David Center for the American Revolution Seminar: "Rhetorical Strategies and Enslaved Property in the Loyalist Claims of Virginia’s Feme Soles,” with Alexi Garrett
The second meeting of the 2021 David Center for the American Revolution Seminar Series will take place on Wednesday, May 26, 2021 at 3:00 p.m. ET on Zoom.
The speaker will be Dr. Alexi Garrett. Dr. Garrett is Institute for Thomas Paine Studies and University of Virginia Press Post-Doctoral Fellow at Iona College, 2020-2022. Her research considers how elite, unmarried white women (legally classified as feme soles) commercially related to the people they enslaved, and how they managed slave-manned enterprises in the American revolutionary and early national periods.
Dr. Garrett will be presenting a paper on "Rhetorical Strategies and Enslaved Property in the Loyalist Claims of Virginia’s Feme Soles.” A description of the paper is below. The paper will be pre-circulated to registered participants in advance of the seminar meeting.
To attend the seminar and to receive a copy of the paper, please register via Zoom.
The David Center for the American Revolution Seminar serves as a forum for works-in-progress that explore topics in the era of the American Revolution (1750-1820). Questions about the series may be directed to Adrianna Link, Head of Scholarly Programs, at [email protected].
Rhetorical Strategies and Enslaved Property in the Loyalist Claims of Virginia’s Feme Soles
On a cold winter night in Norfolk, Virginia in 1775, Penelope Forsyth, her husband William, and their enslaved woman fled from the flames that engulfed their home and shoe shop. The rebels had targeted the Forsyths because the family did not want their colony to become independent from Britain. The three then hid on a cramped schooner at Gwynn’s Island on the James River. After Lord Dunmore could no longer promise their protection, the three fled for England, and William died at sea. The enslaved woman escaped after Penelope arrived in London. Penelope retold this story in her claim to the Loyalist Claims Commission, and hoped for £580 ($92,000 in today’s U.S. dollars) as compensation for her losses—and terrors.
Penelope Forsyth’s petition represents one of thirty-five claims that Virginia’s Loyalist feme soles—unmarried women—submitted to the Crown’s American Loyalist Claims Commission after the end of the American Revolutionary War. Parliament established the Commission in 1783 to provide recompense to loyalists who suffered material losses at the hands of Patriots in America. Most claimants from Virginia recounted their suffering during the Burning of Norfolk (1775-1776), when Lord Dunmore’s troops clashed with local Patriots.
Loyalist husbands submitted the vast majority of claims to the Commission, as patriarchal norms required them to represent their wives’ and children’s’ interests. But if a woman submitted a claim under her own name, she represented herself as the head of household, signaling her unmarried legal status as a feme sole. The vast majority of Virginia’s women claimants were widows. Women’s claims make up six percent of the 552 claims that Virginians submitted. Women’s claims shed light on the revolutionary experiences of southern, white, slave-owning women, a group whose stories have been left out of the standard narrative of the war.
This paper illustrates the violence, terror, loss, and journeys that white women personally experienced during The Burning of Norfolk events of 1775-1776. I show how Loyalist Virginian women deployed a variety of strategies—many gendered—to support their cases in their claims. More importantly, Virginian women’s claims reveal the hegemonic power white women held in a colonial patriarchal slave society. Even while subsumed to men, white women still held power over children and enslaved people. I examine women’s connections to the people their families had enslaved and consequently “lost” during the war. I argue that Virginian Loyalist women conveyed more specific information about their estates’ enslaved people than they did about their non-human property, signifying women’s intimate and commercial relationships to the people they and their husbands enslaved. Relatedly, I show that the number of enslaved people a woman claimant or her family had owned—not her level of wealth—determined her ability to describe or enumerate her enslaved people. The number of people whom these women had enslaved and “lost” was positively correlated with the amount they requested (in pounds sterling) from the Commission. This is the first article-length study of the strategies women claimants made to the Commission since Mary Beth Norton’s “Eighteenth-Century American Women in Peace and War: The Case of the Loyalists” (1976). This is the first article-length study of Virginian women claimants’ commercial relationship to enslaved people.