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Life on the home front was hard.
With men away at war, women had to protect their children. They also had to earn a living and defend the family property. Plus, they still had to do all the household work they did in peacetime.
▲ Women who lived near the fighting sometimes had to take in soldiers. That made more work for them. It also cut into food supplies. Some Patriot women were afraid their daughters would fall in love with British officers. For two years, British officers lived in Rebecca Motte’s home in Charleston. She kept her teenage daughter hidden from them the entire time. Then British troops took over Motte’s house. They made the family leave. So Motte helped set the house on fire.
Abigail Adams was one of the most famous women on the home front. Her husband, John, was away on business for most of the war. So Abigail ran the family farm in Braintree, Massachusetts. She had to deal with rising prices and not enough workers. Plus, there wasn’t enough wool or cotton for clothing. But she kept the farm going. She also kept the family out of debt. John wrote that their friend James Warren told him “that my Farm never looked better, than when he last saw it, and that Mrs. [Adams] was like to outshine all the Farmers.” Abigail Adams became first lady when her husband was elected the second president of the United States. She was also the mother of John Quincy Adams. He became the sixth American president. ▶
◀ Women on farms were not used to being in charge of planting and harvesting crops. They had to take on these jobs. They also had to do their usual chores. However, many took to these new jobs quickly. When women wrote letters to their husbands at the start of the Revolution, they usually called the property “your farm.” But by the end of the war, more women were calling it “our farm.”
◀ Loyalist women had the same problems as Patriot women. Plus, Loyalists living behind enemy lines were afraid of attacks on their families and property. Many moved to Loyalist-held areas. A lot of them ended up in refugee camps. Life in these camps was rough. One camp was near Charleston, South Carolina. By the end of 1781, about 200 Loyalists were dying there each day from hunger. More than half of the dying were children.
▲ Many Native American tribes sided with the British. They thought the British would keep settlers from taking more of their land. In return, Patriot forces attacked Indian villages. Mary Jemison was a white woman. She had lived among the Senecas since the age of 16. She reported that Patriot militias burned crops and destroyed houses. They also killed cattle and horses. Nancy Ward was a Cherokee married to a white trader. In 1781, she tried to create a peace between her people and the American government.
▲ “My father was in the army during the whole eight years of the Revolutionary War.... My mother had the sole charge of four little ones.... When my father was permitted to come home, his pay was short, and he had not much to leave us.... Yet when he went, my mother ever bade him farewell with a cheerful face, and told him not to be anxious about his children, for she would watch over them night and day.... Sometimes we wondered that she did not mention the cold weather, or our short meals, or her hard work.... But she would not weaken his hands or sadden his heart, for she said a soldier’s life was harder than all.”
—From Demeter’s Daughters: The Women Who Founded America 1587–1787, by Selma R. Williams
◀ From the start of the war, the British promised to free enslaved African Americans who left their masters. Thousands of enslaved persons escaped. They traveled with the British army. Old Ross was a 56-year-old African-American woman. She helped a group of fellow slaves escape from a plantation in South Carolina. Three of them were her children.
