Judith Sargent Murray’s “Love Notes” in Salem, Feb. 6

Tonight the Bridge at 211 Bridge Street in Salem is presenting an evening of words and music recalling a love story from the early years of the U.S. of A.

“Love Notes” features the letters from Judith Sargent Murray to the Rev. John Murray, her friend for fourteen years and then her husband for twenty-seven, set to music on the organ and harp. John is known as the Father of Organized Universalism in America. Judith was a pioneering female essayist. They were an early example of an “eqalitarian” marriage in the new American republic.

Bonnie Hurd Smith, author of Mingling Souls Upon Paper: An 18th-Century Love Story about this couple, will read from that correspondence. Catie Canale will play the harp, as she has with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Cambridge Symphony Orchestra, and New Bedford Symphony Orchestra, among others. Patricia Clark, Director of Music Ministries at the First Church in Swampscott, will play the organ.

“Love Notes” will take place on Saturday, February 6, from 5:00 to 6:30 P.M. Light refreshments and non-alcoholic beverages will be served. There is a suggested donation of $10. This is one of many events in Salem’s So Sweet Chocolate & Ice Sculpture Festival this weekend, which appears to be designed to help couples get a jump on Valentine’s Day.

Mrs. Murray’s Medium in Gloucester

In 1795, two years after the Boston’s first theater opened on Federal Street, it hosted its first play “Written by a Citizen of the United States.”

The anonymous author of The Medium: or, Happy Tea-Party (the subtitle later changed to Virtue Triumphant) was Judith Sargent Murray, already busy as an essayist. Boston Literary History states:

Murray suffered through the hastily rehearsed performance and then had to cope with a potentially damaging review that implied that the author was her husband John Murray, a Universalist minister. Beyond the brouhaha that followed, the play is worthy of study because it conveys Murray’s feminist outlook, especially in the character of Eliza Clairville. Notably, because Eliza wants her marriage to be a union of equals, she refuses to marry the man she loves until she reaches personal financial stability.

Despite that early experience, Murray wrote two more plays. The second, The Traveler Return’d, also has a notably independent and intellectual female lead. Murray published them in her collection The Gleaner, but they didn’t stick around in the repertoire of American drama.

This month the North Shore Folklore Theatre is mounting the first-ever theatrical revival of The Medium in Murray’s home town of Gloucester. The performances will take place at the Magnolia Library & Community Center on Lexington Avenue on weekends from Friday, 4 December, through Sunday, 20 December. Check this webpage for times and tickets, or buy season tickets to the North Shore Folklore Theatre here.

Bonnie Hurd Smith on Judith Murray in Boston, 14 Apr.

On Tuesday, 14 April, the Congregational Library in Boston will host a talk by Bonnie Hurd Smith titled “From the Writing Desk of Judith Sargent Murray.”

Murray was an essayist, poet, and playwright in the early American republic. She was among the country’s earliest champions of female equality, education, economic independence, and political engagement. She was also an advocate, with her husband John, for the more open “Universalist” approach to Christian theology.

Here’s a passage from Murray’s 1790 Massachusetts Magazine essay “On the Equality of the Sexes,” about the frustrations that an intelligent but uneducated woman can face:

At length arrived at womanhood, the uncultivated fair one feels a void, which the employments allotted her are by no means capable of filling. What can she do? to books she may not apply; or if she doth, to those only of the novel kind, lest she merit the appellation of a learned lady; and what ideas have been affixed to this term, the observation of many can testify. Fashion, scandal, and sometimes what is still more reprehensible, are then called in to her relief; and who can say to what lengths the liberties she takes may proceed. Meantime she herself is most unhappy; she feels the want of a cultivated mind.

Bonnie Hurd Smith has written six books about Murray. She also created women’s history walking tours in Boston and Salem, and served as Executive Director the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail and board president of the Sargent House Museum.

This event will start at noon. It is free, and the library asks that participants register through Eventbrite.

Revolutionary Women in Weymouth, 27 Mar.

On Thursday, 27 March, the Abigail Adams Historical Society in Weymouth will host a panel discussion of “Revolutionary Women: Abigail Adams, Mercy Otis Warren, and Judith Sargent Murray.”

All three of those women came from upper-class families in eastern Massachusetts and became known for the words they left (though Adams, unlike the others, never published a book in her lifetime).

The panelists will be:

• Nancy Rubin Stuart, author of Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation.
• Bonnie Hurd Smith, editor and publisher of the correspondence of Judith Sargent Murray (who’s shown here, courtesy of the National Women’s History Museum).
• Sara Georgini, Assistant Editor of the Adams Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

The moderator will be Michelle Marchetti Coughlin, author of One Colonial Woman’s World: The Life and Writings of Mehetabel Chandler Coit. Coughlin is also a board member of the Abigail Adams Historical Society, which recently completed the exterior renovation of the house where Adams was born and is now evaluating and restoring artifacts in its collection.

This discussion will last from 7:00 to 8:30 P.M. in the Council Chamber of the Weymouth Town Hall, 75 Middle Street. Admission is $15 per person, $10 for A.A.H.S. members, at the door.

The Legacy of Judith Sargent Murray

And speaking of Judith Sargent Murray, her modern editor Bonnie Hurd Smith will speak about that pioneering American feminist this month as part of the Old Town Hall Lectures in Salem.

Here’s the event description:

Thursday, January 20, 2011
Forming a New Era in Female History: The Life & Legacy of Judith Sargent Murray
Illustrated lecture and book signing

Using excerpts from Murray’s letters, Smith traces the remarkable life of the 18th-century essayist from Gloucester, Massachusetts, who called for women’s full and equal participation in the new American nation.

Independent scholar Bonnie Hurd Smith is currently editing Murray’s letters for publication. Her many published works on Murray include I am Jealous for the Honor of Our Sex: A Brief Biography (2010), Mingling Souls Upon Paper: An Eighteenth-century Love Story (2008), and editions of Murray’s letters.

Those books are available through HistorySmiths.

Boston Discovers Universal Salvation

I’ve been following the religious evolution of two men who left the Old South Meeting-House congregation in the late 1760s: retired artillerist Richard Gridley (1711-1796) and blockmaker Shippie Townsend (1722-1798).

As soon as the Revolutionary War began in April 1775, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress sent for Col. Gridley. He had proven himself as an artillery commander and engineer in the attack on Fort Louisbourg in 1745. Even the British army had recognized his ability, giving him a rank and a pension. Would he take command of the Massachusetts artillery regiment?

Gridley agreed to that post, on the condition that the congress would take over the payments on his pension. He thus laid out the first siege lines around Boston, fought and suffered a wound in the Battle of Bunker Hill, and became the first artillery commander of the Continental Army. In late 1775, Gen. George Washington arranged for Gridley to be made Chief Engineer but relieved of battlefield command. Henry Knox replaced him.

Townsend, in contrast, had become a Sandemanian, and therefore felt religiously obligated to obey the government in power—i.e., the king and his ministers in London. Many of his fellow congregants sailed away with the British military in 1776 and resettled in Canada. But Townsend stayed behind. In August, the Boston Committee of Correspondence complained that he wasn’t fulfilling his militia requirement. Eventually he and the few remaining Sandemanians convinced the authorities that they weren’t threats, that they could be as loyal to the new government as the old. The fact that Townsend’s son David was serving as a Continental Army physician probably helped.

Meanwhile, Gridley had been given responsibility for strengthening the defenses of Massachusetts’s ports. According to his biographer, “when engaged on the fortifications on Cape Ann,” the colonel heard the Rev. John Murray (1741-1815) preach in Gloucester.

Murray (shown above, courtesy of Wikipedia) was an English minister who had moved from the Anglican church through Methodism to an early form of Universalism—he believed in universal salvation, though he also believed in the Trinity and many other Christian traditions. Murray had settled in Gloucester in 1774, prompting some locals to suspect him of being a British spy. Gen. Nathanael Greene and Col. James Varnum of Rhode Island insisted on employing him as a chaplain during the siege of Boston, but he then returned to Gloucester.

Gridley became one of Murray’s supporters and friends. In 1790, after the colonel’s wife died, Murray and his second wife, the feminist author Judith Sargent Murray, visited the Gridley house in Stoughton. According to Gridley’s biographer, Murray later preached at the colonel’s funeral.

As for Shippie Townsend, he also became a Universalist—in fact, a leader of the Boston society. An 1890 history of the Old South Meeting-House, where I found the quotation started this series of postings, reported:

In 1785 its members purchased and enlarged the meeting-house in Hanover street, in which the Rev. Samuel Mather had preached for forty years. Shippie Townsend’s name headed the list of contributors, and he was chosen deacon.

Townsend thus helped take over the church of the minister whom he had debated back in 1768. Even more ironically, the Rev. Dr. Charles Chauncy, who had encouraged Mather to attack the Sandemanian faith back then, had finally published his own Universalist writings in 1784; he had been sitting on them for years, worried that such unorthodoxy would rile his congregation.

In 1793 the Boston Universalists invited Murray to become their minister, getting Judith Sargent Murray in the bargain. Among their acolytes was Townsend’s former apprentice and journeyman Jonathan Balch, who in 1798 interrupted a visiting minister at Mrs. Murray’s behest. The blockmaker’s son Dr. David Townsend also became an ardent Universalist, writing Gospel News in 1794.

Meanwhile, Townsend continued to publish his own pamphlets on religious and other topics:

• Repentance and Remission of Sins Considered (1784)
• The Master and Scholar Attending Catechising: or, An attempt to imitate Timothy’s catechism (1787)
• Peace and Joy: being a Brief Attempt to Consider the Blessings of the Peace between Great-Britain and America, &c. (1788)
• A View of a Most Magnificent Singing-Choir (1793)
• The History of the Mother and Child: A new primer, attempting an easy, entertaining, and effectual method of teaching young children the alphabet (1794?)
• An Attention to the Scriptures: for an answer to the important inquiry, whether unbelievers are under the law and under the curse? (1795)
• Observations on the Religious Education of Children (1797)
  

Townsend’s name doesn’t appear in most of those publications, but his authorship seems to have been an open secret. The Universalist minister Nathaniel Stacy later credited “some of the writings of Shippy Townsend” for contributing to his own conversion. Not bad for a self-educated blockmaker.