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.Land, LoisGreen Carr, and Edward C.Papenfuse, eds., Law, Society, and Politics in EarlyMaryland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 157; Cathy Matson,Merchants & Empire: Trading in Colonial New York (Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1998), 113, 160-161; Elizabeth M.Pruden, Investing Widows: Au-tonomy in a Nascent Capitalist Society, in Jack P.Green, Rosemary Brana-Shute,and Randy J.Sparks, eds., Money Trade, and Power: The Evolution of ColonialSouth Carolina s Plantation Society (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,2001), 344-345; Gloria Main, Peoples of a Spacious Land: Families and Cultures inColonial New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 178-180(she argues that mortgages become common in the Boston area well before theend of the seventeenth century and that their use spread to other parts of theregion in the eighteenth century); Konig, Law and Society, 82-84; Main, TobaccoColony, 70-71; Shields, Civil Tongues, 296; Dayton, Women Before the Bar, 70, 77-79; Rosen, Courts and Commerce, 50-51, 54.She claims, The mutually supportiveand tolerant economic relationships normally attributed to a communal societydo not lead to lawsuits. 35.Rosen, Courts and Commerce, 50; Maryland Archives, XLI, 65-66.36.South Carolina Gazette, March 26, 1744.She was not alone; the widowsSarah Ward, Charlotte Gourian, Mary Saureau, Lydia Viart (who designed toleave this Province ), and Ann Drayton similarly threatened lawsuits; South Caro-lina Gazette, January 13, 1733, January 20, 1733; April 14, 1733; March 2, 1734; Feb-ruary 15, 1735; and April 10, 1736.Boston Gazette, February 15, 1731.While widowsin Massachusetts tended not to place such advertisements in the paper, accordingto Dayton, Women Before the Bar, 94, Nearly 90 percent of litigating widowshad extended small amounts of credit by notes.Thus some widows, whether theywere running a family enterprise or augmenting their income through cautiouslending, displayed considerable facility with written credit instruments.The num-ber of widows appearing county court to sue or be sued over their own debtsincreased about sevenfold between the 1710s and 1750s.Well propertied wid-ows.were an important source of both consumer and commercial loans and 208 Notes to Chapter 5therefore, it must be acknowledged, played a modest but significant part in thecapitalization and commercial development of the countryside. 37.Wulf, Not All Wives, 148; there were 20 shillings in a pound, thus Herredge screditors got back about 50 percent of the original debt; Suffolk County ProbateRecords, 17, 191, and 202.No such declarations of insolvency appeared in the othercountries in Massachusetts, in Maryland, or in South Carolina.This reflects notthe lack of insolvency in those areas but rather the peculiar nature of early Amer-ican recordkeeping.38.Main, Peoples of a Spacious Land, 178-180.She qualified her optimistic viewof widowed creditors by pointing out that mortgages were complicated forms ofcredit that could be used only by those widows who had gained the necessaryskills from their husbands or who had the initiative to learn them upon their hus-bands deaths that is, elite women with access to an education.Those widowswho failed to acquire these skills became even more dependent on male relatives,especially in the increasingly commercialized world of the eighteenth-centuryseaboard.Mary Greenhill, Suffolk County Probate Records, New Series 13, 8-11.Ofcourse, that lack also hid the extent of the female debt network.Pruden, Invest-ing Widows, 344-362, discusses widows and their mortgage practice in Charles-ton, South Carolina.She agrees with Main about the freedom and independencemortgages provided for widows.She found that 21 percent of widows were in-volved in some degree in the mortgage and bond market of South Carolina.Un-like Main, however, she does not see mortgages as an instrument only of elitewomen; 77 percent.were not of the elite and wealthy population but, none-theless, found a way to extend their legacies by a means other than buying land orslaves. For a discussion of women s participation in the debt network in anothercolony at a slightly later time, see Kristi Rutz-Robbins, Divers Debts : Women sParticipation in the Local Economy, Albemarle, North Carolina, 1663-1729, EarlyAmerican Studies 4 (2006), 425-441; and Ellen Hartigan-O Connor, She Said shedid not Know Money : Urban Women and Atlantic Market in the RevolutionaryEra, Early American Studies 4 2006), 322-352.39.Will of Mary Baker, Suffolk County Wills, Book 18, 120-121.40.Boston Gazette, March 14, 1720, Boston News-Letter, March 14, 1715, andSouth Carolina Gazette, January 25, 1739.Between 1720 and 1750, no fewer thantwenty-nine, thirteen, and twenty-six similar ads appeared in the three newspa-pers, respectively.For a discussion of women s immediate immersion in the colo-nial debt network, see Dayton, Women Before the Bar, 76, 91-92, 97 (she found that93 percent of women s lawsuits were with fellow town residents; only 40 percentof men s were); Crane, Ebb Tide in New England, 158-159; Rosen, Courts and Com-merce, 50-51; Konig, Law and Society, 82-84; and Main, Tobacco Colony, 70-71.41.Suffolk County Will Book, 37, 377-380, and 26, 146-148.Burnard, CreoleGentlemen, 77, found that two-thirds of elite male debtors owed money to morethan ten creditors and a third owed money to more than twenty creditors; of Notes to Chapter 5 209those who were owed money, more than half had more than fifty debtors.Un-like widows, these male debtors created a vast debt network; similar to the femaledebt network among widows, however, it was a network based on gender.42.Inventory of Margaret Wilson taken in 1747, South Carolina WPA Misc.Wills, v.7, 352; inventory of Sarah Harley taken February 6, 1744, South CarolinaWPA Misc.Wills, v.71, 368; and inventory of Mary Sumner taken March 19, 1750,South Carolina WPA Misc.Wills, v.77b, 454.See also the inventory of Mary Al-len taken July 9, 1750, South Carolina WPA Misc.Wills, 77b, 522.She left an es-tate valued at £721, and, of that, £680 (94 percent) was debts due to her.43.Inventory of Sarah Allen taken March 14, South Carolina WPA Misc.Wills,77a, 120-122.44.Suffolk County Wills, 13, 226-227; New Series 10, 290-293; 26, 360-365; NewSeries 13, 8-10; New Series 18, 215-216.45.Amory Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Genealogy of AnaAmory, Vol.154, 180-181.46.Amory Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, N279, Reel 1, Oc-tober 1729; June 12, 1736; December 16, 1738; and August 1739.47.Boston Gazette, July 8, 1728; she ran this same ad again on July 15, July 22,and July 29; Boston Gazette, February 24, 1729; she ran this ad again on March 3and March 10.48.For a similar Boston/Charleston connection see the Letters from theSchenckingh Smiths of South Carolina to the Boyston Smiths of Massachusetts, South Carolina Historical and Genalogical Magazine 35, no.1 (January 1934), 1-12.49.Letter dated October 4, 1716, Amory Family Papers, Massachusetts Histori-cal Society, N279, Reel 1.50.Oxford English Dictionary.51.Toby L.Ditz, Formative Ventures Formative Ventures: Eighteenth-Cen-tury Commercial Letters and the Articulation of Experience, presents a brief butimportant analysis of John Hill s Young Secretary s Guide in which he teaches mer-chants how to write letters that explicitly connect the personal and the commer-cial, in Rebecca Earle, ed., Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter-Writers, 1600-1945(Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 6.52
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