Browsing: Adams Family Correspondence, Volume 1

Mrs. Catharine (Sawbridge) Macaulay, later Mrs. William Graham (1731–1791), correspondent of the Adamses and Warrens, political pamphleteer, feminist, and author of a multivolume History of England, from the Accession of James I to That of the Brunswick Line, London, 1763–1783, from an engraving by Williams, after a painting by Catherine Read, in the London Magazine, July 1770. The crusading zeal of this “historian in petticoats” made her the darling of political radicals in both England and America; her literary achievements won for her the unlimited admiration of emancipated and literate women like Mercy Warren and Abigail Adams. See a remarkable letter printed in the present volume (p. 177–179), in which Mrs. Adams undertook to give Mrs. Macaulay a view of American affairs in 1774, and an exchange in 1778 between Mrs. Adams and John Thaxter on a marble statue of her as Clio recently commissioned by one of Mrs. Macaulay's English admirers (vol. 2:391–393, 400–401). John Adams went so far as to call her “one of the brightest ornaments not only of her Sex but of her Age and Country” ( Diary and Autobiography , 1:360)—a judgment that many Americans accepted then, though few today remember her name or have read her History. For an illustrated account of her and her writings, including her sensational tour of America in 1784–1785, see Lucy M. Donnelly, “The Celebrated Mrs. Macaulay,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, 6:173–207 (April 1949).