A Folder of One’s Own: Hannah Lawrence Schieffelin’s Life in Poetry
By Kaitlin Tonti (Hollins University)
Kaitlin Tonti was the recipient of an Omohundro Institute—Mount Vernon Digital Collections Fellowship in 2018. This post describes the work she undertook as a fellow. You can read more about the project here.
During my fellowship at the New York Public Library (NYPL) in the summer of 2018, I stumbled upon a collection of family documents that were unique in the sense that one of the female members had several folders dedicated entirely to her: Hannah Lawrence Schieffelin. Unknown and understudied eighteenth-century women’s writing is commonly archived under their husbands’ names or placed in folders that hold their husbands’ (or other male family members’) documents. However, Schieffelin’s extensive collection of manuscripts, including poetry, was enough to acquire her own folder.
Married to Jacob Schieffelin, an American fighting for the British, Schieffelin was an elite Quaker from New York who proudly wrote about her Patriot sympathies. Despite their odd coupling, they traveled through Montreal to Detroit and eventually made New York their home, where Jacob developed a successful drug and shipping business. Together, they had six children (NYPL).
In this time, Schieffelin developed her talent as a successful poet and essayist who wrote with the intention of publishing. Many of her poems are dated and include where they appeared in print under either pseudonym, Matilda or Cornelia. Much of Schieffelin’s poetry is in conversation with other female poets of the time who wrote on subjects such as religion, friendship, and motherhood. Her political poems addressed to George Washington and Alexander Hamilton add to the genre of poetry written by women whose words mythologized the founding father figures. Along with figures such as Annis Boudinot Stockton and Phillis Wheatley-Peters, Schieffelin’s odes exaggerated the men’s greatness and infallibility.
In a series of poems published in the Time and Literary Piece Companion, Schieffelin’s defense of Washington puts her at the center of a poetic debate concerning gradual abolition. Several magazine contributors read her poem “A Vindication. To Edward Rushton” as a defense of slavery, noting she made a logical error, in other words claiming that if everyone kept slaves, then why to attack only Washington. She eventually issued a new poem that was also met with criticism, “On the Gradual Abolition of Slavery,” that attempted to clarify her position on the topic. In today’s political environment, scholars hope their historical subjects will represent the best of a progressive nature and prove wrong the assumption that eighteenth-century Americans did not know better regarding intersections of race and class. However, Schieffelin is not one of those historical subjects. Her blind devotion to men who actively contradicted abolitionist attempts make it difficult to understand and study her perspective. Schieffelin is not the perfect historical subject. Her views on slavery are messy; however, her poetry contributes to the long history of conversations on gradual abolition that would extend into the nineteenth century between men like Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison.
The purpose of my project has been two-fold. First, an OI—Mount Vernon Digital Collections Fellowship helped fund the digitization of Schieffelin’s poetry at the New York Public Library. Until now, her only digitized piece has been a travel narrative titled “Narrative of Events and Observations that Occurred During a Journey through Canada in the Years 1780-1781.” However, digitizing her poetry will demonstrate her vast array of writing talent and rightfully place her among other early American women writers living in the late eighteenth century. Second, an Omeka site featuring Neatline I created has helped illustrate Schieffelin’s role in the gradual abolition debate, which played out in the magazine over approximately two months.
Additionally, digitization is assisting my efforts to transcribe Schieffelin’s poetry and to analyze her relationships with other female poets of the time, such as Ann Eliza Bleeker and her daughter, Margaretta Faugerés, for whom Schieffelin wrote an elegy for upon her early death. In the same vein that Philadelphia Quaker women used manuscript networks to circulate their work, Schieffelin’s writing will hopefully reveal how those networks also existed in New York. Digitization will also make her work available for other scholars to analyze. Her outward political views add to the cast of women writers who preserved poetry with their pens and challenge Quaker stereotypes that suggest they were pacifist or leaned to loyalist tendencies. Furthermore, much of her poetry, letters, and essays provide insight into early Canadian history and how Schieffelin interacted with non-continental U.S. Indigenous peoples.