tonight's authors talk a program that is made possible in part by a from a generous gift from the massachusetts society of the cincinnati features dr. cynthia kerner discussing her new book, the tories wife, a woman and her

family in revolution mary america. and that was recently published, the university of virginia press. cynthia kerner is a of history at george mason university. she earned her ph.d. from university of virginia and specializes the fields of early america women, gender and early southern history. she is the author or editor of eight books and numerous. in addition to being the organization's own of american historians, distinguished lecturer and the past president of southern association for women history science. throughout her distinguished career, dr. kirchner's research has been supported by the american historical association, the virginia historical, the library company, philadelphia, the american antiquarian society and the national endowment for the humanities. but before i turn things over to dr. kerner, the usual housekeeping items are in order for our friends tuning in with us virtually on zoom this evening. following tonight's author's talk, there will be a question

and answer session. so please feel free to submit your questions any point during the presentation through the the use of the q&a function that can be found at the bottom of screen. and we'll do our best to incorporate them with live audience questions. should you have any technical related questions? comments those can be submitted by using the chat function, and one of our staff members will be monitored that and can do their best to assist. as always. so with that and without further delay, please join me in welcoming anderson house dr. cynthia kerner. but i'm going to knock the glasses trigger. the trigger. thank you and thank you all for coming out tonight or watching on your couch if you're out there in zoom land. welcome. i'm excited to talk about my new book. and in fact, the book came out just a month ago. and so you guys are my first book talk and so fingers

crossed. we'll see how it goes. i think of us who are interested in history are kind of in it for the stories. so i'm going to start by telling two stories. first, a really short one about me, and then a much longer one about a woman and her family during the american revolution. in other words, the topic of my book. and then we'll move on to what we can learn from that story. the story of jane spurgeon a.k.a the tories wife. so i first met jane. figuratively speaking, no sounds involved in the north carolina state archives in raleigh the mid 1990. it's. and at the time i was working on a book on the american revolution and i was reading women's petition to their state legislatures and really hoping to find some women who wrote about the revolution and what it meant to them and how they thought about things like liberty and rights and things

like that. i actually very little of that sort of rhetoric mostly i think because the woman who petitioned and were smart enough to know that they a much better chance of getting help from their government if they described themselves as frail and helpless. in other words, if they justified their request on the basis of their needs as dependents rather than on the basis of their, quote unquote, as citizens, the only exception, that pattern in north carolina least was my woman, jane spurgeon between 1785 and 70, 89, in words, in the years immediately following revolution, she submitted series of three increasingly early, angry, demanding petition laws, and in her final in the third one, she went so far as to criticize the government of the state and the men who ran it and to describe herself as someone who found it. and these are her words

extremely hard to be deprived of the common rights of other citizens. that might not seem like a big deal to you, but for a woman to use that sort language in a confrontation with public officials was extremely unusual, even radical at the time. equally important, jane also boldly declared that in contrast to her husband woman, her husband, whose name was william she, had always been a good citizen and well attached to the state government of north carolina. in other words, as one of her neighbors recalled later, jane spurgeon was, quote, as true a whig. her husband was a tory. in other words, she was as strong a supporter of the revolution as he was a strong opponent of it. in other words, they really disagreed about politics in a really serious way. so i wanted to find out about

jane. ever since the 1990s in this book is my attempt to flesh out her life despite very, very limited source, and also to try to locate kind of the origins of her very strong rhetoric. and i would argue also political consciousness. so first, some basic background information. jane wellborn spurgeon was born in maryland, 1736. she married a fellow marylander in the early in the early 1750s. and then moved with him and their firstborn child to rowan county, r.w. anne. but they say at rowan county in north carolina, in what was then the western of the province or the colony, and they arrived there sometime around 1757. unfortunately, the power point going to not be very good tonight. i can't show you a picture of either. jane or husband william because

at the time only pretty wealthy people would have had their portraits painted. and obviously was no photography. also, they lived in a really place where there would have been few, if any artists as artists kind of wandering around or offering their services as portrait painter. so even if they could have afforded have a portrait painted. the opportunity wouldn't have arisen. also, for that matter, both jane and william were. there is no surviving archive of spurgeon family. what i can you is a map of how the spurgeon and many other families from pennsylvania and western maryland and virginia migrated down. this the great wagon road which is more or less where interstate 81 is today. i guess it's actually really 11, which is the old federal highway, but kind of running down area. and they will move down that

area to settle in the carolina backcountry in the middle, the 18th century. jane and settled with some of their maryland neighbors in an area called abbot's creek in the eastern part of rowan county, which is where the red blob, is on the map. and this area was called abbot's creek. it's the eastern part of rowan county, which at the time was this enormous county in western north, the north carolina backcountry at the time, the spurgeon arrived, there was the fastest growing in the fastest growing colony in british north america. so of people were going there. and jane and her family prospered in north carolina. within a few, william acquired roughly 700 acres of land, which was more than three times what he had owned in maryland and virginia, where land a lot more expensive. their family grew by 76.

jane had given birth to 11, surviving, and there was probably a miscarriage or a stillbirth sandwiched in there somewhere as well. the spurgeon also became stalwart members of a thriving abbotts creek baptist church community, although when they had lived in maryland, they had worshiped at the local anglican church, the of england most impressive of all, though, was the fact that in 1764, less than a decade after he arrived in north carolina, william spurgeon got himself appointed as one of rowan county's justices of the peace, which made him one of the leading men in the county. now, william wasn't, nearly as wealthy as some of his fellow justices. a lot of these guys were really men on mic, men who made tons money and acquired tons of land by corrupt practices, eventually caused a rebellion among local

farmers. and those local farmers known as the regulators, william and jane seemed, to have been quietly sympathetic toward the regulators and fact some of jane's own brothers active in that movement. so all of this is to say if you're familiar with the story of the coming of the revolution, you know about the stamp act, you know, about the towns and duties you know about the boston tea party and all of that stuff. and those things are important in places like boston and new york. they're important in north carolina in the coastal towns like wilmington in new bern. people there in these coastal communities are protesting the stamp act and other offensive imperial laws policies during the 1760s in the back country and places like rowan county, though, people much more preoccupied with the who were defeated in a actual battle with like guns stuff at the battle of

alamance. in 1770. now what's important here is that in rowan county, the public officials, those same corrupt justices of the peace who had led the suppression of the regulators would be the men who emerged to lead the revolutionary movement. a few years later. in fact, spurgeon was the only one of the county's justices of the peace who became a loyalist or a tory, the only one who remained loyal to the king and to the empire, and who opposed the american revolution. all right. so the revolutionary movement finally gets cookin in places like rowan county once the regulators are defeated. and it's a very divisive thing. right. i mean, there are people kind on both sides. there are a lot of people who want to be left alone. if you're running the revolutionary movement. how do you get people to go

along with, your protests to go along with your movement or at the very least, not to cause problems for that movement? well, oats, swearing, loyalty, oath were actually a very important way the revolutionaries to separate their friends from their foes. and so if anybody like they were going to be causing trouble they would be hauled in by the local community and, have to swear an oath to support the protests to support the revolution. and when william refused to swear allegiance to the revolution, the county committee of safety in rowan declared him an enemy to his country. and here again, no pictures, but i got the text. basically, he is named as being an enemy. his country. interestingly, we don't know much about jaynes politics this point because the authorities

didn't require women to swear these oaths. they of assumed that either didn't know or didn't care politics or. i guess they thought that if women did or care, they would simply follow their husbands lead and go along with whatever their husband's political were. and as we shall, that will not be the case. jean william, not only did not support the revolution he actually actively opposed it in january of 1776. so this is like six months before the declaration independence he actually except the royal governor's call to a body of troops to fight the king. and in february, he and his men were among the 800 or so loyalist or militia who were routed by patriot militia at the battle of moore's creek bridge in the eastern part, the colony. william also served in the loyalist militia for pretty much

the entire duration, the war rising to the rank of. he fought in two more relatively battles that maybe you've of you've well you've probably heard of one of them. the first was kettle creek in georgia, which was a pretty small affair in georgia in february 1779. at the very beginning of the southern campaign and another much more famous battle at guilford courthouse in march 1781. in between, he seemed to have been involved in a lot of unnamed skirmishes and raids throughout the carolinas. he also seems to have spent of the war in the woods trying to evade would be captors. so we don't know a lot about william's movements during the war because he was hiding and he did a really good job of it. he never did get captured. but william also went home, jane, from time to time in the way we, knew that is because she kept more children there. 12th child was born in november.

1777 and he was actually named josiah after north carolina's last royal governor. and then the spurgeon the 13th and final child another son named jesse was born. 1780. so once the war began the issue of how to quell dissent and how to make sure people would be loyal to the revolution henry regime really became an even more serious than it had been before. obviously. and so once the war actually started, the state governments, new state governments, the revolutionary governments throughout the united states imposed severe penalties on tory dissenters. william spurgeon and the laws kind of varied state to state. but they were pretty similar in

terms of mandating the confiscate and of property and payment of extra taxes and so forth, so on. in north carolina, men who refused to take the loyalty oath were subject to four times the normal of taxes. and bear in mind the taxes were already increasing at an alarming rate to pay for various expenses related to the states enacted laws that officially banished men who refuse to swear allegiance to the revolution. so you were banished and your property would be confiscated, though, i have to say, and this is going to become important later, that the laws that violate it, the the laws that confiscated the property of loyalist men were very careful to preserve one third of that property for his wife if she behind in the colony. so the common law basically widows with one third of their

husband's property when he died so that they would have something live on. so these laws kind of made the women who were left behind pretend widows or fictive widows and reserved this one third portion for them. william as it turns out, was not only a tory, he was particularly notorious. most of these laws just came out with the sort of blanket you're going to be banished, you're going to lose your property, blah, blah, blah. but they also had like of people that they found particularly offensive that they named by name as being definitely subject to these laws. and there you see he's right there, william spurgeon, he's of a list of like 60 men in north carolina that the government continues. the government government consider to be particularly hateful. so he made the list. he's by name in all of north carolina's banishment and confiscation laws. though the state actually

confiscated his property and he actually was able to stay in north carolina until 1790. in other words, seven years after the war was officially over. so it says it in the law, but it doesn't mean that it's necessarily going to happen the way the law. still, though, jane and her children suffered a lot as a result of william's political choices. she was the one who was at home. and so she was the one that the tax collectors for the payment of those punitive quadruple taxes. which was like an impossible that landed her household the county's list of what called tax delinquency and insolvency. when the war began in 1776. jane left at home with six children aged ten and younger. she endured pregnancies that resulted in the addition of two more infants. as i said, in 1777 and 1780,

even with brothers and her older sons and possibly one enslaved man. it looked like they might have had one enslaved worker as to help run the farm, it must have been difficult. jane later claimed that she was almost continually harassed by soldiers because of william's politics and also the loss of william's labor and the continuing demand for food for the army meant that she and her children were often close to starving during the war. it's actually kind of difficult to pinpoint exactly when jane and william's political differences became iraq insoluble. but by 1781, when the carolina backcountry became a total war zone, jane and william were publicly known to be on different sides at that march. jane, the american commander, nathaniel green, to home. and she actually also

volunteered one of her sons to act as a scout for him at that very same. william spurgeon was a nearby encampment of british gentry british regulars and tory militia. so like jane's at home with nathaniel green hanging out scouting to figure out where cornwallis and the british or william is like a few miles away with all his tory buddies and with cornwallis and all the british soldiers, the two sides would soon engage in battle at guilford courthouse in october, of course, the battle of yorktown in virginia, october 1781 essentially ended the war, though the peace treaty wasn't signed until nearly two years later. and of course, you won because here and you know, history. so i don't to tell you that. so the end of the war secured american independence and. therefore, you know, it resolved a lot of the big issues. but for jane spurgeon, likely

for a lot of other people, there are still were some really important unresolved problems. william didn't return home after the war but he was still in north carolina somewhere. so what was the status of their. the state hadn't confiscated william's property but the law said they could. and in fact, jane found herself and her children on the verge of losing everything, including their home, their home and its surrounding land had been claimed in a series of lawsuits by william's creditors. so william was a banished outlaw, according the anti tory laws and of that he had no standing to contest these lawsuits or to file suits against anyone who might have owed him money, which in turn he might have used to satisfy his debts. jane couldn't do this either, because theoretically these his debts and his property. so she had no standing to sue either. all of this meant that jane and her children faced imminent

homelessness as they for william's creditors to enforce the various judgments against him and the struggle to save at least a portion of her family's land is what led to those remarks about petitions that she submitted to the state legislator beginning in 1785. and what in turn is what led me to her and her story. so, like, i said, i don't have pictures, but i have documents. this is her first petition at the time that i first saw them. you actually had to go to and get them out of like a dusty old box. now you can actually get them online, which is super cool and very helpful. so december 1785, she submitted this petition and the legislature considered it in this petition she sought to estab lish her right to her widow's third of william's property. remember, i talked about the law reserve in one third of the

property for the wife of a tory. in this petition, jane characterized her husband as politically dead, in her words, because he was an outlaw. and she revealed that she did not expect him to return home to help her with the maintenance of herself and her eight small children. she kind of inflated the number of small children that she actually had either that or she miscounted there were like so many and she didn't count them. right. but no one checked. jane's side at the confiscation laws provision for the wives widows and children of anyone whose escape was a state was confiscated. so she went through the law and said, the law says this. and then she about the multiple lawsuits that threaten to deprive her of that very proper t at this point she's really trusting the law. she's trusting the state and she submitted the matter to in her words. the humane and, upright disposition of the general assembly. so i'm thinking that she must

have been both surprised and angry when the assembly rejected her petition. so she goes home to rowan county and she's kind of like to see what happens. and three years later, she her second petition and as you can see, she's got a lot of men in the neighborhood signing in support of her. the red circle is around her signature on this petition. first one doesn't have a signature, but one this one does. and in the second petition, you could tell that was getting a little angry. she was little bit more indignant, even as she recounted what she called the calamities and hardships that she and her children had suffered of william's bad conduct. she took a more critical view of the state and its government. now she was demanding rather than expecting that its officials act honorably. and so i'm going to read part what she said, because it's

pretty forceful other women under the same circumstances are not treated in so hard a manner. nor can your petitioner believe it is the meaning of the law to the wife and children. entire miserable on account of the husband and father's transgressions. in this case, a legislative committee endorsed the passage of a law to assist jane and other women who found themselves in similar circumstances. unfortunately for her and for them, the assembly acted on the committee's recommendation. so a few years passed. she's doubtless freaking out about, oh my god, where are me and all the kids going to do? we're going get kicked out. and in 1791 and there you can see her signature, her two signatures. she was. she files her third and final

petition. and in this petition, her approach changed into key respects first, rather than simply william's political. joyce as condemning his bad conduct, she now presented herself as a bona fide, separate polity girl actor, distinct from her tory husband in both behave if in belief and in other words, he is this and i am that. we are different. she asserted that she, unlike him had always been a good citizen, that she, unlike him, had always been well attached to the state government. second, although jane still the gender card, she claimed that she was old, she was sick, and she had. now she says she has six children to provide for. now, she also stated her case in terms of rights, which is something that she really hadn't done before. she stated it as a right to property, which was a right that

she and other americans saw as an essential right of citizens. her word, although the legislature never formally responds under to this petition. not long after it was filed the state land office did issue a land grant in jane's own name for 400 acres on cabbage creek, which included the site of her house. and i don't think did that because she was like really mad at them. i think quite the opposite. i mean, no ever really commented on her language. i'm not exactly sure why state decided to give her the land, but they did. and obviously for her and her children, that was a good thing. sue i love this. this, like i said, was the holy that i was looking for in the archives. woman speaking her mind and talking about being a citizen, having rights.

and i think because was the holy grail that i was looking for, it's really kind of tempting for and maybe for you to read something more than desperation. exasperation into her rhetoric. but i think in the final analysis, my take on jane is that she was no proto feminist, but rather she was a woman who really resented the legal arrangements that, penalized good women who were married to bad or stupid men. and then she also resented authorities, people with power, who, in her view, didn't make good on their promises, who didn't follow the very rules that they themselves established. it's worth noting that jane became angry, indignant only when the state refused to give her the rights provided by its own statutes that one third our portion of her husband's the

widow's enjoyed under the common law. so even she didn't expect to be the equal men. and i don't think she did. jane did see herself as a member of north carolina's political community as someone whose problems and concern burns merited the sympathy and the attention of the state's representatives. it's also worth noting that by the time jane submitted this third petition, her position more like being an actual widow than it ever had been before. now she was in abandoned and her relationship with william effectively over. in fact, in november 1787, william had become a father yet again. but jane was not the mother of. his new infant son who was born to a woman named anne bed reddick, who was a much younger married woman who had previously lived with her husband solomon and their five children on the

side of north carolina's northern border. william and anne's relationship began while he was on the run in hiding from his whig enemies during the 1780s. the spurgeon separate was really finalized in 1790, though, when william left north carolina for and in there a young child soon followed, and william and anne presumably lived happily ever after, together as a married couple, because they had three more children together in canada. neither jane nor william ever sought a dissolution of their marriage. william, of course, secured a kind of de facto divorce by leaving the state, but didn't jane divorce william had some students read my book and they agreed. it's literally like this william's jerks. she should have dumped him. why didn't she? well, for one thing, she might

have known that she was unlike louis to receive a formal divorce from the state of north carolina. the state of north carolina had never granted anyone a formal divorce at this point, and in fact, they didn't grant. one until 1794. jane also might have known that most women who sought divorces did mainly to shield any property that they had or any property they would acquire from the claims of their estranged spouses. the state's land grant jane, in her own name. in 1792 had solved that potential. so there was no point in asking for a divorce. so what do we make of all this? i think it's a good story, but what do we make of all that? well, for one thing, i think the spurgeon story yields significant insights into the impact of war on family life. i mean, everybody knows that war

causes separate nations, fathers from families, husbands from wives, war, permanent separations, death. war causes. economic scarcities. i mean, all of those things people have written about a fair amount. most historians today, in fact, see the american war for independence as a brutal civil war. the spurgeon story that the same that, as the cliche goes pitted brother against brother could also pit husband against wife. and by the way, i have found some other examples of this. you can find them. if you're looking for them and if you want, we can talk more about that in the q and a. we might also ask whether the disorders of war may have provided a convenient opportunity for people unhappy marriages to go their ways. fragments carry evidence from a later chapter. the spurgeon family story

suggests that the disillusion jane and william's marriage might have consensual, maybe even weirdly kind of friendly. jane stayed in roanoke county where she died in in 1803, but most of her sons ended up moving west, and when they moved west, they settled in the southeastern corner of which was where a lot of people from virginia and north carolina win. if they didn't go to like kentucky or. after william died in, 1806 in canada and canada and she moved into the exact same area with william and her sons order still in 1799. and the estranged husband, solomon, left virginia with a woman named amy. they may or may not have been married. solomon, amy and sons by also all relocate dated to this same

place in south eastern indiana. so we have the sons by gene and william. the sons by william. and in the sons by and in solomon. plus an end all hanging out. i mean, i'm thinking that's weird, right? it's weird. might this unlikely gathering of character from the spurgeon family drama in such close proximity to each other mean that the breakup of these two marriages and these two families left no hard feelings even among men who as children, had been as a result of williams anne's elopement. did it mean that the parting of both the spurgeon and the ruddock's had been perhaps and that the disorder is war and the penalties imposed by williams tourism had. the informal dissolution of their marriages kind of more discreetly and without the usual

social and financial penalties. and to look at the big picture, does it mean that was postwar post migration which historians usually see economically motivated? was it also a potential means of me, of obtaining what we might think as a kind of do it yourself, divorce. hey, everybody move and i'll move into don't like you, you don't like me. we're out of here. boom. it's done. jan spurgeon was from a typical backcountry farm woman, but her experiences show how the revolution tested and in some cases transform as both personal and political. certainly the relationship between her and william, which seemed fine before the war. the relationship, her and her state government before the jane had a stable marriage. no documented political voice. when it was over, she was a de

facto single woman with and she had publicly claimed what she called the common rights other citizens. and then finally, one other take away, particularly those of you who like to do historic research, the spurgeon story is a cautionary tale for researchers who were tempted to interpret laws in other official documents or prescriptive literature at face value the supposedly banished william was often in roanoke, both during the war and for years after it was over. william was supposed to have lost all his property to the but the state never sold william's property. indeed, they never even confiscated it. and then there was one other thing that i didn't tell you

about that's kind of cool. in 1785, william spurgeon was tried and found guilty of stealing and. he was sentenced to death. a date was set. his execution, but he remained alive somewhere here in rowan county until at least 1790, when the first united states census him as residing there in a household separate from jane's. and then jane, whose three petitions are marked in the official records as either or not acted, ended up with 400 acres, which she passed to her oldest surviving son when she died in 1803. and there's her tombstone. thank you very much. questions. so basically, i mean, one of the

really fun things about this is that and also one of the reasons why it took me so long to do it after discovering the petitions is that basically the primary dogma or artifacts that i have for jane are the three petitions in the tombstone. that's it. she left behind nothing else. so everything else is corn text. and so this actually sort of became my pan genic project because like how much netflix can you really watch? and one of the things that was super interesting about, it is, it gave me an opportunity to see how much research can actually do online these days when you're ing, you know, when you're shut in but also how much you really do need to go to the archives anyway and fortunately, archivist and librarians who should be our heroes.

they're fabulous people of. i think they were really bored during the pandemic. so if i ever emailed and said, could you please send me this document, i'd have a pdf usually by the end of the day because they really didn't have anything else to do. so yeah, we. where did you go in canada. where did you go in canada on. cheerio. sorry town. an area known as the long point settlement. i believe it's norfolk county. and what's really is that most of the people who went there were not loyalists at it was settled a little late. i mean a lot of the loyalists leave in the 1780s they go to nova scotia they go to other places in ontario. so this is a place that is settled. and william has two petition up

there. a lot to get land because people don't really believe he's a loyalist because he gets there so late. but he actually ends up getting he convinces them he gets a significant hunk of land. and that's where he's where he settled. and interestingly he has two sons and two daughters by this woman. and the two sons moved to indiana after he dies. the two daughters actually marry into other loyalist families and stay behind in canada. thank you so much for interesting presentation. first of all, the first map shown seems to be more recently. we're not sure which was depicted, including the state of westward ginia. yeah here, right? no, you're absolutely right. the maps in, the book is much

better, but i tried to reproduce it for, the slide and it just was not visible at all. so yes, absolutely there is no west virginia at the time. you you're absolutely right. i see that in. 1863. okay. now to our question, are is jane going off of this story? is she given the thought of the option of returning to her home state, maryland, where she probably had some family or friends to resettle there or as many tories used to do after the war, they escaped to canada to start a new in canada. okay. so the first the question about jane, one of the things that's really interesting about, this migration down the great wagon road is that families tended to move together. and in fact, sometimes move together. so when there migrating down in the 1750s, both of william's

siblings who are brothers, also are moving with their families and of jane's siblings who i think are also brothers move so pretty much i mean all her family is in the carolinas. one of william's brothers later moves to south carolina but nobody goes back to maryland and. you know, there are good reasons why people migrate southward and the land is cheaper. and in the case of the spurgeon in particular, their father, who an interesting guy, he came over as as a as convict laborer because he was convicted of a stealing stuff in england. but he works his way out of that and he gets land and he has these three sons. and when he dies, he leaves all of the land to william, the oldest son, and so like, what happens a lot of times with these families is they decide that if they move together, they

get more land in that way all of the sons can have land and they can stay and so in a lot of ways, it would not have made sense to go back to maryland or virginia. there are no people there. there is no land there. and then the other thing is that by the time you get to revolution, the 700 acres that william had acquired were cleared, were productive, valuable and and then the other thing is that the war begins in the north, right? and then it moves to the middle atlantic region. so that being in north carolina, even though in a lot of places it's a very rough kind of place, you be thinking you're going to stay away from big battles and that kind of works until 1780. those last years are brutal though and then your question about the tories going to canada. i missed that in london london.

the because. you start a new life in canada could she moved to canada to start a new life there. yeah well he did what william did. that's what william did. and it's really interesting. i you know, the tories, they don't just go to canada, they go to england, they go to the british west indies, they go florida, which is a british territory briefly. and then it turns spanish and they go somewhere else. so there really is this, you know, sort diaspora of loyalists, you know, the people who were in the british armed service, a lot of them end up in india. i cornwallis is a very effective guy in india after whole mess is over. so people people are really on the move after the war is over and some of them are, you know, moving west like the people going to indiana, others or loyalists who were just sort of looking for a new place where

they can be comfortably british, but i mean, one of the things that a lot of the new scholarship, though, is showing is the vast majority of loyalists don't leave. they just like kind of shut up and play nice and hope that people will let them stay. in most cases, they do. there. three guys. oh, and he's not here. but there were three men in rowan county spurgeon, this guy mathias banfield, and another guy named samuel morgan, who is not mentioned in this law, but he's mentioned in another one of the laws or the most notorious loyalist in rowan county. and it's really interesting, william we know goes off to canada. matthias sharp banfield dies during the war. samuel morgan comes to rowan

county and lives out his life. and people are nice to him and, you know, and they're okay with it. so a lot of the loyalists don't leave. and my guess is that, you know, william was probably hanging out in north carolina, maybe trying to figure out what to do, you know, and then he probably realized that, well, you know, i don't have any property anymore. and, you know, and the whole horse thief thing, execution thing. yeah, that's little scary. that was a close call there. were a lot of good reasons for him to leave but it took him a long time to do it he doesn't leave 1790 anybody else. we do have some questions on zoom. oh, absolutely. let's do it. we're going to start with some land questions. there are a lot of questions about what to the land that was never scott confiscated, what did jane do with the land to support her family after? okay. well, so they ended up losing.

300 acres to these judgments. although, i mean, it's really interesting that if he had 700 acres and i think it was really. 706 and she was owed widow's third, i'm not going to do the arithmetic, but 400 acres is more than a third of 700 acres. so she did get more than the customary. the other land went to william's creditors and she passed on that land to her oldest son, her state and rowan county. and it was very successful later became a state senator. and he, in fact, over the years bought back some of the land that the family had lost the surrounding area. so the land stays in the family until quite late. and by the way, i should have

said the talk when i showed the map with the little red that liam, we're talking is near the located near the present day city of high point, north carolina, if you know where that is. great. thank you. and to dovetail off that a little bit. you showed the the gravestone at the end of the presentation. was that on the property? no, that's that's a great story. some of you probably find a grave com which awesome you can like look at people's tombstones online and so one day when i was in work avoidance i didn't want to write it's like well let's see if jane had a tombstone. lo and behold, she did. and tombstone is lowercase in the grave or the old graveyard of abbotts creek primitive baptist church, which, as i said, is like it's near high point. i think the mailing address in

fact might be high point. and so a friend of mine and i drove down here to find the grave site so i could take that picture. we get all the way down there and i hope there's no one from the church here because i'll be in trouble. we get we get all way down there and we can see the graveyard and we can see this dusty, active pierce stone work is is is peculiar to the area i mean this is this is a local stone carvers did this and it's very unusual and people have written books about it and stuff like that and we get there and we pull in the gravel parking lot and there's this chain and it says that you can't cross the chain and go in the graveyard and i'm like, you know you keep watch and. i went in there with my camera and with my phone and took i have of pictures of this because i'm like we are probably never coming back here again. so no, it's not on the family property. it is in the church graveyard,

which, you know, it would been customary for churches back then to have. graber the church itself is, not an original building, but the land is. i'm going to get like an email from the minister tomorrow morning. i'm sure i can edit that out. it's okay. one question about james jane's background. she seems articulate. so do we. do you know anything about her upbringing or her education? well, i mean? no, nothing at all she wouldn't have gone to girls wouldn't have gone to school in the colonial era almost without. i mean, if you lived in a city like boston or new york, maybe williamsburg, you might have gone for like dancing lessons or music lessons or something like that. you know, there was among protestants generally a are an attachment associate with literacy, a strong predisposition in favor of literacy because of the need to read the bible. it's really interesting.

a lot of girls were taught to read, but not to write. the idea being, you know, like, oh it's important for you to read the bible, but it's really important for you to express yourself in any way. she knew how to write, least to the extent that she could sign her name. the petitions would have been written by clerks. but we know that she had that. she had a signature or so no, i mean, we know nothing about her education. but again, the fact that her children also appear to have been literate suggests that she was educated enough to teach them because they also not going to school. growing up, the very rustic area in which they grew up, particularly since most of them up during wartime. so she would have been responsible for teaching them. but these are, you know, people who, you know, who are unschooled but educated in the sense, you know, they read they

can probably write and, you know, they also need to know, you know, basic arithmetic just to do the business farming in one of the illustrations in the book is of page out of a girl's school book. i mean you she was being taught by her mother but an exercise book or whatever from eastern north carolina during this period like the 1780s. and the reason why it's in the book is because she's got all these sort of patriotic flags and ships and just absolutely beautiful drawings. and i mean, my point with that particular is that, you know, this shows that, you know, even these little girls have this sense of patriotism. they know what's going on in terms of the war. and they're probably getting that from their mothers. but if you and can view this online at the southern collection at the university of north carolina at chapel hill this cipher book if you actually

went through the pages and you saw the kind of arithmetic these kids were learning, you know, i mean, i took algebra intriguing stuff, but some of this stuff makes my head want to explode because it's not it's that really kind of practical. i mean, it's very far beyond kind of basic arithmetic. so they they knew stuff and they either a lot of the stuff they knew was sort of transferred generation to generation. they also would have had access to books, spellers and like that, which would have been harder get in an interior place like county. but there were towns was a town the moravian were nearby. there were towns moravian were big on reading and although they mostly did it in german, but know i mean they're there but they would not have they would have had very little in the way of formal education. but that doesn't mean that they have been educated. right. thank and you mentioned that a lot of historians consider this

a civil war. obviously, the american revolution, especially in the carolinas. can you talk about the postwar the did the versus neighbor to the reverse, you know, patriot rivalry still exists. and how long did that last or. yeah, well, there's been there's been a very good study done of south carolina in which the south carolina bk country is in many ways like the north back country, where the spurgeon lived. i mean, the fact that there is a state boundary really does not that the circumstances of people's lives plus, in south carolina, you had a very large loyalist community in charleston in which was the fourth biggest city in the united states at the time of the american. and what this study of south carolina argues is is that the vast majority of loyalists were just sort of re integrated into

their communities you know, they're just kind of like mean clearly if you were a real jerk and you celebrated the king's birthday every year in the 1790s people were not going be nice to you but if you were just kind of like, okay, we lost so let's just go back to life as normal people were pretty accepting, they were they were a lot more accepting than you would expect. and again, i mean, i go back to the example of samuel morgan in rowan county, who the british considered these single most influential, effective member of the tory and the entire state. and yet he goes back and lives out his life in roanoke county, apparently, with the respect of neighbors. so i'm sure that there were certain people that made themselves just so horrible and so unpleasant that were like kicked out, but even a lot of those people, you know, if they

got kicked out of their community in north carolina, they would go to virginia, where no one knew them and just sort of kind of blend in. and a lot more of them did that, you would think. great. thank. i think that's a good place to up. and actually somebody put the find the grape link in the chat. so if you're looking for that, you can go online and, see that. but dr. i want to thank you very much for coming out and speaking us tonight. everybody go buy a copy of the book. thank you all for attending in person and on zoom and for your continued support of our mission. so we will see you next time and get home safe. take care. thanks very much,