Scope and Content Note
The correspondence with index of Elizabeth Fries Lummis Ellet spans the years 1835-1865, with the bulk of the material dating from 1848 to 1850. The collection documents Ellet's research for the publication of her three-volume work, The Women of the American Revolution (1848 and 1850), the first history of women’s participation in the American Revolution. The papers are in English.
The correspondence documents Ellet’s research and writing process as she worked on The Women of the American Revolution. Ellet researched the lives of women by requesting information from their descendants through correspondence, receiving letters from more than 100 individuals. Correspondents included women relatives such as Lucy Knox Thatcher, Susan J. Donaldson, Eliza Susan Quincy, and Delia Tudor (Stewart) Parnell; prominent politicians and writers such as Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, George Washington Parke Custis, and Robert Jefferson Breckinridge. Ellet also corresponded with noted historians of the day such as Henry Onderdonk Jr., Jared Sparks, William Hickling Prescott, and George Washington Greene, the grandson of Catherine Littlefield Greene and Revolutionary war hero Nathaniel Greene. The collection includes letters excerpted in The Women of the American Revolution, as well as unpublished material. Also included is an index to the correspondence, presumably created by Ellet, though some letters listed are not part of this collection.
The 2024 Addition consists of a letter written by Ellet to author and editor Sarah Josepha Buell Hale. Ellet discusses her own translation of a poem by Alphonse de Lamartine, the New York production of her play Teresa Contarini (1835), publication opportunities, and reprinting her poetry in Hale's American Ladies' Magazine, later known as Godey's Lady Book.