Hannah Corbin, Widow

Hannah Lee Corbin was undeniably a force to be reckoned with. She attracts interest from scholars and history-lovers alike, whether for her unusual private life, her defection from the established Anglican faith of her family, or her general independence of spirit. Hannah is sometimes celebrated as an 18th century proponent of women’s right to vote, which is a claim requiring more nuance than it is usually given. Hannah posed in private correspondence poignant questions about political representation and the political participation of women. She sought to persuade her famous brother that "no taxation without representation" had more local application than perhaps he and his fellow revolutionaries had considered. Join us this Women’s History Month as we remember Hannah Lee Corbin of Stratford, Peckatone, and Woodberry.      

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Transcript

2.3 Hannah Corbin, Widow

INTRO

This month a reply from a brother to his older sister on the topic of applying a revolutionary principle more widely. 

Hannah Lee Corbin was born in February 1728 at Machodoc plantation, only a year before it was looted and burned to the ground by immigrant felons disgruntled about judgments entered against them by Hannah’s father and Westmoreland County justice, Thomas Lee (January 29, 1729). Among the tragedies of that brisk January night in 1729 was the loss of her father’s library, which included the library of his father Richard, nicknamed the Scholar, one of the most impressive libraries in the Virginia colony. Hannah shared her grandfather’s passion for books, but the Scholar may have disapproved of a literary genre well-represented in Hannah’s library, specifically, by what a Virginia Gazette writer condemned as “literary Opium” … novels. Novels were emerging alternatives to traditional advice literature and often stood traditional advice on its head. Where traditional advice might advise women to rely on the honor and superior intellect of men to guarantee female virtue, novels shifted that responsibility from unreliable men to capable women. Receipts indicate that Hannah was an avid consumer of novels with titles like The Fortunate Country Maid, The History of a Young Lady of Distinction, and True Merit, True Happiness. Headstrong and capable Hannah would have found in such novels a partial mirror of her own experiences, especially experiences of the double standards and inequities arising from the gendered social and legal hierarchies of her day, and she would have found encouragement in pious and resilient heroines who weathered adversity while competently managing their own affairs.   

By 1759 Hannah was a widow. Her late husband, colony big-wig Gawin Corbin, stipulated in his will that should Hannah ever remarry her inheritance of half of Corbin’s estate would be reduced by 1/6th to the standard ‘widow’s third.’  The widow’s third entitled a widow to the use of one-third of the husband’s estate for her lifetime or until she remarried. In consequence of this and until her death, Hannah signed her name: “Hannah Corbin, Widow.” Hannah Corbin, Widow, enjoyed the legal status of a feme sole (woman alone) and could thus negotiate legal contracts in her own name, own property, including enslaved African Americans, and dispose of it in her own name.  Hannah Corbin, Widow, unlike the married Mrs. Corbin, belonged to a small minority of adult women (especially widows) who defied the ‘good wife’ norm, enjoying some of the same privileges free white men enjoyed, and making up a significant economic force in Virginia. After more than a decade of co-managing Peckatone plantation with her late husband, Hannah Corbin, Widow, hung onto a full half share of the late Corbin’s legacy. This in spite of the fact that soon on the heels of Corbin’s death, Hannah openly took a live-in lover named Dr. Richard Lingan Hall, who attended Gawen Corbin in his final days. An unpaid medical bill of 68 pounds Sterling to Dr. Hall was among the debts of the late Corbin. We can only guess at what feelings may have been born around Corbin’s death bed. Ultimately Hannah Corbin, Widow, kept both her rightful half of Corbin’s estate and Dr. Hall, her husband in all but name until his death in 1774. Hall’s last will and testament kept up the pretense, noting that his children Elisha and Martha were “born of Mrs. Corbin.” The near silence about the relationship of Hannah and Dr. Hall in Lee family correspondence suggests that it was initially a point of friction that later resolved into a subject of studied avoidance. The only reference to Hannah’s irregular arrangement occurs in a somewhat overwrought letter from her youngest brother Arthur Lee, who was then studying medicine in Edinburgh, to Richard Henry Lee (8 November 1761) back home at Stratford:

"How & where is our unchaste sister, is she irrecoverably lost? Angels would weep at it! O try my Br. try, I beseech you to recall her … Oh then attempt, pursue, try every gentle winning art to lure her to herself … Sooner in me might every Faculty be changed than I could cease to love her. Even now Compassion steals upon me and melts me into Tears for her Perversion."

Richard Henry undoubtedly knew that “beseeching” Hannah would get him nowhere. As the brother to whom she was closest, Richard Henry knew Hannah to be independent-minded and headstrong. And this wasn’t the only time Hannah set foot on a path other than the one prescribed for her. The Lees were staunch Anglicans, but in 1764 Hannah was cited for failing to attend worship, and sometime after 1772 in the long shadow of the First Great Awakening she converted to the Baptist religion, which emphasized inclusive participation and the intensity of religious feelings over the formal and solemn Anglicanism of her youth. A Baptist marriage would have legitimized her life with Dr. Hall in the way that mattered most to pious Hannah, and would conveniently have had no legal standing, meaning that Hannah Corbin, Widow, would have been a widow still in the eyes of Anglican Virginia. But despite speculation (by some that such a marriage happened) no records confirm that such a marriage took place. 

Her conversion to the Baptist faith with its emphasis on sentiment and feeling fit with her literary preferences. And perhaps the perseverance of Virginia Baptists in the face of tough legal restrictions on the practice of their religion also resonated with her experience as a woman facing challenging cultural and legal constraints. On March 14th 1778 Hannah writes to her sister Alice, who was then staying at Chantilly with their brother Richard Henry Lee: 

“I have wrote to my Brother & I beg you will use your interest with him to do something for the poor desolate widows.” 

Hannah’s letter to Richard Henry has been lost, but his reply survives and is among the most scrutinized letters from the revolutionary generation of Lees.  

“Chantilly, March 17, 1778 

My dear Sister,                                                                                  

Distressed as my mind is, and has been, by a vast variety of attentions, I am illy able by letter to give you the satisfaction I could wish on the several subjects of your letter. Reasonable as you are, and friendly to the freedom and happiness of your Country, I should have no doubt about giving you perfect comfort in a few hours conversation. You complain that Widows are not represented, and that being temporary Possessors of their estates, ought not to be liable to the Tax. The doctrine of representation is a large subject, and it is certain that it ought to be extended far as wisdom and policy can allow. Nor do I see that either of these forbid Widows having property from voting, notwithstanding it has never been the practice either here or in England. Perhaps ’twas thought rather out of character for Women to press into those tumultuous Assemblies of Men where the business of choosing Representative[s] is conducted. And it might also have been considered as not so necessary, seeing, that the representatives themselves as well as their immediate Constituents, must suffer the Tax imposed in exact proportion as does all other property Taxed and that therefore it could not be supposed the Taxes would be laid where the public good didn’t absolutely demand it. This then is the Widow’s security as well as the never married Women who have lands in their own right, for both of whom I have the greatest respect, and would at any time give my consent to establish their right of Voting, altho I am persuaded that it would not give them greater security, nor alter the mode of Taxation you complain of.”

For all that we are lucky to have this letter, we must keep in mind that Hannah isn’t the subject of her own thoughts, which have been processed and restated here by her brother (however able he was). The estates left to Hannah made her a person of significant property and a taxpayer. From her letter to Alice and Richard Henry’s reply, we gather that Hannah wished to apply the Revolutionary principle of “no taxation without representation” to propertied widows. Hannah’s concern for “desolate widows” may also refer to the grim facts of the ongoing war with England. Were her patriot brothers guilty of hypocrisy on this point of principle? 

Richard Henry answers that the principle doesn’t apply. When Parliament levied on the Colonies a tax that no Member of Parliament paid, the tax was untethered from the economic realities of living in the Colonies (there wasn’t sufficient common interest between the taxers and the taxed). The Virginia Assemblymen who levied taxes on Virginians had to pay the taxes they levied, and Richard Henry suggests that for reasons of economic self-interest they levied taxes only when necessary for the public good. His point is just that as a self-interested tax-paying Virginian Hannah is represented by another self-interested tax-paying Virginian. If Hannah had been shaped by the novels she read, she was unlikely to find convincing the claim that her interests were being considered by the men in the Virginia Assembly. Was Hannah looking more for advocacy than representation? How are we to overcome the problems posed by a single person representing so many diverse and different people? Is legitimate representation a function of how similar the representative is to me, or you? The doctrine of representation is a large subject, and … ought to be extended far as wisdom and policy can allow. Richard Henry offers privately his support for the right of propertied women to vote, widows and the unmarried, and in so doing seems to extend the policy beyond his sister’s immediate concern: widows. This is an open-minded opinion for the 1770s, however flawed by silences on the question of women without property, as well as enslaved, indentured, and indigenous women. 

If political representation is the activity of making citizens’ voices and views present in public policy making processes, Hannah wanted propertied widows at least to have their say in choosing the political actors responsible for taking their voices and views into account. Later in the letter Richard Henry claims that a Virginia law passed in October 1777 gave Freeholders and Heads of Households (including women) the right to vote for county tax commissioners [William Walter Henning, Statutes at Large, vol 9, (Richmond: J & G Cochran, 1821) p. 351, III]. There is no extant evidence to suggest that Hannah or any other woman in Virginia voted for county tax commissioners before the position was changed from elected to appointed in 1781.      

As considerable as voting rights were in revolutionary and early national America by 18th century standards, voting largely remained the prerogative of propertied white men; and the new Constitution proved to be a disappointment on the subject of broadening the electorate and voter requirements. As a result, suffrage or political franchise became a focal point for the women’s rights movement and the civil rights movement, and it remains a contested ground today, but that is a story for another day. 

To read this month’s letter in full log onto the Lee Family Digital Archive at leefamilyarchive dot org and search Hannah Lee Corbin.    

OUTRO

*For more on Hannah as a reader of novels, see Catherin Kerrison, “The Novel as Teacher: Learning to Be Female in the Early American South,” The Journal of Southern History 69, no. 3 (2003): 513–48. https://doi.org/10.2307/30040009.

*For more on Hannah generally, see McCarty and Pettit, Hannah! The Story of a Unique Woman in Colonial Times (Baltimore: Otter Bay Books, 2019). 

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Music is William Ross Chernoff's "In Shadows"
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© Dr. Gordon Blaine Steffey, 2024