The Sister Who Asked for the Vote

On a Virginia plantation above the winter fields, a widow sits at a writing desk, the account books open beside her with their columns of rents and taxes owed. She dips her pen and begins a letter to her brother, away at the Continental Congress, turning the Revolution’s own language toward a question no one in her family expects from her.

It is 1778.

She does not just grow up in one of Virginia’s great houses. She is born at Stratford Hall into a family of planters and statesmen, sister to two men who will sign the Declaration of Independence, raised inside a Tidewater world of large estates and enslaved labor.

She does not just keep a household. After her husband dies she manages a large estate in her own right, pays the taxes on its land, and carries the responsibilities usually reserved for men, while the law counts her only as a temporary holder of what she runs.

She does not just defer to custom. She leaves the Church of England for the Baptists, lives openly for years with a doctor she never legally marries, and bears the scandal that comes with both.

She does not just pay what she is told. In 1778 she writes to her brother in Congress and asks why a propertied widow should be taxed when she has no vote, taking the Revolution’s cry of no taxation without representation at its full word. Her own letter is lost. We know the argument only because he wrote back, granting that he saw no reason such women should not vote, and then leaving the custom exactly where it stood.

Her Spark of Liberty was the question the Revolution did not want to answer.

She measured the new nation’s promises against herself and found them written for men. Her estate rested on enslaved labor, and that contradiction sat inside her own life as well, but the question she put to her brother was the right one, and it would take the country almost a century and a half to say yes to it.

Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”

Born at Stratford Hall in Westmoreland County, Virginia, on February 6, 1728, she was a daughter of a president of the Virginia Council and a sister to two of the men who would sign the Declaration of Independence. In 1748 she married a wealthy planter and burgess and, after his death around 1760, managed his estates and the enslaved people on them as a widowed landowner liable for taxes. She left the Church of England for the Baptists and lived for years with a physician, Dr. Richard Rind, without marrying him. In March 1778 she wrote her now-lost letter to her brother in the Continental Congress, arguing that propertied widows taxed on their land deserved a voice in the laws that taxed them, among the earliest such suffrage arguments by an American woman. She died in Virginia around 1782, about fifty-four years old.

Her name was Hannah Lee Corbin.

Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon

A new Sparks of Liberty short read is here. What the Candle Witnessed tells the story of the enslaved boy who taught himself to read and, by candlelight in the summer of 1776, read the anti-slavery passage that Congress struck from the Declaration of Independence. Read it now on Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H6VJQW4G

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