Defiant Brides

Speaker 1: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Brian: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

Brian: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Brian Balogh.

Nathan: I’m Nathan Connolly.

Joanne: I’m Joanne Freeman.

Brian: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians along with our colleague, Ed Ayers, and each week we explore a different aspect of American history.

Joanne: I want to take you to Boston Common in August of 1773 when a young woman named Lucy Flucker sets eyes on a young man who’s going to change her life.

Nancy: She’s not quite 18 when she meets him and he is drilling on probably the Boston Common with this militia and she’s struck by how handsome he is. He’s tall, he’s handsome. She gets to know him, he’s a book-binder. He’d been sort of orphaned at a young age. He had to drop out of Boston Latin School. He’s brilliant and he studies all these books he’d brought over from England. He sells these books, he has a flourishing book store in Cornhill in Boston. People like John Adams and Samuel Green come and read these books so he has this flourishing little business but she’s completely bowled over by him and he is by her. Lucy, sparkling dark eyes, high color, vivacious, and he was madly in love with her.

Joanne: That’s Nancy Ruben Stuart. She’s written about Lucy Flucker and Peggy Shippen, two revolutionary era women whose choice of romantic partner played out against the turbulent politics of the day.

Joanne: Peggy married Benedict Arnold who would turn his allegiance from George Washington’s forces to the British, and Lucy’s choice, the bookseller Henry Knox, put her socially and politically at odds with her parents.

Nancy: Her father was a royal appointed secretary of the province of Massachusetts. Her mother was the heiress to the Waldo Patent. Waldo Patent owned a huge tract of land in Maine. They were high born and they lived very elegantly and she’s gonna marry this bookbinder?

Joanne: So she’s a woman who knew her mind. Knew that she loved him, knew that she wanted him, but then what about Henry’s politics?

Nancy: Well, you know, this is 1774 and things were heating up between the Americans and the British and more and more he’s embroiled in the politics and her family is alarmed. What’s gonna happen? But she doesn’t care and she gets married. They don’t come to the wedding. She lives with him, we don’t know exactly where, but then she just is with him all the time as much as she can. She follows him, eventually, through the army camps of the Revolution.

Joanne: Wow. Did she ever reconcile with her family?

Nancy: No, it’s a sad part of the story because when she gets married to Henry and she moves in with him and she eventually, once the war breaks out, she has to live with people that are well below her quote social status in makeshift homes and so on, almost you would say shelters but she tries to write to her parents and the letters are never answered. When the British evacuate Boston, she hears that her father, who of course was the secretary, is transported by the British back to London. Her mother ends up in Halifax, Quebec and there’s a little correspondence with her sister about that and many years later, well after the Revolution, there is correspondence with her mother and her father but mostly her mother in London but then her parents die so she never sees them again after the Revolution is broken out.

Joanne: Wow. Really does give you a sense of what that decision was, what a powerful decision that was.

Joanne: And so let’s switch to decision number two. Tell us a little bit about Peggy Shippen and how she ended up meeting Benedict Arnold.

Nancy: Think about Peggy Shippen like a china doll, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, petite, innocent-looking. Skilled in the usual things a belle would be skilled in, you know, dancing, needlework, maybe some French but she was the brightest of Judge Shippen’s daughters and also his favorite so what happens is that because Judge Shippen’s a neutralist, when the British occupy Philadelphia, he’s entertaining them. When the British finally leave Philadelphia, and the Patriots come back in, he’s buddy-buddy with them. He sort of plays both ends so Benedict Arnold’s now the commandant and all seems to be well. He’s keeping the civil peace, he’s friendly with both of the people who were on the Torie side and are the Patriots. He plays both ends and he looks pretty good. Yes, he’s 20 years older, yes he’s crippled, yes he has children from his first marriage, but he looks pretty important. He’s now been made a general. Judge Shippen’s no fool, he checks him out. He gets character references. He still has kind of doubts. There’s some sleazy stuff that Arnold did with trading and so on, not great, but on the other hand, the guy’s sort of at the top of his form and he’s important and he’s respected by the army.

Nancy: And Peggy is insistent and so she marries him in 1779 but as I say, within a month, although nobody knows it for another year, year, year and a half, he’s already beginning to spy on the Americans and give out trade and weapon secrets and so on.

Joanne: Let me ask you a totally different kind of question, a more of a historian-esque kind of a question and less of the 18th century kind of question ’cause I’m just very curious. As a woman now looking back and going through this research, what was it that really struck you when you first started getting these two women’s sense of what they were doing? What grabbed you immediately when you started doing that research?

Nancy: Well I think that their strong desire to do what they wanted to do is what fascinated me. I don’t think, though, that either of them knew what they were really getting into.

Joanne: Well, no, none of us does.

Nancy: Nobody ever does.

Joanne: Really. No.

Nancy: Yeah couple things on that. Peggy Shippen who always used to say in the beginning her husband was the best of husbands, that Arnold was the best of husbands, later in life when one of her relatives is getting married, she’s in England, she writes back to her father and she says, well marriage is but a lottery.

Joanne: Nancy Ruben Stuart is the author of Defiant Brides: the Untold Story of Two Revolutionary Era Women and the Radical Men they Married.