Hannah Lawrence Schieffelin and Women's Experiences in Revolutionary America

By NYPL Staff
July 29, 2016
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building

Hannah Lawrence Schieffelin was, in many ways, an exceptional woman. A prodigious poet, she used her talents to provoke the British by depositing, anonymously, her mocking, anti-British poem in front of Trinity Church. At twenty-two, she rebelled on the domestic scale, renouncing her family’s Quaker faith in order to marry Jacob Schieffelin, a young British officer. Less than three months later, the newlyweds left New York for Detroit, beginning what would be a seven-month journey through Canada. Along the way, Schieffelin recorded her observations of the Canadian wilderness, its fledgling cities, and its rough-hewn inhabitants. Her literary talents make the narrative a compelling, rich historical source. The account covers a wide range of topics, from Native American lifestyle, to modes of traversing icy rivers, to etiquette at British garrisons. Notably, the account also describes a number of the women Schieffelin met along the way, including French- and British-Canadian women, women from a variety of tribes living around Quebec and Detroit, and female missionaries. As in every primary source, these accounts are colored by the author’s own perceptions, perceptions which can tell us about both the author and the time period in which she lived. For Hannah Schieffelin, appearance, character, status, and the connection between these three attributes were most important in describing and evaluating the women she encountered.

Molly Brant 

Molly Brant (c.1736-1796) is the most recognizable of the women Schieffelin encountered. Coming from a politically powerful, Anglicized Mohawk family, Brant’s position was further elevated by the military status of her brother, Joseph (c.1743-1807), and her long relationship with Sir William Johnson (c.1715-1774), the British Superintendent of Indian Affairs from 1756 to 1774. Johnson and Brant met in the late 1750’s, and began a relationship that would continue until his death in 1774. They lived together during this time, and had a total of nine children.  During the Revolutionary War, Brant exerted her influence to aid the British.

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Description of Molly Brant from Hannah Lawrence Schieffelin's Narrative. Image ID: 5444261

Hannah Schieffelin met Molly Brant in November 1780. Schieffelin was excited to see Brant, “this female Indian, whose wealth and influence, as well as the decent propreity [sic] of her conduct, procure her a degree of respect nearly equal to that of a legal Relict (widow).” The way in which Schieffelin accounts for Brant’s status is telling. By beginning with Brant’s “wealth and influence,” Schieffelin acknowledges Brant’s connections to the more “masculine” worlds of politics and warfare. However, she quickly moves on to Brant’s manners and conduct, traditionally more “feminine” markers of character. Further, though Schieffelin is technically correct, in that Brant and Johnson never married, Brant was widely accepted as his partner. It is interesting, then, that Schieffelin qualifies the respect Brant received as “nearly equal to a legal Relict,” and indicates the importance to Schieffelin of formal titles and marital status.

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Description of Molly Brant from Hannah Lawrence Schieffelin's Narrative, continued. Image ID: 5444262

Schieffelin also describes Brant’s appearance and person. Brant “is below the middle size, as the Indian women generally are, her countenance not displeasing, though grave, and her manner sedate, her complection [sic] is fairer than most of her Nation.” Whenever she encounters Native American women, Schieffelin pays particular attention to the shade of their skin color, noting those who are “lighter” or “fairer” due to their mixed parentage. She often described these lighter skinned women as more attractive, and in turn more socially acceptable. Continuing her description of Brant, Schieffelin references the lyrical and gentle sound of Brant’s voice, a characteristic she cites as common amongst Mohawk women, and reflected in their “extremely mild and modest” countenances. However, this ostensible compliment is merely a set-up to contrast the appearance of these women with their alleged “savagery”: “nor could we suppose from appearance, that those gentle pleasing creatures, become the furiest of furies, when the chance of war subjects an ill-fated captive to their mercy.” Though Schieffelin concludes that Brant’s behavior is “conformable to our modes of politeness,” and seems pleased with her overall appearance, her racialized conceptions of beauty and character show her wariness of the woman, and of Native Americans in general.

The Farmer’s Daughter

Though briefer than the passage on Brant, Schieffelin’s description of a wealthy farmer’s daughter follows many of the same themes, and is similarly revealing in understanding Schieffelin’s conceptions of womanhood.

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Description of Wealthy Canadian Farmer's Daughter, from Hannah Lawrence Schieffelin's Narrative. Image ID: 5444254

Early on in their journey, the Schieffelins stayed with a wealthy farming family outside of Quebec City. The farmer and his wife had one daughter who Schieffelin describes in the same backhanded manner she used on the Mohawk women, contrasting appearance with character. The farmer’s daughter “might have been esteemed rather pretty,” Schiefflin says, “if the extreme of vulgarity and indelicacy, had not proved more repulsive, than her person was attractive.” She ties the lost potential of the daughter to the appearance of the family’s home, which “though large and delightfully situated… had a neglected appearance.” She extends this metaphor to Canadians in general, as “the misery observable in their looks, dress and habitations, is the more surprizing [sic] when we reflect that the fertility of the soil is remarkable.”

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Description of Wealthy Canadian Farmer's Daughter, from Hannah Lawrence Schieffelin's Narrative, continued. Image ID: 5444255

That Schieffelin extends this appearance vs. character standard of judgment to a people as a whole indicates that the standard is not completely gendered.  Nonetheless, though she describes many men in depth, including Joseph Brant and British General Frederick Haldimand, she never directly compares their appearances to their characters. 

The Northwestern frontiers of the Revolutionary War were rife with marauding armies, bitterly cold weather, and disease. Life there was difficult. As Hannah Schieffelin’s narrative reveals, it was particularly difficult for women. Women were expected, despite the circumstances, to conform to social norms—no easy task, and one that even Hannah Schieffelin herself was not exempt from.  

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With support from the The Polonsky Foundation, The New York Public Library is currently digitizing upwards of 50,000 pages of historic early American manuscript material. The Early American Manuscripts Project will allow students, researchers, and the general public to revisit major political events of the era from new perspectives and to explore currents of everyday social, cultural, and economic life in the colonial, revolutionary, and early national periods. The project will present online for the first time high quality facsimiles of key documents from America’s Founding, including the papers of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. Drawing on the full breadth of the Library’s manuscript collections, it will also make widely available less well-known manuscript sources, including business papers of Atlantic merchants, diaries of people ranging from elite New York women to Christian Indian preachers, and organizational records of voluntary associations and philanthropic organizations. Over the next two years, this trove of manuscript sources, previously available only at the Library, will be made freely available through nypl.org.