ABSTRACT
Anne Royall was a reformer not out of philosophical conviction but out of necessity. The cause she espoused was her own, but it directly touched that of numerous others without her resources of courage and endurance. Royall was a Deist, an admirer of Thomas Paine, contemptuous of established churches, and a dedicated Freemason. Mrs. Royall sought people and eventually commented upon most of the conspicuous persons of her time, especially in politics, whom she met in her travels or in Washington. She had publicly denounced a group of Presbyterians who maintained a church near her own home in Washington and who hated her for the antichurch views she treasured from her late husband—views that also comported with her generally pro-Andrew Jackson, civil-rights sympathies. They had her brought to court on an old law that prescribed ducking in water for any person convicted of being a “common scold.”
