Washington from the house, saving it from the devastation that followed.

Lucretia Mott
Educated in Boston, Lucretia Mott became a teacher at the age of fifteen. Eight years later after moving to Philadelphia, she took charge of a small school in that city. After a year she appeared in the ministry of the Society of Friends, and was soon acclaimed for the clarity and eloquence of her presentations.
Early in life Lucretia became active in the movement against slavery . She became one of its most prominent and vocal advocates, continuing so until the emancipation. She helped form the American Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia and, later, was active in founding female anti-slavery organizations. She traveled extensively throughout New England, Maryland, Virginia, Ohio and Indiana, where she did not refrain from denouncing slavery. When attending the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, she was denied membership because she was a woman. Eventually, she took part in establishing women's rights journals in England and France, and contributed her talents in furthering that cause in the United States.
She helped form the first Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 to improve the legal and political status of women. She was active in the movement until her death.

Mary Philipse
Daughter of Frederick Philipse, speaker of the New York Colonial Assembly and one of the early great landholders on the Hudson River, Mary Philipse was carefully educated and enjoyed all of the advantages that society offered.
She was described as having great personal beauty, with dark eyes and hair, strong-willed yet of a kindly disposition.
George Washington was a Virginia Colonel, 24 years of age, who had just won his first laurels on the field of battle. On his way to Boston to meet General Shirley, he stopped at the house of Colonel Robinson in New York. There he met Miss Mary Philipse, visiting her brother-in-law during the winter months. George's young heart was touched by her charm and beauty. He left reluctantly, continuing on to Boston. On his return he was again the willing guest of Colonel Robinson. He remained there, in Mary's company, as long as duty would allow. Speculation is that he offered her his hand but was refused, though that is in doubt. The most probable version of the story is that he was called away by his public duties before he was able to make sufficient overtures into the lady's heart.
Truth was that Washington's time was taken up almost totally by military matters. Shortly thereafter, he heard that Colonel Roger Morris, his companion-in-arms and confidante on the bloody field of Monongahela, won Mary's hand. The couple were married in 1758. They built a mansion on the outskirts of New York where they lived happily, until the dark days of the Revolution. Then, after Colonel Morris affirmed his allegiance to England and the King, their house was confiscated and, ironically, became Washington's headquarters in the autumn of 1776.
Mary, her sister and the wife of Rev. Charles Inglis were the only women accused of treason during the Revolution. Mary went to England with her husband where he died in 1794. Mary lived for another 31 years. She died at the age of 96 and was buried by her husband's side near Saviour-gate church in York.

Molly Pitcher
During the Battle of Monmouth on June 28, 1778 the fighting was fierce and intense. The heat of battle was searing, and the soldiers' throats were parched. Many were exhausted and wounded.
All through the day — amidst the smoke and fire of the fighting — a private's young wife, Mrs. John Hays, carried water in a pitcher back and forth from a well to her husband and his fellow artillery gunners. Thus, the nickname Molly Pitcher.
As the battle ensued Molly's husband was wounded and could not continue, but she knew his job well enough to grab a rammer and keep the gun firing. She served at the cannon for the remainder of the battle.
For her heroic service she was ultimately granted relief by an Act of the Pennsylvania Legislature.

Betsy Ross
Operating an upholsterer's shop in Philadelphia, Betsy Ross is credited with making the first stars-and-stripes flag. She did so at the request of George Washington, Robert Morris and George Ross.
Attributing Betsy Ross as the maker of the flag is based on family tradition made public by her grandson William Canby in a paper delivered before the Pennsylvania Historical Society in 1870. Records of the Pennsylvania State Navy Board show that payment was ordered for "making ships' colours, etc." on May 29, 1777.
The stars-and-stripes was adopted as the national flag by a resolution of the Continental Congress on June 14, 1777.

Catharine Sedgwick
On her father's death Catharine Sedgwick — when she was 24 years old — took over the management of a private school for young ladies in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, an endeavor she continued for fifty years.
At the same time, encouraged by her two brothers, she wrote a work of fiction entitled "A New England Tale." It appeared anonymously in 1822.
Her second novel, "Redwood," also published anonymously, was reprinted in England and translated into four languages. Six other novels followed.
Miss Sedgwick also wrote and published a collection of her "Sketches and Tales" from magazines. She next authored a series of papers descriptive of everyday life, including such titles as "The Poor Rich Man and The Rich Poor Man" and "Live and Let Live." Her travels through Europe over a year's time resulted in "Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home."
Sedgwick wrote numerous historical sketches and biographies, and edited and authored several articles for literary publications. Her writing is considered to be thoroughly American in thought and feeling, and captured the character and manners of New England.

Sojourner Truth
The woman we know as Sojourner Truth was born into slavery in New York as Isabella Baumfree. She was sold several times, and had five children. In 1827, New York law emancipated all slaves, but Isabella had already left her husband and run away with her youngest child. She discovered that a member of the Dumont family had sold one of her children to slavery in Alabama. Since this son had been emancipated under New York Law, Isabella sued in court and won his return.
In 1843, she took the name Sojourner Truth, believing this to be on the instructions of the Holy Spirit and became a traveling preacher (the meaning of her new name). In the late 1840s she connected with the abolitionist movement, becoming a popular speaker. In 1850, she also began speaking on woman suffrage. Her most famous speech, Ain't I a Woman?, was given in 1851 at a women's rights convention in Ohio.
Sojourner Truth met Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote about her for the Atlantic Monthly and wrote a new introduction to Truth's autobiography, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth.
During the Civil War Sojourner Truth raised food and clothing contributions for black regiments, and met Abraham Lincoln at the White House in 1864. While there, she tried to challenge the discrimination that segregated street cars by race. Active until 1875, when her grandson and companion fell ill and died, Sojourner Truth returned to Michigan where her health deteriorated and she died in 1883 in a Battle Creek sanitorium of infected ulcers on her legs. She was buried in Battle Creek, Michigan, after a very well-attended funeral.

Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman is perhaps the most well-known of all the Underground Railroad's "conductors." During a ten-year span she made 19 trips into the South and escorted over 300 slaves to freedom. And, as she once proudly pointed out to Frederick Douglass, in all of her journeys she "never lost a single passenger."

Tubman was born a slave in Maryland around 1820. At age five or six, she began to work as a house servant. Seven years later she was sent to work in the fields. While she was still in her early teens, she suffered an injury that would follow her for the rest of her life. She escaped from slavery and fled to Philadelphia. This was the beginning of her journey into the South to help slaves escape.
Tubman had made the perilous trip to slave country 19 times by 1860, including one especially challenging journey in which she rescued her 70-year-old parents. Of the famed heroine, who became known as "Moses," Frederick Douglass said, "Excepting John Brown -- of sacred memory -- I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than [Harriet Tubman]."
Becoming friends with the leading abolitionists of the day, Tubman took part in antislavery meetings. On the way to such a meeting in Boston in 1860, in an incident in Troy, New York, she helped a fugitive slave who had been captured.

During the Civil War Harriet Tubman worked for the Union as a cook, a nurse, and even a spy. After the war she settled in Auburn, New York, where she would spend the rest of her long life. She died in 1913.

Mercy Warren
One of the most educated and brilliant women of her time, Mercy Warren was close friends with Thomas Jefferson, John and Abigail Adams, James Winthrop and Elbridge Gerry.
Wife of Revolutionary War leader James Warren, she wrote a number of political plays including "The Group" in which Gov. Hutchinson and other Tories were satirized. Other plays were "The Sack of Rome" and "The Ladies of Castile." Her play "The Squabble of the Sea-Nymphs" gives an account of the Boston tea-party.
Her three-volume "History of the American Revolution" published in 1805 is valuable because of her first-hand knowledge of many of the key personalities of the war.

Martha Washington
No list of notable early American women would be representative without that of America's first First Lady.
When she was seventeen years old, Martha Dandridge married Daniel Parke Custis, one of the wealthiest planters of eastern Virginia. Eight years later her husband died, leaving her with two children. Characterized at the time as "the prettiest and richest widow in Virginia," she met Colonel George Washington in 1758. They were married a year later.
They made Mount Vernon their home where Martha managed her husband's plantations in his absence. During the war she visited him in camp — sharing his honors, anxieties and hopes. Almost at the very hour of Washington's victory over the British at Yorktown, Martha's only son Col. John Parke died from camp fever only a few miles away. Arriving at the scene, Washington wept like a child. He vowed to Martha, "I adopt his two younger children as my own, from this hour."
As wife of the president, Martha was a gracious hostess, both in New York and in Philadelphia, and known for her official receptions every Thursday afternoon at the Executive Mansion.

Mary Ball Washington
To Mary Ball Washington we owe the precepts and example that governed her son throughout his life. The moral and religious maxims found in her favorite manual — "Sir Matthew Hale's Contemplations" — made an indelible impression on George's memory and on his heart, as she read them aloud to her children. That small volume, with his mother's autograph inscribed, was among the cherished treasures of George Washington's library as long as he lived.
When George was 14 years old, his half-brother Lawrence obtained a midshipman's warrant for him in the English naval service. George made plans to embark on board a man-of-war, then in the Potomac. His baggage was already on the ship.
But at the last minute his mother refused to give her consent, preventing her son from a life that would have cut him off from the great career he would eventually pursue.
A noted biographer described her action as "the debt owed by mankind to the mother of Washington."

Phillis Wheatley
Phillis Wheatley was America's first black poet.
Born in Senegal, Africa in 1753, she was kidnapped on a slave ship to Boston and sold at the age of seven to John and Susannah Wheatley. Phillis was soon accepted as a member of the family, and was raised and educated with the Wheatley's other two children.
Phillis soon displayed her remarkable talents by learning to read and write English. At the age of twelve she was reading the Greek and Latin classics, and passages from the Bible. At thirteen she wrote her first poem.
Phillis became a Boston sensation after she wrote a poem on the death of the evangelical preacher George Whitefield in 1770. Three years later thirty-nine of her poems were published in London as "Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral." It was the first book published by a black American.
In 1775 she wrote a poem extolling the accomplishments of George Washington and sent it to the commander-in-chief. Washington responded by praising her talents and inviting her to his headquarters.
After both of her benefactors died, Phillis was freed as a slave. She married Dr. John Peters in 1778, moved away from Boston and had three children. After an unhappy marriage, she moved back to Boston, only to die in poverty alone in her apartment at the age of 30.
Years later her "Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley" was published in 1834. "The Letters of Phillis Wheatley, the Negro Slave Poet of Boston" appeared in 1864.