“If they will Quarel about such a trifling thing”

Jeremy Dibbell at PhiloBiblos passed on word of a new blog about the writing of women in the Revolutionary period and early republic, designed around the book In the Words of Women, by Louise V. North, Janet M. Wedge, and Landa M. Freeman.

Last week the blog featured an entry from the journal of Jemima Condict, twenty-year-old daughter of a New Jersey farmer, on 1 Oct 1774:

It seams we have troublesome times a Coming for there is a great Disturbance a Broad in the earth & they say it is tea that caused it. So then if they will Quarel about such a trifling thing as that What must we expect But war & I think or at least fear it will be so.

From the Women’s Project of New Jersey, here are images of pages from this diary. An edition was published in 1930.

Miss Condict’s journal provides a fine segué into yet another Boston Tea Party Week here at Boston 1775!

TOMORROW: The artistic inspiration for the name “Boston Tea Party”?