Sharon M. Harris

Mary Edwards Walker: The Soul Ahead of Her Time

Mary Edwards Walker was a gallant woman who stood for womens rights, embodied the true American spirit, and served the Union Army in the Civil War as a surgeon. She later became the first and only woman in United States history to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Daughter of Boston: The Extraordinary Diary of a Nineteenth-Century Woman, Caroline Healey Dall (review)

perhaps in an appendix. His call for membership in what he calls the “American family” would provide an interesting parallel to his campaign for inclusion in Gold’s domestic circle. In addition to Boudinot’s address, Gaul might also have included a discussion of the letters’ resemblance to epistolary novels like Hannah Foster’s The Coquette. The following words from Harriett’s relatives, who regard her engagement as catastrophic, seem drawn from the pages of Foster’s bestselling novel: “The dye is cast, Harriet is gone, we have reason to fear” and “They may yet do it; & if [Harriett] must die for an Indian or have him, I do say she had as well die, as become the cause of so much lasting evil as the marriage will occasion” (81, 121–22). Such comparisons would shore up a literary analysis of these letters, helping us think about how a real-life Anglo-Indian romance related to and revised epistolary and sentimental conventions. As outrageous as the GoldBoudinot marriage was thought to be, it had important literary ancestors. The last section of Gaul’s book, which includes the letters Harriett and Elias wrote to her relatives after their marriage, is a poignant affirmation of Cherokee nationhood. As Boudinot writes in a later letter to Harriet’s sister and brotherin-law, “The last right and in some respects, the most important right of the Cherokees, is to be fought and contended for—their right to the land. It is true we have been abused persecuted and oppressed beyond measure—illegible our rights have been outrageously wrested from us, yet we are on our lands—we have possession” (175). Unlike some studies that claim to acknowledge native sovereignty and yet limit “the nation” in question to the United States, Gaul concludes her introduction with an assertion that these letters render the histories of “two nations” (66). The repetition of the word “nation” in reference to the Cherokees serves as an important reminder of the unique political status of indigenous peoples; despite the removal policies of the nineteenth century and other challenges to native sovereignty, the possession that Boudinot speaks of persists.