Episode 336: Tory’s Wife

In 1785, Jane Welborn Spurgin of Abbots Creek in Rowan County, North Carolina petititioned the North Carolina Legislature, attesting her right to 704 acres of land so that she might provide for her family of 12 children. Her husband, William Spurgeon, had been a leading Loyalist combatant during the Revolution. Now Jane sought to reclaim some of the property that had been taken from them by the rebel government of North Carolina. The Revolution had split their family, upended hierarchies, and now made Jane Spurgin claim citizenship and some of the rights pertaining to it. Cynthia A. Kierner captures Jane Spurgin, her world, and her voice in The Tory's Wife, A Woman and Her Family in Revolutionary America.

Cindy Kierner is professor of history at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. She was last on the podcast to discuss her book, Inventing Disaster: The Culture of Calamity from the Jamestown Colony to the Johnstown Flood.

For Further Investigation

The State Archives of North Carolina
The Regulator Movement, described by the North Carolina Encyclopedia.
For an overview of the American Revolution in the South, see my conversation with John Buchanan in Episode 110

Transcript

[00:01:23] Al: Let's talk about your first meeting with Jane Wellborn Spurgeon.

[00:01:30] Al: Do you remember? Do you remember where you were and what you felt? Because I bet you do.

[00:01:37] Cindy: I, so like back in the mid 90s, I was writing a book about southern women, mostly white women. In the colonial and the revolutionary era, and it was a very open ended project, but from reading other books about the revolution, people like Linda Kerber in particular had used women's petitions to the state legislatures as a way of [00:02:00] getting at their voices.

[00:02:01] Cindy: In other words, women who might not have left behind any other documents have left behind these documents where they told the legislators about their lives, about their problems as a way of getting some sort of help. And so I'm like, okay, I'm going to read all of these for Virginia and North and South Carolina, all the ones that were written by women.

[00:02:22] Cindy: And what I'm really hoping to find is, women saying things like, Oh, we had this revolution. Isn't that awesome? Now we have rights. Woohoo. None of them did that. None of them did that. What they did when they asked for help was basically they said, Oh, I'm a poor, weak woman. Sob, sob, please help me.

[00:02:43] Cindy: The one exception to that was Jane Spurgeon who, submitted three petitions between 1785 and 1791 and with each successive petition, when she didn't get what she wanted, she got madder and finally said, look [00:03:00] I should have the common rights of other citizens. And so I first.

[00:03:03] Cindy: I met Jane in the North Carolina State Archives in Raleigh in the mid 1990s, and I wrote a little bit about her at that point, but I've really been thinking about her petitions and her very strongly worded

[00:03:18] Al: So we have to talk more about petitionary literature in a little bit because I get so nerdy and excited about it. It's like the coolest damn thing. Petitionary literature throughout the 18th century. But how many are there of these petitions? 

[00:03:32] Cindy: There were hundreds submitted by women alone within this sort of, 10 or 20 year period. Many more were submitted by men and groups of men. But what's different about this period is that prior to the revolution at least in these States women almost never, they did occasionally, but it was very rare.

[00:03:55] Cindy: What the revolution did and what the war did really was created situations where a [00:04:00] lot of these women were on their own and they were needing to collect debts, needing tax relief, wanting their husbands back pay if their husbands were soldiers and so forth and so on. And they petitioned the legislature in order to get that.