The Tory’s Wife Quotes

“Jane Spurgin was not the subject of one of [Elizabeth Fries] Ellet’s brief biographies, but another antebellum historian, the North Carolinian E. W. Caruthers, did write about her. Born in Rowan County in 1793, Carruthers was an anti-slavery clergyman and local historian who produced two volumes in the 1850s in which he recounted "revolutionary incidents" that occurred in North Carolina, mostly in the backcountry. The second of these volumes, published in 1856, included the earliest published account of Jane's interaction with General Greene, as well as brief biographies of other North Carolina women from the revolutionary era, most of whom either resolutely withstood enemy threats and insults as their homes were plundered or, "using their superior intelligence and shrewdness with a womanly dignity and manner and proper use of the tongue," outsmarted would-be plunderers”
― Cynthia A. Kierner, The Tory’s Wife: A Woman and Her Family in Revolutionary America

“Because coverture vested control of all marital property in the hands of husbands, the state viewed family property as belonging to men, rendering wives’ political allegiance immaterial in matters of confiscation.”
― Cynthia A. Kierner, The Tory’s Wife: A Woman and Her Family in Revolutionary America

“Although disagreements between wives and husbands may have been less common, or perhaps only less well documented, Jane and William were far from being the only married couple for whom the Revolution created political divisions that were seemingly irreconcilable.”
― Cynthia A. Kierner, The Tory’s Wife: A Woman and Her Family in Revolutionary America

“Although the Revolution in the southern backcountry was unusually bloody and divisive, that conflict was a civil war that fractured families of all sorts throughout British North America.”
― Cynthia A. Kierner, The Tory’s Wife: A Woman and Her Family in Revolutionary America

“Thousands of Rowan County residents opposed the Revolution or at least tried to avoid involvement in the independence movement and in the war that followed. Scholars estimate that roughly 20 percent of all American colonists remained loyal to the king and to the British Empire after 1776 and that an additional 40 percent were neutral or apathetic. Despite strong Whig leadership in the area, the numbers in both of these latter categories were likely even higher in the North Carolina Backcountry, where resentment toward eastern elites who led the revolutionary effort ran high just a few years after the defeat of the Regulators at Alamance.”
― Cynthia A. Kierner, The Tory’s Wife: A Woman and Her Family in Revolutionary America

“Marriage was a particularly high-stakes proposition for women because the English common law at least theoretically gave men virtually limitless power within their households. Under the common-law doctrine of coverture, a wife's legal rights and duties – including her control of property and liability for debts and other contractual obligations – were subsumed by those of her husband; by law and custom, fathers also governed their children with near-absolute authority. Because men's powers within marriage derived in part from the belief that women and children were inherently weak and inferior, they were also at least notionally tied to men's corresponding responsibility to protect and provide for their domestic dependents. In reality, however, both law and custom less rigorously enforced men's protective obligations than the authority they wielded over their wives and other subordinates.”
― Cynthia A. Kierner, The Tory’s Wife: A Woman and Her Family in Revolutionary America

“Because North Carolina lacked a deepwater port and because plantation-based agriculture increasingly predominated in its eastern counties, white people who migrated into the colony's western, or backcountry, region came overwhelmingly from the north—chiefly Pennsylvania and the western parts of Maryland and Virginia – rather than directly from Europe, as was more often the case in other British provinces. ...

These people came to North Carolina to pursue upward mobility by securing fertile land on easy terms, acreage they would clear, cultivate, and then pass on to future generations.”
― Cynthia A. Kierner, The Tory’s Wife: A Woman and Her Family in Revolutionary America

“Revolutionary-era legal reforms neither eradicated nor weakened the prevailing interpretation of the English common law of marriage, which characterized wives as dependents and husbands as their protectors, and accordingly endowed husbands, fathers, and masters with near-complete authority over wives, children, and bonded labor (which included people held in servitude either by contract or as a result of having been enslaved). In fact, in the postrevolutionary era, as the law increasingly rendered private households immune from governmental or judicial oversight, men actually acquired more power over their wives and other domestic dependents.”
― Cynthia A. Kierner, The Tory’s Wife: A Woman and Her Family in Revolutionary America

“Despite these challenges, Jane's story can be told, and it is well worth telling both because of its intrinsic drama and because making history more diverse and inclusive – going beyond the familiar narratives that focus on the exploits of presidents, generals, and other great white men – is a more honest approach to the past and also a precondition for attaining a more complete and nuanced understanding of it.”
― Cynthia A. Kierner, The Tory’s Wife: A Woman and Her Family in Revolutionary America

“Despite her involvement in such key developments in early American history, it would be impossible to write a conventional biography of Jane because so few surviving sources document her life. In America as elsewhere, public archives were established and curated to bolster the authority of the state by preserving documents pertaining to politics, property, war, and the like, so their collections tend to lack materials that explicitly pertain to women and their experiences.”
― Cynthia A. Kierner, The Tory’s Wife: A Woman and Her Family in Revolutionary America