Hidden from history: Archivists reveal the lives of famous, and not-so-famous, women

Welcome to The Highlight Podcast. Every month, a Vox journalist calls someone up — someone we think needs to be highlighted because of the cool, weird, or important work they’re doing.

In 1786, Abigail Adams received a very gossipy letter from her sister.

The former first lady of the United States is known for a lot of things, like telling her husband to consider women when writing the Declaration of Independence, giving him other political advice, and writing letters about the Revolutionary War. But her appreciation for tea spilling was not, it seems, limited to beverage leaves in Boston Harbor.

“We live in an age of discovery,” Adams’s sister wrote to her, “One of our acquaintances discovered that a full grown child may be produced in less than five months!”

She goes on to explain that the husband of the new mother in question was out of town nine months earlier … suggesting this baby is not, in fact, a miracle of the age of discovery but instead the product of infidelity.

These are the kinds of letters that Kathryn Gehred, a women’s historian and media editor for the Virginia Humanities, likes to feature on her podcast, Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant. Each episode, Gehred and a guest dig into an 18th- or 19th-century letter written by a woman. They read the letter in its entirety and discuss the context surrounding it, an exercise that usually reveals a different type of history than the big sweeping narratives explored in biographies of “great men.”

Every month on The Highlight, Vox’s members-only podcast, a Vox reporter speaks with someone whose work they want to highlight. Gehred’s podcast inspired me to start transcribing letters — so much so that I wound up transcribing several hundred letters between President James Garfield and his family for the Library of Congress’s By The People project. This month, I spoke to her about her work, what I learned from it, and what close-reading everyday letters has taught her about the past.

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What follows is a partial transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity and length. For a longer version of the conversation, check out the podcast. You can listen here.

You said something in an early episode of the show about how a biography will excerpt one or two sentences from a letter, maybe the most important lines relating to a battle or something. And that sacrifices the context, especially about everyday life or the sort of domestic experience that people were going through. I’m curious why you think it’s important also to keep that context in, to focus or highlight the everyday and domestic lives?

Yeah. A lot of that is just something that I personally find interesting as a human and a historian, and also sort of the discipline of women’s history and family history is talking about … the famous quote, “well-behaved women rarely make history?” The whole point of that quote is that they should. A woman who’s just at home living her life, not doing anything that you might think of as relates to a war or relates to politics or public life … she’s still living in a historical moment. And even the daily tasks that she’s doing, how she travels to a place, what she’s cooking, everything that is sort of central to the lived experience of that time … it’s still really important to understand.

So I think keeping the entire letter in, even the boring stuff, is really important to have a certain type of understanding of the past. And to me it makes it feel real and vivid and sort of allows you as a reader to put yourself in that moment in time.

What I found kind of fascinating coming to your podcast is how funny it is. Is there a letter that comes to mind that really highlights just how quippy people could be?

This is something that I think people don’t always realize when they’re thinking about letters!

But women and people of earlier time periods, when they’re writing these letters to their family — or to anybody, to friends — they’re trying to make this letter interesting. And that’s part of why people liked reading these letters is because people were actively trying to make them entertaining.

And if people were funny, they would really try to be funny. So if you’re imagining somebody writing a letter and sending it to their family to be read around the fireplace, somebody from like a big 10-person family … they’re writing sometimes to tease their siblings and they’ll have like a line in there to make everybody laugh.

A correspondent who I think is really great at this is Thomas Jefferson’s granddaughter, Ellen Randolph Coolidge. She is a character. There are a lot of descriptions of Ellen Randolph Coolidge, but nobody can deny that she is a very strong letter writer. And particularly one of her strengths is describing other people, sometimes really in a very sharp, mean way.

Wait, what does she say?

I’ll just give you one of my favorites. Let’s see.

“Eliza Woodward the first assistant is extremely valuable to Aunt H she [. . .] possesses good sense and piety and performs her functions as well as they could be performed. But she is uninteresting in manners and conversation — conversation, I should not say, for she seldom speaks but in monosyllables. She is a saint no doubt and saints are the most tiresome people in the world.”

Tell me how you really feel, Ellen!

She does not pull punches. So she is just so fun to read. She just writes very freely. I enjoy reading her letters, and I want to get them out to the world a little bit.

But I think that that gives you a real sense of how irreverent people could be, too, right? Like, I think people think of people, especially in the 1700s, when there are all these texts being like, “God, and country,” etc. … to have someone being like, “Saints are kind of snoozeville.”

Yes! Saints are the most boring people in the world! It gives you an insight into the time period, right? There’s the “best foot forward” history and then there’s what people are writing in their personal letters.

In your show, though, you talk a little bit about the kind of risks of relating to some of these people too much. There’s a letter from Cornelia Jefferson Randolph that you feature.

Can you tell me a little bit about that? Who that is about, about the letter and sort of what happens in it?

Sure. One of the most significant letters to me that I found while working on my thesis and one of the reasons I wanted to do the podcast was a letter from one of Thomas Jefferson’s granddaughters. Cornelia Jefferson Randolph is writing to her sister, Virginia Randolph Trist.

So Thomas Jefferson passed away in 1826. He died super in debt, so his daughter and some of his granddaughters were very financially strapped, and they had to leave the house that they had all grown up in and live in a much smaller house. It’s in … I don’t think it’s quite called Washington, DC, yet, but in Washington, DC. And Cornelia is writing, and it’s just your usual sort of fun letter with updates, and Cornelia is a particularly funny writer, so I usually really enjoy her letters. So she starts sort of talking about family and health and all of that and then she has the line, “You will laugh to hear what disciplinarians we have turned out to be.”

And she ends up describing her and her mother and another free Black woman named Melinda holding an enslaved woman named Sally — it’s not Sally Hemings, it’s an enslaved woman named Sally — but holding her down and whipping her. She says that they had hired a constable to whip her previously, but she continues to misbehave, and so they do it literally themselves.

So she holds the woman down, and her mother, Martha Jefferson Randolph, who I had just written my entire thesis about, physically whips this woman. And she spins it as something just like a ha ha, fun little anecdote.

And it really sort of woke me up to the time period I’m working with and the backdrop to some of these stories, which can seem so funny and lighthearted, [but] they’re built on a society that is run on slavery. There are enslaved people in the background of all of these stories.

Did you want to go back and rewrite your whole thesis? Did it cause you to question what you had written about her?

Honestly, it made me reevaluate my entire approach to history and I did actually go back and rewrite basically the entire thesis, which is part of why my thesis is so bad.

I think this happens in all history. There’s people who have the idea of history as sort of the history of great men. They’re writing history as almost a form of propaganda, as a way of getting you proud and excited and relating to these sort of heroic figures.

And I realized that I had been writing my thesis on Thomas Jefferson’s granddaughter and relating to her and sort of finding the things in her letters that I thought were good and pulling those out and ignoring the stuff that was problematic. Or even, you know, empathizing with her. It’s like seeing her as an extension of myself.

And this is going to be really boring to people who study race in America. This is what they talk about all day, every day. But it sort of surprised me of how dramatically it shifted the way that I was looking at history. And if you stop picking historical figures to sort of think of as extensions of yourself, then everything changes, and it makes the past much more clear, and it allows you to engage in history better. So that was huge for me.

So the letter you mentioned, the Cornelia Randolph letter, is one of my favorite episodes. I sort of bare my soul a little bit in it, but it’s about the complicity of white women in slavery and perpetuating slavery. And I think that’s really important to look at head on. And some of these letters allow you to do that.

When you read stuff like this, do you ever worry about the times when letters don’t mention stuff like this? When it’s just two sisters writing back and forth, talking about a dance or whatever? Do you worry that you’re forgetting that this is the context that that dance exists in, that the people you’re reading about are actually enslaving people?

I worry about that all the time. So what I try to do is get letters from a variety of time periods, a variety of perspectives. I use, if I can, letters from enslaved people, to counterbalance.

I think it’s also important to talk about the full humanity of these people who are enslavers because it allows you to understand how slavery happened and how these types of evils continue to happen to this very day. And it helps you understand that better if you think of them as full human beings who are capable of doing these horrible things, instead of just a caricature of evil that you can sort of absolve yourself from any guilt by thinking of these sort of cartoonishly evil slaveholders who you could never do anything like.

That’s part of the reason that I wanted to feature the letter. I think that when you find something like this and you really engage with it and grapple with it head-on, it makes the world and history more clear, and not just propaganda.

Just earlier this week, I was looking for other sources for the podcast, and I found a Virginia girl’s diary from 1782. And I’m like, “Yes, this is exactly the type of stuff I’m looking for!” And I was looking through it and reading it, and it was hilarious, and she’s talking about suitors, and it’s perfect, and it’s so funny, and then I was like, “Hmm, this book … this is a printed volume, even though it’s not talking about anything important … a young woman’s diary that’s not talking about anything significant. How in the world did this get printed, knowing what we know about what sources get printed?”

And I looked at the publication date, and it’s 1871. So what had just happened in 1871, that all of a sudden, a white girl going and having fun … how did that suddenly get funding to be published?

Well, of course, it is one of the first pushes of rewriting the history of the South to be a Gone With the Wind, Lost Cause type fantasy. They’re talking about the good old days where these sweet Virginia rich girls were visiting each other’s houses and having fun and living this idyllic life.

And that is of course why that got published. It doesn’t talk about slavery, and it’s specifically being published at a time period when that is the new history that they’re trying to do.

So boy do I not want my podcast to be that. But is it dangerously close to being that from time to time? Yes.

So that is part of my work. One of the guiding principles of my podcast is “never girlboss a slaveholder.” That’s absolutely not what I want to do with this show.

You’ve mentioned this already, but you don’t only try to sort of highlight white women’s stories in your show. Can you talk a little bit about what letters and other records we do have?

The surprising part of working for a project like the papers of George Washington is … sort of accidentally … they have a lot of references to slavery in them if you’re actually really looking at the documents.

So I think sometimes people pretend that there’s fewer documents than there actually are. But like, we have letters from enslaved people writing to Thomas Jefferson or to Dolly Madison that are in these Founders projects because anything that’s even slightly connected to a Founder gets saved and gets archived.

So if you’re looking for them, you can find a surprising amount of letters from or about or referencing people who are enslaved. There are a lot of smaller projects out there, a lot of digital projects, that are really trying to emphasize more bottom-up histories.

There’s this really great resource called enslaved.org.

One of the coolest projects that I was able to feature is from the Prize Papers. It’s huge, out of the UK and France and Germany. There’s all these universities working on it, but they’re taking letters that were confiscated from ships for like the past 300 years. Just like every letter that was on a ship that would be taken by Great Britain during one of their many, many, many wars. And so that includes letters from poor people, from immigrants, from just about everybody.

The Occom’s papers project has some letters from Indigenous students at a school in New England.

So you’ve got to dig, you’ve got to work harder to find them, but they are out there.

My understanding from at least one of the episodes that you did is that some of those letters … there are challenges of interpretation, for example. Can you talk about the letters that are kind of filtered through white transcribers, for example?

Yeah, one letter in particular is from an enslaved woman, Hannah Valentine, that she’s writing to her daughter Eliza in 1837. She was barred from learning how to read or write, so to write this letter, she is telling a white overseer what to write for her and to then take and deliver to her daughter, who’s in Richmond.

Had her daughter been sold?

Her enslaver had become the governor of Virginia. So he had moved to Richmond and he had taken her daughter with him, but she had stayed on the plantation. So Hannah’s basically writing to let her daughter know what’s going on at the plantation and sort of asking her daughter to fill her in on what’s going on in Richmond.

But the things that she’s going to tell a white overseer to say are probably not … she’s not writing in an unfiltered way. So you sort of have to read between the lines a little bit to get to what she’s actually trying to say.

These are the letters where you get people talking about how wonderful and how nice the white enslavers are because she’s speaking to a white person for a letter that she knows is going to be delivered to her enslaver to be given to her daughter. So you can’t say, “See, look how happy enslaved people were! Look at the wonderful things she’s writing about her owners!”

If you look at the context of how that letter is written, there’s a lot going on there that explains that. So you can’t just take everything necessarily at face value. As always, you’ve got to look at the context of who’s writing when, what the motivations are, and that’s something that, I think, my format allows me to do in a way that I think is helpful.

And I think that throwing in the towel too early and saying, “This is unknowable,” is also not the best response because that just helps to keep things silent for longer.

There’s almost a pyramid, I guess, of letters. You have this enormous base of rich literate white men’s writings. And then you have a much smaller section of letters from individual, frequently wealthy white woman, where you still have a lot of the historical context around them. And then there’s an even smaller triangle in that pyramid of Black women, Black men, poor Americans, immigrants of all kinds, Native American writers, et cetera, et cetera.

Which is funny because if you’re looking population-wise, it’s the exact opposite pyramid.

But how do you, how do historians, counteract that? That imbalance? The fact that the record is heavily weighted in favor of the letters of these very rich white people?

It’s hard, but I feel like, responsibly, historically, that’s what you’ve got to do. And I think that one of the best ways to do it is to read these documents with that in mind, knowing whose perspectives are there and whose are being left out, asking those questions, and also with the vast swath of letters that you have, taking what you can find out about poor people, about enslaved people, Indigenous people, what you can tease out from those letters is really valuable.

And also looking at different types of sources. My podcast, it’s mostly letters that are your sort of classic one correspondent writing to another correspondent. But if you start looking at things like receipts, like maps and land grants and wills and deeds and legal documents and things like that … that is a lot of the time where you get some of this juicy information to pull that historians use. And you’ve got to use creative and oftentimes not published sources.

The things that have been prioritized to be published are those sort of nice, straightforward letters from one rich white guy to another rich white guy. And not only are they easier to find, but they’ve already been published and edited to you in a beautiful, readable way that some of these other ones have not been. So you’ve just got to find some of those other sources where you can.

What do you hope that people take away from your podcast?

I feel like my podcast will have succeeded if I get people to think a little bit more about the sources that history comes from. Because I think a lot of times, there’s like fun fact history on the internet. And it’s like, how do we know? Where did you find this information? Where is this coming from? What are you trying to do by talking about this history? And I think that digging into the sources — the primary sources — is the best way to figure out what’s happening. And looking at the entire source yourself is the best way to analyze that. You don’t just have to take history through these historians as the arbiter of telling you what’s really going on. Not to sound like a conspiracy theorist. But the whole point of history is you’ve got to look at the sources.