A History of American Literature

54 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods

named or pseudonymous author, like “A Poetical Epistle. Addressed by a Lady of

New Jersey to Her Niece, upon Her Marriage” (1786) by Annis Boudinot Stockton

(1736–1801). “With reverence treat in every place, / The chosen patron of your

future days,” Stockton advises her niece. “For when you show him but the least

neglect, / Yourself you rifle of your due respect.”

Stockton also wrote poetry addressed to her friend Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson

(1737–1801), one of the best-known poets of the eighteenth century, under

Fergusson’s pen name of “Laura” (“To Laura” (1757)). Both Stockton and Fergusson

composed poems on married love (“Epistle to Lucius” (1766); “An Ode Written on

the Birthday of Mr. Henry Fergusson” (1774)); Stockton also wrote about public

figures (“The Vision, an Ode to Washington” (1789)) and Fergusson about conven-

tional and philosophical topics, such as the transience of love (“On a Beautiful

Damask Rose, Emblematical of Love and Wedlock” (1789)) and the primacy of self-

love (“On the Mind’s Being Engrossed by One Subject” (1789)). Both women were

known, as well, for the literary salons over which they presided prior to the American

Revolution, Stockton in Princeton and Fergusson near Philadelphia. They belonged,

in short, to a coterie of women writers who knew each other, corresponded with

each other, and frequently exchanged their work. One of Fergusson’s surviving com-

monplace books was apparently prepared for Stockton. And, just as Stockton

addressed a poem to Fergusson, so another woman poet of the time, Sarah Wentworth

Morton (1759–1846), wrote an “Ode Inscribed to Mrs. M. Warren” (1790), that is,

Mercy Otis Warren (1728–1814), poet, dramatist, and historian. Warren, in turn,

wrote a verse letter to another female writer and critic of the time, Elizabeth Robinson

Montagu (1720–1800), titled “To Mrs. Montague. Author of ‘Observations on the

Genius and Writings of Shakespeare’ ” (1790), thanking Montagu for praising one of

Warren’s plays. What is remarkable about many of these poems written by women is

their sense of a shared suffering and dignity, sometimes associated with the core

experience of childbirth. “Thrice in my womb I’ve found the pleasing strife, / In the

first struggles of my infant’s life: /” observes Jane Colman Turell (1708–1735) in a

poem published in 1741 that remained untitled. “But O how soon by Heaven I’m

call’d to mourn, / While from my womb a lifeless babe is born?” “What man is there,

that thus shall dare / Woman to treat with scorn, /” asks Bridget Richardson Fletcher

(1726–1770) in “Hymn XXXVI. The Greatest Dignity of a Woman, Christ Being

Born of One” (1773), “Since God’s own son, from heav’n did come, / Of such an one

was born.” That sense of shared suffering and dignity can also extend beyond the

specifically female sphere. In later life, Morton, for example, acquired a considerable

readership for a powerfully expressed antislavery poem, “The African Chief ” (1823).

While someone from quite outside this privileged circle of educated white women,

Lucy Terry (1730–1821), an African slave who eventually settled as a free black in

Vermont, composed a poem called “Bars Fight” (published in 1855, after being

handed down by word of mouth for nearly a century) that records the pain experi-

enced and the courage witnessed during a battle between whites and Indians.

Cotton Mather had attacked poetry as the food of “a boundless and sickly appe-

tite,” for its fictive origins and sensual appeal. Benjamin Franklin, the presiding

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