EAS Miscellany sat down recently to chat with Cynthia Kierner, author of “George Washington and the Ladies of Trenton: The New Jersey Women Who Feted a Hero and Then Disappeared from History,” our featured article from our Summer 2025 issue.
What drew you to the story of Trenton’s 1789 reception of George Washington as a lens for exploring Revolutionary-era women’s political engagement and historical memory?
I have always been interested in the Currier and Ives print, which depicts George Washington being welcomed to Trenton by a group of “ladies” and girls when he passed through their town in 1789 on his way to New York to assume the presidency. Historians often use this image as evidence of women’s political consciousness. I myself used it in a book called Beyond the Household. Of course, the print was made decades later, in the 1840s. And my research for my article suggests that this image truly celebrated Washington and had very little to do with documenting women as political actors—quite the opposite. The fact that Currier and Ives produced at least nine iterations of this image suggests that it was popular and that Washington’s reception at Trenton in 1789 was literally an iconic event for more than half a century after it happened. Yet that event, and especially the women who organized it, have been mostly forgotten. I wanted to learn more about the women and their objectives. I wanted also to think about why they were so celebrated in 1789 and then, in effect, disappeared from history. As a New Jersey native, I guess I also wanted to do a little shout-out to the history of the Garden State, which was an especially violent place during the American Revolution. As it turns out, the women organized their special welcome for Washington because they believed that he had done his best to protect them and other vulnerable civilians from wartime violence.
What do you think is the most interesting source you looked at as part of your research?
I found two manuscript letters that included eyewitness accounts of the Trenton reception. One, in the collections of the Library of Congress, was written by a woman who knew some of the participants, and who wrote an admiring description of the event, complete with a sketch of the triumphal arch the women constructed for the occasion. The other letter, in the archives of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association at the George Washington Presidential Library, was even more interesting. Written in 1861, by a seventy-nine-year-old woman who had been one of the “little girls” who welcomed Washington in 1789, this letter described not only the work that the women did to build and to decorate the arch, but also the emotion of the occasion, which was still vivid decades later. The author of this letter, Sarah Bond Howell Agnew, also emphasized that the women’s way of welcoming Washington was very different from the sorts of receptions planned by men in the other cities and towns he visited. In Trenton, she noted, the ladies welcomed the hero of the Revolution with flowers and sonnets, not “with wild huzzas, booming cannon that seemed intended for the destruction of all human Nature…reminding bystanders more of war than peace.”
How did you go about reconstructing the lives and motivations of the women involved in the Trenton reception, and what challenges did you face in interpreting their voices?
Although these women were mostly upper-class and literate, there are few surviving sources that document their voices, so my main approach was, first, to figure out who they were—their family connections, where they lived, and so on—and then to situate them and their community in their larger historical context. Trenton was, of course, the site of one of the Revolution’s key battles. New Jersey’s population was divided, and civilians often suffered violent attacks on their homes and persons, especially in 1776-77, when both armies were in the area. For women, rape was a special sort of trauma, and British soldiers and their allies committed several highly publicized rapes in southern New Jersey in 1776. So, fear of rape, and Washington’s reputation as someone who made a point of publicly denouncing violence against women and children were central to the Trenton women’s understanding of the war and its significance. Their proximity to Philadelphia and their personal connections with prominent Philadelphia women also led to their involvement in the famous fundraising effort to benefit the Continental Army in 1780.
These two prior experiences—the horrific violence of war and the 1780 fundraising effort—gave the women a sense of connection to Washington and motivated them to greet him in a truly unique and personal way. They also explain the special sonata from “Virgins fair, and matrons grave/Those thy conqu’ring arms did save,” which apparently brought Washington to tears, and the banner on the women’s triumphal arch: “The Defender of the Mothers will also Protect their Daughters.”
How did considerations of race and class illuminate your understanding of the women who organized the reception?
Every contemporary reference to the women who organized this reception called them “ladies.” By definition, “ladies” were the wives and daughters of important men; they were white and mostly upper-class. On the one hand, that meant that their presence and support for Washington and his presidency, in the eyes of many, enhanced the legitimacy of the new political order established under the recently adopted—and still controversial—U.S. Constitution. On the other hand, without their privileged social status these women would not have been able to plan and execute the reception. The “ladies” of Trenton had access to the funds needed to buy the materials to produce the arch and its decorations, as well as to the information they needed to ensure that their handiwork was both structurally sound and aesthetically pleasing. And many (or likely most of them) had time to devote to the project because their households included enslaved domestics or white servants, who could take care of their children and do their housework.
Why do you think the women of Trenton faded from historical memory, and what does their erasure reveal about the ways the early Republic chose to remember the Revolution?
These are particularly salient questions, given that we are on the cusp of commemorating the 250th anniversary of the Revolution. I think there are at least two reasons, one involving the war and one that is more about the postwar construction of American citizenship. First, in terms of the war (and its revolution), the predominant narrative imagines a largely consensual fight for independence—the people rising up as one against the king and his evil minions—and minimizes internal conflict, in part to distinguish America’s supposedly comparatively respectable revolution from all the others. Even in the era of the early republic, wartime violence against civilians, and perhaps most especially rape, was not really part of the story Americans liked to tell, despite the fact that the best recent research argues persuasively that the American Revolution was, among other things, a brutal civil war. Second, in the post-revolutionary decades, American civic life was increasingly defined as the purview of white men, at least theoretically because of their supposed military readiness. Significantly, in 1776, New Jersey’s first state constitution had enfranchised both unmarried women and Black men who met certain property qualifications; both groups lost their right to vote in 1807, and universal white manhood suffrage soon followed. By the 1840s, when Currier and Ives made their first print depicting the scene at Trenton, most Americans would have agreed with their interpretation, which made the ladies decorative foils for the nation’s hero, rather than politically minded event organizers.
As a senior scholar of women’s and gender history, how has the field evolved over time? What do you think are some of the key trends?
Early work in the field focused mainly on elite women—the sorts of women for whom we have surviving letters and diaries, and who wrote and read prescriptive literature and novels. Obviously, it is easier to write about people for whom there are documents. Historians like documents! In the past few decades, however, scholars have grappled with the silences in the archives, which we now recognize as having been constructed to privilege certain types of people (and therefore certain types of history). Smart and creative new approaches and methodologies have enabled historians to research and write about non-elite women, and non-elite people generally.
Reading documents “against the grain,” using material culture and oral traditions, the expansion and reimagining of fields like environmental history—historians of early America have in many cases led the way in these sorts of innovations, in part because our sources are comparatively scant. That’s especially true once we move away from Great Man history.
Cynthia Kierner is a professor of history at George Mason University, where she teaches courses on early America, women and gender, and disasters in history. Her most recent book is The Tory’s Wife: A Woman and Her Family in Revolutionary America, a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize and winner of the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize from the Southern Association for Women Historians. Her current project is a biography of Joan Whitney Payson, founding owner of the New York Mets. Readers can contact her at ckierner@gmu.edu.
Read Kierner’s article “George Washington and the Ladies of Trenton: The New Jersey Women Who Feted a Hero and Then Disappeared from History“ in EAS’s Summer 2025 issue.