When Ann Dumville stood to speak, the meeting paused. The clergy were debating the future of the women’s college, which was insolvent. Lenders were demanding payment, and the Catholic church had offered to buy the property. The meeting was the “conference,” the annual gathering of Methodist preachers in the region, and Mrs. Dumville’s participation was unprecedented. Women were not members of the conference, were not ministers, did not hold leadership positions in Methodist congregations, and seldom attended the conference, even as observers.

It was a large assembly. One hundred and twenty clergy were present at the “West Charge” church in...

The early letters focus on local news and day-to-day activities—they give accounts of shopping, sewing, reading, and travel, and they report marriages, the quality of Sunday sermons, and even the occasional family quarrel. At this relatively early stage of the daughters’ lives, the letters also give considerable attention to schooling. Ann’s letters encourage education, Jemima’s report her pursuit of it, and Hephzibah’s lament her lack of it. It is not clear how far either daughter progressed at the college, but Jemima refers to taking exams. Hephzibah does not appear to have reached that point.¹ In 1852, Jemima received a...

The darker aspect of the letters is their focus on illness and death. In one year, 1854, Hephzibah’s letters discuss the deaths of seven people who are named and several who are unnamed. In 1854 and 1855, there was a cholera outbreak in central Illinois—the number of cases in the area increased from one in 1850 and twelve in 1852 to twenty-four in 1854 and seventy-one in 1855.¹ The transmission of cholera through contaminated food and water had been established in England shortly before,² but public health measures to limit its spread had not yet been implemented in Illinois.³...

During the 1850s the abolition of slavery was the inescapable issue in American politics, and it was, of course, a moral, a religious, and an economic issue as well as a political one. It split the Methodist Church, it was largely responsible for the creation of the Republican Party, and it was the defining issue in the presidential elections of 1856 and 1860. But, as we have seen, the early letters focused on matters close to home. Even the brief mentions of abolition arose in the context of the Pitner case, a controversy within the local Methodist community. As the...

In 1858 Lincoln sought the Senate seat held by Stephen Douglas. Both were local heroes—Lincoln practiced law in Springfield and had previously represented the district in Congress, and Douglas had been the county prosecutor in Jacksonville. Although U.S. Senators were then elected by the state legislatures, Lincoln and Douglas campaigned throughout Illinois to generate public support for their candidacies, and the two met in several locations for a famous series of debates. The debates gave Lincoln national prominence, but a majority of the Illinois legislators chose to return Douglas to the Senate. In a letter to Jemima dated November...

In the early months of the war, Union troops had little success, and Hephzibah’s letters at that time express the anxiety of the public in the North. A letter written late in 1861 comments on two battles, one successful and the other a defeat. The victory was a naval assault on Port Royal, located between Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina, where there were two forts, one on each side of the entry to the harbor. Union ships shelled the forts until the Confederate forces retreated. The defeat took place at Ball’s Bluff, near Leesburg, Virginia. The Union army was...

There are no later letters in the archive.¹ By using information from public records, however, we can extend the story. In the next few years, the lives of Hephzibah and Jemima ran parallel. Both married within a few months of the end of the letters,² when Jemima was thirty-three and Hephzibah was thirty, well past the age at which most nineteenth-century women married.³ Jemima married James Holme, a widower from a town near Carlinville. Her first child was born the following year, after Jemima and Holme had moved to rural Missouri, near St. Joseph, where they eventually established a substantial...