Annis Boudinot (Stockton) "WhigParty-Elite"

Annis Boudinot Stockton was born on 1 July 1736 in Darby, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Elias Boudinot, a merchant and silversmith, and Catherine Williams. Her Boudinot forebears were French Huguenot refugees who had come to the North American colonies in the late seventeenth century. She was the second of ten children; the supplied account says that about half of the children survived to adulthood.

About 1757, Annis Boudinot married Richard Stockton, an attorney of a prominent family. They had several children and lived at Morven, their Princeton, New Jersey, mansion and estate. She became known as the “Duchess of Morven.” The couple entertained prominent visitors there, including George Washington. The supplied notes state that Annis Stockton corresponded with Washington and sent him poems as part of that correspondence.

Stockton was among the first women published as poets in the Thirteen Colonies. Her work addressed political and social subjects and included odes, pastorals, elegies, sonnets, epitaphs, hymns, and epithalamia. According to the supplied notes, 21 of her poems appeared in leading newspapers and magazines of her day, and her writings were read in the colonies as well as in England and France. She was part of a Mid-Atlantic literary circle that included Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, Benjamin Young Prime, Samuel Stanhope Smith, Philip Freneau, and Hugh Henry Brackenridge. Her connection with Fergusson also linked her with Anna Young Smith, Susanna Wright, Milcah Martha Moore, and Hannah Griffitts.

During the American Revolution, Richard Stockton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, escaped the British but was later captured and imprisoned. The supplied notes report that British forces under General Cornwallis plundered Morven, burned Richard Stockton’s library and papers, and drove away valuable livestock. His imprisonment had lasting effects on his health, and he died in 1781, before the official end of the war.

Annis Stockton’s younger brother, Elias Boudinot, studied law with Richard Stockton and later married Hannah Stockton, Richard’s younger sister. He became a New Jersey statesman, served as President of the Continental Congress in 1782–1783, and signed the Treaty of Paris.

The supplied account describes Annis Stockton as a patriot in her own right. Before the British invasion of Princeton, she reportedly rescued and hid important papers of the American Whig Society, a secret society committed to the revolutionary cause. After the war, the society recognized her service by electing her an honorary member; the supplied notes state that she was the only woman so honored.

Much of Stockton’s writing was not widely known to later scholars because manuscript circulation was common among writers of her circle, particularly women. In 1984, Christine Carolyn McMillan Cairnes and George H. Cairnes donated a manuscript copybook containing numerous poems and other writings by Stockton to the New Jersey Historical Society. It became available to researchers in 1985. Before its availability, Stockton was known to have written 40 poems; the copybook reportedly expanded the known body of her work threefold. In 1995, Carla Mulford published a collection of 125 poems described in the supplied notes as Stockton’s known pieces.

Annis Boudinot Stockton died on 6 February 1801. She is featured in the permanent exhibit at Morven Museum & Garden in Princeton, New Jersey.