ABSTRACT
“IS THIS LIBERTY?” ASKED Rachel Lovell Wells at the end of I the American Revolution. The year was 1786—three years after a peace treaty with Britain had been signed, one year before the Federal Constitution would be ratified. Wells was probably 65 years old, a woman of the lower middle class. She was poor, but she was intellectually sophisticated. She could read and write (although her spelling was poor). Her sister, Patience Lovell Wright, was an accomplished artist who had served in a modest way as a spy in England, gathering information from the nobility whose portraits she sculpted in wax. Wells had bought war bonds from the state of New Jersey during the Revolution. Subsequently, she had moved to Philadelphia but returned to her New Jersey home after the war. In an effort to curb speculation, the New Jersey legislature decided that only state residents had a claim on interest payments. Wells's claim on her money was turned down because she had not been in the state at the war's end in 1783. Wells appealed directly to the Continental Congress. She believed firmly that she was entitled to a response from the patriot government: “I have Don as much to Carrey on the warr as maney that Sett Now at the healm of government.” Wells urged the Congress to remember what her purchase of war bonds had accomplished: “If She did not fight She threw in all her mite which bought the Solgers food & Clothing & Let them have Blankets and Since then She has bin obligd to Lay upon Straw & glad ofthat.” The Continental Congress did not respond to her petition, and it remains in the National Archives, perhaps the most moving witness to the Revolution left to us by a woman.
