A multiyear effort to transcribe and publish each of the twenty
letter books created by Judith Sargent Murray for the benefit of
future generations.
Judith Sargent Stevens Murray (1751-1820) was twenty-three years
old when she decided to copy the letters she was writing to family
and friends. It was 1774. She was living in Gloucester,
Massachusetts, a thriving, colonial seaport whose ties to Great
Britain were being tested. The daughter of a wealthy, merchant-class
family, Judith was suitably married at the time to her first husband,
Captain John Stevens Jr., a comparably well-off shipowner. She was
also part of a small group of Universalists who were questioning the
sovereignty of Gloucester's established Congregational church. The
preacher they turned to for guidance, John Murray of England, had
recently arrived in Gloucester at the request of Judith's father,
Winthrop Sargent. Change was in the air. As a student of history,
Judith had an instinctive sense of her role at this moment and in
this place. She had the time, the financial wherewithal, and--of
tantamount importance--the literacy skills to initiate what would
become a forty-four-year process of historical documentation.
Judith began her first "letter book"--a blank volume, bound in light brown leather--with a statement of purpose to her future readers. She explained that she "committed to the flames" nearly all of the letters she had written before 1774 as they were merely "a kind of history of [her] juvenile life" and could not be of interest to anyone. While Judith's intended audience was her direct descendants, we know from her plan to keep her correspondents "purposely involved in ambiguity" (by protecting their identity in her letters) that she anticipated a wider readership. Ultimately, she wrote, she wished to "commend [her] volumes of letters to affectionate posterity."1
Following this statement, Judith determined her recording system. She left the first few pages of the book blank and then copied what letters she had, numbering each letter and every page. As proper letter-writing etiquette dictated, she included her return address, the date, a salutation, and an appropriate closing in her letters. When the book was full, Judith created an index in the opening pages, listing the recipient of each letter and the page on which that person's letter appeared.
When Letter Book 1 was done, Judith began work on Letter Book 2, not knowing how many she would complete in her lifetime. She would fill twenty in all, copying approximately 2,500 letters. It was an enormous undertaking--reproducing into these volumes all of this material by quill pen, often by candlelight. But we know from her letters that Judith believed in the value of what she was doing, and even contemplated publishing the letter books herself in 1796.2
Judith was sixty-seven years old and widowed when she completed the last letter book, Letter Book 20. The final letter she included was written in 1818, shortly before she moved from Boston, Massachusetts, to Natchez, Mississippi, where she spent the final two years of her life living with her daughter, Julia Maria (who had married a Natchez planter named Adam Lewis Bingaman), and her infant granddaughter, Charlotte Bingaman. To date, no letter books of Judith's have been found from this period of her life.
It wasn't until 1984, one hundred and sixty-four years after Judith's death, that the letter books were discovered by the Reverend Gordon Gibson. A Unitarian Universalist minister, Reverend Gibson had studied the founding figure of American Universalism, John Murray, and he became curious about his wife. Reverend Gibson knew that Judith had edited, contributed to, and published John Murray's autobiography after his death, and he wondered what else she might have accomplished. He had read the oft-quoted "fact"3 that Judith's personal papers had long been destroyed, but he had also encountered a conflicting statement contained in an old biographical sketch: a family Bible existed somewhere in Natchez.4 Since he was serving a congregation near that city, Reverend Gibson decided to search for that Bible. He determined that members of the Bingaman family still lived in town, and he found the missing volume in one of Natchez's grand antebellum mansions. He asked the owner if she knew of any other material on Judith, and she directed him to another mansion called Arlington where "some old copybooks" of Judith's could be found.
It was there that Reverend Gibson found the treasure trove for which he was not even specifically searching. After two years of negotiating with the owner of Arlington, Reverend Gibson was able to place the letter books into the capable hands of Michael ("Mick") Hennen, curator of manuscripts at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History at Jackson, one of the premier archival facilities in the United States. In 1989, under a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Department published Judith's letter books on microfilm (the originals continue to be housed in Jackson). According to Mick Hennen in his introduction to the Judith Sargent Murray Papers microfilmed edition, "it is not known who was responsible for placing the Judith Sargent Murray Papers at Arlingon." As the house was sold over the years, the papers were "included in the sale of the house and contents" until they were donated by its present owner to the Department of Archives and History.5
Despite their reproduction on microfilm, Judith Sargent Murray's letter books have not truly been accessible to researchers because to date they have not been transcribed nor have they been published in print or electronically. Bonnie Hurd Smith's latest book, The Letters I Left Behind: Letter Book 10 begins the methodical process of transcribing every letter book, but it is, in fact, the third book on the subject (in addition to "The Rediscovery of Judith Sargent Murray," an article by the Reverend Gordon Gibson published in The John Murray Distinguished Lecture Series in 1993 by the Murray Grove Association). The first book, Judith Sargent Murray: Her First 100 Letters, published in 1995 by Bonnie Hurd Smith under the auspices of the Sargent House Museum in Gloucester (Judith's former home), contains one hundred letters from Letter Book 1. The second book, From Gloucester to Philadelphia in 1790: Observations, Anecdotes, and Thoughts from the 18th-Century Letters of Judith Sargent Murray, published in 1998 by Bonnie Hurd Smith through the Judith Sargent Murray Society, features the letters Judith wrote during a six-month journey in 1790 that exposed her to key people and places in the new American nation. In addition, the book's biographical introduction contains excerpts from letters culled from each of the other nineteen letter books.
The work of transcribing the letter books from microfilm is not easy. The images show fragile paper pages that are often mildewed or fragmented, or that show ink bleeding through from one page to the next. Judith's handwriting requires careful examination because characters run together, look similar in appearance, or are so tiny as to be almost indecipherable. Her vocabulary was enormous, incorporating words that are now out of use. Her punctuation differed significantly from today's standards.
Still, the process of transcription has been worth the effort. The Letter Books Project is, in a sense, part of a continuum that fulfills Judith's wish for "affectionate posterity" and for publication--from her original work, to the Reverend Gibson's discovery of the volumes, to their transcription, publication, and dissemination. The Letter Books Project has two objectives. The first of these is to make this unique historical record usable for researchers. The second objective of the Letter Books Project is to restore Judith Sargent Murray's voice to the American story. Her published works--essays for the Gentleman and Lady's Town and Country Magazine, the Massachusetts Magazine, and the Federal Orrery; her poetry in these periodicals along with the Boston Weekly Magazine and the Boston Magazine; and her book, The Gleaner, which was reissued in 1994--are available but, although important, they do not reveal the person in the way that the letter books do.6
After the time and effort Judith Sargent Murray took to
create her letter books, she deserves nothing less.
Notes
1 Judith Sargent Murray, opening statement, Letter Book 1, Judith Sargent Murray Papers, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, Mississippi.
2 Judith Sargent Murray to Reverend Robert Redding, 14 December 1796.
3 Richard Eddy, D.D., The Universalist Quarterly and General Review (Universalist Publishing House, 1881), 213. The text reads: "At her death she left a large and valuable collection of manuscripts…. These papers … were stored in an unoccupied house on her son-in-law's plantation, and when an effort was made to remove them a few years afterwards, they were found to be utterly rotted and spoiled by mildew."
4 Reported in Vena Bernadette Field, "Constantia, A Study of the Life and Works of Judith Sargent Murray, 1751&endash;1820," Maine Bulletin, No. 7 (University of Maine, 1931).
5 Earl M. Hennen Jr., introduction, Judith Sargent Murray Papers, 1.
6 The Gleaner was reissued by Union College Press. It contains Judith Sargent Murray's "Gleaner" essays and her first two plays. Her other essays were reissued by the Judith Sargent Murray Society, and they are available at the Society's Web site, www.hurdsmith.com/judith. Judith's poetry has yet to be reissued either in print or electronically in its entirety, but it is available through microfilmed editions of the Gentleman and Lady's Town and Country Magazine, Massachusetts Magazine, Boston Magazine, and Boston Weekly Magazine.