Episode 59: The Scheme I Undertake with Chearfulness

Kathryn Gehred 

Hello and welcome to Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant. This is a women's history podcast where we feature 18th and early 19th century women's letters that don't get as much attention as we think they should. I'm your host, Kathryn Gehred. I'm thrilled to welcome Diane Ehrenpreis to the show. Diane is the curator of decorative arts and historic interiors at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello.

Diane Ehrenpreis 

Thank you for the invitation. It's nice to see you, Katy.

Kathryn Gehred 

Wonderful to have you. So first, can you tell me a little bit about your work at Monticello?

Diane Ehrenpreis 

Well I've been here over 20 years, and my background is in art history, and I've been fortunate enough to do many projects here, frequently researching whether objects can be identified as original to Monticello or to Thomas Jefferson specifically, or if we're fortunate, Martha Jefferson, and that's really enabled me to work on many projects over the years, particularly related to research and re installation of the rooms in the house. So some of our guests maybe have been back in the last six to 10 years, and has seen the second and third floors open on our behind the scenes tour. I oversaw that research and re installation, and then that was followed by doing the same process for Thomas Jefferson's private suite, the most significant rooms, probably at Monticello, as far as understanding Thomas Jefferson and his work practices and how he liked to surround himself, what objects stories of people visiting these spaces or enslaved working in these spaces, and currently I'm working on plans really are in play to restore the tea room to best reflect how it looked in Jefferson's era. And people will be very surprised to know that it was its own remarkable color adjacent to the dramatic and well known yellow dining room. I just been so fortunate to be able to use my art historical skills, but also in working here, cultivated a real background in doing social history and women's history, which brings us together today.

Kathryn Gehred 

Yeah, I wanted to ask, is there any Martha Jefferson object that you've come across that's really exciting in your career at Monticello?

Diane Ehrenpreis 

Well, of course, you know material culture with Martha is never enough, but we do have. We actually are fortunate. So we have silver from her first marriage, and pieces that she brought to Monticello and used here, a beautiful ladle that we like to have on view. I'm very attached to a silk pin cushion that originally had little steel pins that probably said something like welcome stranger, or that kind of little message. Those were imported from England in the 1770s and this is something that Martha Jefferson Randolph saved. So we really think this is an important, very personal kind of object. And of course, it tells us about how they used pins to keep baby clothes on, which we wouldn't do today,

Kathryn Gehred 

Absolutely terrifying to think about for me.

Diane Ehrenpreis 

Yeah, and most recently, Thomas Jefferson commissioned a memento mori watch key in honor of his wife after she died. We're not exactly sure where he got it, but certainly some sort of urban setting, Philadelphia, possibly Williamsburg, maybe Paris, but on one side, it has her, of course, name and life and death dates. On the recto, underneath a crystal, is a plait of her hair, this beautiful Auburn shade of hair. So it's really the physicality of Martha wrapped up in that piece. And it was very exciting to finally bring that home, and it just, you know, it's, there's the only one. There might be eight silver Jefferson cups, but there's just one of these watch keys. And when you think about it by extension, this is something Jefferson wore next to his person every day, and would have handled it and thought about her every day when he wound his pocket watch. So yes, and you know, we always hope to find more things, or there's clues about what was here using archeological shirts and tableware. And we could talk about a lot Katy.

Kathryn Gehred 

Coming on a women's history podcast, how does sort of working in history and historic interiors? Do you feel like that ties into women's history and your experience.

Diane Ehrenpreis 

That's how this whole project started, was through an interior. You know, it's a domestic sphere. But years ago, the curator at the time, Susan Stein, asked me to please start doing research and putting together a furnishing plan for the South Pavilion, which many of our listeners know, was the first domestic dwelling where Thomas Jefferson and Martha Jefferson started their married life. And that's how I started working on her story. Picture living in a studio apartment in New York and you've got one or two toddlers in there while you're waiting for your house to be built in the suburbs. That's what it was. It was sort of like. For them, and that's how I ran across and learned more about the silver that I mentioned and the pin cushion and these types of important objects that survive from Martha. That was my introduction to learning that the actual documentary evidence for her life was reduced to what we then thought was three letters. And working on this project, a fourth letter showed up. Those are the only letters, actual, you know, correspondence, that survive in Martha Jefferson's own hand. I'm sure we'll find more. I know we will. But the content of those letters is what set this project in motion, as far as understanding, you know, what is she writing about? Who's she writing on August 8, 1780, so absolutely women's experiences, the material culture that's left from them, documentation, probates, inventories, absolutely overlays pretty much every space at Monticello in one way or another.

Kathryn Gehred 

So tell me more about this project that you're working on.

Diane Ehrenpreis 

Working with a young scholar named Nicole Brown, and together, we are working on an essay. It's really about Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson, how her, almost her entire married life, overlays the Revolutionary era in Virginia, and seeing if we can go back to the documentation, not just these four brief letters, but you know, letters that people write to one another, that might mention her, or the overlaying where the expense account tells us they were and what was happening in Virginia at that time and increasingly, the stakes got higher and higher, as far as what women in Virginia went through as the theater of war finally comes to Virginia in late 1780 and twice during 1781 so that's the project we're working on, and we've managed to find some really Interesting new material. I was excited to find sort of a gossipy letter which said, oh, please share this with Mrs. Jefferson. And the tone of the anecdote was very chatty and warm. And you know, as you know, doing women's history, sometimes you have to go by inference, or, you know, deduction. What that would tell us if he's wanting to interact via a letter with such a warm and sort of almost gossipy, playful tone, recounting a story about a shared friend. What does that tell us about Martha? And I think that it told us quite a bit. So that's some of the stuff that's coming along in this essay. Oh, great. That's awesome. Yeah, you know, maybe we should talk about, why is Diane having to go in through the back door? Yeah, to find, you know, by inference, learn more about Mrs. Jefferson's temperament and her playful, you know, maybe her sense of humor. And that's because most of the entire epistolary record and has disappeared. So that's fairly well known, I think for many of our listeners, that Thomas Jefferson and the way that Martha Washington, Thomas Jefferson, there's one reference that makes it very clear that he's actively collecting Martha Jefferson's his deceased wife's letters late in life. So it's not that he's just destroying the their own letters between them, but he's asked the neighbor down the road, Mrs. Coles, for Martha Jefferson's letters, and that's pretty calculating, right to like, literally round them up, and by extension, he probably asked Martha Jefferson's half sisters for letters that she may have written. This is why they're so very scarce. And even a great granddaughter records how no one in our family has a scrap of paper that Mrs. Jefferson wrote on. So that's why we have to go to extensive lengths. We will not be defeated. We can tell this story, you know, give her voice back to a certain extent, by using tools that people who do women's history have had a lot of success with thinking about things just a little differently.

Kathryn Gehred 

Yeah, sometimes you have to use different sources. So I've thought about this a lot after working on the Martha Washington Papers of like, why you would choose to burn your correspondence, and I feel like Martha Washington sort of wanted her letters destroyed because she didn't want to be part of the historical narrative. But it does feel a little bit interesting that Jefferson would go to such lengths to burn all of those letters, and it's sort of like claiming, you know, the memory of this other person as yours. I feel like that's how it was for Martha Washington, but it just feels a little brutal for Thomas Jefferson to be like, I am the only person who gets to know who this person was.

Diane Ehrenpreis 

You know when you get to have the luxury of spending enough time to really read materials and think about them. But, there was one published in Jefferson's first biography, written by his grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph. In an appendix, he included a very important document, which is essentially a receipt of some donations that Virginia women made to a campaign that I think we'll talk about but it occurred to me that the grandson didn't really know what this was. He didn't understand that what he was reading was a campaign that his own grandmother had launched in support of the war effort, asking her peers and contacts of women in Virginia to support such a thing because the record was gone, there was no context for it, and so her own children and grandchildren didn't know her contribution, not just you know, like much about her personality, but even her life in tandem with Thomas Jefferson, or as an activist apart from Thomas Jefferson. When I think about that, and you have children, I think, my gosh, you know, everyone wants to have a little bit of a sense of where you come from and who these ancestors were, and probably was sort of a painful void that they just didn't have enough information. And we don't know, but my guess might be Thomas Jefferson probably didn't talk about Martha Jefferson very much.

Kathryn Gehred 

Sounds like that. So let's talk about her a little bit.

Diane Ehrenpreis 

Okay, let's keep this going.

Kathryn Gehred 

We're going to be doing one of the few letters from Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson's wife. Can you give me sort of an introduction to who this person was?

Diane Ehrenpreis 

Yes, yes. So Martha Jefferson, her mother, was from a Virginia gentry family, the Eppes family, another Martha, Martha Eppes, who married John Wales, and they were down in the Tidewater. John Wales was an Englishman who came over. He was a tax collector, a planter. He dealt in the slave trade. And Martha's own mother died when she was a baby, very young infant. And John Wales goes on to marry three times, multiple stepmothers that Martha Wales had brought in over her and then through those marriages, she had at least three half sisters who lived to adulthood, and she was particularly close to her sister Elizabeth Wales, who marries another Kinsman, Frances Eppes, also John Wales has a relationship with Elizabeth Hemings, and so there's a family connection that's very close throughout generations, and they're some half siblings through that relationship as well. Much has been written about that, and I encourage people to take a look at the Hemings and monticellos remarkable book. So Martha Jefferson, by extension, we know there's a book that survives that was clearly her own book, Telemachus. She and Thomas Jefferson appreciated Tristram Shandy so popular literature, classical literature, and doing work on this essay. Just recently, Jefferson, in a letter, mentions Mrs. Jefferson's old tutor. I think his name is Mr. Rose, and I don't think we knew she had a tutor. So we, you know, that is a great one short reference that makes us learn a whole lot more about she was very well educated. And also musical keyboardist who had a tutor. I think it's Peter palum who was at Brewton parish church. So really schooled and classical education, beautiful handwriting, and then she almost certainly had experience in how you manage a plantation in the slave society in Virginia, which we know she went off to do at Monticello. So we don't think that she had to figure that out on the wing. She probably was doing some of that at the family home called the forest down in Charles City County. She married when she was 18 to a man named batter Skelton, and they were married for about three years, and she had a son named John. And then the record suggests that Skelton dies 1768, other scholars think that Thomas Jefferson probably started to court her early in 1771 and they marry on New Year's Day, 1772. Sadly, maybe six months beforehand her one son from her first marriage had died. So Jefferson and Martha in the middle of winter, he brings her to Monticello. I think he must be excited to see that one freestanding brick structure that I referenced earlier. I think this was a good introduction to working on topics with Jefferson, because you hear the lore, the sort of story that was passed down in the family about how they arrived. Knee deep snow in the middle of winter, no one was expecting them, and that there was no fire or beds ready, and then they find a bottle of wine the evening, and the in the whole honeymoon is salvaged, because they just companionable together in this freestanding building, literally on the top of a little denuded mountain. And what was so helpful for me to learn early on was when I actually overlaid that anecdote with the actual written record in Jefferson's memorandum book, we could see that they only stayed about a week, and then they went back down to the Tidewater, went to stay with friends and family. And you know, when you think about it, like, oh, well, if I was a newlywed, even today, and I was on this snowy mountain top with insufficient everything and completely isolated from all my friends and family, I might say, I think it's, this is lovely. I can't wait to come back in the summer, but, and by the way, they do come back in the summer, and they do live in this freestanding what our visitors will know as the South Pavilion, and they come back in time in July to ensure that their first child, who becomes Martha Jefferson Randolph, is born in that space and a few other children too. They do not have success. They have a lot of heartbreak over the number of children that they lose together, and ultimately, only two of their at least six live births, Martha had survived to adulthood. Martha eventually dies in September 1782, so she makes it all the way through the war years. Knows that that the cause is probably one has one more child born, child named Lucy Elizabeth, and then maybe six months or so after that last birth, she passes away. One thing that I have noticed and at least one other scholar before me has brought up the birth weight in those children. Jefferson records the birth weights of

Kathryn Gehred 

Classic Jefferson.

Diane Ehrenpreis 

Yeah, that's a good anywhere you can have a math problem, right? But those babies are getting bigger and bigger, and that last baby was a 10 pound baby.

Kathryn Gehred 

Oh, wow.

Diane Ehrenpreis 

And so someone has already commented that it's possible that she had gestational diabetes, or she may have had diabetes. They knew what diabetes was in those days, but within that time, she was, you know, married to the governor of Virginia. She was wartime wife, overseeing and entertaining both prisoner of war British officers, a German Baron, as well as American officers, and working in her own way to support the war effort, as well as taking care of family, keeping the plantations going, managing enslaved workers while Jefferson himself is gone. Lots that we can extrapolate from financial records, you know, travel records. I think part of me Martha Jefferson's been short handed often that oh, she wasn't healthy, she wasn't well, and so she sort of gets a buy. And I just feel like she accomplished a lot. Look at what she managed to accomplish, what she kept going successfully as a, you know, as a wife and plantation manager, as a individual who supported the war effort in her own right.

Kathryn Gehred 

It sort of strikes me that I feel like with Jefferson, there's a lot of focus on, like, leading up to the American Revolution with, like, the Declaration of Independence, and then his presidency and his time in Paris and all of that. But like, the actual American Revolution, it's like nobody remembers what Jefferson was doing during the actual Revolution, when he was governor of Virginia, because he wasn't, you know, a military figure, necessarily. And it kind of feels like she's the victim of that a little bit, because, you know, she passes away right at the end of the war.

Diane Ehrenpreis 

To your point, he was not a military man, and in fairness to him, the full might of the British regular army arrives in Virginia after years of giving supplies and manpower, and people are exhausted, and all of a sudden it gets 100% worse for Virginia while Jefferson's governor. So I'm not making excuses, but I agree that it's and maybe Jefferson himself, to your point, might prefer that we don't talk about, you know, he was criticized for whether his actions were sufficient.

Kathryn Gehred 

Yeah. So who is she writing this letter to?

Diane Ehrenpreis 

There are four letters that are almost exactly the same, and the one that I would chose to read to you is one that we know was sent to Mrs. Madison. So if our listeners go to founders online, you can find this letter the editors so far have identified that as Eleanor Conway Madison, which is James Madison of President Madison's mother. Other scholars have put forward, and I think that they're right, that it's probably to a woman named Sarah Tate Madison, who's the wife of Bishop James Madison down in Williamsburg, who is the head of the College of William and Mary at that time. And there is evidence that that couple is actually in Thomas Jefferson and Martha Jefferson's orbit, in a way that I don't know that I would be writing to Eleanor Conway, who is an elderly woman at this time, but it's possible, so it is to a Mrs. Madison. Shall I read it?

Kathryn Gehred 

Yeah, let's do it.

Diane Ehrenpreis 

Don't blink, or you'll miss it.

Diane Ehrenpreis 

August 8th 1780

Diane Ehrenpreis 

Madam Mrs. Washington has done me the honor of communicating the inclosed proposition of our sisters of Pennsylvania and of informing me that the same grateful sentiments are displaying themselves in Maryland. Justified by the sanction of her letter in handing forward the scheme I undertake with chearfulness the duty of furnishing to my country women an opportunity of proving that they also participate of those virtuous feelings which gave birth to it. I cannot do more for its promotion than by inclosing to you some of the papers to be disposed of as you think proper. I am with the greatest respect Madam

Diane Ehrenpreis 

Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson to Eleanor Conway Madison

Diane Ehrenpreis 

Richmond

Diane Ehrenpreis 

Your most humble servant,

Diane Ehrenpreis 

Martha Jefferson

Kathryn Gehred 

Okay, I know, I know she's doing something. She's getting business done.

Diane Ehrenpreis 

She is very busy. This one is, if I'm writing, thinking, this one goes to Williamsburg, so it's an urban letter, but the other three letters are to contacts who are in a rural setting. So she writes one letter goes to family friend in Albemarle County. Her name is Mary Walker Lewis. These are all people that she knows, I think, in some way or another. She sends one letter to Frances bland Randolph Tucker, who is at a plantation matoax. Lastly, there's a letter that survives that was sent to Elizabeth Phillips gates, that's the wife of General Horatio Gates, and they lived up in Berkeley County, now West Virginia, at a place called travelers. Rest, all of these letters are variations. The main body of the text is about the same, but it's interesting. For example, the letter she writes to Mrs. Gates, she's especially humble and obsequious in her closure. And this one that I just read to you is much more straightforward, which also suggests to me, someone that she knows pretty well that it's more of a some sort of friend or acquaintance that she's writing to. So what's going on in this letter? And what Martha Jefferson was writing about was a campaign that the women in Philadelphia had launched in June 1780, so Martha is writing about two and a half, three months after the women of Philadelphia had rallied around determining that they wanted to be active supporters of the American revolutionary cause of the soldiers who were in such difficult straits as far as not being paid and not being properly clothed. So what these women in Philadelphia, put together was a broadside which is called the sentiments of an American woman. And the primary authors thought to be Esther De Beer Reed, who was the wife of Joseph Reed, the president of Pennsylvania. And this has been very well documented their own grandson, in contrast to Thomas Jefferson, Randolph, who I mentioned previously, who had no idea what he was looking at when he had a receipt from a bunch of with a bunch of ladies names on it, the reads, grandson found all of this documentation. So the Philadelphia women's campaign was well known as early as when he published a biography of his Reed grandparents in 1847 and he he ran across letters, particularly as Katy knows, between George Washington and Esther Reed, about how this campaign would take shape and be told that it was so successful and that they had gathered so much money, and that these obviously white women of a certain class who had wherewithal and time, were going door to door, collecting money. And so the Broadside is quite lengthy, but it was printed many, many copies. I don't know if anyone knows how many copies were printed, but what I think is happening in this letter is she says, Mrs. Washington, so we're saying George Washington's wife Martha, has done me the honor of communicating the enclosed proposition of our sisters of Pennsylvania, that is absolutely copies of the sentiments of an American woman is was she has sent me these broadsides, and she says that the women of Maryland are also being successful and undertaking this campaign, and then testified by the sanction of her letter and handing forward the scheme. So handing forward the scheme is very clearly outlined, both in the Broadside, and then there was an addendum to the Broadside the next day, I think they got very excited. And the addendum is this detailed outline about how the campaign will work. We need a treasurist, and she's going to keep a log book of everyone who gives money, and then we'll gather the funds. That is what Martha Washington sends to Martha Jefferson. This is not new. Scholars have known about it, but what I noticed was some scholars, as you read on, especially in Martha's closing. Martha Jefferson's closure, she says, I cannot do more for its promotion than buying closing to use some of the papers to be disposed of as you think proper. That turn a phrase, some scholars have interpreted, is she's being half hearted. She's not particularly involved. She's sort of, okay, fine. I'll send these along, but I'm not going to take this up. But to me, and I ask you, Katy, I think she's saying, This is so eloquent. This is so clear. All of the materials are here. I'm trying to get the word out. So she's saying I can't do better than what I'm enclosing. You, if you think it's, it's a worthy cause, then you know, do what you think is is right, which is, see page two, is what I would argue.

Kathryn Gehred 

That makes sense to me.

Diane Ehrenpreis 

Well, good. And then, of course, Martha's own actions. We don't know how many of these letters Martha sat down and wrote while she's like, six months pregnant in August in Richmond, but we can see, you know, geographically, this is not Philadelphia. She's got to try and throw her net. It's a completely different situation than an urban setting. So what the Jeffersons do the very next day is they put a notice in the Virginia Gazette, again, announcing this campaign and saying a little bit more about how women can participate, and that we want to use the churches. There'll be a treasurist and you can bring your donations to the church, and it'll be a funnel system signed from both Thomas Jefferson and Martha Jefferson. So it's, it's sort of a part of the story that people haven't included, but it just shows that this is not her wording that I cannot do more is just not been interpreted as straightforwardly and in Martha's favor, as I think it should be,

Kathryn Gehred 

Yeah, she is doing more Yeah, like setting things in motion.

Diane Ehrenpreis 

Very next day, she's on it. Thomas Jefferson and Martha Jefferson clearly worked together on this campaign. But I feel part of the reason, a major part of the reason we don't know about it in the way that the Philadelphia sister campaign has so thoroughly documented, is because Thomas Jefferson, her fellow revolutionary and activist, suppressed her story. You know, he took it away from his family, and we're just now able to sort of patch it together. I'm sure he had a good reason to do it.

Kathryn Gehred 

I've always heard he was just so crushed by her death that he couldn't even just bear to talk about her for the rest of his life. Yeah, I could believe it. I have seen this letter before because it mentions another letter written by Martha Washington. So of course, we had to use that in our book, and we actually published a version of this letter in the Martha volume. Because where we don't have letters, we would get creative sometimes, or we know that a letter existed of Martha Washington asking Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson. So then that introduced me to the whole Esther de Burt Reid and the groups of women in Philadelphia that were raising money. And then that led me down a rabbit hole of like, what actually happened with all of this money that was collected by the women in Philadelphia, and there's just not as much research into what happened. This shows that there was, like a Southern wing of that. I think people are aware of the sentiments of American woman. I think that shows up in textbooks and things like that, but I don't think there's as much understanding that, like you pointed out, in a totally different setting. She can't go door to door in this plantation system, like asking people to give some money, she has to use her network a different way to get people involved.

Diane Ehrenpreis 

Umm cannot recall what visiting scholar, but someone ran across really important piece of the story that was published in the southern messenger. Her in the 1850s but this included, I knew just what it was women did activate. It was in play. Mary Walker Lewis, she clearly delivered funds. She's the first one to have cash arrive in Richmond in November 1780 women in Fredericksburg, women in Alexandria, people at separate locations. We have the names I counted up give or take, around 34, 35 women by name. So we're not talking anywhere near the numbers of Philadelphia, but that's just the names of of either a treasurer's who collected and was sending her funds. Literally on the letter, it says to Mrs. Jefferson in Richmond, you know, very specific like, this is woman to woman, and I hear you, and I'm very proud in her cover letter, this is Anne Ramsey in Alexandria. She's very proud. She hopes to collect more, and this is to go to Mrs. Jefferson in Richmond, specifically. So all of these women deserve recognition. And what I can bring to the story is, if you start looking at the dates and you recognize that as the funds are coming in, is the same time that the British are leaving South Carolina North Carolina, and they are invading Virginia. So I was very excited to find a few specific instances of personal accounts of the very women who gave either their treasure, meaning actual coinage species, their wedding rings, pearl earrings, in addition to sending their sons off to war, a few of their personal stories are quite horrific, like these donors become caught up on the front line, especially in Hanover County, and including Martha Jefferson herself, who has to flee twice that I know of to avoid being captured or being in the middle of, you know, a Battlefront. One of the donors, she's in Hanover County. Some women left Williamsburg, Jamestown, went to Hanover County to their family plantations with their enslaved thinking that they would be safe there, that they were further away from the river, from James River, and the British were so well armed. They had so many horses. They just pretty much had free reign of Virginia. They could go where they wanted. So this one woman the entire, you know, British cavalry in camps at her place overnight, and then the next day, her neighbor, Mr. Honeyman, comes to check on her, and he describes the destruction and how there were just three women left there to meet the British Army. And he said, Oh, you know, they tore down fences. They killed and eviscerated animals that they didn't eat. They just killed everything. They strewn about all of the grain, and it was just a massive scene of destruction. And I said to myself, aha, that is what happened to the Virginia ladies campaign of 1780 I mean, it was incredibly powerful to have a multiple examples another woman, Mary Ambler, she had given, along with her sisters, some very personal items, and she sickened and died there in Hanover County. And her descendant tells the story of how the British came through. She hadn't been dead very long, and the British saw a fresh grave. And of course, they say the servant, but we know it was an enslaved, probably house servants, who were left, and they said, no, no, that's where Mary is buried. And that didn't, not surprisingly, deter them. They were convinced that that's where the silver was, and they dug her up. Oh my gosh. And it really was this woman who had just, you know, donated to the campaign that Martha Jefferson, I would argue, as activist and revolutionary in her own right, along with these women, undertook to sort of say that this petered out, or that people were half hearted. They were just as energized and committed as their sisters in Philadelphia, just the way Mrs. Washington had hoped. And Martha Jefferson did everything she was to do, and her contacts, some of them, were taking up the cause, and next thing you know that they're all subject almost all of them, except for Mrs. Gates, up in travelers, rest in Berkeley County are in peril. For me, it just makes the story of the revolution, and the revolution as it played out in Virginia over the years, that much richer. You know, we've got a 50% of the story that I might argue we've been missing.

Kathryn Gehred 

Absolutely. So do we know, like, the amount of money that was raised eventually with these treacherous reports?

Diane Ehrenpreis 

We do. We have an idea. Know, give or take. And right before this campaign launched, there was a changeover in currency because of inflation. It's hard to say, but there was, as far as a written bottom line on a historic document, we might say, you know, 1600 pounds, plus the wedding rings in the ear wings and and that kind of thing. But with inflation, you know, maybe that was two, 300 pounds, we also know what the Virginia women wanted this money to go to, which was before the British arrived in Virginia in late 1780 and 81 the battlefront was in South Carolina and North Carolina, and there was a terrible loss that included many, many Virginia militia, at least. And I think some you know American regulars in Camden. And also, I'm a little unclear, but many of these Virginia men were held in prison in Charlestown, and they were in deplorable conditions. Perhaps some of these soldiers were, you know, the sons and brothers or husbands of some of the people who donated, but we do know that their hope was for their campaign in the way that the Philadelphia ladies ended up. They collected a lot of money. But as many of you know, George Washington did not want to just hand hand these soldiers money that shirts were made. Well, this is what the Virginia women probably wanted to, you know, also provide clothing or badly needed supplies for these prisoners.

Kathryn Gehred 

George Washington's letter to Esther de Burt Reid, I feel like it's a very characteristic George Washington, where he's like, thank you so much, ladies for this money. These men don't need money. But like, yeah, they do, George,

Diane Ehrenpreis 

Of course they do. Somebody could send some money home, but yes, so they're not getting paid. He's assuming the worst, right? That they are going to drink it up.

Kathryn Gehred 

He's absolutely assuming the worst of his soldiers. But he says, make shirts, which, you know, I'm sure is very helpful as well.

Diane Ehrenpreis 

But so there's amazing little footnote to my story, Martha Jefferson's story. So of course, all of this drama happens in Virginia in that summer 1781, and then Yorktown happens. Amazing, you know, miracle that the French arrive. So the timing was such that all of a sudden, not only was Virginia devastated and people who had been donors or refugees and etc, etc, but actually the whole, essentially, the war is over all of a sudden, which is like whiplash, it seems to me, for people in Virginia. Martha herself, we mentioned, dies in 1782 and then there's some correspondence between Jacqueline Ambler, who's the husband of one of the donors, and brother in law, and so on. There was quite an Ambler presence on this list. He writes as the treasurer of Virginia, and says, What am I to do with this money and these personal items? Should we return them to the donors? Because they're not doing any good here. There's no action taken. He writes again a few years later. He says, literally this, you know, like wartime, paper money is going to be useless soon. Again. Here's all of these personal items. It goes before the House of Delegates, and they table his request. That's the last I know about the donations. They just didn't do anything personally, I hope that he at least took his wife's wedding ring back and sort of a sad end to a spirited campaign where women wanted to do honor and act like those heroines of from antiquity and meet every challenge, give everything to the cause, whether it's your wealth, your time, your food stuffs, your sons, and you know, they tried very hard to succeed, led by Martha Jefferson.

Kathryn Gehred 

Well, that's fascinating. I've always sort of heard of this as a little footnote, but it's such an incredible story.

Diane Ehrenpreis 

Thank you. The more I was able to work on it. And thank you Thomas Jefferson foundation all these years, they're very generous in letting me sort of explore, and to have this sort of come together at this time, with 2026 coming up, it's very exciting. And I really feel just like if I can't get the word out for these women at this point in time for what they attempted to accomplish and what they experienced and what our nation goes through in order to have a democracy, then I haven't. I haven't done my job. So this is great. I appreciate the invitation to talk to you and your listeners about my very. Short, sort of confusing letter.

Kathryn Gehred 

It's short, but it's important. It's important. It's important. Thank you so much for coming on the show. This is a fascinating story. Wow, goodness.

Diane Ehrenpreis 

Thank you. And please come and see us at Monticello. We are always here doing women's history. You can see the little honeymoon cottage, and yeah, the honeymoon cottage, which you can walk into, it is furnished lightly, but it does show what it might have felt like in 1772 Well, thank you. Thank you

Kathryn Gehred 

So to my listeners, thank you very much for checking out this episode. We will provide links to the letters that we mentioned in the show notes, and I am, as ever, your most obedient and humble servant. Thank you very much. Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant is a production of R2 Studios, part of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. I'm Kathryn Gehred, the creator and host of this podcast. Jeanette Patrick and Jim Ambuske are the executive producers. Special thanks to Virginia Humanities for allowing me to use their recording studio. If you enjoyed this episode, please tell a friend and be sure to rate and review the series in your podcast app. For more great history podcasts, head to R2studios.org. Thanks for listening.