September 17, 2018 • 46 mins
Today we've got our live show from our recent East Coast tour, all about Anne Royall. She was a travel writer and a muckraking journalist way before Theodore Roosevelt coined that term, at a time when there were very few women doing either of those jobs.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, everybody. Today's episode is our
East Coast show from our recent tour. This is one
that we recorded at the Arts at the Armory and Somerville, Massachusetts,
(00:21):
so let's hop right into it. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Tracy new Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.
Today we are going to talk about Anne Royal. And
while she was living and Newport, Royal was a very
well known, even notorious, public figure. She was a travel
writer and she was a muck raking journalist way before
(00:45):
Theodore Roosevelt coined that term, at a time when there
really were not a lot of women being travel writers
or journalists at all. And she made such a name
for herself that by the time she was put on
trial for being a common scold. So we're going to
talk about that today. Uh that was national news, the
(01:07):
common Scold trial of Anne Royal. At the same time,
she was really divisive and complicated and imperfect and just messy.
And the longer I worked on this podcast, the more
mess I found. So today we're going to do our
best to celebrate the things about her that were awesome,
which there are several, and also not shy away from
(01:30):
the parts that were not, which were mostly calling the
unfortunate racism portion of the program. It always lurks. But
she was born in Newport on June eleven, seventeen sixty nine,
outside of Baltimore, Maryland, and her father, William, was actually
rumored to be an illegitimate descendant of the Calvert family,
(01:52):
as in George Calvert, first Baron Baltimore, whose son was
the city's namesake. William moved the family to the frontier
of western Pennsylvania in seventeen seventy two, and before he
died around seventeen seventy five, he taught and to read phonetically,
and this might be part of why later on she
was really interested in documenting the accents and the dialects
(02:15):
of the people that she met in her travels and
then writing them down, sort of rendering them phonetically in
her books. And after William Newport died AND's mother, Mary,
remarried a man from Hannah'stown, Pennsylvania, and on July thirteenth,
seventeen eighty two, after the British surrendered at Yorktown, but
before the Treaty of Paris formally ended the Revolutionary War.
(02:37):
Hannah's town was attacked and it was burned by the
Seneca Nation and their British allies. And a stepfather also
died right around this time, and the surviving family fled
to what is now West Virginia. But at the time
this happened, it was still just part of Virginia. An
even more dramatic version of this story got passed around
later on in Anne's life and after her death. It
(02:59):
was not true. It was also not something she said
was true. People just sort of glommed onto it. This
was that Anne herself had been captured by the Native
force and was held prisoner until a very brave American
Army captain came and rescued her, and that they later
got married not true at all. On November eighteen seventy,
(03:23):
when Anne was twenty eight, she did get married. This
was to Captain William Royal. He was about twenty years
her senior, and he was a veteran of the Revolutionary War.
He had served under the Market Lafayette, and William was
part of the area's wealthier class. He had a large
estate and an enslaved workforce. Uh. And in a lot
of accounts, Ann and William actually met because Anne's mother
(03:46):
was working as a domestic in his home, but that
is not entirely clear whether that's true or not. So
every time we've done this show so far, when you've
gotten to the end of the sentence about the market
a Lafayette, you've taken a little breath, And every time
I'm just expecting someone in the audience to spontaneously burst
into Hamilton's I'm giving them a moment. I'm like, here's
your shot, here's your shot. Yeah. So, it was not
(04:12):
clear whether Anne's mother really did work as a domestic
in his household. But what was clear is that Anne
and William cohabitated for quite some time before they got married,
like maybe a decade. This, of course, was scandalous. Neighbors
and William's family considered Anne to just be an indigent
(04:32):
woman of very questionable morals. Uh. They spread some rumors
that William had just been keeping her as his concubine
and that he hadn't ever intended to marry her. Some
of them said that he had not married her at all.
There was a marriage certificate. They definitely got married, but
they people had a vendetta against Anne Royal. So they
(04:54):
did get married, and they were married for the next
fifteen years. And during that time, William and and read
together all the time, which is sort of romantic and charming, uh.
They especially read classic works of literature and the work
of Enlightenment thinkers. And this really bolstered Ann's education because
prior to that, really she had just had a very
brief time in a log cabin school in Pennsylvania in
(05:17):
terms of formal learning. And this also really influenced her
social and political attitudes because she and William would always
discuss whatever it was they were reading, and she tended
to just pick up on his opinions. An assumed more
and more responsibility for managing their home and their farm
as their marriage moved on, because William developed a problem
(05:37):
with alcohol, and this didn't have the kind of stigma
that it might today at the time because for an
affluent Southern man, drink was a part of life and
drunkenness was a sign of masculinity. But for for An
it made her life a lot harder. Number One, she
was having to do a lot of his work that
he could not do because he was intoxicated. But it
(05:58):
was also harder because her neighbors would judge her for
being too harsh with him when he was too drunk
to get his work done. Ah every time, William Royal
died in thirteen and with the exception of a small
legacy that had been set aside for Anne's niece, he
left and all of his property, and she ultimately became
(06:21):
the sole executor of his estate, which meant that it
was up to her to manage all of William's affairs
after he had died, and this included running their home
and household and also managing that enslaved workforce that she
had inherited. So this is a good time to take
a moment to note some of A's attitudes. In a
lot of ways, she was a woman who was way
ahead of her time, but not when it really came
(06:44):
to slavery or race. At the same time, her opinions
on those subjects were really full of contradictions. She called
slavery a curse, and she hated the idea of white
men fathering children with their enslaved with enslaved women who
were living on their property, and then enslaving those children.
She really hated that idea. She was also really horrified
(07:05):
when she witnessed violence and brutality against enslaved people. But
to be clear, there is no flexibility that could allow
you to define her as an abolitionist. She thought slavery
should be up to the states, and she actually worried
that emancipation could really impact white workers in a negative way.
And she also very clearly knew that slavery was still
(07:28):
slavery even if someone who enslaved people was considered a
good or kind slave owner. But even though she knew
that didn't make it any less wrong, she would still
make a point to mention how she thought several slave
owners were very kind in some of her writing. It's
like you just said, you just said you knew it,
(07:49):
didn't make it not slavery. So she wasn't a like
actively advocating for slavery like a lot of people of
her background were. But that is a low bar that
I don't. That bar is like buried down in there um.
She was similarly contradictory when it came to Native Americans
as well. She tended to romanticize Native Americans as a group,
(08:13):
but then when she met individual Native people, she often
wrote about them in a really stereotypical and sometimes degrading way.
She didn't think it was possible for the native and
white populations to live together in the same place, and
that was an argument that people were using for removal.
But at the same time, she railed against land companies
that were defrauding the native population of their land. She
(08:36):
praised charitable charitable mission work with the indigenous tribes, but
she really decried missionaries efforts to convert the native population
to Christianity, and she absolutely hated it if it seemed
like missionaries were trying to extort conversions in exchange for
food and supplies. So if you had a charitable mission
(08:56):
where you were, you know, providing people with food and
and uh and supplies and things like that without expecting
anything in return, that was fine. But if you were
sort of like, if you come to church, we'll have
food for you, she did not like that at all.
And after William's death, it became really apparent that he
had been carrying a lot of debt, and this was
(09:18):
compounded by some of Anne's own decisions that she had
made while trying to figure out what she was doing
with his estate. She ended up selling off parts of
his property, including some of that enslaved workforce. But then
William's family actually contested the will. They framed Anne and
William's relationship as a complete sham and said that she
had orchestrated the whole thing just to get William's fortune.
(09:40):
And then they said that she had in fact forged
the will. So this started a legal battle that went
on for six years, and in eighteen nineteen a jury
annulled the will. Although she was still legally entitled to
a much smaller financial portion of her late husband's estate,
Ane's own debts and her expenses left her with really
almost nothing, and at that point she was fifty years old.
(10:04):
This it was while all of this was going on
that she finally decided to leave Virginia and she started
on the path to becoming a travel writer. And travel
writing had become a popular genre as the United States
had become more established as a nation, with roads and
steamboats and ways to make it possible for people to
go out and travel. Uh So, most travel writers, though,
(10:26):
were men, and sometimes they were women, but always traveling
with a companion. And the big distinction above anything else
is that those people actually had money to do that traveling,
and on the other hand, was a woman with no
fortune at all traveling alone. The annulment of the will
meant that she didn't even have horses or a carriage
of her own, so she had to take public modes
(10:46):
of transportation like stage coaches and steamboats. She also had
to stay in public houses, and she had to try
to fund her room and board through the sale of
her books. This would be sort of like if you
wanted to be a travel writer but you didn't have
a car or any money like it. It It was not
a comfortable way to try to earn a living. Yeah,
(11:06):
being a travel writer on spec is rough business. Um.
But her approach to selling her books was really controversial
and is the reason I've been sitting here giggling for
a couple of minutes. Uh. It was typical for writers
of the day to sell their work by subscription. It was, however,
not typical for them to sell those subscriptions by going
(11:28):
door to door and barging in on people's houses with
an aggressive sales pitch. And it was especially not typical
for writers to sell these subscriptions by satirizing people who
refused to purchase them. Uh. But that is exactly how
Anne played it. That was her business model. She stopped
right in and say I'm gonna write nasty stuff about
(11:48):
you buy a subscription um And who wouldn't be wooed
by that? I know she She was definitely not the
only writer who was doing weird stuff to promote themselves
around this time. I mean, while Whitman was writing views
of his own books, I'm under fake names and publishing
them to be like the great writer of the United
States has arrived. But that was a lot less confrontational
(12:10):
than at them. I see your eating dinner by my book.
I was just gonna say the people I'm at the
dinner table, now would you like to subscribe? Uh? Now,
whose turn is it? You're okay? I don't know why
last track of this thing. It's like I've never done
this before, so especially at first, this whole barging in
(12:32):
on people in demanding the buy books like this is
a weird financial juggling act that was kind of difficult.
At various points. She made ends meet thanks to the
charity of other people and the help of various Masons.
Her late husband had been a Mason and had told
her that if she needed help, she should go find
a Mason, and that advice served her extremely well. Um
(12:53):
Mason's helped her out of a number of jams. And
there was also a huge anti Masonic movement that was
going on in the United States at this point, which
was really a whole other story. But Anne Royal was
very critical of people who criticized the Masons, and so
that earned her even more of their support. Another early
patron of hers was the Market Lafayette, thanks to her
(13:14):
husband's military service under him. Anne's first book was titled
Sketches of History, Life and Manners in the United States
by a Traveler, and it was published in New Haven
in eighty six, and at that point she had just
turned fifty seven. She went on to publish numerous volumes
of travel writing, and these included collections of letters to
(13:35):
her friend and her lawyer, Matthew Dunbar from Alabama, and
she had written those while her husband's will was in dispute.
She also included what or she also wrote what she
called Penn portraits, and those were vignettes of noble and
semi noble or semi notable people. I don't know why
I've now completely lost my ability to say words uh.
She also wrote a novel, so she started her writing
(13:58):
career really late in life, but her hust was the
real deal. She did a lot of work. She was prolific,
and by the end of her career as a travel
writer and Royal had gone pretty much every place you
could go in the United States by steamboat or stage coach.
She wrote about all the places that she went and
the people that she met, and she often documented their
accents and their dialects and their slang. She wrote about
(14:20):
what the travel was like getting there, what the roads
were like, the weather, all the various things you would
expect out of a travel book, and she also wrote
about her opinions of what she saw and who she
saw and encountered, some of which could be very judge.
She was especially critical of people who she didn't think
(14:40):
we're educated or and even worse sin in her eyes,
who didn't care to improve their own level of education.
And this also trickled down to communities that didn't try
to educate their residents. So if she went into a
place like a township that had no school, it was
pretty much a guarantee that that place was going to
get a scathing up about it and This was really
(15:01):
the start of her work as a political writer. She
increasingly commented on the social conditions and political issues that
she witnessed while she was out traveling, and Royal became
really widely known over these years as a travel writer.
Sometimes when she arrived in town, she was greeted as
a celebrity. She had fans who were eagerly awaiting the
next installment of her book. Other times, especially if she
(15:25):
had been really critical of that place the last time
she was there, the reception would be just outright hostile.
Please don't come to our houses anymore. I just sort
of imagined them, like, get the bitchforks. It's in Royal. Uh.
When her second travel book came out in the Boston
(15:47):
Commercial Gazette wrote, quote, her style is so highly seasoned,
her love of country so predominant. She gives so much
of local topics and applies the lash so unsparingly to
her enemies that her books, like her manners, are resistless.
As she traveled back and forth all over the United States,
(16:07):
and Royal also went to Washington, d C. To try
to secure a widows pension, and she started spending more
and more of her time there and that's where that
unsparing lash that the Boston Commercial Gazette had noted got
her in some real trouble. Because Anne Royle's late husband
(16:31):
had been a veteran in the Revolutionary War, she was
at least in theory, entitled to a widows pension, But
because of the way the law was written, widows were
not automatically granted pensions. They had to petition for them
individually to Congress. It's a great use of Congress's time.
(16:52):
She had to prove that the man in question was
a veteran, and that she had been married to him,
and that he had died, and a royal started gathering
all of this information in eighteen o eight, except for
the death part, because her husband was still alive then. Uh.
But it was towards the end of his life and
he was obviously getting older and ailing, and she had
filed a petition for a pension on his behalf on
(17:13):
November twenty nine of eighteen twelve, and she pointed out
that he had served for the entirety of the war,
he had received no pay, he had paid for all
of his own expenses and supplies during the war, and
he had paid for things like troop transport, and now
that he was elderly and he was in poor health,
she really thought that a pension could ease his last
year's And this claim was actually rejected on January one
(17:37):
of eighteen thirteen, and then all of those records were
lost in a fire, so she had to start from
scratch and gather everything over again. I feel like this
whole story about trying to get a pension for him
in his old age really highlights the whole idea that
this was a ragtag volunteer army in the universe shower
with the rich people paying their own way. They're like,
(17:57):
it was not even something that was being fun did
in a lot of ways by any kind of governmental effort.
It was like, this guy that has this estate is
paying for the troops to move on his own. It's
bizarre idea to me. Anyway. After William's death and the
annulment of his will, and started petitioning to get a
(18:19):
widow's pension, and she ran into a problem. They had
gotten married in sevent but the law only allowed pensions
for marriages that had happened up until seventeen. This is
where I suspect she really regretted that whole cohabitation decade.
Probably I haven't been an issue before that except for
the whole family squabble thing. And then she's like, uh,
(18:43):
she did refile the petition over and over, and she
actually started making friends with influential members of the government,
hoping that they could kind of speed things along and
help her plead her case. And in particular there was
John Quincy Adams, who was at the time Secretary of State,
and he agreed to help her. He also took up
the cause of pension reform. He subscribed to two of
(19:04):
her books. Uh, and he then introduced her to his wife, Luisa,
who gave her a shawl. And he also encouraged her
to go to Massachusetts and visit his father, which she did.
I can't imagine what the meeting of Anne Royal and
Abigail Adams would have been like. Yeah, so this brings
(19:26):
us to a favorite but also apocryphal story about Anne
Royal and John Quincy Adams after he became president in
I don't know why I almost said seventeen because there's
seventeens on the page. Uh. So, yeah, it's a very
fun story, but don't get attached because it is not true.
According to this story, though John Quincy Adams was known
(19:46):
to bathe in a tributary of the Potomac River called
Tiber Creek every morning, that is actually true. He was
a skinny dipper. Uh. Legit Royal decided, according to this story,
that she wanted to be the first woman to interview
a president in office, but she was turned away in
her requests, and then, having found out about his bathing habits,
(20:07):
she went down to the river one morning and she
plopped herself down and sat on his clothes uh and
refused to get off of them until he agreed to
her terms that he would do an interview with her.
And once he did agree to this, because he hadn't
no pants, uh, she got off of all of his
stuff and then politely turned away so he could get dressed.
So my friend Amy, who was a history teacher, was
(20:28):
that our Atlanta show and she said that one of
her students had told her this story. And to paraphrase
what Amy said, I think that's bull roar. It is.
It is bull roar number one. Apart from raising some
issues with privacy and consents to a modern year, this
is a pretty delightful story about a woman's clever thinking
and boldness and determination and sitting on John Quincy Adam's clothes.
(20:51):
But in the nineteenth century it was not any of
those things. It was scandalous and disgraceful. And a number
of retellings of it from the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, because it does go pretty far back, they
add various details that make both and and John Quincy
look worse. So one version of the story, dating back
(21:12):
to nine made it so that it wasn't that that
Anne Royle sat on his clothing until he agreed to
do an interview. It was that she threatened to scream
and attract the attention of some fishermen who were nearby,
and imply that the president had assaulted her right. Total
smear campaign. Uh. And there are several reasons that we
(21:34):
know that this story is apocryphal. So one is that
neither of the two people involved in the story ever
said anything about it. And another is that John Quincy
Adams and a royal already knew each other, and he
was publicly polite to her, but privately he criticized her
more divisive behavior. He actually called her a virago errant
in enchanted armor and virago comes from the Latin word
(21:57):
for women warriors, but it had come to have a
different meaning, which was a loud, overbearing, shrill, and obnoxious woman.
And it also is defined as a woman who is
courageous and strong. But it was really, at this point
in time used in a pejorative sense as an insult,
and not to be like, hey, you are very strong.
It's like, hey, you're painting my neck. Uh. So, the
(22:18):
whole setup of her being this unknown, scrappy reporter who
wanted to seek an audience with the president really just
does not reflect what we know their actual relationship to
each other was. So the last reason that we know
this is apocryphal is that right after it supposedly happened,
and Royal was put on trial for being a common scold.
(22:40):
And if she had literally sat on the president of
the United States close to force him to interview her,
it probably would have come up as evidence. It didn't,
So here's what really happened. Uh And Royal had a
lot of opinions. She liked to express them very loudly
and very stridently and not necessary really in a way
(23:00):
that anyone would categorize as ladylike and We're going to
get into the breadth of and Royal's strong opinions later.
We've already mentioned some, but there are more. But the
opinion related to this trial was that Royal was a
huge proponent of the separation of church and state. So
this was happening during a religious revival known as the
(23:21):
Second Grade Awakening, and there was a growing movement of
evangelism and of trying to elect explicitly Christian candidates to office,
to try to reform the law to be more specifically Christians. So,
for example, there was a General Union for Promoting the
Observance of the Christian Sabbath that was established in It
was focused on, among other things, ending Sunday mail delivery,
(23:45):
and and Royal objected. And her issue was not with
religion itself, it was with evangelism and religious hypocrisy. She
recognized that the United States was a country of many,
many religions and thought that the idea of crafting a
government just around one of them was tyranny. She also
wrote favorably about the idea of Christian charity, but was
(24:08):
really really angry about the fact that there was, for example,
an entire organization, as Tracy just mentioned that was focused
on things like ending Sunday mail delivery when it really
should have been focused on things like feeding or sheltering
the needy, or reforming in humane prisons or making sure
that sick people were cared for. She had she did
(24:28):
not like she was like, this is really what you
need to be spending your time on. Also, maybe she
liked getting packages every day of the week. There were also,
uh there were cities where the churches were allowed to
put chains across the roads in front of their buildings
on Sundays, which in a lot of places completely shut
down traffic. Like you just couldn't go down main Street
(24:49):
because all the churches had chained off the thing. And
and like there was a big reform movement to make
that stop stop being obstructing all the traffic for everyone
because it's Sunday Ah. And that was another thing that
Anne Royal was very much. She was in favor of
not chaining off the street in front of the church
every Sunday. Um Royal she also made enemies with a
(25:12):
number of people within this movement. In Burlington, Vermont, she
had an incident with a missionary that, in her account,
led to his shoving her down his steps so forcefully
that she dislocated an ankle and couldn't walk for six weeks.
She had been trying to sell him a book when
that happened. She also had a running dispute with Presbyterian
(25:37):
minister Ezra styles Eli, who had been advocating for the
creation of a Christian party in politics. And then there
was the matter of her neighbors in Washington, d c.
There was a fire engine house near where she lived
that had been built with federal money, and it was
being used as a Presbyterian meeting house, and royal thought
that a building that had been built with federal dollars
(26:00):
should absolutely not be used for a religious purpose, and
she made really, really, really really sure that everybody knew
how she felt about it. The congregation claimed that she
shouted things at them from her windows, sometimes using swear words.
She claimed that the congregation's children threw rocks at her house,
(26:22):
and that some of the adults sat under her windows
and prayed for her salvation, which she did not appreciate.
And the congregation took this matter to the U. S.
Circuit Court of the District of Columbia, and after a
grand jury returned an indictment. On June one, Royal was
(26:42):
charged with three offenses, number one being quote an evil
disposed person and a common slanderer, number two being a
common scold, and number three being quote a common brawler
and sower of discord, and all three of the charges
also nodded to the idea that she was doing all
(27:03):
of this bad stuff among quote her quiet and honest neighbors.
It's still having now done this show is the third time.
It still is so bizarre to me that you could
just charge somebody with being an evil disposed person like
that was. I'm so glad you can't do that anything.
(27:23):
I would be so arrested. I do not have the
money for lawyers. So Royal pleaded not guilty to being
a common scold. She demured on the other two charges.
So demor basically means that the defendant doesn't dispute the charge,
but also it's not enough to warrant some kind of
(27:46):
legal response, so it's sort of like entering a plea
of so what's your point. So those charges of being
an evil disposed person and a common slanderer and a
common brawler and so of discord were dropped, and that
left and Royal on trial for being a common scold
in the highly publicized and sometimes very gleefully reported United
(28:11):
States Versus Royal. So the idea of being a common
scold has a very long history in English common law,
and several former British colonies still had laws about it
on the books after the Revolutionary War that had been
there since before the war. But it hadn't been widely
prosecuted in Britain since the seventeen seventies, and only a
(28:32):
handful of people had ever been put on trial for
it in North America, including in New York, Pennsylvania, and
as should surprise none of you, Massachusetts. This was a
crime that was apparently only committed by women, um because
only women were ever charged and tried for it, uh,
(28:54):
And the only punishment that was outlined for it was ducking,
which was being put into a chair that was kind
of like a see saw or a balance and being
dunked into a nearby lake or river. So like being
a scold, which was a crime, that's not how only
women committed. Ducking as a punishment was only administered to
(29:16):
women because it was only used in cases of scolding
or a select few other women. Only crimes. This probably
sounds yes, like which is this probably sounds like something
really archaic. And it was even in eighteen twenty nine. Uh,
this whole idea of being a common scold was so
(29:37):
obsolete and so completely rarely prosecuted, at the point that
the attorneys at the trial were not even completely sure
of what exactly constituted being a common scold. And there
was also a line of thought about how if you
had been found to be scold a scold at one time,
you were a scold forever, which had a little bit
(29:57):
of an upside because once you had been punished, could
then scold with impunity for the rest of your life.
It's like, we can't try her for being a scold
again if we already found her to be a scold.
How would that work? Uh, Like you're being charged as
a scold. Huh again, so what's your point? She's got
(30:18):
the scarlet as um. Also, nobody had a ducking stool,
although according to some accounts, one was commissioned to be
built at the Washington Navy Yard for this purpose. Uh.
Later on, when you are texting somebody about this show,
(30:39):
you really did mean ducking this time. There was also
the slightly more serious question of whether ducking, which was
the only punishment for scolding under the law, ran a
foul of the Eighth Amendment prohibition of cruel and Unusual punishment.
That seems kind of obvious since number one, back when
(31:01):
ducking had been used as a punishment more often, it
was not uncommon for the women who were being administered
that punishment to drown or just die of shock. And
number two, there was no ducking stool anywhere in the
United States, So that pretty much fits the unusual category
pretty cleanly. We're gonna have to build the contraption required
(31:22):
to dole out this punishment that does seem unusual. Throughout
this trial, though Anne Royal's behavior was described as very
respectable and lady like. Witnesses for the prosecution talked about
her shouting at them and using profanity and generally making
them feel bad. I know she heard it their feelings.
(31:45):
Witnesses for the defense talked about how she had always
been perfectly cordial to them. Uh and the defense witnesses
included John Eaton, Secretary of War for the newly inaugurated
President Andrew Jackson. Jackson himself had also been invited to testify,
but he declined in spite of her perfect princess behavior
(32:07):
in court and the witnesses on her behalf. Royal was
found guilty and before sentencing, John Coyle, who was one
of the original complainants, came forward with another complaint that
a few days earlier and Royal had called him quote
a hypocritical old scoundrel the very idea um and he
(32:28):
brought this up as evidence that Royal needed to face
a harsh sentence, but Royal claimed that he had come
at her first, saying that her time was short, which
is obviously a threat, and the judge concluded that these
two offenses just canceled each other out um, and then
he sentenced and Royal to a fine of ten dollars
in lieu of ducking because nobody had the darn stool. Uh.
(32:50):
Plus she had to pay a two d and fifty
dollar deposit to secure her good behavior for a year. Yeah,
it's like this is sort of like being on probation,
but not really. It's like the ultimate swear jar in
escrow might kind of. Her fine was paid by two
(33:12):
reporters from the Daily National Intelligencer, which is usually framed
as solidarity among members of the press, because it was
absolutely clear to everyone that this whole trial was not
just about the Presbyterian congregation that was meeting at the
fire engine house. It was about and Royal's poison pen
and her many extremely strong opinions that she had been
(33:34):
stridently writing about for most of the eighteen twenties. It
was a trial that was basically about making and Royal
shut up, and after being convicted of being a common scold,
and Royal thought it might be a smart idea to
get out of Washington, d c. But she did not
stay gone for very long. It does not appear that
(34:02):
Anne Royal did anything to cause her to forfeit that
two and fifty dollars for good behavior that she was
fined after her conviction for being a common skulled. But
on December thirty one, she published the first issue of
her new newspaper. It was The Paul Pry, and she
published that in Washington, d C. And, in addition to
publishing other material, The Paul Pry loudly and stridently published
(34:27):
and Royal's opinions on the political topics of the day,
as well as her own reporting about the goings on
in the halls of government, especially when it came to
exposing corruption and the Paul Prize opening editorial began quote,
our course will be a straightforward one, as Heretofore, the
(34:47):
same firmness which has ever maintained our pen will be
continued to this end. Let it be understood that we
are of no party. We will neither oppose nor advocate
any man for the presidency. The well, fair and happiness
of our country is our politics. To promote this, we
shall oppose and expose all and every species of political
(35:08):
evil and religious fraud, without fear, favor or affection. We
shall patronize merit of whatsoever, country, sect, or politics. We
shall advocate the liberty of the press, the liberty of speech,
and the liberty of conscience. The enemies of these bulwarks
of our common safety, as they have shown none, shall
receive no mercy at our hands. So that all sounds
(35:31):
pretty great, But we should make it clearer that even
though it said right there that the paper had no
official political parties, stance royal zone political opinions very clear
in its and a lot of people thought that the
that the Paul Pry and its successor were jackson Ian papers,
even when and Royal strongly criticized things that President Andrew
(35:51):
Jackson was doing when she didn't agree with him. And
the Paul Prize quality was variable, to be very kind
about it, she was printing it at home on an
antique press, and she was using a hand me down
type face. And when we say hand me down, that
is not in any way a joke, and it really
doesn't cover how intensely hand me down. The situation was
(36:15):
um Duff Green, who worked at the United States Telegraph,
which was another paper, not the Telegraph Office, had asked
his staff to gather up all of their discarded letters
to give to her, and that is what she was using.
So she was basically printing things that looked like the
cutout ransom notes that you would get, except she was
just cranking them out on her home press. And on
(36:36):
top of this highly erratic quality of the print, the
writing was not especially polished either. But she got about
a hundred subscribers with two orphans that we're helping her
make the deliveries. Maybe not surprisingly considering this whole thing,
with like the not very polished prose and the serial
killer writing and the orphans, she couldn't really get the
(37:02):
Paul prior to turn a profit, and the name was
part of the problem because Paul pry made it sound
like it was a gossip rag instead of something that
offered some serious journalism. So she shut it down on
November thirty six, and on December two, just a couple
of weeks later, she published the first issue of her
new newspaper, The Huntress, which she chose. Yes, she chose
(37:25):
the name to more clearly reflect a connection to the
editor of the paper, which was in Royal, and since
at this point she had five years of experience under
her belt, she was no longer like just deciding she
was going to have a political newspaper. Uh The Huntress
was a much stronger paper than the Paul Prye had been.
And as she had done with The Paul Prye, while
(37:47):
she was publishing The Huntress and Royal, personally walked the
halls of government, meeting with legislators and interrogating them about
their positions and what they were doing. And she met
and spoke with every president who sir during her time
as a journalist in the Capitol. And she made such
a name for herself with her dogged pursuit of stories
that when she entered a room. A lot of the time,
(38:08):
men who had been targets of her criticism would just
get up and roll out Audio sma Um, the Senate doorkeeper,
who was named Isaac Bassett, described her as quote homely
in person, careless in dress, poor in purse, and vulgar
in manners. But he also said she had much shrewdness
(38:30):
and respectable talents. Royal published The Huntress until July fifty four.
She kept it up after Congress passed the new law
in eighteen forty eight that gave Revolutionary war widows who
were married before January second, eight hundred access to a
lifetime pension. Although her husband's same relatives that had contested
(38:51):
the will laid claim to that too, they did not
like her, uh so she only got part of it.
But for twenty three years she was publishing her own
newspaper in Washington, d c. And between The Paul Prye
and The Huntress, she published more than twelve hundred issues
with the help of her friends Sally Stack and those
two orphans who were helping both with deliveries and errands.
(39:15):
And to quote Sarah Harvey Porter, writing for the Historical
Society of Washington, d c. In nineteen o seven. Quote
from the first number of Paul Prye to the last
issue of The Huntress, almost a quarter of a century afterward.
There was not a single political battle fought in Washington
about and about which and Royal did not have or
rather fling her say, she hit two with uncommon frequency,
(39:39):
and always near the bull's eye. Her pages contain much
to offend a critical literary taste, much that her her
admirers could wish had never been printed, but liked or
disliked her bitterest enemies must admit that her editorial and
other utterances never lacked point. Royal died just a couple
(39:59):
of months after publishing her last issue of The Huntress
on October one, eighteen fifty four, at the age of
eighty five. She was virtually penniless, having barely sustained herself
with these newspapers. She was buried in Congressional Cemetery in
an unmarked grave, and then a stone was erected by
Mason's in nineteen eleven which read and Royal, Pioneer Woman
(40:21):
Journalist seventeen sixty nine to eighteen fifty four, pray that
the Union of these States maybe Eternal erected an appreciative
recognition by a few men from Philadelphia and Washington May twelfth,
nineteen eleven. And Royal's reputation really endured for a long
time after her death. Almost forty years later, on February
twenty second, eighteen ninety one, the Washington Post ran an
(40:44):
article about her under the following headline, which is long,
so you're gonna think it's done, and I'm going to
keep going. Um. She was a holy terror. Her pen
was as venomous as a rattlesnake's fangs. Former Washington editress
how and Royal made life a burden to the public
men of her day. Please let me have a headline
(41:07):
that good after I die. Please please, Plazness, please please
another fifty years after that, President Harry S. Truman, who
loved to tell that false skinny dipping story, called her
a shrew of a newspaper woman. Yeah. Most of the
write ups about and Royal today focus on one of
three things. There's that apocryphal story about John Quincy Adams,
(41:31):
the trial for being a scold, and the extremely opinionated
and strident political reporting that was dedicated to exposing corruption
and hypocrisy that she did for almost twenty five years.
But there's one more thing that's really important to note
about her, and that's that although she was mostly able
to support herself through writing and reporting, often she really
(41:51):
had very little. Especially when she was running her own newspapers.
People described her as shabby because she only had that
one dress, but she was constantly doing everything that she
could for people who had less than she did. She
donated as much money as she possibly could to charitable
causes rather than buying more dresses. She visited the sick
(42:12):
and imprisoned. She took so called fallen women into her
home because she was really mindful of the fact that
that could have been her in that exact same position.
And one of the reasons that she hated political and
religious corruptions so very deeply was that it was so
often taking funds away from people who really desperately needed it.
It's also tricky to try to sum up royals very
(42:34):
complicated and sometimes contradictory opinions. So to quote Sarah Harvey
Porter again, here's a rundown quote. Entire separation of church
and state in spirit and letter, Exposure and punishment of
corrupt officials, sound money, public schools in all parts of
the country, free from sectarian bias or control masonry, justice
(43:01):
to the Indians, liberal immigration laws, transportation of mails on Sunday,
internal improvements, territorial expansion, liberal appropriations for scientific investigation, equal
and just terra laws, no nullification States rights. In regards
(43:21):
to the slavery question, she had a mostly good list
until that point, except for the maybe the territorial expansion
part also had problems, but anyway, betterments of conditions of
wage earners, free thought, free speech, and a free press.
And then my favorite good works instead of long prayers.
(43:46):
On May, the Society of Professional Journalists unveiled a plaque
to be hung in the Senate Daily Press Gallery, and
it reads and and Royal, who published newspapers from eighteen
thirty one to eighteen fifty four in Washington, d C.
A fearless champion of freedom of the press, and Royal
(44:06):
walked the halls of the capital gathering firsthand reports on
legislation and politics. She bears the distinction of being the
first woman to cover the US Congress. She advocated the
separation of church and state and the preservation of the Union,
making a notable contribution to political journalism and that is
in Royal. Before we close out today's show, we have
(44:31):
a bunch of thank you's. First, thanks to the staff
at all of our venues across the board. Everyone in
every city was great to work with. Thanks to our
marketing staff in our Atlanta office for handling a lot
of the wrangling with the venues and with our booking agent,
answer our colleague Tamika who handled making most of our
travel arrangements for us. And then I want to thank Holly. Holly,
(44:53):
you did all the legwork on figuring out where we
should stay and I just copied off your paper. It's
fine by me. I love to pick a hotel. Thank
you for doing all the research for this episode. We
also need to thank everyone who came out to the show,
especially the many people who stayed behind to talk to
us afterward. In particular thanks to Colleen who brought us
some chocolates and some handmade cowls, and Maria who brought
(45:16):
us some goodies from historic St. Mary's City, and Sophie
who brought us some really beautiful art. And if you
brought us a treat and we haven't mentioned you, we
sincerely apologize that we got really blurry a little while,
to the point that sometimes I did not know what
airport I was in. That happened to me also, and
I just remembered that that we uh, somebody brought us
some peanut butter because they did a peanut butter taste
(45:38):
test and we had the peanut butter episode that was
in Raleigh, and I didn't write down that person's name.
I also want to give us special thank you to
Corinne for dashing up onto the stage during our last
show in Washington, d C. With some cough drops when
the cold that I had started fighting off in Summerville
finally caught up with me and I could not stop
(45:58):
coughing on stage. And lastly, massive thanks to head count
dot org UH they were on site to register people
to vote at most of the shows on this tour.
They will also be on our West Coast tour. Very
exciting and I feel like it's so important that they
are there and I really appreciate the effort of all
of those volunteers. And our next tour is coming up
in October. We will be in Seattle, Washington, Portland, Oregon,
(46:21):
and Los Angeles and San Francisco. California. You can find
more information and links to buy tickets at missed in
History dot com slash tour. We are hopeful that we'll
be able to have some more stops in other cities
on other tours in the future. Uh And since that
was kind of a long episode and we had a
lot of thank yous, we have no listener mail today,
(46:41):
just the blanket. Thank you again to everyone. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, is how staff
works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, everybody. Today's episode is our
East Coast show from our recent tour. This is one
that we recorded at the Arts at the Armory and Somerville, Massachusetts,
(00:21):
so let's hop right into it. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Tracy new Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.
Today we are going to talk about Anne Royal. And
while she was living and Newport, Royal was a very
well known, even notorious, public figure. She was a travel
writer and she was a muck raking journalist way before
(00:45):
Theodore Roosevelt coined that term, at a time when there
really were not a lot of women being travel writers
or journalists at all. And she made such a name
for herself that by the time she was put on
trial for being a common scold. So we're going to
talk about that today. Uh that was national news, the
(01:07):
common Scold trial of Anne Royal. At the same time,
she was really divisive and complicated and imperfect and just messy.
And the longer I worked on this podcast, the more
mess I found. So today we're going to do our
best to celebrate the things about her that were awesome,
which there are several, and also not shy away from
(01:30):
the parts that were not, which were mostly calling the
unfortunate racism portion of the program. It always lurks. But
she was born in Newport on June eleven, seventeen sixty nine,
outside of Baltimore, Maryland, and her father, William, was actually
rumored to be an illegitimate descendant of the Calvert family,
(01:52):
as in George Calvert, first Baron Baltimore, whose son was
the city's namesake. William moved the family to the frontier
of western Pennsylvania in seventeen seventy two, and before he
died around seventeen seventy five, he taught and to read phonetically,
and this might be part of why later on she
was really interested in documenting the accents and the dialects
(02:15):
of the people that she met in her travels and
then writing them down, sort of rendering them phonetically in
her books. And after William Newport died AND's mother, Mary,
remarried a man from Hannah'stown, Pennsylvania, and on July thirteenth,
seventeen eighty two, after the British surrendered at Yorktown, but
before the Treaty of Paris formally ended the Revolutionary War.
(02:37):
Hannah's town was attacked and it was burned by the
Seneca Nation and their British allies. And a stepfather also
died right around this time, and the surviving family fled
to what is now West Virginia. But at the time
this happened, it was still just part of Virginia. An
even more dramatic version of this story got passed around
later on in Anne's life and after her death. It
(02:59):
was not true. It was also not something she said
was true. People just sort of glommed onto it. This
was that Anne herself had been captured by the Native
force and was held prisoner until a very brave American
Army captain came and rescued her, and that they later
got married not true at all. On November eighteen seventy,
(03:23):
when Anne was twenty eight, she did get married. This
was to Captain William Royal. He was about twenty years
her senior, and he was a veteran of the Revolutionary War.
He had served under the Market Lafayette, and William was
part of the area's wealthier class. He had a large
estate and an enslaved workforce. Uh. And in a lot
of accounts, Ann and William actually met because Anne's mother
(03:46):
was working as a domestic in his home, but that
is not entirely clear whether that's true or not. So
every time we've done this show so far, when you've
gotten to the end of the sentence about the market
a Lafayette, you've taken a little breath, And every time
I'm just expecting someone in the audience to spontaneously burst
into Hamilton's I'm giving them a moment. I'm like, here's
your shot, here's your shot. Yeah. So, it was not
(04:12):
clear whether Anne's mother really did work as a domestic
in his household. But what was clear is that Anne
and William cohabitated for quite some time before they got married,
like maybe a decade. This, of course, was scandalous. Neighbors
and William's family considered Anne to just be an indigent
(04:32):
woman of very questionable morals. Uh. They spread some rumors
that William had just been keeping her as his concubine
and that he hadn't ever intended to marry her. Some
of them said that he had not married her at all.
There was a marriage certificate. They definitely got married, but
they people had a vendetta against Anne Royal. So they
(04:54):
did get married, and they were married for the next
fifteen years. And during that time, William and and read
together all the time, which is sort of romantic and charming, uh.
They especially read classic works of literature and the work
of Enlightenment thinkers. And this really bolstered Ann's education because
prior to that, really she had just had a very
brief time in a log cabin school in Pennsylvania in
(05:17):
terms of formal learning. And this also really influenced her
social and political attitudes because she and William would always
discuss whatever it was they were reading, and she tended
to just pick up on his opinions. An assumed more
and more responsibility for managing their home and their farm
as their marriage moved on, because William developed a problem
(05:37):
with alcohol, and this didn't have the kind of stigma
that it might today at the time because for an
affluent Southern man, drink was a part of life and
drunkenness was a sign of masculinity. But for for An
it made her life a lot harder. Number One, she
was having to do a lot of his work that
he could not do because he was intoxicated. But it
(05:58):
was also harder because her neighbors would judge her for
being too harsh with him when he was too drunk
to get his work done. Ah every time, William Royal
died in thirteen and with the exception of a small
legacy that had been set aside for Anne's niece, he
left and all of his property, and she ultimately became
(06:21):
the sole executor of his estate, which meant that it
was up to her to manage all of William's affairs
after he had died, and this included running their home
and household and also managing that enslaved workforce that she
had inherited. So this is a good time to take
a moment to note some of A's attitudes. In a
lot of ways, she was a woman who was way
ahead of her time, but not when it really came
(06:44):
to slavery or race. At the same time, her opinions
on those subjects were really full of contradictions. She called
slavery a curse, and she hated the idea of white
men fathering children with their enslaved with enslaved women who
were living on their property, and then enslaving those children.
She really hated that idea. She was also really horrified
(07:05):
when she witnessed violence and brutality against enslaved people. But
to be clear, there is no flexibility that could allow
you to define her as an abolitionist. She thought slavery
should be up to the states, and she actually worried
that emancipation could really impact white workers in a negative way.
And she also very clearly knew that slavery was still
(07:28):
slavery even if someone who enslaved people was considered a
good or kind slave owner. But even though she knew
that didn't make it any less wrong, she would still
make a point to mention how she thought several slave
owners were very kind in some of her writing. It's
like you just said, you just said you knew it,
(07:49):
didn't make it not slavery. So she wasn't a like
actively advocating for slavery like a lot of people of
her background were. But that is a low bar that
I don't. That bar is like buried down in there um.
She was similarly contradictory when it came to Native Americans
as well. She tended to romanticize Native Americans as a group,
(08:13):
but then when she met individual Native people, she often
wrote about them in a really stereotypical and sometimes degrading way.
She didn't think it was possible for the native and
white populations to live together in the same place, and
that was an argument that people were using for removal.
But at the same time, she railed against land companies
that were defrauding the native population of their land. She
(08:36):
praised charitable charitable mission work with the indigenous tribes, but
she really decried missionaries efforts to convert the native population
to Christianity, and she absolutely hated it if it seemed
like missionaries were trying to extort conversions in exchange for
food and supplies. So if you had a charitable mission
(08:56):
where you were, you know, providing people with food and
and uh and supplies and things like that without expecting
anything in return, that was fine. But if you were
sort of like, if you come to church, we'll have
food for you, she did not like that at all.
And after William's death, it became really apparent that he
had been carrying a lot of debt, and this was
(09:18):
compounded by some of Anne's own decisions that she had
made while trying to figure out what she was doing
with his estate. She ended up selling off parts of
his property, including some of that enslaved workforce. But then
William's family actually contested the will. They framed Anne and
William's relationship as a complete sham and said that she
had orchestrated the whole thing just to get William's fortune.
(09:40):
And then they said that she had in fact forged
the will. So this started a legal battle that went
on for six years, and in eighteen nineteen a jury
annulled the will. Although she was still legally entitled to
a much smaller financial portion of her late husband's estate,
Ane's own debts and her expenses left her with really
almost nothing, and at that point she was fifty years old.
(10:04):
This it was while all of this was going on
that she finally decided to leave Virginia and she started
on the path to becoming a travel writer. And travel
writing had become a popular genre as the United States
had become more established as a nation, with roads and
steamboats and ways to make it possible for people to
go out and travel. Uh So, most travel writers, though,
(10:26):
were men, and sometimes they were women, but always traveling
with a companion. And the big distinction above anything else
is that those people actually had money to do that traveling,
and on the other hand, was a woman with no
fortune at all traveling alone. The annulment of the will
meant that she didn't even have horses or a carriage
of her own, so she had to take public modes
(10:46):
of transportation like stage coaches and steamboats. She also had
to stay in public houses, and she had to try
to fund her room and board through the sale of
her books. This would be sort of like if you
wanted to be a travel writer but you didn't have
a car or any money like it. It It was not
a comfortable way to try to earn a living. Yeah,
(11:06):
being a travel writer on spec is rough business. Um.
But her approach to selling her books was really controversial
and is the reason I've been sitting here giggling for
a couple of minutes. Uh. It was typical for writers
of the day to sell their work by subscription. It was, however,
not typical for them to sell those subscriptions by going
(11:28):
door to door and barging in on people's houses with
an aggressive sales pitch. And it was especially not typical
for writers to sell these subscriptions by satirizing people who
refused to purchase them. Uh. But that is exactly how
Anne played it. That was her business model. She stopped
right in and say I'm gonna write nasty stuff about
(11:48):
you buy a subscription um And who wouldn't be wooed
by that? I know she She was definitely not the
only writer who was doing weird stuff to promote themselves
around this time. I mean, while Whitman was writing views
of his own books, I'm under fake names and publishing
them to be like the great writer of the United
States has arrived. But that was a lot less confrontational
(12:10):
than at them. I see your eating dinner by my book.
I was just gonna say the people I'm at the
dinner table, now would you like to subscribe? Uh? Now,
whose turn is it? You're okay? I don't know why
last track of this thing. It's like I've never done
this before, so especially at first, this whole barging in
(12:32):
on people in demanding the buy books like this is
a weird financial juggling act that was kind of difficult.
At various points. She made ends meet thanks to the
charity of other people and the help of various Masons.
Her late husband had been a Mason and had told
her that if she needed help, she should go find
a Mason, and that advice served her extremely well. Um
(12:53):
Mason's helped her out of a number of jams. And
there was also a huge anti Masonic movement that was
going on in the United States at this point, which
was really a whole other story. But Anne Royal was
very critical of people who criticized the Masons, and so
that earned her even more of their support. Another early
patron of hers was the Market Lafayette, thanks to her
(13:14):
husband's military service under him. Anne's first book was titled
Sketches of History, Life and Manners in the United States
by a Traveler, and it was published in New Haven
in eighty six, and at that point she had just
turned fifty seven. She went on to publish numerous volumes
of travel writing, and these included collections of letters to
(13:35):
her friend and her lawyer, Matthew Dunbar from Alabama, and
she had written those while her husband's will was in dispute.
She also included what or she also wrote what she
called Penn portraits, and those were vignettes of noble and
semi noble or semi notable people. I don't know why
I've now completely lost my ability to say words uh.
She also wrote a novel, so she started her writing
(13:58):
career really late in life, but her hust was the
real deal. She did a lot of work. She was prolific,
and by the end of her career as a travel
writer and Royal had gone pretty much every place you
could go in the United States by steamboat or stage coach.
She wrote about all the places that she went and
the people that she met, and she often documented their
accents and their dialects and their slang. She wrote about
(14:20):
what the travel was like getting there, what the roads
were like, the weather, all the various things you would
expect out of a travel book, and she also wrote
about her opinions of what she saw and who she
saw and encountered, some of which could be very judge.
She was especially critical of people who she didn't think
(14:40):
we're educated or and even worse sin in her eyes,
who didn't care to improve their own level of education.
And this also trickled down to communities that didn't try
to educate their residents. So if she went into a
place like a township that had no school, it was
pretty much a guarantee that that place was going to
get a scathing up about it and This was really
(15:01):
the start of her work as a political writer. She
increasingly commented on the social conditions and political issues that
she witnessed while she was out traveling, and Royal became
really widely known over these years as a travel writer.
Sometimes when she arrived in town, she was greeted as
a celebrity. She had fans who were eagerly awaiting the
next installment of her book. Other times, especially if she
(15:25):
had been really critical of that place the last time
she was there, the reception would be just outright hostile.
Please don't come to our houses anymore. I just sort
of imagined them, like, get the bitchforks. It's in Royal. Uh.
When her second travel book came out in the Boston
(15:47):
Commercial Gazette wrote, quote, her style is so highly seasoned,
her love of country so predominant. She gives so much
of local topics and applies the lash so unsparingly to
her enemies that her books, like her manners, are resistless.
As she traveled back and forth all over the United States,
(16:07):
and Royal also went to Washington, d C. To try
to secure a widows pension, and she started spending more
and more of her time there and that's where that
unsparing lash that the Boston Commercial Gazette had noted got
her in some real trouble. Because Anne Royle's late husband
(16:31):
had been a veteran in the Revolutionary War, she was
at least in theory, entitled to a widows pension, But
because of the way the law was written, widows were
not automatically granted pensions. They had to petition for them
individually to Congress. It's a great use of Congress's time.
(16:52):
She had to prove that the man in question was
a veteran, and that she had been married to him,
and that he had died, and a royal started gathering
all of this information in eighteen o eight, except for
the death part, because her husband was still alive then. Uh.
But it was towards the end of his life and
he was obviously getting older and ailing, and she had
filed a petition for a pension on his behalf on
(17:13):
November twenty nine of eighteen twelve, and she pointed out
that he had served for the entirety of the war,
he had received no pay, he had paid for all
of his own expenses and supplies during the war, and
he had paid for things like troop transport, and now
that he was elderly and he was in poor health,
she really thought that a pension could ease his last
year's And this claim was actually rejected on January one
(17:37):
of eighteen thirteen, and then all of those records were
lost in a fire, so she had to start from
scratch and gather everything over again. I feel like this
whole story about trying to get a pension for him
in his old age really highlights the whole idea that
this was a ragtag volunteer army in the universe shower
with the rich people paying their own way. They're like,
(17:57):
it was not even something that was being fun did
in a lot of ways by any kind of governmental effort.
It was like, this guy that has this estate is
paying for the troops to move on his own. It's
bizarre idea to me. Anyway. After William's death and the
annulment of his will, and started petitioning to get a
(18:19):
widow's pension, and she ran into a problem. They had
gotten married in sevent but the law only allowed pensions
for marriages that had happened up until seventeen. This is
where I suspect she really regretted that whole cohabitation decade.
Probably I haven't been an issue before that except for
the whole family squabble thing. And then she's like, uh,
(18:43):
she did refile the petition over and over, and she
actually started making friends with influential members of the government,
hoping that they could kind of speed things along and
help her plead her case. And in particular there was
John Quincy Adams, who was at the time Secretary of State,
and he agreed to help her. He also took up
the cause of pension reform. He subscribed to two of
(19:04):
her books. Uh, and he then introduced her to his wife, Luisa,
who gave her a shawl. And he also encouraged her
to go to Massachusetts and visit his father, which she did.
I can't imagine what the meeting of Anne Royal and
Abigail Adams would have been like. Yeah, so this brings
(19:26):
us to a favorite but also apocryphal story about Anne
Royal and John Quincy Adams after he became president in
I don't know why I almost said seventeen because there's
seventeens on the page. Uh. So, yeah, it's a very
fun story, but don't get attached because it is not true.
According to this story, though John Quincy Adams was known
(19:46):
to bathe in a tributary of the Potomac River called
Tiber Creek every morning, that is actually true. He was
a skinny dipper. Uh. Legit Royal decided, according to this story,
that she wanted to be the first woman to interview
a president in office, but she was turned away in
her requests, and then, having found out about his bathing habits,
(20:07):
she went down to the river one morning and she
plopped herself down and sat on his clothes uh and
refused to get off of them until he agreed to
her terms that he would do an interview with her.
And once he did agree to this, because he hadn't
no pants, uh, she got off of all of his
stuff and then politely turned away so he could get dressed.
So my friend Amy, who was a history teacher, was
(20:28):
that our Atlanta show and she said that one of
her students had told her this story. And to paraphrase
what Amy said, I think that's bull roar. It is.
It is bull roar number one. Apart from raising some
issues with privacy and consents to a modern year, this
is a pretty delightful story about a woman's clever thinking
and boldness and determination and sitting on John Quincy Adam's clothes.
(20:51):
But in the nineteenth century it was not any of
those things. It was scandalous and disgraceful. And a number
of retellings of it from the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, because it does go pretty far back, they
add various details that make both and and John Quincy
look worse. So one version of the story, dating back
(21:12):
to nine made it so that it wasn't that that
Anne Royle sat on his clothing until he agreed to
do an interview. It was that she threatened to scream
and attract the attention of some fishermen who were nearby,
and imply that the president had assaulted her right. Total
smear campaign. Uh. And there are several reasons that we
(21:34):
know that this story is apocryphal. So one is that
neither of the two people involved in the story ever
said anything about it. And another is that John Quincy
Adams and a royal already knew each other, and he
was publicly polite to her, but privately he criticized her
more divisive behavior. He actually called her a virago errant
in enchanted armor and virago comes from the Latin word
(21:57):
for women warriors, but it had come to have a
different meaning, which was a loud, overbearing, shrill, and obnoxious woman.
And it also is defined as a woman who is
courageous and strong. But it was really, at this point
in time used in a pejorative sense as an insult,
and not to be like, hey, you are very strong.
It's like, hey, you're painting my neck. Uh. So, the
(22:18):
whole setup of her being this unknown, scrappy reporter who
wanted to seek an audience with the president really just
does not reflect what we know their actual relationship to
each other was. So the last reason that we know
this is apocryphal is that right after it supposedly happened,
and Royal was put on trial for being a common scold.
(22:40):
And if she had literally sat on the president of
the United States close to force him to interview her,
it probably would have come up as evidence. It didn't,
So here's what really happened. Uh And Royal had a
lot of opinions. She liked to express them very loudly
and very stridently and not necessary really in a way
(23:00):
that anyone would categorize as ladylike and We're going to
get into the breadth of and Royal's strong opinions later.
We've already mentioned some, but there are more. But the
opinion related to this trial was that Royal was a
huge proponent of the separation of church and state. So
this was happening during a religious revival known as the
(23:21):
Second Grade Awakening, and there was a growing movement of
evangelism and of trying to elect explicitly Christian candidates to office,
to try to reform the law to be more specifically Christians. So,
for example, there was a General Union for Promoting the
Observance of the Christian Sabbath that was established in It
was focused on, among other things, ending Sunday mail delivery,
(23:45):
and and Royal objected. And her issue was not with
religion itself, it was with evangelism and religious hypocrisy. She
recognized that the United States was a country of many,
many religions and thought that the idea of crafting a
government just around one of them was tyranny. She also
wrote favorably about the idea of Christian charity, but was
(24:08):
really really angry about the fact that there was, for example,
an entire organization, as Tracy just mentioned that was focused
on things like ending Sunday mail delivery when it really
should have been focused on things like feeding or sheltering
the needy, or reforming in humane prisons or making sure
that sick people were cared for. She had she did
(24:28):
not like she was like, this is really what you
need to be spending your time on. Also, maybe she
liked getting packages every day of the week. There were also,
uh there were cities where the churches were allowed to
put chains across the roads in front of their buildings
on Sundays, which in a lot of places completely shut
down traffic. Like you just couldn't go down main Street
(24:49):
because all the churches had chained off the thing. And
and like there was a big reform movement to make
that stop stop being obstructing all the traffic for everyone
because it's Sunday Ah. And that was another thing that
Anne Royal was very much. She was in favor of
not chaining off the street in front of the church
every Sunday. Um Royal she also made enemies with a
(25:12):
number of people within this movement. In Burlington, Vermont, she
had an incident with a missionary that, in her account,
led to his shoving her down his steps so forcefully
that she dislocated an ankle and couldn't walk for six weeks.
She had been trying to sell him a book when
that happened. She also had a running dispute with Presbyterian
(25:37):
minister Ezra styles Eli, who had been advocating for the
creation of a Christian party in politics. And then there
was the matter of her neighbors in Washington, d c.
There was a fire engine house near where she lived
that had been built with federal money, and it was
being used as a Presbyterian meeting house, and royal thought
that a building that had been built with federal dollars
(26:00):
should absolutely not be used for a religious purpose, and
she made really, really, really really sure that everybody knew
how she felt about it. The congregation claimed that she
shouted things at them from her windows, sometimes using swear words.
She claimed that the congregation's children threw rocks at her house,
(26:22):
and that some of the adults sat under her windows
and prayed for her salvation, which she did not appreciate.
And the congregation took this matter to the U. S.
Circuit Court of the District of Columbia, and after a
grand jury returned an indictment. On June one, Royal was
(26:42):
charged with three offenses, number one being quote an evil
disposed person and a common slanderer, number two being a
common scold, and number three being quote a common brawler
and sower of discord, and all three of the charges
also nodded to the idea that she was doing all
(27:03):
of this bad stuff among quote her quiet and honest neighbors.
It's still having now done this show is the third time.
It still is so bizarre to me that you could
just charge somebody with being an evil disposed person like
that was. I'm so glad you can't do that anything.
(27:23):
I would be so arrested. I do not have the
money for lawyers. So Royal pleaded not guilty to being
a common scold. She demured on the other two charges.
So demor basically means that the defendant doesn't dispute the charge,
but also it's not enough to warrant some kind of
(27:46):
legal response, so it's sort of like entering a plea
of so what's your point. So those charges of being
an evil disposed person and a common slanderer and a
common brawler and so of discord were dropped, and that
left and Royal on trial for being a common scold
in the highly publicized and sometimes very gleefully reported United
(28:11):
States Versus Royal. So the idea of being a common
scold has a very long history in English common law,
and several former British colonies still had laws about it
on the books after the Revolutionary War that had been
there since before the war. But it hadn't been widely
prosecuted in Britain since the seventeen seventies, and only a
(28:32):
handful of people had ever been put on trial for
it in North America, including in New York, Pennsylvania, and
as should surprise none of you, Massachusetts. This was a
crime that was apparently only committed by women, um because
only women were ever charged and tried for it, uh,
(28:54):
And the only punishment that was outlined for it was ducking,
which was being put into a chair that was kind
of like a see saw or a balance and being
dunked into a nearby lake or river. So like being
a scold, which was a crime, that's not how only
women committed. Ducking as a punishment was only administered to
(29:16):
women because it was only used in cases of scolding
or a select few other women. Only crimes. This probably
sounds yes, like which is this probably sounds like something
really archaic. And it was even in eighteen twenty nine. Uh,
this whole idea of being a common scold was so
(29:37):
obsolete and so completely rarely prosecuted, at the point that
the attorneys at the trial were not even completely sure
of what exactly constituted being a common scold. And there
was also a line of thought about how if you
had been found to be scold a scold at one time,
you were a scold forever, which had a little bit
(29:57):
of an upside because once you had been punished, could
then scold with impunity for the rest of your life.
It's like, we can't try her for being a scold
again if we already found her to be a scold.
How would that work? Uh, Like you're being charged as
a scold. Huh again, so what's your point? She's got
(30:18):
the scarlet as um. Also, nobody had a ducking stool,
although according to some accounts, one was commissioned to be
built at the Washington Navy Yard for this purpose. Uh.
Later on, when you are texting somebody about this show,
(30:39):
you really did mean ducking this time. There was also
the slightly more serious question of whether ducking, which was
the only punishment for scolding under the law, ran a
foul of the Eighth Amendment prohibition of cruel and Unusual punishment.
That seems kind of obvious since number one, back when
(31:01):
ducking had been used as a punishment more often, it
was not uncommon for the women who were being administered
that punishment to drown or just die of shock. And
number two, there was no ducking stool anywhere in the
United States, So that pretty much fits the unusual category
pretty cleanly. We're gonna have to build the contraption required
(31:22):
to dole out this punishment that does seem unusual. Throughout
this trial, though Anne Royal's behavior was described as very
respectable and lady like. Witnesses for the prosecution talked about
her shouting at them and using profanity and generally making
them feel bad. I know she heard it their feelings.
(31:45):
Witnesses for the defense talked about how she had always
been perfectly cordial to them. Uh and the defense witnesses
included John Eaton, Secretary of War for the newly inaugurated
President Andrew Jackson. Jackson himself had also been invited to testify,
but he declined in spite of her perfect princess behavior
(32:07):
in court and the witnesses on her behalf. Royal was
found guilty and before sentencing, John Coyle, who was one
of the original complainants, came forward with another complaint that
a few days earlier and Royal had called him quote
a hypocritical old scoundrel the very idea um and he
(32:28):
brought this up as evidence that Royal needed to face
a harsh sentence, but Royal claimed that he had come
at her first, saying that her time was short, which
is obviously a threat, and the judge concluded that these
two offenses just canceled each other out um, and then
he sentenced and Royal to a fine of ten dollars
in lieu of ducking because nobody had the darn stool. Uh.
(32:50):
Plus she had to pay a two d and fifty
dollar deposit to secure her good behavior for a year. Yeah,
it's like this is sort of like being on probation,
but not really. It's like the ultimate swear jar in
escrow might kind of. Her fine was paid by two
(33:12):
reporters from the Daily National Intelligencer, which is usually framed
as solidarity among members of the press, because it was
absolutely clear to everyone that this whole trial was not
just about the Presbyterian congregation that was meeting at the
fire engine house. It was about and Royal's poison pen
and her many extremely strong opinions that she had been
(33:34):
stridently writing about for most of the eighteen twenties. It
was a trial that was basically about making and Royal
shut up, and after being convicted of being a common scold,
and Royal thought it might be a smart idea to
get out of Washington, d c. But she did not
stay gone for very long. It does not appear that
(34:02):
Anne Royal did anything to cause her to forfeit that
two and fifty dollars for good behavior that she was
fined after her conviction for being a common skulled. But
on December thirty one, she published the first issue of
her new newspaper. It was The Paul Pry, and she
published that in Washington, d C. And, in addition to
publishing other material, The Paul Pry loudly and stridently published
(34:27):
and Royal's opinions on the political topics of the day,
as well as her own reporting about the goings on
in the halls of government, especially when it came to
exposing corruption and the Paul Prize opening editorial began quote,
our course will be a straightforward one, as Heretofore, the
(34:47):
same firmness which has ever maintained our pen will be
continued to this end. Let it be understood that we
are of no party. We will neither oppose nor advocate
any man for the presidency. The well, fair and happiness
of our country is our politics. To promote this, we
shall oppose and expose all and every species of political
(35:08):
evil and religious fraud, without fear, favor or affection. We
shall patronize merit of whatsoever, country, sect, or politics. We
shall advocate the liberty of the press, the liberty of speech,
and the liberty of conscience. The enemies of these bulwarks
of our common safety, as they have shown none, shall
receive no mercy at our hands. So that all sounds
(35:31):
pretty great, But we should make it clearer that even
though it said right there that the paper had no
official political parties, stance royal zone political opinions very clear
in its and a lot of people thought that the
that the Paul Pry and its successor were jackson Ian papers,
even when and Royal strongly criticized things that President Andrew
(35:51):
Jackson was doing when she didn't agree with him. And
the Paul Prize quality was variable, to be very kind
about it, she was printing it at home on an
antique press, and she was using a hand me down
type face. And when we say hand me down, that
is not in any way a joke, and it really
doesn't cover how intensely hand me down. The situation was
(36:15):
um Duff Green, who worked at the United States Telegraph,
which was another paper, not the Telegraph Office, had asked
his staff to gather up all of their discarded letters
to give to her, and that is what she was using.
So she was basically printing things that looked like the
cutout ransom notes that you would get, except she was
just cranking them out on her home press. And on
(36:36):
top of this highly erratic quality of the print, the
writing was not especially polished either. But she got about
a hundred subscribers with two orphans that we're helping her
make the deliveries. Maybe not surprisingly considering this whole thing,
with like the not very polished prose and the serial
killer writing and the orphans, she couldn't really get the
(37:02):
Paul prior to turn a profit, and the name was
part of the problem because Paul pry made it sound
like it was a gossip rag instead of something that
offered some serious journalism. So she shut it down on
November thirty six, and on December two, just a couple
of weeks later, she published the first issue of her
new newspaper, The Huntress, which she chose. Yes, she chose
(37:25):
the name to more clearly reflect a connection to the
editor of the paper, which was in Royal, and since
at this point she had five years of experience under
her belt, she was no longer like just deciding she
was going to have a political newspaper. Uh The Huntress
was a much stronger paper than the Paul Prye had been.
And as she had done with The Paul Prye, while
(37:47):
she was publishing The Huntress and Royal, personally walked the
halls of government, meeting with legislators and interrogating them about
their positions and what they were doing. And she met
and spoke with every president who sir during her time
as a journalist in the Capitol. And she made such
a name for herself with her dogged pursuit of stories
that when she entered a room. A lot of the time,
(38:08):
men who had been targets of her criticism would just
get up and roll out Audio sma Um, the Senate doorkeeper,
who was named Isaac Bassett, described her as quote homely
in person, careless in dress, poor in purse, and vulgar
in manners. But he also said she had much shrewdness
(38:30):
and respectable talents. Royal published The Huntress until July fifty four.
She kept it up after Congress passed the new law
in eighteen forty eight that gave Revolutionary war widows who
were married before January second, eight hundred access to a
lifetime pension. Although her husband's same relatives that had contested
(38:51):
the will laid claim to that too, they did not
like her, uh so she only got part of it.
But for twenty three years she was publishing her own
newspaper in Washington, d c. And between The Paul Prye
and The Huntress, she published more than twelve hundred issues
with the help of her friends Sally Stack and those
two orphans who were helping both with deliveries and errands.
(39:15):
And to quote Sarah Harvey Porter, writing for the Historical
Society of Washington, d c. In nineteen o seven. Quote
from the first number of Paul Prye to the last
issue of The Huntress, almost a quarter of a century afterward.
There was not a single political battle fought in Washington
about and about which and Royal did not have or
rather fling her say, she hit two with uncommon frequency,
(39:39):
and always near the bull's eye. Her pages contain much
to offend a critical literary taste, much that her her
admirers could wish had never been printed, but liked or
disliked her bitterest enemies must admit that her editorial and
other utterances never lacked point. Royal died just a couple
(39:59):
of months after publishing her last issue of The Huntress
on October one, eighteen fifty four, at the age of
eighty five. She was virtually penniless, having barely sustained herself
with these newspapers. She was buried in Congressional Cemetery in
an unmarked grave, and then a stone was erected by
Mason's in nineteen eleven which read and Royal, Pioneer Woman
(40:21):
Journalist seventeen sixty nine to eighteen fifty four, pray that
the Union of these States maybe Eternal erected an appreciative
recognition by a few men from Philadelphia and Washington May twelfth,
nineteen eleven. And Royal's reputation really endured for a long
time after her death. Almost forty years later, on February
twenty second, eighteen ninety one, the Washington Post ran an
(40:44):
article about her under the following headline, which is long,
so you're gonna think it's done, and I'm going to
keep going. Um. She was a holy terror. Her pen
was as venomous as a rattlesnake's fangs. Former Washington editress
how and Royal made life a burden to the public
men of her day. Please let me have a headline
(41:07):
that good after I die. Please please, Plazness, please please
another fifty years after that, President Harry S. Truman, who
loved to tell that false skinny dipping story, called her
a shrew of a newspaper woman. Yeah. Most of the
write ups about and Royal today focus on one of
three things. There's that apocryphal story about John Quincy Adams,
(41:31):
the trial for being a scold, and the extremely opinionated
and strident political reporting that was dedicated to exposing corruption
and hypocrisy that she did for almost twenty five years.
But there's one more thing that's really important to note
about her, and that's that although she was mostly able
to support herself through writing and reporting, often she really
(41:51):
had very little. Especially when she was running her own newspapers.
People described her as shabby because she only had that
one dress, but she was constantly doing everything that she
could for people who had less than she did. She
donated as much money as she possibly could to charitable
causes rather than buying more dresses. She visited the sick
(42:12):
and imprisoned. She took so called fallen women into her
home because she was really mindful of the fact that
that could have been her in that exact same position.
And one of the reasons that she hated political and
religious corruptions so very deeply was that it was so
often taking funds away from people who really desperately needed it.
It's also tricky to try to sum up royals very
(42:34):
complicated and sometimes contradictory opinions. So to quote Sarah Harvey
Porter again, here's a rundown quote. Entire separation of church
and state in spirit and letter, Exposure and punishment of
corrupt officials, sound money, public schools in all parts of
the country, free from sectarian bias or control masonry, justice
(43:01):
to the Indians, liberal immigration laws, transportation of mails on Sunday,
internal improvements, territorial expansion, liberal appropriations for scientific investigation, equal
and just terra laws, no nullification States rights. In regards
(43:21):
to the slavery question, she had a mostly good list
until that point, except for the maybe the territorial expansion
part also had problems, but anyway, betterments of conditions of
wage earners, free thought, free speech, and a free press.
And then my favorite good works instead of long prayers.
(43:46):
On May, the Society of Professional Journalists unveiled a plaque
to be hung in the Senate Daily Press Gallery, and
it reads and and Royal, who published newspapers from eighteen
thirty one to eighteen fifty four in Washington, d C.
A fearless champion of freedom of the press, and Royal
(44:06):
walked the halls of the capital gathering firsthand reports on
legislation and politics. She bears the distinction of being the
first woman to cover the US Congress. She advocated the
separation of church and state and the preservation of the Union,
making a notable contribution to political journalism and that is
in Royal. Before we close out today's show, we have
(44:31):
a bunch of thank you's. First, thanks to the staff
at all of our venues across the board. Everyone in
every city was great to work with. Thanks to our
marketing staff in our Atlanta office for handling a lot
of the wrangling with the venues and with our booking agent,
answer our colleague Tamika who handled making most of our
travel arrangements for us. And then I want to thank Holly. Holly,
(44:53):
you did all the legwork on figuring out where we
should stay and I just copied off your paper. It's
fine by me. I love to pick a hotel. Thank
you for doing all the research for this episode. We
also need to thank everyone who came out to the show,
especially the many people who stayed behind to talk to
us afterward. In particular thanks to Colleen who brought us
some chocolates and some handmade cowls, and Maria who brought
(45:16):
us some goodies from historic St. Mary's City, and Sophie
who brought us some really beautiful art. And if you
brought us a treat and we haven't mentioned you, we
sincerely apologize that we got really blurry a little while,
to the point that sometimes I did not know what
airport I was in. That happened to me also, and
I just remembered that that we uh, somebody brought us
some peanut butter because they did a peanut butter taste
(45:38):
test and we had the peanut butter episode that was
in Raleigh, and I didn't write down that person's name.
I also want to give us special thank you to
Corinne for dashing up onto the stage during our last
show in Washington, d C. With some cough drops when
the cold that I had started fighting off in Summerville
finally caught up with me and I could not stop
(45:58):
coughing on stage. And lastly, massive thanks to head count
dot org UH they were on site to register people
to vote at most of the shows on this tour.
They will also be on our West Coast tour. Very
exciting and I feel like it's so important that they
are there and I really appreciate the effort of all
of those volunteers. And our next tour is coming up
in October. We will be in Seattle, Washington, Portland, Oregon,
(46:21):
and Los Angeles and San Francisco. California. You can find
more information and links to buy tickets at missed in
History dot com slash tour. We are hopeful that we'll
be able to have some more stops in other cities
on other tours in the future. Uh And since that
was kind of a long episode and we had a
lot of thank yous, we have no listener mail today,
(46:41):
just the blanket. Thank you again to everyone. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, is how staff
works dot com.
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