“I Showed Your Name and Mark”: Women’s Religious Allegiances in the American Revolution

Sometime after 1779, Margaret Floyd, a caretaker of the Countess of Huntingdon’s Bethesda Orphan-house outside of Savannah, Georgia, wrote to her aristocratic mistress in England to outline the fate of the property through the war. The worst damage had come at the hands of the British, though, as Floyd insisted, she had “showed” the Countess’s “name and mark,” sewn into the linen, to British soldiers. They carried off the lot anyway. In subsequent years, Floyd reported, matters had deteriorated further. When Floyd wrote, perhaps as late as 1785, she had moved a mile away, she reported only two older African American women living at the place—“Sue and Abigal and they plant a little provisions for themselves.” The property’s male caretakers had discouraged her writing, but she felt compelled to make a personal appeal and accounting, nonetheless.

The story of religious allegiance in the American Revolution has naturally been dominated by the writings of men, and it has emphasized the destruction and replacement of institutions. Floyd’s narrative opens up a new thread of investigation into how religious and political affiliations operated in this highly-contingent historical moment, one that connects the most elite patroness of Britain’s emerging Methodist movement to poor women and women she enslaved across the ocean. It prompts the reader to ask how women located at different points of distance from the loyalist Countess conceived of their relationships, and on what grounds—shared faith, patronage, shared womanhood, categories of race and freedom—they based those ties. Furthermore, how were those relationships changed by the breakneck politics of the era?