Dr. Jacqueline Beatty joins host Kathryn Gehred to discuss The Petition of Belinda from 1783 in which Belinda Sutton petitions The Massachusetts General Court for the funds left to her by her enslaver Isaac Royall after he fled the colonies during the Revolutionary War. Beatty and Gehred discuss Sutton’s use of poetic language to describe her kidnapping and enslavement.

 

Dr. Jacqueline Beatty is an Associate Professor of History at York College of Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses in Early American, Women’s and Gender, and Public History. Her book, In Dependence: Women and the Patriarchal State in Revolutionary America explores the ways in which women in Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston manipulated their legal, social, and economic positions of dependence and turned these constraints into vehicles of female empowerment.

 

Find the official transcript here. 

 Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant is a production of R2 Studios part of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. 

 Digital Archive of Massachusetts Anti-Slavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions, Massachusetts Archives, Boston MA, 2015, "Massachusetts Archives Collection. v.239-Revolution Resolves, 1783. SC1/series 45X, Petition of Belinda", https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/0GMCO, Harvard Dataverse, V4.

 The Royall House and Slave Quarters - https://royallhouse.org/