ABOUT THE
LETTER BOOKS PROJECT
Letter
Book 10 now available!!!
Other
letters available on this site.
Covers of Letter Books 3, 10, 13, and
19.
In 1774, when she was twenty-three years old, Judith Sargent Stevens
(later, Murray) decided to start making copies of her outgoing
correspondence to family, friends, political leaders, and business
acquaintances. As a self-taught student of history, she knew the
importance of documentation. As someone with a keen understanding of
the momentous political change that was taking place and who had the
resources and literacy skills to do this work, Judith began to create
what would become twenty volumes of letters left behind for future
generations.
History is forever indebted to the Rev.
Gordon Gibson for locating these letter books in 1984. He found them
in an ante bellum mansion in Natchez, Mississippi, called Arlington.
Judith Sargent Murray died at another Natchez mansion, Oak Point, in
1820, after moving there from her home in Boston to be with her
daughter, Julia Maria, who had married a Natchez planter named Adam
Lewis Bingaman. To this day, no one knows how the letter books made
their way from Oak Point to Arlington.
The Natchez ante bellum mansion called Arlington, where Gordon
Gibson found the letter books.
Reverend Gibson convinced the owner of the
letter books to donate them to the Mississippi Department of Archives
and History in Jackson, Mississippi. They had them preserved and
published on microfilm in 1986 under a grant from the National
Endowment for the Humanities. The original manuscripts remain housed
in the Jackson facility, but the microfilm is available for anyone to
purchase.
It is the work of the Judith Sargent Murray
Society to transcribe and publish all twenty letter books, in print
and electronically, to make this valuable resource more readily
available.
INSIDE THE LETTER
BOOKS
Judith Sargent Murray left the first few pages of each letter book
blank. After she filled the volume, she created a table of contents
on those pages. This one appears at the beginning of Letter Book
I.
Letter Book I begins with this statement, in
which Judith tells her readers that she "committed to the flames"
most of her early letters deeming them unworthy of saving. She
concludes this statement by explaining her desire to be "remembered
with affectionate posterity."
Judith wrote to George Washington in 1798 when she sent him his copy of her book, The Gleaner.
She also wrote to John Adams in 1798, when
she sent him The Gleaner.
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