Free
Life was not easy on the home front.
With men away at war, women had to protect their children, earn a living, defend the family property—while doing all the things it took to keep a household going in peacetime.
▲ Women who lived near the fighting were sometimes forced to house soldiers. This created extra work and put a strain on food supplies. Some Patriot women feared that their daughters would fall in love with British officers. Rebecca Motte, of Charleston, kept her teenage daughter hidden from the British for the two years that British officers lived in her home. After her family was displaced when British troops took over her house, she helped set fire to it.
Abigail Adams was one of the most famous women on the home front. Her husband, John, was away for much of the war on official business. So Abigail was in charge of the family farm in Braintree, Massachusetts. She faced such problems as shortage of farmhands, rising prices, and a lack or wool or cotton for clothing. But she kept the farm going and the family out of debt. John wrote that their friend James Warren reported “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, 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 in addition to their other full-time chores. However, many took to this responsibility quickly. Letters to husbands show that at the start of the Revolution women usually referred to “your farm,” but, by the end of the war, more women were calling it “our farm.”
◀ Loyalist women faced the same struggles as Patriot women. Plus, those Loyalists who lived behind enemy lines feared violence against their families and their property. Many moved to Loyalist-held areas, but conditions in refugee camps there were harsh. By the end of 1781, in the camp near Charleston, South Carolina, about 200 Loyalists were dying each day of hunger and exhaustion. More than half of them were children.
▲ Many Native American tribes sided with the British. They believed that the British would keep settlers from taking more of their land. In retaliation, Patriot forces attacked Indian villages. Mary Jemison was a white woman who had lived among the Senecas since the age of 16. She reported that Patriot militias burned crops, destroyed houses, and killed cattle and horses. In 1781, Nancy Ward, a Cherokee married to a white trader, tried to negotiate 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 freedom to enslaved African Americans who left their masters. Thousands of enslaved persons escaped and attached themselves to the British army. Old Ross was a 56-year-old African-American woman. She helped a group of fellow slaves, including three of her own children, escape from a plantation in South Carolina.
