“They also kept in place the old law of domestic relations”

The Omohundro Institute’s Uncommon Sense blog just shared Joseph M. Adelman’s interview with Linda K. Kerber, looking back on her 1980 study Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America.

In that book Kerber set forth the very influential concept of “republican motherhood,” the idea that arose after independence that women had a special responsibility to bring up virtuous sons (and, men conceded, daughters) to preserve the new republic.

Of course, with that great responsibility came…limited power. Here are extracts from Kerber’s remarks about the legal doctrine of coverture, which said that husbands controlled their wives’ property and persons. It could cut both ways:

The common law understanding of coverture meant that women were not guilty of crimes committed under the auspices of their husbands; by extension, women who sought permission to travel to join husbands who were behind British lines were not treated as traitors [though their husbands were].

In some confiscation statutes, the dower rights of wives or widows of exiled Loyalists were protected when the state seized their property IF the woman had broken with her husband and enacted her own loyalty to the Republic. Even in states without explicit statutes, courts often acted as though the remaining wife or widow had indeed dissociated herself from her husband and made her own political commitment. . . .

The Founders not only kept in place [and strengthened] the law of slavery; they also kept in place the old law of domestic relations, continuing coverture – aspects of which are still being dismantled in our own time – which, under the guise of “protection,” severely limited the options of the married women [and often, by extension, the not-married woman] to protect their own bodies, to manage their own earnings and to express their political views. Resistance to coverture began with the Revolutionary generation, not with the accomplishment of suffrage in 1920.

In the interview Kerber quotes a “a well-known Boston minister” warning, “Women of masculine minds have generally masculine manners.” That was the Rev. John Silvester John Gardiner, assistant rector of Trinity Church, in 1801. (Four years later, he became the rector.)

This Gardiner was a grandson of the Loyalist doctor Silvester Gardiner, born in Britain as the son of an imperial official. He got a little schooling in Boston before 1775, and his family spent the rest of the war in the Caribbean before returning to try to regain the doctor’s property.

Gardiner was high Federalist in politics, which he injected into his sermons. He’s appeared on Boston 1775 only once so far, for complaining about Jeffersonians in 1795. One of Gardiner unhealthy examples of a woman of masculine mind was “Mrs. [Catharine] Macaulay, the author of a dull democratic history.” He praised the “purity of our blood” in New England compared to the “motley rabble, that infest other parts of the Union.”

In sum, Gardiner was no democrat, and seems barely republican. Nonetheless, as first president of the Anthology Society and cofounder of its Athenaeum (both all-male enterprises at the time), he had influence over the early republic’s literary scene.

Caricature of a Tea Partier

Adam Colson (his family name was also spelled Collson, Coleson, and Coulson) was born in 1738. At that time his grandfather David was a Boston selectman. Adam followed his grandfather into leather-dressing, and he also became politically active.

Colson joined the St. Andrew’s Lodge of Freemasons in 1763. In 1766 the town meeting elected him as a “Clerk of the Market,” a beginner-level office. By 1773, he was also a member of the North End Caucus (and, reportedly, the “Long Room Club”).

Colson was in the second set of volunteers patrolling the wharves to make sure no East India Company tea was landed. Benjamin Bussey Thatcher’s 1835 book Traits of the Tea-Party listed him among the men who destroyed that tea on 16 Dec 1773—the earliest such list to see print. Thatcher also wrote of that night’s meeting at Old South:

Some person or persons, in the galleries, (Mr. [William] Pierce thinks Adam Colson,) at this time cried out, with a loud voice, “Boston Harbor a tea-pot this night!”—“Hurra for Griffin’s Wharf!”—and so on.

For Colson to have gotten down from the gallery during a crowded meeting and onto a tea ship would have been a feat.

In 1774 Bostonians voted Colson to be the town’s Informer of Deer, a post he held for years, and the next year he was chosen to be a Warden. In 1779, with the town hurt by shortages and price jumps, he was made an Inspector of the Market. He appears to have served only briefly in the military, patrolling the town under Col. Jabez Hatch.

During these years Colson maintained his business selling leather goods in the South End under the “Sign of the Buck and Glove” near Liberty Tree. But he also bought real estate, opening an inn and what by 1788 he called the “Federal Stable.” In 1782 he hosted the future Marquis De Chastellux, who was making a trip through the new U.S. of A.

In Boston’s 1792 state election returns, Colson garnered 7 votes for lieutenant governor, coming in third. Samuel Adams with 686 was the clear winner, and merchant Thomas Russell with 17 was second. Yet Colson was still just a tradesman and landlord, not a gentleman (he didn’t get “Esq.” after his name in the official tally). That made his relative prominence notable. So what were his post-Revolutionary politics?

In 1795 the Rev. John Silvester John Gardiner (1765-1830), future rector of Trinity Church, published a book called Remarks on the Jacobiniad through the new Federal Orrery newspaper and then the printers Weld and Greenough. It was a biting, satirical, and not entirely coherent attack on the nascent Jeffersonian party in Boston. In particular, Gardiner lampooned Thomas Edwards, Benjamin Austin, Samuel Hewes, “Justice [John] Vinal,” and Colson. Judging by a legal report in the Columbian Centinel in 1791, Gardiner must have been carrying on that feud for years.

Remarks on the Jacobiniad portrayed Colson as an illiterate veteran of the Revolutionary struggle. At what must have been some expense, the book even included caricatures of those five leading “Jacobins,” allowing us to see a version of Adam Colson, above.

Colson died in 1798, not surviving to see his party take the Presidency and hold it for six terms. He left an estate worth nearly $17,000, including $10,000 of real estate on Washington Street in the South End.