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 seri