Betsy Ambler - and an interview with Sarah Botstein from the PBS documentary The American Revolution

Summary

The History Chicks: “Betsy Ambler — and an Interview with Sarah Botstein from the PBS documentary The American Revolution”

October 24, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode of The History Chicks centers around the remarkable but largely overlooked life of Elizabeth "Betsy" Ambler—later Betsy Brent Carrington—a Virginian woman whose experiences, letters, and resilience provide a vivid window into the domestic realities of the American Revolution. The hosts detail her upbringing in a privileged, slave-owning family, her survival through war and personal tragedy, and her lasting impact as a founder of one of America’s earliest women-led social service organizations. The latter portion features an in-depth interview with Sarah Botstein, co-director of the anticipated Ken Burns PBS documentary, The American Revolution, where Ambler’s story, read by Maya Hawke, plays a key narrative role.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

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Betsy Ambler's Family Background and Society

• The Virginia Aristocracy: Betsy was born in 1765 into the wealthy Ambler and Burwell families of Yorktown, VA, both deeply rooted in colonial power politics, landholding, and slave ownership.
  • “...everyone we're going to talk about, from George Washington to Thomas Jefferson, etcetera, belonged to, if not the first families of Virginia, definitely to the Virginia aristocracy.” (06:49)
• Enslaved Labor and Wealth: Both sides of Betsy’s family held hundreds of enslaved people, and their fortunes were tied to colonial cash crops and British connections.
  • “Grandpapa bought the other half of the island... Ultimately, he owned 2,000 acres and over a hundred enslaved people.” (04:45)
• Education and Gender Norms: Betsy and her sisters’ education, overseen by their father, was notable for its breadth and encouragement, unusual for girls of their class at that time.
  • “Our education went on without rule or form... such attentions as we experienced were without parallel.” (19:16, 20:40)

The Reality of Revolutionary War for Women

• Constant Upheaval: As war closed in on Yorktown, the Ambler family became refugees, moving multiple times for safety and often separating for practicality.
  • “Basically, for the next four years, the family is going to be kind of refugees from Yorktown at this point.” (30:24)
• Women’s Roles in Crisis: The absence of men forced elite women like Betsy into new roles—managing households, making difficult decisions, and assuming traditionally male responsibilities.
  • “Necessity taught us to use exertions which girls of the present day know nothing of.” (39:27)
  • “Instead of morning lessons, we were knitting stockings. Instead of embroidering, we made homespun garments...” (40:02)
• Girlhood in Wartime: Correspondence and later writings show Betsy’s journey from pampered child to capable, self-aware woman, gutted by trauma but strengthened by necessity.
  • “I'm not afraid, not truly, but I am changed. The war has made women of us before our time. And I wonder what girlhood will I remember when this is done?” (62:11, 62:47)

Everyday Life and Social Dynamics

• Letters to Mildred: The lively and sometimes gossipy letters between Betsy and her best friend Mildred Smith have survived, providing historians with invaluable front-row seats to the civilian experience of the war.
  • “As it turns out, the fact that Elizabeth and Mildred were separated was quite a gift to posterity because we've learned quite a bit about the civilian experience of this part of the war from letters they wrote to each other.” (43:37)
• Scandal and Empathy: A powerful thread is the story of Rachel Warrington, a family acquaintance whose pregnancy by a French officer during the war became both town scandal and inspiration for Betsy’s later, unfinished novel, focusing on women’s vulnerability and societal double standards.
  • “Her experience was fundamental to Betsy's development.” (45:47)
  • “The main theme seemed to be the necessity for women to be educated and prepared to see the danger coming when it was coming toward them...” (83:10)

Loss, Resilience, and Community Building

• Marriage, Widowhood, and Remarriage: Betsy’s life was marked by dramatic reversals—her true love died just months after marriage; she remarried a family friend and found herself widowed again years later.
  • “...widowed, wretched, forlorn...now, oh, my friend William died three months into their marriage.” (72:03)
• Women’s Social Agency: Channeling her experiences and empathy, Betsy became an early advocate for social welfare, co-founding the Female Humane Association of Richmond—one of the first women-run organizations for girls’ welfare.
  • “This organization was historic in that all of the officers...were women. And women who didn't have legal rights in other areas now had them as part of this organization.” (85:41)

Legacy and Lasting Impact

• Lasting Social Services: The Female Humane Association evolved over the years, eventually known as the Memorial Foundation for Children, still functioning today to support vulnerable youth in Richmond.
  • “...the institution she helped to start endures to this day.” (96:52)
• Preserving Women's History: Betsy’s extensive family histories, records, and letters offer modern historians a rare civilian perspective on the Revolution—and highlight the essential but under-acknowledged contributions of women.
  • “...it's because of this collection...that we know anything about Betsy at all or about the community that she lived in, outside of the roles of the men who were soldiers and officers and running and building the country.” (90:01)

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

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On the contradictions of the Revolution

“There's a genuine irony to this fight for freedom in a place where so many were held enslaved.” — Host B (06:49)

How war matured children, especially girls

“Girls at the age of 12 or 13 require a mother's care. A girl of 13 left without an advisor and fancying herself a woman stands on the precipice that trembles beneath her.” — (32:28)

Betsy recalls rapid loss

“Widowed, wretched, forlorn, a month since I was the happiest of wives. And now, oh, my friend William died three months into their marriage on their very first visit to his family.” — Betsy’s letter, read by Host A (72:03)

On surviving, rebuilding, and moving forward

“Certainly it is that another Revolutionary war can never happen to affect and ruin a family so completely as ours have been. The only possible good from the entire changing in our circumstances was that we were made acquainted with the manner and situation of our country, which we otherwise should not have known.” — Betsy’s letter, read by Host B (65:56)

Reflecting on liberty after war

“It is over. Our individual sufferings are nothing. Now we can reflect that the great end is accomplished, peace again is restored, and we can look forward to happy days. What sacrifice would not an American and a Virginian at the earliest age have made for so desirable an end?” — Betsy Ambler (66:51)

On married women’s (lack of) legal rights

“Once a woman was married, the identity legally of the married couple was in fact the husband. The wife was a legal nonentity...as a group, these women had rights that individually they would never have been granted.” — Host B (86:16)

Empathy for women's experience in history

“The book was a window to her real feelings about the necessity of female education and the need to protect the vulnerable women in society.” — Host B on Betsy's novel (84:26)

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Important Timestamps

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• [02:10 – 03:15]: Introduction to colonial context and Betsy’s birth
• [17:51 – 19:24]: Betsy’s (progressive) education and family life
• [23:32 – 28:41]: The family’s response to war’s arrival, Jack's loyalties, and decision to leave Yorktown
• [30:24 – 33:46]: Betsy becomes a refugee; the perils and social risks for young girls
• [39:27 – 41:14]: “Necessity taught us to use exertions which girls of the present day know nothing of...”
• [51:15 – 54:13]: Exile from Richmond before Benedict Arnold’s raid; Betsy’s mature reflections on trauma and war
• [62:11 – 64:52]: “When or where shall we find rest?...I am changed. The war has made women of us before our time.”
• [85:41 – 87:25]: Founding of the Female Humane Association—historic shift in women’s legal rights and social work
• [101:02 –121:02]: Interview with Sarah Botstein about the PBS Ken Burns documentary

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Interview with Sarah Botstein (PBS Documentary Co-director)

Themes:

• The American Revolution was messy, surprising, and “more like a civil war” than popularly remembered. Stories of everyday people, especially women and children, are integral to understanding the era.
  • “I think anytime you do a story of a war, you should make a secondary film about the women, but instead, we just sew the women into the narrative where they're often left out.” (106:48, Botstein)
• The documentary features Maya Hawke as the voice of Betsy Ambler, with Ethan Hawke as her father.
• The film weaves “big names” and “the ones you’ve never heard of” throughout, breaking away from a single heroic narrative.
• Lessons for today: Empathy, critical thinking, and recognizing progress as ongoing (“We are still getting our sea legs...”)

Memorable Quotes:

"[The Revolution] was a global war. We would not have won without the help of the French and a great revolution over how a country could govern." — Botstein (104:32)

“Empathy is a good tool.” — Botstein, on understanding Loyalist perspectives (107:11)

“America is a great experiment. We are still getting our sea legs. Our country changes all the time in small and big ways.” — Botstein (120:21)

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Tone and Style

Much like all History Chicks episodes, the content is fresh, witty, digressive, and accessible, marked by a balance of humor (plenty of asides—e.g., [15:03] “Jack and Rebecca, just like on the TV show This Is Us!”), pop culture references (frequent comparisons to Pride & Prejudice and Bridgerton), and well-sourced historical detail, with a strong emphasis on female agency and critique of traditional narratives. The interview segment maintains a collegial, conversational tone—serious about history but always personal and inviting.

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Final Thoughts

This episode powerfully argues for rescuing women like Betsy Ambler from archival obscurity, showing that even as war raged and history was written by the victors, women's lived experience, emotional insight, and organizational leadership left marks just as lasting as any battlefield victory. The episode closes with a call for deeper scholarly work on Betsy (“great opportunity out there... for someone to do a deep dive, a biographer... a lot of questions we couldn’t find answers to”) and the warm hope that her story—now animated for a national audience by Ken Burns’s film—will find its rightful place at the center of America’s Revolutionary story.

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For detailed show notes and resources, visit thehistorychicks.com. The Ken Burns PBS documentary "The American Revolution" featuring Betsy Ambler premieres November 16, 2025.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the History Tricks, where any resemblance to a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental.

[B]

Doesn't it seem like we just got back from a major trip? Well, guess what? We have an announcement opening today.

[A]

So when you hear this will be our Chicago field trip June 3rd through the 7th of 2026. This is one of those long weekends that we have, but we pack as much Chicago history and activities in as possible. We're going to visit some old friends like Jane Addams and Frances Glessner Lee.

[B]

We are going to see art and architecture. We're going to ride on a boat.

[A]

I don't want to give everything away, but even the hotel we're staying at is very important to women's history, not.

[B]

Only in one way, but also culinarily, industrially, artistically.

[C]

Right?

[B]

There's a lot of ties to that hotel.

[A]

Lest us not forget the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. There will be an accent on that during this trip as well.

[B]

So go to likeminds travel.com and I would say don't hesitate and go to the History Chicks field trip to Chicago and put your name on the list.

[A]

And we aren't kidding. Go there if you want to go, sign yourself up because London sold out in what, 36, 37 hours, two days?

[B]

Again, that's likeminds travel.com June 3rd to 7th, 2026. Hope to see you there. And here's your 30 second summary. Life during the Revolutionary War was more than military strategy. There were plenty of battles to be fought at home. Betsy Ambler was a young teenager during the turbulent years of the Revolutionary War. And through her records and letters, we have a more complete story of American life during the birth of our nation. The End let's talk about Betsy Ambler.

[A]

But first, let's drop her into history. In 1765, British Parliament enacted their first direct tax on American colonists. Called the Stamp act, it was a tax of paper goods, but also legal documents, newspapers, pamphlets and playing cards. To add just a little more sting to the tax, the money collected was used for British troops to police the colonies. In France, Louis xv, or as we call him, Grandpa Louis, ruled France. Our former subject, Maria Theresa co ruled Austria with her son Joseph. And Queen Charlotte of Great Britain had only been married to King George III for four years, but had already given birth to her first three sons. Robert Fulton, future inventor of the first commercial steamboat, and Eli Whitney, future inventor of the cotton gin, were both born. And in 1765, a little girl who would grow up to help others and write a Lot of letters began her life.

[B]

Elizabeth Jacqueline Ambler was born in Yorktown, Virginia on March 11, 1765, the oldest surviving daughter of the four living children of Rebecca Burwell Ambler and Jacqueline Ambler, who people called Jack. Four additional siblings died young, and I am sorry to say this 50% mortality rate was not the exception, but a relatively standard figure for this time and place.

[A]

Papa Jack was the youngest surviving child of a very prosperous merchant named Richard Ambler. Grandfather Ambler had come from his homeland of England as a young man, most likely with a very minimal education. But an uncle here brought him into his, what would be the family business, a tobacco merchant. About four years later, that uncle died and Grandpa Ambler took over the whole company.

[B]

And once he had some ducats in his coffers, he married the wealthy daughter of a major landowner and I quote, who owned half of Jamestown Island.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Thus significant property flowed to him upon his father in law's death. So he, yes, was a self made man up until he was like doubled down on, you know, crowned, one might say, with additional wealth.

[A]

Right. And he. We're talking about tobacco farmers and of course we are also talking about enslaved people here. I just want to throw that out there.

[B]

That's going on over the course of the next decades. Grandpapa bought the other half of the island like you do. Ultimately, he owned 2,000 acres and over a hundred enslaved people.

[A]

Grandpa sent Jack's older two brothers back to England to be educated. But Jack, he was well educated in the colonies. He went to the College of William and Mary for high school. Go Griffins.

[B]

But the college is the College of William and Mary, not a college back then.

[A]

It was one of those schools that educated like high school and the beginning college. Yeah. So still defining itself. Yeah. Back in 1756, when we're talking about, there really wasn't a whole lot of options here. There was the College of William and Mary. There's the collegiate school that would become Yale, the College of New Jersey, which would become Princeton, King's College, which would become Columbia, and the one that Papa Jack chose, the College of Philadelphia, which, which would ultimately become the University of Pennsylvania.

[B]

Grandpapa held powerful positions in the county. He was justice of the Peace. He was also enumerator of titheables, which in part, he was the one that kept the lists of I don't know how to. I mean, enslaved people as inventory. He was the collector of the York River Customs District on behalf of the king for 35 years. He was very powerful man. After apprenticing with his father and brother Edward, for two years, Papa became a partner in the family business. He also had a house in Yorktown, and he also owned a plantation just outside in the next county over. Tobacco was the cash crop. And we knew we were going to get to the issue of enslaved people. Everyone we're going to talk about, from George Washington to Thomas Jefferson, etcetera, Belonged to, if not the first families of Virginia, definitely to the Virginia aristocracy. And with those positions often came hundreds of enslaved people. We talked about that during our Martha Washington episode. And of course, we're going to be talking about the American Revolution. And there's a genuine irony to this fight for freedom in a place where so many were held enslaved. I will tell you, the Royal African Company ships that traded in enslaved people landed in Yorktown on their routes. So it was a fact of life in Virginia and in this social class. And we often forget there were enslaved people all throughout the colonies during this time period.

[A]

Jack did what Lady Agatha Danbury of Bridgerton would call a most excellent match when it was time for him to get married. The young lady we're talking about, her name was Rebecca Lewis Burwell.

[B]

Mama was the youngest daughter of counselor and briefly acting governor Lewis Burwell. This family was descended from a man called King Carter, Virginia's largest landowner of the day, who owned 300,000 acres.

[A]

Whoa.

[B]

I think it came on through the maternal side, actually. So their firepower is extensive. The scale of Burwell fortune is almost unfathomable. Grandpapa Burwell was educated in England, in Cambridge, and was considered one of the most eminent men of his day. He was a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, which I think is the lower house, like not the Senate, but the House of Representatives. Ish. Oh, dear.

[A]

Just that, huh?

[C]

Oh, dear.

[A]

Just that.

[B]

Oh, no. President of the King's council and acting governor of Virginia. There's a lot of acting governors in this family. Following the pattern of Papa's family. This grandpa also married an heiress, this time, one Mary Willis, and inherited the 7,000 acre white marsh plantation where they lived with their children and hundreds of enslaved people. The King's council literally met in their house. So we are definitely dealing with the cultural elite of the American colonies at this point. I would also like to point out that the land that this family of Burwell's plantation sat on is now the site of something called the Fairfield Foundation's archaeological exploration. And they are working on telling the stories of the enslaved people who lived there. People are actively working on that both historians and archeologists and anthropologists. So we'll give you a link in the show notes, but I don't know, that was probably a weird place to put that and maybe I'll put it at the end.

[C]

No, I think.

[A]

I think it's good. Why not take a little side tour? Getting back to the story, however. They may have had all this money and all this land, but that doesn't stop life from happening. Two days after Rebecca was born, her mother died. She was just 28. Ten years after that, her father died. That made Rebecca very wealthy, but also orphaned. She was sent to live with her maternal aunt and uncle in Yorktown.

[B]

Uncle William, by the way, was later, you guessed it, an acting governor of Virginia. Like it seems like. Wait, have you gotten your card punched?

[A]

That's right.

[B]

I know. Isn't it your turn?

[A]

I did it last year. Yeah.

[B]

One of the cousins she grew up with would later sign the Declaration of Independence. So again, we're dealing with the highest echelon of society now. Mama, however, is perhaps the most famous in her youth for being the object of teenage Thomas Jefferson's romantic obsession. They ran in the same circles and.

[A]

At the time, Thomas Jefferson was just a student at William and Mary. And one night they were both at a local tavern and Tom saw this beautiful young woman dancing the quadrille and was smitten. Really smitten. Hardly smitten, Hardly. No, hard, hard, heartily, heartily smitten.

[B]

This is her mistake. She once gave him a silhouette portrait of herself. To her, I think from here it was like, oh, here, somebody did this. You can have it if you want.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

To him it was like hit by the thunderbolt from above. He wore that tucked into his watch case as a love token until one day it was ruined when it got wet and his life was over. He was not confident enough in her feelings for him to even ask for a replacement portrait or even admit his he'd been carrying it around. Isn't that funny?

[A]

We're thinking of Thomas Jefferson as this excellent student, excellent writer, but a really bungling man who was trying to court her.

[B]

Well, after obsessing about her offstage, I guess, to friends in letters for a number of years.

[A]

Yeah, I know.

[B]

He had finally worked himself into the courage to ask her to marry him. Now this is a one sided obsession. So he's been thinking about her every day. She has not been thinking about him at all. Do you know what I'm saying? So this did not go well as, as you can guess. I Would like to quote Thomas Jefferson here. I was prepared to say a great deal. I had dressed up in my own mind such thoughts as occurred to me, and as moving language as I know how I expected to have performed in a tolerably creditable manner. But.

[C]

But.

[B]

Good God. When I had an opportunity of venting them, a few broken sentences uttered in great disorder, interrupted with pauses of uncommon length, were the two visible marks of my strange confusion. So Rebecca left that conversation. Like, what even was that?

[C]

Huh?

[A]

I know.

[B]

Number one, that guy is weird. Number two. Huh? What just happened to me?

[A]

I know.

[B]

I just. She.

[A]

Now, was she going by the name Belinda or did he just call her that?

[B]

No, Belinda was a reference to, I want to say, an epic poem. It was a character in some popular literature of the day.

[A]

No, I know in his writing he refers to Belinda, and that's this woman that's.

[B]

I think if you were to say, like, to understand that a little better, you would say my Juliet.

[A]

Got it.

[B]

You know, she's. She's my Juliet.

[A]

He comes up with these literary references, but then when he's, like, faced with her to talk, it's like.

[B]

Well, and then, you know, he should have just left it there. But then he regrouped and he. He practiced in front of the mirror, and he came back for another go. This time he just affirmed to himself he was going to be more clear, he was going to be more professional about it. And he overcorrected. And his second attempt ended up being lawyerly and too full of big words and equally awkward. He went out the other side and unfortunately, more public. Also, she refused his offer of marriage and instead got engaged to Jack Ambler not long afterward. Because, you know why? He is a young man in her aristocratic circles who seem to have his crap together behaviorally, you know?

[A]

And according to this legend, when Thomas Jefferson learned about Jack and Rebecca's engagement, he had the first of a lifelong series of migraines.

[B]

Yeah, I know. Everyone says that's where they started. He did famously suffer from migraines, and everyone pointed to this as the origin story. Right. It was probably just the first time it happened to him in public. Or maybe it really was the first thing that hit him this hard. Yeah, I don't really know. It shook him loose.

[A]

Like, whatever the migraine thing was in his brain. Maybe. Maybe.

[B]

And I'm very sorry to say that mama never had much respect for him Afterward, later, her daughter will talk about Thomas Jefferson in a disrespectful way that makes me think that he was Common fodder for mockery in the house. Anyway, that happened. Mama and Papa were engaged also. Papa, having reached the age of majority, was now in full legal control of his own fortune. There was nothing holding them back.

[A]

This is so out of left field. But it kept going through my head. Now, this couple's name is Jack and Rebecca. Just like on the TV show this Is Us.

[B]

Oh, have you ever seen that show? Oh. Oh.

[A]

Every episode made me cry.

[B]

Well, I don't want to. You know, Every episode of Parenthood made me cry. I'm just like, I think I'm good. I don't need that.

[A]

A lot of it was sweet crying. Oh, that's so sweet. Yeah. But anyway, that just. I kept writing Jack and Rebecca. Oh, Jack and Rebecca. When they married in 1764, he was 22, she was 18. But within a few years, his father died, and then eventually his brothers died. So that entire fortune went to him and a couple young nephews, sons of one of his brothers that he then brought under his wing. He was it. He was the head of the family of the Ambler business holdings. He was the guy.

[B]

Jack, by tradition, also inherited the position of collector of the customs for the Yorktown area. That's a position that had gone from his father to his brother Edward, and then down to him. A lot of these positions. This seems very Continental, doesn't it, that government positions are inheritable?

[A]

Yeah, I mean, this is a British position. These are British citizens right now, correct?

[B]

Correct.

[A]

The collector of customs, it was kind of like a way station, except for ships as they came into Yorktown harbor. He would collect fees. He would collect taxes on any imports or exports, like tobacco. So he worked for the Crown and he was rewarded well for it. I would think this would be a great reason to have this job. He was excluded from jury duty, military service, and paying local taxes.

[B]

He also simultaneously was a justice of the peace for York county and served as the county sheriff. He was a man who had a big hat closet. In other news, Mama began her work right away, having three children in as many years, all daughters. Our Elizabeth and then Mary, called Polly and Martha to finish out the family. Just in the interest of keeping things moving, I'm not going to put them in their. In their year of origin. Starting in 1769, we have Rebecca, number one, who unfortunately was only 10 days old when she died. Rebecca, two, a couple of years later, who died at one year old. And then Nancy, a baby named John, the only son, and Lucy, who was born in 1776.

[A]

Wherever have I Heard that date before. Our Betsy grew up very wealthy. Her family was extremely religious. They faithfully attended a Episcopalian church. They even housed the church's rector. He lived with them.

[B]

Betsy's father educated her and her sisters at home. There was really genuinely no place to send a girl of their social class to school, except perhaps in England. And also in England or thereabouts, they might have had a governess, or perhaps their mother might have taken charge of their education. Betsy was not really very explicit with why their mother did not in fact, take charge. She later succumbed to what we might now refer to as either anxiety or depression. I have also read bipolar disorder. Perhaps the signs were here earlier, or perhaps Papa just thought he would do a better job, maybe that. That he wanted to take charge. Betsy wrote, quote, he held an office that afforded little leisure for such employment. But every hour from his business was devoted to us, and he spent a.

[A]

Lot of time teaching them. He taught them grammar and spelling and arithmetic. But his ways of teaching sounded very Montessori almost. She said, the first figures I well remember were encircled with flowers, which had a happy in drawing in our attention. So it wasn't that he just wrote the numbers down. He, like, made it pretty, like a cute picture.

[B]

He would also buy books meant to attract the attention of a young child and then just casually leave them around and not refer to them. Oh, look at.

[A]

What's this? I'll just pick it up. She summed it all up as this. Quote, Our education went on without rule or form.

[B]

Also, he allowed his daughters to read books on a wide variety of topics, which is a sentence that we often say on this show is the precursor for greatness and many of the women that we cover. She describes her recollection of education in a letter that she wrote as an adult to her sister Nancy, who was too little to remember these days. A lot of the letters between the sisters were the elder sister telling Nancy, who couldn't remember, remember this, about the life that the family had led before the war and incidentally, enlightening historians about how things were. Thus did our dear father devote himself to us and pursue every means in his power to give us instruction. In a time when girls in our country were simply taught to read and write at £25 and a load of wood per year. Such attentions as we experienced were without parallel. So I looked that up, that amount. £25 and a load of wood. It's actually a cliche kind of £25 and 25 loads of wood is the real standard payment that's what it started out as. Like a real thing. But now in this time, it's kind of like saying paid me with peanuts. Like it doesn't mean anything. It means a piddling amount. It comes from a diary that was published in Stuart, England, so slang used to stick around a lot longer.

[A]

I just put it in parentheses with question marks after it.

[B]

So you took it the step further. Oh, okay. So what she's saying is Papa didn't thoughtlessly send us to an indifferent dame school. That's basically what she's saying. She ended that by saying such attentions as we experienced were without parallel. The Audible original Pride and Prejudice is an intimate performance that will have you falling in love with the Jane Austen classic all over again.

[A]

Pride and Prejudice stars a full cast including Marisa Abella as Elizabeth Bennett, Harris Dickinson as Mr. Darcy, plus Marianne, John Baptiste, Will Poulter, Bill Nighy, and Glenn Close as Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

[B]

Marisa Abella brings you inside the stubborn and complicated mind of Elizabeth Bennett as she navigates family expectations, societal pressures, and her own misconceptions. When she meets the enigmatic Mr. Darcy, what we hear is a lot of internal monologue.

[A]

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[B]

Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy are the OG enemies to lovers. Pride and Prejudice is globally recognized as one of the greatest romance novels ever written.

[A]

Listen to the new Pride and [e-mail] janeaustin foreign.

[B]

Out in the wider world, tensions between the British and the colonists, who of course at this time were British subjects, were increasing. The news that was coming out of the north of the country were alarming. The things that were happening in Boston especially caused great consternation. And when in 1775, the events at Lexington and Concord began the open warfare that we now call the Revolutionary War, the population of the colonies had a lot of decisions to make. Think about that. What side were they on? How loyal were they going to be to the crown? How far would they go to break free? What price would they have to pay for such a liberty? Who was on the same side as you? Not easy to tell.

[A]

It wasn't like they had enough time to try and decide. That stamp act we talked about in our dropped in history, that was 11 years before this. And since then King George had been doing other acts that put taxes on things like glass and paint and tea. We've all heard of that one. It just got to the point where things were just getting tighter and tighter on the colonists. And they had all reached the. It's time to pick a side. The pooh is hitting the fan. It's time. What are we gonna do?

[B]

Right. And loyalties were, however, indifferently known. Some people were better at concealing their allegiances than others.

[A]

Right. You weren't necessarily telling who you were by taking down your British flag in front of your house, for instance. Yeah.

[B]

So three things happened. Speaking of an acute situation in 1776 in quick succession. First, we're going to give you the one out in the wider world, the Declaration of Independence. Powerful men in Philadelphia had laid down the gauntlet for King George. And part of the Declaration of Independence, the part that we don't know how to sing because it was not in Schoolhouse Rock, was the listing of grievances. And we're not going to list them all for you right now. But some should sound very familiar.

[A]

He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodations of large districts of people unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

[B]

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states for that purpose, obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners and refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations. Hither.

[A]

He has made judges dependent on his will alone for the tenure of their offices and the amount and payment of their salaries.

[B]

He has erected a multitude of new offices and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and. And eat out their substance.

[A]

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us, for cutting off our trade.

[B]

With all parts of the world, for.

[A]

Taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments.

[B]

He has abdicated government here by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us. A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. Really. The lines had been drawn in the sand. There was no more equivocating. Either you were for this behavior by the king or you were not really.

[A]

And Papa Jack had another big problem because one of his jobs was working for the Crown, collecting taxes. He had a really tough decision to make at this point, and he gave up his post.

[B]

So the first major event of 1776 affected the country as a whole, and in fact would affect the entire world. The next two major events of 1776, the other two were much closer to home. Eight year old Martha died suddenly of illness, and the last sister, Lucy, was born. Betsy writes that her mother was increasingly unable to. To cope with what I mean, we'd call it stress, living in a state of underground panic at all times. And Betsy says she had to grow up rather quickly, even at the age of only 10 or 11. Now here's Papa looking around at his town. To anyone that could think strategically, the deepwater harbor in Yorktown would be a prize for either side in a war, which is doubly not good for anyone living there. And. And Papa had a powerful position of authority within the town. His family was sort of known supporters of the patriot cause. They had expressed their disappointment in the way things were being handled in a town that also held prominent loyalist families. All of these things made Papa believe that the best course of action was to remove his family from Yorktown. Because one way or another, psychologically, politically, socially, or in fact in war, Yorktown was going to be a battleground at some point. And you know what? People don't know anything. You don't know what's going to happen. You don't know how bad it's going to get or where it's going to get bad. The Chesapeake Bay and all the rivers that ran into it, including the York river, were under constant threat from British ships. Raids on nearby plantations and towns were becoming increasingly common. It was like a terrifying sense of the sword of Damocles. You know what that is like the big sword that's held up over the guy's head with one hair, you know, to hold it up or the other shoe. When is it gonna drop?

[A]

Yeah, you know what? It's also, Papa Jack is about the same age as all the people we consider the founding fathers. He's only about 33 years old at this point. Maybe mama is about 30. Yeah. So imagine millennials going through this.

[B]

I think millennials are all like 42 by now.

[A]

I think. No, my daughter is almost 30 and she says she's at the tail end. She's like a cusp of millennial. Okay, I know. I don't. What do I know? What do I know from my lofty position on the cusp of Gen X?

[B]

I am firmly Gen X. Like, I'm not cusp. I'm totally cusp. Yeah, I'm just like Winona Ryder.

[A]

But I never related to anything on the baby boomer stuff.

[C]

Never.

[A]

My husband does, and he's younger than me, so I don't understand.

[B]

So Boomer is a state of mind.

[A]

That's right.

[B]

So Betsy wrote about this period, speaking of cusps, where her father was deciding what to do. She wrote, yorktown is quiet now, though not with peace. Father says we must leave by week's end. The British ships are too near and the town no longer safe for girls with minds and mouths like ours. How interesting to put it that way.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

In fact, she was chastised because she packed her books first and her mother's like, shoes and socks, shoes and socks. Like, don't put the iPad in first. Please get your bathing suit and your shorts, you know? Yeah, the way children pack. But she said she could not bear to leave behind the words that have kept her company through all the uncertain days.

[A]

Basically, for the next four years, the family is going to be kind of refugees from Yorktown at this point. Betsy and her sister Polly went to live with relatives in Winchester, Virginia. Her mother and her sisters went elsewhere. But she was about 11 years old right now. And she starts writing letters to her friend Mildred Smith back in Yorktown.

[B]

So Winchester is in the wilderness of the Shenandoah Valley. It's pretty far from Yorktown. I think distance was the key. It's almost considered the frontier. Hilariously, Betsy recalls that even though she was a very young person at the time, there was a certain element there of un unattended and bored soldiery. Soldiery, shall they say? Some troops who'd been garrisoned there that didn't have a lot to do perhaps hadn't been considered important enough to rely on for more serious things. And in that society, she was petted and fetid and learned to flirt and et cetera, to an improper degree, to the point at which an alarmed note to her papa brought him to fetch her and Paulie back from there. This has a very strong ring of Lydia Bennet from Pride and Prejudice, absolutely being allowed too much freedom to associate with officers. And then she got out and about and almost in, in Elizabeth's case, spoiled her reputation. Just in time. Papa came. She later blushed and was very embarrassed at the memory of all this. Although there.

[C]

You know what?

[B]

There's something to be said about that first realization that you are attractive to other people. Although I would have hoped that they would be age appropriate. Like at the skate rink. No, no. Or wherever you go these days. Where does one go? There's no more skating rinks. You know, you'd go to the skate rink and get your nachos. And the other fifth grader was like, ooh, you're so cute. That's appropriate.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

At 11 or 12. But not bored. Soldiery.

[A]

No. She was saying in one of her letters, girls at the age of 12 or 13 require a mother's career. A girl of 13 left without an advisor and fancying herself a woman stands on the precipice that trembles beneath her. So that means that she's ready to flirt.

[B]

Dangerous. Dangerous. I hope it was a lesson learned. She.

[A]

She said about her father coming to get her. She said he saw that we were considered of an age to attract too much attention.

[B]

Yikes. That's why I moved you out of Yorktown.

[A]

Right, Right.

[B]

Well, he moved them part way back to another, more reliable relative's house. Actually, one of his widowed sisters in law, like, surely I can count on her. But he had to go. He had to go back to the capital of Williamsburg. He had duties and concerns. Among other things, Papa served on Virginia's board of trade, which oversaw domestic manufacture and allocation of military supplies and necessities. He wasn't going back just because he was a workaholic. He was going back to help America become America, you know?

[A]

Yes.

[B]

In 1778, the year that Betsy was 13, the family as a whole, except for Papa, moved back to a small house in Yorktown. The localized activity around Jamestown and Yorktown had largely died away in. And Yorktown actually seemed safer than to be somewhere in the country with only your own resources to rely upon. I. It is a calculation that everyone is having to make, really, every hour of every day. I. You know, just an underground drumbeat of stress and pressure, like, where is my family going to be safe? Where am I going to be safe? What can I do? And I actually am not certain why they didn't move back to their other house. Had it been damaged to be incognito. Have there been financial reverses? I mean, yeah, I don't know.

[A]

There were financial reverses, and they happened fairly quickly. As Papa came to get the two sisters and bring them back to Yorktown, even Betsy could see that their change of status had changed, that they had gone up there in a coach and they came back in a wagon. She said that she was rather ashamed of our cavalry. You know, this the way she came back to town, it wasn't the way she left. So I think that has to do with it. And I think their house was closer to the shore, so in town, a little bit farther away from the harbor.

[B]

It could have been their Neighbor that made this such an attractive proposition. That's really the only thing Elizabeth said later that helped her keep her reason that made her feel more secure was knowing that next door was a man named Captain Thomas Marshall. A very strong presence next door, since Papa was not there and her mother could not be relied upon to be the grown up, you know, thank goodness they had that strong neighbor. Out in the wider world, though this is 1779, still American General Benedict Arnold. Have you heard of him? Had flipped and purposely weakened the defenses at West Point for a significant amount of cash from the British. Yes, George Washington had trusted him. This was a shocking betrayal. Thus his name becoming synonymous with being a snake and a betrayer. I. It makes me have. This is a side note, just between. I don't know. It's between you and me, but I don't mind saying it out loud. It irritates me that I read over and over that his behavior was blamed on his wife, Peggy Shippen, who was from a Tory family. And while I'm sure she had great influence on her husband or whatever, he's a grown man and he can be accountable for his choices. And we are blaming the powerless for the actions of powerful men, you know, and they give.

[A]

They had no legal rights. Women didn't. So why are you suddenly giving them.

[B]

All this influence when you don't even.

[A]

Consider them, you know?

[B]

Well, ultimately, you know, he had some burning resentment about lack of respect, and people were promoted over him. And it's. Whatever. We'll have to give you a link. We're not here to talk about Benedict Arnold, but. But anyway, that's what's happening in the wider world. So he has secretly worked for the British, and he is about to turn his eyes toward Yorktown. This is the year that Betsy was about 14, and then she turned 15. Yorktown was under patriot control, and there's raids and skirmishes elsewhere, but Yorktown itself was perfectly calm, almost creepily calm. Most of the men were away at war and churches were boarded up, and the normal activity you would see on a street was not happening. I'm remembering the first couple of months of COVID Oh, yeah, Acute Covid, like fearful. We don't have a vaccine. What even is this Covid, where everything stopped? It was eerie. She's looking around and it's really, honestly, very scary. Trade had slowed to almost nothing because there was a British naval blockade. Goods were scarce. It was getting a little hard. So this refers to a different war, but have you ever seen that movie Cold Mountain or Last of The Mohicans, both of those. They focus upon what has to happen at home while the men are at war. But in those particular cases, it talks about how frightening it is that to be left behind as women and children, really, with the. Some of the men may be the nefarious elements of your society, and all the protectors are away. So there's another layer that you don't often think about, do you, what is happening. You know, if life is going to go on. You know, life has to go on. We see it time and time again. World War I, World War II, probably more. More famously, men are out in the field, but with trackable and grand affairs, with maps and paperwork and theme. But yet at home, those left behind have to keep the home fires burning to keep society alive. And during the Revolutionary War, women had to step. They had to step out of their traditional subservient roles and assume male responsibilities. Famously, we've talked before about how Abigail Adams ran her entire household as a single parent establishment for years at a time while her husband was working on behalf of the patriot cause, making all the decisions. When Betsy looked back on her youth from, you know, being significantly older, she wrote, necessity taught us to use exertions which our girls of the present day know nothing of. You know, gone are the days you might be called on to sit for a silhouette for Thomas Jefferson, how about it? Or paint a screen. There was much more emphasis on. Well, she wrote, instead of morning lessons, we were knitting stockings. Instead of embroidering, we made homespun garments. And in place of the music of the harpsichord, we were to listen to the loud clanging trumpet and never ceasing drum in every direction. We hear nothing but the den of war. I will tell you that Ambler's formal education came to an absolute halt at about this time. Just like the Bennetts, we keep talking about Pride and Prejudice. Any sister who wished to further her education by extensive reading certainly could. But their father no longer had the capability to hold formal lessons at all. The capital of Virginia moved from Williamsburg to Richmond in 1780.

[A]

Why?

[B]

Because they needed to move the capital further away from British attacks by the British Navy. Williamsburg was too close to the coast. The new location was also more centralized. For the growing population in the west, it was considered much safer. It only had, at the time the Capitol was moved there, about 1800 people, 900 of whom were persons enslaved. How about that? That is something I would be very interested in investigating further, something I tried and tried to figure out. I know the Amblers had Enslaved persons. I don't know what happened to them during the following minutes of our show. I don't know during some of the more acute scenarios where everybody was. Yeah, well, with the government's move, Papa decided it was finally time to move the whole kit and caboodle of the Amblers to the new state capitol as well, much to his daughter's dismay.

[A]

Even though the family had moved a couple times during the war, at this point, they came back, and there in Yorktown was Betsy's best friend, Mildred Smith. So when the family moved up to Richmond, Betsy and Mildred began a correspondence. They talked about things they'd talked about in person. You know, the novels that they had been reading. Both girls love to read. They love to read novels, and they talked about them. They talked about their families in these letters. They talked about their communities and what they were like in turmoil. But it's very interesting to me that at this point, one of the main topics that these two teenage girls are talking about while their country is at war are things that you and I would talk about right now. You know, they're talking about books and stuff, but they're also talking about gossip, specifically. One woman named Rachel Warrington was an acquaintance of both of their families. Rachel was about 10 years older than Betsy and Mildred. She was unmarried. She had been orphaned at a very young age and was living with a very wealthy aunt.

[B]

Notably, at this time, in Yorktown itself, there was a contingent of French soldiers that added to the social life of the beleaguered town in a way, Hilariously, in her letters that Mildred thought Elizabeth was well out of considering. Remember your behavior when you left town last time and how your father had to come get you. She castigated her friend for having been under the influence of that Rachel Warrington and her flibbertigibbet ways. I'm just paraphrasing. I just wanted to say the word flibbert.

[A]

Gibbet.

[B]

Yes, those Frenchmen had a lot of firepower, and I don't just mean their guns. They were popular. Popular.

[A]

And because there was no salacious Netflix series to distract them, this is the version that the girls had available to them. What they did was gossip. There were two Frenchmen who had quartered in Rachel's aunt's house, and nature took its course, and Rachel ultimately found out that she was pregnant. This subject was in Mildred and Betsy's letters. Quite honestly, for years, they followed the subject.

[B]

Well, as it turns out, the fact that Elizabeth and Mildred were separated was quite a gift to posterity because we've learned quite a bit about the civilian experience of this part of the war from letters they wrote to each other. And if they hadn't ever been separated, there wouldn't have been any need to write them. And so Susan and I were talking a little bit ago about how, you know, there is war and there is turmoil going on outside and that is real. But there's also society just continues and the concerns you had in peacetime, like gossip in this case or, or novel reading, they continue. People are still the same people. They just have a layer of turmoil and trauma laid on top of their regular civilian life. They haven't turned into this other person called a non combatant with no personalities, you know, I absolutely understand.

[A]

Yes. I mean, life goes on, I guess, is.

[C]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

I feel like this is just between you and me. I actually feel bad bringing Rachel Warrington into it. Like, feel bad about that. Like we're, I don't know. I feel bad.

[A]

I like Rachel in that she was, she was caught up in this. I mean, something that could have happened to Betsy if she kept flirting with the soldiers.

[B]

I don't know. I don't know. It just seemed like we were doing her a little bit dirty, a little bit.

[A]

Well, I also, I like that the, the baby grows up to be an outstanding man and he is loved and appreciated.

[B]

As far as Rachel's family, I am going to say I don't know if it was wartime or if it was good character. Her family supported her and helped her to raise that child who ended up being a brilliant public servant and military man.

[A]

So decorated in the War of 1812.

[B]

Yes. So as titillating as her condition was to the two young teenage girls and as full of consternation as the older people of town found this, you know, that situation has happened throughout history and I'm glad everyone sort of rallied around their daughter, you know.

[A]

Oh, for sure.

[B]

Ultimately, the story of Rachel Warrington would go down deep into Betsy's consciousness. She thought about the role of women during war, the vulnerable role of women in society for really the rest of her life, to the point where, and we'll talk about this later, as an adult, decades after this, she based a novel on the experiences of Rachel Warrington. So we didn't just bring her up for no reason at all, just for the purposes of gossip and slander. Her experience was fundamental to Betsy's development.

[A]

I know we just got back from Italy and I shouldn't whine about anything, so get out your teeny tiny violin. But I miss my blissy pillowcase so badly. I forgot about all the frizz that the Blissy pillowcase helps me control. I forgot that my Blissy pillowcase helps me keep my hairstyle from day to day. I just need to freshen it up just a little bit. It wasn't like that in Italy at all.

[B]

Well, okay, number one, Italy does not have curly hair water. No, I'm just telling you. Number two. Number two, I now know what to get you for Christmas, which is a Blissy satin pillowcase that you can literally just put in your suitcase and leave it in there as your spare.

[A]

Well, thank you. I would love that.

[B]

Now see, here's the thing. Silk, which is what these are made of, is better than satin. They look very similar, but satin is made from synthetics on a microscopic level. They're rough. Rough on hair, rough on your skin. Satin is cheap for a reason.

[A]

And it's not just your hair. Silk has anti aging properties. It reduces fine lines and wrinkles over time.

[B]

It's antibacterial and hypoallergenic with the natural hydration of silk fibers. Now, something I love about them because I like a little bit of a low maintenance household, is they are machine washable.

[A]

Love that. And I love that it's always cool. It's always the cool side of the pillow. Even the top that your head's been on for hours. Does that even make sense?

[B]

Yes, absolutely.

[A]

Blissey pillowcases come in 99 colors. There's been over 3 million sold.

[B]

Because your listeners, Blissey is offering 60 nights risk free plus an additional 30% off when you [e-mail] historychicks that's blissy.

[A]

B L I S S Y.com history chicks and use code History chicks to get an additional 30% off.

[B]

Your skin and hair will thank you.

[A]

The correspondence of Betsy and Mildred would unfortunately be all they had. Because Papa Jack had gotten positions in Richmond, the family was settling there for.

[B]

The long haul as far as father was concerned. But the peace in Richmond did not hold for very long. As early as January 1781, news came that the British were raiding along the James River. This was our old enemy, Benedict Arnold the traitor and his, his group of men, which were called his green coats. I'm telling you, the gloves were off. Benedict Arnold was now openly in the pay of the British. And his new directive was to lead the invasion of Virginia's new capital at Richmond. And he began to work his way there. He was setting fire to property along his route. So it was very clear that he was a comin And Betsy wrote in her letters, even here we find no rest for the sole of our foot. Another alarm this morning. Should it be confirmed that the British are really coming up the James River. My poor mother will not continue a moment. Poor dear soul. What sufferings are hers. So the house is getting a little panic stricken. And there was a sudden tipping point. And immediately there was no time to lose. The British had landed, were actually on their way to town, and the Amblers fled with only the clothes on their backs and whatever they could snatch up as they ran to the carriage. And they ended up at the home of Aunt Mary Carrie Ambler, one of Papa's widowed sisters in law. A little bit out in the country, Elizabeth wrote to her friend Mildred, at the moment I was writing you, we had too certain confirmation that not a moment was to be lost. And we were off in a twinkling. My father seemed to think we had not a moment to lose. Such terror and confusion. You have no idea. Governor Council. Everybody's scampering here. We shall remain with our friends, but my father will return to reconnoiter. What an alarming crisis is this war in itself, however distant. It is terrible. But when brought to our very doors, when those we most love are personally engaged in it, when our friends and neighbors are exposed to its ravages, when we know assuredly that without sacrificing many dear to us, our own lives, our country must remain subject to British tyranny, the reflection is overwhelming. She has adult thoughts in her young, adult body.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, there's evidence right there that she really was forced to grow up faster than would have been expected before the war.

[B]

On a. I don't even know if this is a slightly lighter note, but just on another note, Mama's old beau, Thomas Jefferson, now the governor of Virginia, escaped the town just ahead of the British forces. He could see, let's just say there was an ineffectual defense by the minutemen, who were pretty sure Richmond was going to be pretty safe. So they fired, like, once and then ran away because, you know, they were not paid enough for this, you know, type of thing, sort of. No plans had been made for its defense. We'll give you a link and we'll. We'll let you decide there. There were British orders, though, to capture Jefferson and any other officials they could find, that includes Papa. And so they scattered, and Thomas Jefferson took his family and escaped to a plantation he had in the west of Virginia. And Betsy later wrote of Thomas Jefferson and called him, quote, our illustrious scampering Governor took neither rest nor food for man or horse till he passed over Carter's mountain and rode to safety 20 miles from Monticello.

[A]

The family was not too prejudiced against Thomas Jefferson, were they?

[B]

Oh, yeah. And then she regaled her correspondent with the fact that he promptly fell off his horse and broke his arm upon his reaching safety, so he had to stay in the woods for a month and a half. And she said, of course, the horse who unseated him was named Caractacus, the name of a British king. Oh, Betsy. Seeing irony.

[A]

No, actually, I kind of love that about her.

[B]

So I know. I will tell you. The legislature met to talk about his behavior. Did he exhibit cowardice by escaping? And then I guess the overwhelming response is like, look, it was chaos. I don't know what you wanted the guy to do. There were no more troops, like, type of thing. But they did investigate him. So there was a large percentage of the population who gave him the dirty eyeball, too.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Not just Betsy.

[A]

No, I. You know what? And I just think that that is an example of, you know, how you could be fighting for the same cause and have disagreements and how it's happens, you know, little squabbles, like families, you know, on your own side. Doesn't change that you're part of the team. You know, it's just. Just part of. Of war, I guess. War and families.

[B]

Right. Well, so she told Mildred that if they could, they would stay in their comfortable country retreat. But already the men in their party were starting to realize that the enemy, having defeated Richmond, would turn its sights outward. She wrote, if they do, God knows what will become of us. And I do not know how the post worked at this point. Did you just give it to someone headed in the right direction? Somebody that might know them? Several times in her letter, she says things like, I'm not certain where exactly to direct this. I await hearing from you to know where to send this.

[A]

I imagine there was. There was carriages and. And convoys, or what did she call them? Cavalries, that were headed on a regular basis like a bus, right back to Yorktown.

[B]

I just think it's amazing that any of these letters found each other at all. Because her friend, of course, in Richmond, was also in peril. Right. A decision was made that their resort that they had repaired to was no longer safe. And so the family took off again. This is now to a place called Louisa Courthouse. And they took refuge in this tiny house. And Betsy was so alarmed about the safety of her friend, she wrote, oh, my dearest girl, I tremble for your safety. Where were you hid when the enemy passed your door? We only had time to learn. They were on the road out from Richmond when we were again in the carriage and in a few hours reached this place where it would seem impossible for us to be in any danger. My much loved father is full of anxiety for us. Much have we to apprehend for him. The public office which he hold makes it absolutely necessary for him to run no risks of falling into the hands of the enemy. So every night papa made a bed in the carriage and there was a driver that stayed up at night, just in case Papa had to peace out all of the sudden in the night and try to outrun the enemies. Now think about that. So papa made that decision too. He would have to abandon his family, hoping to draw the enemy away from them, right while leaving them behind. What a decision. One night the family was eating. I am telling you, I'm not going to try this cottage cheese with honey on it.

[A]

Okay, well, you lost me a cottage cheese, so.

[B]

Well, I love cottage cottage cheese, but cottage cheese and honey has some layers of texture problems.

[A]

Oh, I see.

[B]

But anyway, that's what they had. Money never goes bad and maybe cottage cheese is already bad.

[A]

So it's a good book.

[B]

Yes, maybe that is a good travel food. But suddenly a whole bunch of horses were at the door. Was it the attackers? No, it was a party from the local militia. They were going door to door down every road, warning people the enemy were traveling through the countryside. But they had literally no more details than that. I don't know what roads have been taken. I don't know how many dudes there are. I don't know how many parties there are. I just want to warn you that the danger is mobile and they have left Richmond. And it was just determined they should just take off again. They thought, well, okay, the closer we get to the mountains, the harder the terrain, the less familiar with the opposing armies. They didn't know, I don't think that there was an American at the head of these armies, by the way. Well, so they traveled through back roads with like branches whipping their foreheads. These such unused were these roads they tried to go by the back ways. Just think about this in your own neighborhood, in your own town, what would you do? And they thought of a friend who had a plantation somewhat nearby where they thought they had got to and would surely take them in. But it took the rest of the night to reach it. And when they arrived, they found the place locked up and abandoned and they Broke in for shelter, figuring, you know, I'm going to apologize. Yeah, we have a dire need. So they. They broke in, opened the door, and the family began to make beds for themselves inside pallets. Do other people use that word, pallet?

[A]

Oh, yeah, I. I used that word.

[B]

My grandma always used to say that. Let me make a pallet on the floor.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

When the kids had sleepovers in each other's rooms, we made pallets.

[B]

Pallet. I wonder where that comes from.

[A]

I don't know.

[B]

Well, they were settling in in the clothes they'd fled Richmond in. Remember, they didn't have stuff. And Papa set out to Charlottesville. That had been laid out as a meeting place for officials. They'd all scattered from Richmond, but the plan B was prearranged, you know, wherever you end up, ultimately circle back and get to Charlottesville. And then. So everybody's kind of settling in, trying to sleep, trying not to smell themselves, et cetera. And the owner of the plantation arrived, and they're like, we're sorry about the way. He's like, nope. F the window. Like, no, fine. I'm not worried about the window. What I'm worried about is your father is in big, big trouble because Colonel Tarleton and his whole force has literally just passed here, and they're on their way to Charlottesville to catch officials, Thomas Jefferson in particular, and your father is headed right for it. The absolute terror of knowing their father was headed there and would meet the enemy and would be seized, and then what would happen? Do you know what I mean? Like, I'm just picturing ants when you. When you disturb the top, like, everybody's just running around.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You don't know what to do. There's nothing to be done.

[A]

Yeah. You know what the overriding thought in my head is that these, the officers and Papa and Jefferson and all them, they made a pre. Plan, right, to meet up someplace and they couldn't communicate. Kind of like. I mean, I try to put this into modern times. If we did not have the Internet, you know, what is our pre. Plan, you know, what is our method of communication? That's the part that's kind of making my palms sweat a little bit.

[B]

And are we going to go back to the. Hey, are you headed vaguely toward Oklahom Park?

[A]

Right, right.

[B]

There's a letter from my sister who has brown hair. Could you deliver it to her? She has brown hair. She lives in that apartment building.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Well, they had no way of knowing this until later, given the state of communications. But Papa actually, by complete accident, had taken a different road. And he had been warned in time not to enter Charlottesville, to turn back around. So the next thing they know, at the House of Brooklyn Windows, which I'm sure had another name, Papa's bursting in and telling everyone, get back in the carriage. We gotta go back to Louisa Court House. Like, yikes. So then she wrote to Mildred. Thus we were one whole night and the greater part of the next day accomplishing what placed us precisely in the same situation we were in before a spot I defy the British or even the devil himself to find. Despite the terror and the privations and the hunger and dirt, her family was all together. And she wrote, great cause have we for thankfulness, however dreary it is, I will endeavor to be contented hoping and trusting for a speedy deliverance. But how dreadful the idea of an enemy passing through such a country as ours committing enormities that fill the mind with horror and returning exultantly without meeting one impediment to discourage them. It was Cornwallis, basically chasing Lafayette, who I love, all over the place. And this man named Lt. Col. Banastra Tarleton was supposed to round up the officials who'd scattered them. He. He gloated that he patrolled the officials in their beds. But I will tell you, one of the generals later wrote that Cornwallis, British General Cornwallis was surprised that the people of Virginia were so hostile. He'd been led to believe the population there was mostly Loyalists. As they galloped around at full speed destroying fields, terrorizing citizens, stealing or burning supplies, he was surprised that they didn't meet with more cheers.

[A]

Right, exactly. Like, if they thought that these people were all on their side, then why are they doing all this damage, all this violence, if they're on your side?

[B]

Right.

[A]

Yeah. And it also gives. It also tells you about the propaganda being filtered to the British officers and.

[B]

The propaganda being filtered out to the colonists. The rumors spread and multiplied as refugees turned up telling the stories of what they had seen. Stories of atrocities were magnified. I'm not saying the atrocities didn't exist. I'm actually reminded of that scene in the Patriot where the Lucius Malfoy. I don't remember that actor's name, was the general who locked the town in their church and set the church on fire. I couldn't find any evidence that that was based on a real event.

[A]

And we just talked about this with Catherine de Medici. You know, they filled the church with Protestants and then set it on fire.

[B]

Well, so. So atrocities don't have to be grand gestures and certainly soldiery with their adrenaline up has not traditionally behaved themselves very well. Regardless of what side you're on, I'm not going to go into more detail than all know what I mean? Elizabeth wrote, when or where shall we find rest? I'm not afraid, not truly, but I am changed. The war has made women of us before our time. And I wonder what girlhood will I remember when this is done?

[A]

That's. I mean, to be so young and having that thought seems very self aware to me.

[B]

Yeah. Yep. Back in Yorktown, General Cornwallis British had begun building that deepwater port that everyone always thought Yorktown was, was destined or doomed to have to host. You know, not so fast, said the American and French forces. Well, on we go to the Battle of Yorktown, also called the Siege of Yorktown, which was the final major battle of the American Revolutionary War. So we are all the way in September and October by the time this happened. So Elizabeth and her family have been in unease and turmoil for months and months. Over half a year.

[A]

Well, and even before that, years.

[B]

And Elizabeth is still only 16. General George Washington and the Comte de Rochambeau besieged British General Cornwallis's army at Yorktown. So after weeks of bombardment and no hope of reinforcement, in fact, I just saw a cartoon where Cornwallis looks to the harbor, excited to see his reinforcement ships come and realize, oh, it's French ships. I think I'm screwed. He surrendered on October 19. This effectively ended the war and paved the way for the American, like, the finality of American independence. Do you remember that song from Schoolhouse Rock that. We all know this part. A shot heard round the world was the start of the Revolution. Okay, so we know that part. But the end of that song, which I'm sorry to say, Gen x did not 100% memorize the way we did. The first part goes. Well, let's see, because I'm not as familiar with singing this part. It goes, at Yorktown, the British could not retreat because of Washington and the French fleet. Cornwallis surrendered and finally we had won. And then all the cartoons go hooray. So there were definitely some cleanup battles, et cetera, but functionally, the Battle of Yorktown was largely considered the decisive end of the political battle. There you go. So the war is over and now what?

[A]

Papa Jack was first elected to the position of counselor of state and. And then he was promoted to state treasurer for Virginia. And this is a position he's going to keep for the rest of his life.

[B]

Financially. They had lost a bit of property, although not as much as Mildred Smith's family. Their house and smokehouse were destroyed. A lot of the property in Yorktown suffered, let's call them depredations from the siege and the battle there. And Betsy did write in her letters, and I quote, certainly it is that another Revolutionary war can never happen to affect and ruin a family so completely as ours have been. The only possible good from the entire changing in our circumstances was that we were made acquainted with the manner and situation of our country, which we otherwise should not have known. We were forced to industry, to appear to be genteel, to study manners, to supply the place of education, and to endeavor by amiable and agreeable conduct to make amends for the loss of fortune, which by this time was reduced to. To a pretty low ebb.

[A]

There was no place to drop this in, in the rest of this episode, but their property out on Jamestown. You know how the family owned most of Jamestown. That was actually used as a transfer of prisoners station. Which you know, would be one of the reasons why they didn't move there. That's how ingrained in the revolution this family is now, of course, if you are a man who has come from wealth, you know how to make more of it. And Papa Jack was able to do that not as quickly and to the degree that it had been, but enough that he was able to build him a house. He was able to buy property around his house for his children and their families. Because he's still wanting to keep his family close on like a compound almost. I think that that's a residual of the. Of the whole. Keeping them together as much as possible during the war. You know, I just want to keep them close.

[B]

She wrote, it is over. Our individual sufferings are nothing. Now we can reflect that the great end is accomplished, peace again is restored, and we can look forward to happy days. What sacrifice would not an American and a Virginian at the earliest age have made for so desirable an end?

[A]

And later on in that letter, she wrote the word liberty so sounding in my ears seemed to convey an idea of everything that was desirable on earth.

[B]

So people have experienced the trauma and the loss and the uncertainty, and they have decided that that had been a cause worth pursuing.

[A]

Part of getting back to their new normal is to continue things like getting married. Betsy had met a man named John Marshall. In the hierarchy of families, because she was the oldest sister, he would have been her guy. But she kind of passed on him. So passed him down to Paulie, who was then courted and married by this former military Officer, present day attorney John Marshall, who would in the not too distant future, become the fourth Chief justice of the United States.

[B]

Well, now I will say, number one, she was only 16 years old.

[A]

True.

[B]

Number two, he was 28. Now, that fact said out loud, the whole family loved him. He had actually been the man next door. Do you remember earlier we said that the only reason that our Betsy felt comfortable with her papa away is that they were living next to a powerful neighbor? Well, that's this man's father. So literally, Polly's marrying the boy next year. And he was so much a part of their family that I would like to equate the relationship of the entire family to that of Laurie and the March girls in Little Women.

[A]

Oh, that's perfect.

[B]

He was beloved of all of them, but some only as a brother, if.

[C]

You know what I mean.

[A]

So, no, I think even Betsy considered him a brother in her letters. His brother. Yeah.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Well, so a few years passed. The family is still in the capital, and when Betsy was 20, she wrote a letter to her friend saying the following. Just at this moment are at my disposal two of the very smartest beaus this country can boast. Both at my feet at once. There is much speculation in town going on as to the preference I will give. However, they are both men that are not to be trifled with. Men that either coming separately, no girl in our city would refuse. But both in one day. What would be done if a little fluttering at the heart did not enable me to decide? Now my heart is seriously interested. Colonel Brent is everything that can be wished.

[A]

She talks to Mildred about meeting him at a theater in Richmond. She thought he was hanging around their box for a friend. But no, it was for her. She wrote to Mildred, your own giddy friend, who did not consider it worthwhile to practice one extraordinary grace stole his heart. So she was just being herself is basically what she's saying. Like, I was just myself hanging out. Here's this guy. I thought he was here for someone else, but no, it was for me.

[B]

This was a true love match on both sides. And I'm happy to say that's something that was happening more and more in both the colonies and in the home country of England. This is right on the cusp between your family chooses your husband and young ladies. Consider your feelings when choosing a husband. One article I read attributes that to the way the women had had to emerge and take charge during the war. A lot more had been expected of them and they, you know, they delivered and got collectively a lot More initiative now also, that's happening without the war. It's called the Enlightenment. So just letting you know, society as a whole is gradually moving that way anyway. And the war perhaps made it a little more acute in America. Yes.

[A]

It makes total sense, though. I mean, if you've been so independent during the war, you've been, you know, responsible for your own safety in a lot of times. Why should you give up that just.

[B]

Because the war is over?

[A]

Why should you not be in control of yourself?

[B]

Yeah. To the degree that it was possible. Oh, absolutely, Absolutely. She simply coyly wrote, colonel Brent has had communication with my father.

[A]

And not long after that, her brother in law, John Marshall himself issued the marriage license for our Betsy to marry William Brent. That was March 31, 1785.

[B]

She was 20 years old.

[A]

The heartbreak of this is after writing this glowing, giddy letter to her friend Mildred, the very next letter that she writes is written four months later. And she says, four months have passed since I last wrote you what I have endured. Then widowed, wretched, forlorn, a month since I was the happiest of wives. And now, oh, my friend William died three months into their marriage on their.

[B]

Very first visit to his family. I mean, it was weeks marked by celebratory balls, receptions, neighbors coming to meet them, every sign of felicity for decades of happy marriage and welcome into her new family. You know, something to celebrate. Everyone rallied behind them. Just two and a half months after they were married, he died after an acute illness. She said it was 40 hours of acute suffering. And then he was just gone, Just gone. And Paulie's husband, their dear friend and brother, was the one who came to bring her home foreign. Here is something that I am going to cling to. You know, I like fall, you know, I like fall, but I am going to cling to a teeny, tiny bit of summer. And what that is is the smell of Osea's andaria, algae, body oil, grapefruit, lime, mango and mandarin, and then a hint of the dark forest of Cyprus. It is like summer in a bottle. It's clinically proven to improve skin elasticity and moisturization, and it leaves your skin visibly firmer, smoother and more supple. Importantly, unlike a lot of lotions, you will not feel greasy after application. I love that so much.

[A]

Okay, go ahead, tell them the thing.

[B]

Here's a fun fact, and I'm grateful that Susan let me say it, because I think it's important. Undaria seaweed is considered an invasive species. Osea is turning that into Something positive. They carve it sustainably and put it to good use. That reminds me of the bamboo that you regret planting in your yard but yet makes such sustainable flooring and clothing and furniture.

[A]

It's absolutely wonderful. And that's why it is osea's number one best selling product.

[B]

I heard a bunch of you in line for, I want to say the Uffizi Gallery talking about the smell of OSEA body oil.

[A]

Yes. Oh my goodness. Maybe I was in that conversation because I was talking with some people about it and they were sad that they had to leave it at home and I told them OSEA makes a travel size and I brought it with me and then I let em smell my arm because I'm kind of weird like that.

[B]

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[A]

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[B]

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[A]

So head to Osea, that's o s e a malibu.com and use code chicks for 10% off. So even though she had these great plans for the rest of her life, moving in and having a life with her husband, she moved back to her father's house. And at this point in our story we kind of have to fade to black and cue the six years later sign.

[B]

At 27 in 1792, Betsy married a good friend of her and her first husband, another wealthy planter, lawyer and politician. Those are the circles in which she ran, a man named Edward Carrington, 17 years older than she was, but very, very well connected. In fact, he'd been a delegate from Virginia to the Continental Congress and was a close personal friend of George Washington's. Remember how we talked about during the Martha Washington episode and I actually talked about it during the Elizabeth Packard episode and we've probably talked about it like many times how George Washington's house at Mount Vernon had at certain times, like to become Grand Central Station for everyone with any pretension to property or class that ever passed within 10 miles of Mount Verrain. Yes.

[A]

Like guess what?

[B]

Literally, we don't understand the economics of always having randoms in your house at all times. Well, we actually have from the other end of that transaction in some of Elizabeth, now Elizabeth Carrington, her letters of exactly how the days went. There as a guest, she exclaimed about how Mrs. Washington was venerable, kind and plain, and she Talked about family dinners and their extensive greenhouse and how lovely it was to have all of these young people, these relatives, running in and out. And she was actually there as a guest when a member of the family went upstairs to deliver a baby. Talk about, like, having visitors at the wrong time. And I think it's so funny, her letter. She seems very oblivious to the fact that her husband hustled her out of the house to Washington, D.C. for a week because of that going on. Like, they invited her to stay. She's like, oh, thanks. And they're like. He's like, they don't mean it, girl. Like, read the room. They're just being polite. She's having a baby. And you just met. Like, no, we're out of here. And so they went to Washington, D.C. she wrote. She called her husband fastidious. How hilarious to me that is. Please give them a break is basically what he's saying.

[A]

You know, it's. This is just bringing it back to personal life and stuff. What? We toured Mount Vernon. I was walking behind our friend Laura Hart, and she had her hand on the railing and she just had a moment where she was like, I can't believe this is the railing that, you know, Martha Washington walked up. George Washington walked. So now there's actually three subjects that we've covered who have used that railing.

[B]

Oh, my goodness.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

That's right. And we haven't covered. We may cut this out. We haven't covered and probably won't the Marquis de Lafayette. But I do believe that he got a key to the Bastille and that is framed inside of Mount Vernon. So there's like a frequently referred to rooster in evidence in that house also.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Well, anyway, what else did she say about there? She said about the Washingtons. It is wonderful, after a life spent as these good people have necessarily spent theirs, to see them in retirement, to assume the domestic manners that prevail in our country. All these innocent delights that are so congenial to their years. She talked about tranquil happiness. How wonderful Mrs. Washington's personality was that she was an extraordinary companion, having met so many diverse people for half a century. And she was willing to relate those stories to our Elizabeth Carrington. So that's exactly what we thought of them. Although, you know, they. They've retired from public life. They're out on their farm while domestic things are happening also. There's like an infinite streaming of house guests also.

[A]

Yeah, well, she was a. She was a hostess, that's for sure. If you are going into the world of information and looking for things. On Betsy Ambler, you're going to find a number of names that she's used by. And at this point, she's not only going by Elizabeth, but some people get to call her Eliza. I think we should still call her Betsy because we're almost done with the story. But, but, but there's been. There's whole articles and they call her Eliza and there's whole articles where they call her Betsy and others where they call her I just. She's got a very long name. It's almost. It makes it a little difficult. But also that's kind of cool that she could be under all these different names.

[B]

Well, have you noticed that in the modern era when we're referring to Pride and Prejudice, we call her Lizzie Bennet? But so many times in the actual text of Pride and Prejudice, people call her Eliza. People that are literally operating in her fictional world are calling her Eliza. So I don't, I'm very interested to know, were there degrees of familiarity?

[A]

I don't know. Probably, probably. And to me, Eliza seems like a much better nickname for Elizabeth than Betsy.

[B]

I don't, I don't know. But then you have Betsy Ross, who's fully a grown up lady and we know her as Betsy Ross.

[A]

Yeah, I don't mean it's like infantile. I just mean Elizabeth to Betsy.

[B]

We also have an account of her having been to the new Capitol, like because of her husband's quote, fastidiousness. I want to quote her there too. I found myself while in Washington in a new world. All those very farms where once dwelt my old friends. Now did I see the stately edifices of the Capitol, the President's House, etc. All appearing to me like an enchantment. Only a few years past, I'd seen the first trees being felled on their land. And now avenues and intersecting streets cover the ground that I so often passed over while going from one friend's house to another. It is absolutely magic. The Capitol was laid out to create awe among foreign dignitaries and it's already working its magic on the citizenry.

[A]

Love that Betsy and Edward never had any children of their own. She did have nieces and nephews. You know, the family was very close. There was one niece in particular, Nancy's daughter, Jannetta, who was almost like a daughter to Betsy. She was always close to her and took her in sometimes, and they had a really great relationship.

[B]

She took up two writing and research projects which occupied her to varying degrees for the next Couple of decades of her life, she had access to a chest of long forgotten family letters, something which future historians are not going to find for the era we are currently living in. It's bumming me out. And she set herself to creating a genealogy and record of the people in her family that had gone before her, as well as a record of her immediate past, the war and family life to those who came after her. Her own letters from this period often were directed to her sister Nancy, and they give us a fuller picture into what life was like before and during the Revolution for those who were not on the front lines and, of course, in some cases were not yet alive.

[A]

Another bit of writing that she was doing is, you know, she had always been interested in novels. She'd always been reading them. So like a lot of people who read a lot of novels, she started to write one of her own. She called it Variety or the Vicissitudes of Long Life, which I had to look up. And it means a change of circumstances, typically unwelcome ones. And this book was not so loosely based on her experience observing what was happening to Rachel Warrington, you know, all those years ago.

[B]

It's very clear by the tone of the prose that Elizabeth had sympathy for the main character. You know, there but for the grace of God go I. You know, that could very well have been me. The main theme seemed to be the necessity for women to be educated and prepared to see the danger coming when it was coming toward them, and then to be armed for combat, as it were.

[A]

Yeah, she wanted to help young girls navigate the sea of people who might want to take advantage of them. Just kind of forewarned, just forearmed.

[B]

Now, Elizabeth never did finish this book, so we'll have to be the ones to tell you that Rachel Warrington's son, the Scandal of Richmond, at one point grew up to be a decorated war hero in the War of 1812. So to have been sort of the proof of the value of rallying around, protecting your own and giving people second chances.

[A]

Yeah. In one of her letters, Betsy wrote about Lewis Warrington. It was impossible for me to describe the emotions produced in my mind when I heard every voice's unanimous comment in the rapture to describe his modesty as he entered the Senate hall to receive his merited award. So she is embracing Lewis Warrington, you know, as. As the hero from their town.

[B]

So the book was a window to her real feelings about the necessity of female education and the need to protect the vulnerable women in society. And it was time, when she was about 40, to put those beliefs into action.

[A]

She helped to found an organization called the Female Humane Association. According to legend, a young homeless girl had knocked on the door of the former governor of Virginia asking for help. His wife, Jean Moncure Wood, tried to get the girl that help she needed. And that's when she realized that there was no homeless shelters, there was no resources to direct this young girl to. And she realized that she was going to have to be the one to make it happen. So she and enlisted the help of some of her society friends and Betsy was one of them. From the very beginning. Betsy was part of the group that helped to establish this new service to help specifically girls in Richmond. She helped to organize the bylaws and helped to write the constitution of did take a couple more years, but the 27 women who worked on this project were founding members and they were able to petition the Virginia State assembly to become incorporated as the Female Humane association of Richmond.

[B]

It certainly helps to be related by birth or marriage to most of the General Assembly. Just a little piece of advice from me to you if you want to get something done.

[A]

This organization was historic in that all of the officers of this organization were women. And women who didn't have legal rights in other areas now had them as part of this organization. They were able to sell property and sign contracts and even file suits in court. Things that as an average woman, they would not have been able to do.

[B]

We've talked about this before, how once a woman was married, the identity legally of the married couple was in fact the husband. The wife was a legal non entity. So accidental loophole, not sure. But nevertheless, as a group, these women had rights that individually they would never have been granted.

[A]

I can't imagine that it wasn't. That it wasn't accidental because there were men that helped and they did not go on as officers of the organization. There's no right, no men listed.

[B]

Elizabeth held the position of secretary from the beginning and she held that office for 26 more years. Just going forward a little with this. And then we'll have to jump back for a personal issue. They did have enormous initial success. Part of what they were trying to do is to prevent women and girls from turning inevitably to sex work in order to survive. They built an orphanage on donated land in 1813. They had a little bit of a hiccup after the War of 1812. Hard financial times. They had to retrench a little bit and reduce the number of orphans that it cared for.

[A]

The personal issue that Becca just talked about was after 18 years of marriage. And at the age of just 45, Edward Carrington died, making Betsy once again a widow.

[B]

I'm very interested in the location of his grave. Once upon a time, when he was a young man, he and a friend stood outside of an open window listening to Patrick Henry's Give me liberty or give me death speech. And he asked as far back as that incident, that when I die, I wish to be buried in this spot right outside this window. Such was his fervor at having heard and been inspired by that speech.

[A]

I love the image of this because he's standing outside the window with his buddies listening to the speech and the quote that I had seen about it. He turned to them and he said, boys, bury me here in this very spot. Which is such relatable language. And she was able to have that happen. We talked just a little bit ago about how she had this little pet project of doing a family genealogy with her old letters and. But around this time, in her 50s, Betsy takes that little pet project and makes it huge for her. She starts going back through all those letters. She numbered. I mean, really organized. She numbered all the letters. She cross referenced them. You know, sometimes we'll say, go listen to Martha Washington's episode. She did the same thing. Go read this letter that Mildred wrote back on whatever date it was. She's rewriting them, she's annotating them. She's organizing them into a huge formal memory project that would serve as her family's historical record. She had the intention of taking her family and putting them smack dab in the middle of the revolution as the important roles that they had played. And by doing this project, that was her ultimate goal, to leave a legacy. Right. She went farther. And she had family and friends that she had sent letters to send her their correspondence. She was studying family portraits, looking for clues as to when her ancestors lived. I mean, she's doing a lot for this manuscript. She's putting everything into it. Got to admire that.

[B]

I always like how people with time on their hands in Victorian times that are men, we have like hundreds and hundreds of, all of a sudden, scientists, gentlemen, scientists. And it almost seems like now we get a hold also of gentlemen and gentlewoman historians.

[A]

For sure. Yeah. I love it. And again, it's because of this collection, this, what she was calling at this point, a manuscript that we know anything about Betsy at all or about the community that she lived in, outside of the roles of the men who were soldiers and officers and running and building the country.

[B]

Something we haven't really spoken about. This whole time, except for maybe a vague reference at the beginning to her mother being religious. This family and also Betsy in particular were very devout and religious. Right after the war, Anglican churches were sort of affiliated in people's minds with the British occupiers. And so those churches went a little bit downhill. And she almost single handedly kept up the church in her own parish with money and with work.

[A]

She's also doing other things. She's still serving as secretary for the Women's Humane association of Richmond. And she came to. This is going to be very carefully worded. She came to the defense of a man that she had known for a large portion of her life. This man's name was William Caswell, and he had been an enslaved man. And like a lot of enslaved people, he was sent from one person to another upon the death of whoever was his enslaver. In this case, William landed in the Ambler's house because he was. William was inherited by one of the rectors of the church, and the rectors were living in the Ambler's house. So William came to live with the Amblers. Upon his death, that rector not only divided his estate among the Ambler daughters, but he gave William his freedom.

[C]

He became.

[A]

Became a free man. However, in Virginia, William had one year to file paperwork to make it official, and he never did it. It blows my mind that the state of Virginia is putting this extra step in place for this man to have to do, but he just never got around to do it. He was working as a paid driver for Betsy.

[B]

I just think that in a time and place, when it was. I mean, think about when this was. This was a couple few decades before the Civil War, Virginia was tightening their restrictions on freed people of color. They did not want them around. They did not want them around to give ideas to those that were still enslaved that there was hope. I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, they were really trying to prevent infection of liberty ideas into the wider populace. The irony of all of this, given how much we have talked about the Revolutionary War happening so acutely in this area, including Yorktown, that Virginia would tighten restrictions on freed people of color. In fact, they taxed freed women of color. They just really didn't want. They didn't want that happening. They wanted people to leave, and large amounts of them did go to Ohio. But it's not like you can just pick up and go. It's not like an easy thing to do. You've lived your whole life in one place. You're going to pick up and just move to Ohio because the legislature told you you had to get out within six months or whatever. And then they also don't want you to be reading.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And technically, at certain points, if you didn't leave, you were re enslaved. Like you snoozed and you lose. Yeah.

[A]

And in William's case, it was 11 years before he had been given his emancipation by his enslaver till he filed it with the courts. And in that time he was married, he had three children. He not only had lived in that area, he was raising a family there. So she was able to garner enough signatures, character recommendations, including by her brother in law, Justice John Marshall, wrote a character reference for him. She had a petition that she passed around to all her society people saying, you need to sign this so that we can get this man full of emancipation. And that's exactly what happened. William became a deacon at Richmond's First African Baptist Church, and he continued to work for Betsy for the rest of her life. Elizabeth Jacqueline Ambler Brent carrington died on February 15, 1842 at the age of 76. The Richmond Inquirer ran an obituary that called her one of Virginia's most distinguished women and that, quote, her intelligence and cultivated mind, her generous heart, her active and diffusive charity, of which the Female Humane association of Richmond furnishes, is one enduring memorial. I would love to tell you where she's buried. We don't know.

[B]

They think in all probability she's likely buried in the St. John's Episcopal Church of Richmond next to Edward Carrington. Although there is no real indication of this, I sense an opportunity to perhaps get a hold of a memorial for her.

[A]

Yeah, well, he's got a huge one. It almost looks like a table right outside the church, right by that window, because she made it happen. She put it up there, but there was nobody that put one up for her.

[B]

So I will tell you that. The Female association, however, kept going and they saved many, many orphaned girls from lives of poverty and literally provided them with protection in a world that if you didn't have a male protector, you were thrown to the four winds. You know, it was the kind of the vanguard of women entering into the public sphere and also the vanguard of women recognizing a social need and filling it while theoretically staying within their own domestic sphere. It's the thin end of the wedge. We talked about that during Hull House, too. Social work was the way in to women's equality. So this is the very, very beginning of that. Now the Association's work has survived. It's changed its name and its mission many times. Its modern iteration is called the Memorial foundation for Children, which distributes, even now hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in grants for charitable purposes. Although its actual orphanage closed in the 1970s, the institution she helped to start endures to this day.

[A]

In November of 2025, Ken Burns the American Revolution premieres on PBS. Maya Hawke is the voice of Betsy Ambler. Reading some of her letters throughout the entire series. I love that her father was also. Ethan Hawke is also a voice in this documentary. I mean, it's a Ken Burns documentary. They get the biggest names. They got Tom Hanks, they got Laura Linney.

[B]

You know, they've got big names ever since John Adams. Laura Linney is literally the voice of Abigail Adams. Friar can't disagree with that one tiny.

[A]

Bit, including in this particular presentation. Several months ago, the people associated with this documentary came to us and they said, hey, there's not a lot out there in the world about Betsy Ambler. Can you cover her on your show and do your thing? And we said, yeah. And they said, you know what? Just to make it a little sweeter, would you like to do an interview with the co director of this particular series who's been working with ken Burns for 20 years, Sarah Botstein? Now, we don't normally do interviews, but you know what? I think this is a situation where we can make an exception. And that's the next few minutes of this show.

[B]

So after the ad break, stay tuned for our interview with the co director of the new miniseries, Ken Burns the American revolution, that premieres November 16, 2025.

[A]

We're not going to do media for this particular episode. We will put all of our recommendations and links on our show notes for this episode. But I will say that there's a great opportunity out there for someone to do a very, very, very deep dive, a biographer and write a biography about Betsy Ambler. Because there's a lot of stories in there and there's a lot of questions that we had that we couldn't find answers to.

[B]

You know what season it is.

[A]

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[B]

Foreign November 16, 2025 PBS will air Ken Burns the American Revolution. Six episodes, 12 hours worth of exploration into the history of the revolution that turned the world upside down. And here with us right now is Sarah Botstein, a co director and producer of this project that has taken six years to come to fruition. Welcome, welcome, welcome.

[C]

It's actually nearly a decade, so I. Oh, my goodness.

[B]

Well, let's start with your story. How did you first get into. Well, directing for. For one. And what drew you to this particular series or to history in general? I know you have a long history of history.

[C]

Yeah. Well, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. I graduated from Barnard College in New York City in 1994, and I didn't know what I wanted to do, honestly. And I got a job working in New York City being the assistant to a group of people in an advertising and PR agency. And I met Ken and I got put on an account that supported work that he did. And I was an American Studies major in college and I'm very interested in kind of cultural, political history and how art intersects with that. And he offered me a job working on a series on the history of jazz music. And I didn't know anything about jazz. I couldn't have told you the difference between Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughn or was not music I listened to. And I moved to a tiny town in New Hampshire where he lives for what I thought was two years. And that was 30 years ago. And I think 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, eight films later. Wow.

[A]

And for those wondering who Ken is, she just casually drops the name. It's Ken Burns, the documentarian. Yeah.

[C]

So Ken Burns is a, is, is one of the leading historical documentary filmmakers of our time. He's been working, making films for public television for almost five decades. And he's really committed to public television, public media, fairly traditional historical documentary films. And we take on big subjects and make long movies and ask a lot of our viewers and hope they get.

[B]

A lot of it. But onto maybe the American Revolution itself, I would have to say, and we are almost of an age that the first exposure you and I probably had was the shot heard round the world on Schoolhouse Rock. And then the next thing, maybe the only thing children get exposed to is that thing about the tea.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So it's such a massive story that mostly didn't get told to us. And how on earth do you as a team decide what stories, like, what stories are you going to cover since there's a wide open field?

[C]

Right, that's a great question. Gets to the heart of so much of what is kind of confounding about this. We live in a country that's actually fairly young on the global stage. So let's just say we're in our adolescence. We know very little about our founding. On the one hand, yes, it. Yet it's draped in a huge amount of kind of popular culture reference mythology that has very little to do with the actual history of our revolution, which just makes for a really great story. Honestly, it's really surprising. It's really complicated. It's very unlikely. We were totally the underdogs. Our American Revolution in many ways was actually a civil war. And our Civil war was in many ways our revolution. We were born in violence in a very divided time. Not everybody jumped to the patriot cause. And the war took almost a decade to fight and to win. And the story is both story of a very brutal, complicated, difficult 18th century military war that was a global war. We would not have won without the help of the French and a Great revolution over how a country could govern. And there is enormous optimism and patriotism and excitement in our founding documents.

[B]

Do you find any parallels between the historical moments that you were portraying and the world we're living in now?

[C]

I mean, that happens on any film I'm working on. Whether I'm making a film about Ernest Hemingway or the history of Prohibition or the Vietnam War or the American Revolution. These films take a long time to make. And so the ways that we understand our history and our present keep changing. They change today versus a week ago. So I think there's always a lot to learn from a varied deep dive into our history.

[A]

You had touched on the events of the American Revolution that were lesser known. Was there something, an event or people that you personally were really excited to tell the stories about?

[C]

Well, I'm always interested to tell the stories of people we've never heard of.

[A]

Right.

[C]

Children in a war. You know, Henry Knox, who's a famous military story of him bringing the cannons from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston. George Washington asked him to do it. It was totally unlikely that he could do it. He did it. But he had a wife back in Boston whose entire family were Loyalists. And so she lost her family and was the wife of a really important military character. So I'm always interested in the secondary characters. I think anytime you do a story of a war, you should make a secondary film about the women. But instead, we just sew the women into the narrative where they're often left out. So I think it's the most interesting to think about life and history when you're taking the big, bold face names, the famous stories, and sewing them together with the ones you've never heard of or the people you've never heard of.

[B]

Because the way people typically learn it is there's one rising tide of disaffection with the British, and everyone rose up. But that's literally. I mean, house to house now within a house, as you just said.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

What happened?

[C]

Brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor. You didn't know what side anyone was on, and it took a lot of convincing. There were many truly legitimate and understandable reasons to stay loyal to the crown. And that's important for us to understand. Empathy is a good tool.

[B]

Is that what you hope audiences, especially maybe the younger viewers, take from that story? Empathy, or what do you hope is the impact on people learning about our turbulent birth?

[C]

I always hope that any work we do has people ask questions and think about things in new ways where they haven't thought about them before. Be Excited about history, want to learn more, want to talk to their families at dinner about whatever the subject that they just watched is. I think I'm really interested in activating a engaged public. Our founders believe that we should be educated, active, engaged, virtuous citizens. And I think there's a lot to that.

[A]

I'm going to just backtrack to your personal. Were you interested in history before you got involved with Mr. Burns?

[C]

I was an American studies major, so.

[A]

Oh, okay.

[C]

I'm very interested in intersection of history, art, culture, politics.

[A]

Right. You just didn't get dropped in the deep end?

[C]

No, no, no. I wasn't like a math major going to work for Ken. That would.

[B]

Right.

[C]

But, you know, could happen.

[B]

Yeah, sure. So I've seen you interviewing people for the Holocaust special. Is there.

[C]

Were there.

[B]

What kind of research did you personally do for this particular series?

[C]

We do a lot of research before we do an interview. So we interview depending on the subjects, different kinds of people who've spent their lives either living through or studying a subject. So we spend, before we sit down and interview a scholar, we spend weeks researching what that scholar has written, how they've talked about the subject, what their views are, and we go in with a map of questions. We are, we are a big bunch of nerds. I sit with an incredible team of people and we all, we read a lot, we think a lot, we debate a lot. We work really hard to bring our best game to an interview and to do as much background research as we can to make it worth both the interviewee's time and hopefully have a really rewarding conversation for both of us.

[A]

And then comes the challenge of taking all that information and distilling it down to bite size. I mean, this is a six part series. It's 12 hours, if we can call that bite size. But how much of a challenge is that to take, you know, however long you're.

[B]

How long are you?

[C]

Well, we're always, we're always boiling, we're always crafting, we're always, you know, trying to get whatever someone says to the essence of it. So the first time you see it, you pull a bite from someone in a, in a show and that might be three paragraphs and by the end it's four sentences. Sentences.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So long ago. I swear I have a point. Long ago I used to dj and there are sets you do for the people in the room or the audience, and there are sets you do for other DJs. Okay, you mentioned you're surrounded by history nerds. Are. Is there Anything going on in this series that is for the other DJs? Is there a moment that the history nerds in your audience are going to.

[C]

Be like, yes, I hope that happens in every scene. Honestly, I think we. We really. Let's see. How do I answer that? We make our films. First of all, I'll say this. We make our films for everybody. So I hope the history nerds are happy, and I hope the people who don't care about history are happy. And I. I hope my mom wants to watch the show as much as my dad. Not because I'm their kid, but because they're both finding totally different things to be interested in. I think our work also sits at an interesting intersection of history and art. Right. We're trying to visualize a history that has no archives. That's traditional the way that we think of when we think of a historical documentary. It's no photographs and newsreel. There aren't contemporaneous news reports of someone on the battlefield interviewing a soldier. So you're reliant on memory, on the more crude elements that were made at the time. And then how to creatively think about filming the places people live, the sites where the war was fought, the important landmark places that we walk by every day, whether it's Independence hall or the State House in Boston, or the Yorktown Battlefield in Virginia, or a Longhouse in upstate New York. I think we want to celebrate the vast and beautiful landscape of North America. Places where these things happened and the places where people lived.

[A]

Did you get to go to any of these places that really just struck you that you've never been to before? I mean, living in New Hampshire, you're in the middle of history.

[C]

I live in New York City now, right in midtown Manhattan. You have to hear a fire truck. You know, every project I've worked on has brought me to really amazing sacred places. Whether it's getting up at 4 o' clock in the morning in the early June and walking up the beaches of Normandy to imagine what D Day must have been like, or to be in the middle of a highway in Saigon 50 years after the fall of Saigon, or to walk through the Saratoga battlefield at dawn just two weeks ago and remember what happened there. So we're very lucky to go to really beautiful, important historic sites. In all the work we do.

[B]

Were there any moments that felt especially emotional or personal for you when you were either researching or filming them?

[C]

It's a good question. I think some of the beautiful quotes written at the time actually by Abigail Adams really Surprised me at how moving and forward thinking she was. And they were. And that, you know, she and her husband John Adams have a very famous correspondence which when you put it in its historic context, actually really becomes quite dramatic and wonderful. So I love hearing families talk to each other in any subject. And those often move me, obviously, when an important something happens in an important moment in history. But you know, the Declaration of Independence is no joke. There's a lot to celebrate there. And it was a really important moment. It changed the world. There's a lot for us to be proud of. We've done a lot since those words were written. When they were written, only a certain tiny segment of wealthy white men had the right to vote. And here we are 250 years later and we can vote. Black people have the right to vote. Poor people can vote. There's been a lot of progress made in 250 years.

[B]

So you mentioned that. And I have this written down to ask you. I haven't seen in your body of work the road to women's suffrage. And I am putting my quarter up for you to do that. We just covered Alice Paul and then we, we took 50 listeners with us to her birthpl.

[C]

Ken made a really beautiful film on the history of Stanton and Anthony and the women's suffrage movement in the mid-90s.

[A]

Gotta go back.

[C]

Yeah, gotta go back.

[A]

Yeah, just a little bit. Going back to Abigail and John Adams, you were talking about their correspondence. We are weaving this conversation we're having with you into our episode on Betsy Ambler. How did you meet her?

[C]

So this film is, is directed and made by three of us. Ken, my dear friend and colleague David Schmidt and myself. David Schmidt grew up in Williamsburg, Virginia. He is a student of the 18th century. He was a fife and drummer as a little boy growing up there. And while we were making the film, I said to him at one point, you know, I think we need a. We need a child's story here. We need to hear from a child. I think anytime you make a film about a war, again, widening the lens of the voices we typically hear from. And I mean, we don't. Everyone knows from the Diary of Anne Frank, children have a lot to say and a lot of wisdom. So he set out to try to find a good young character. And he stumbled across Betsy Ambler, whose papers have been well organized and well cataloged, but haven't been exposed much. She was 10 years old in Yorktown, Virginia when the war started. Her family became refugees and moved through the colonies during the war. And she Ended up because of her writings, which she wrote for her younger sisters so they would remember what her family had lived through. That's also very moving to me. And so she's in almost every episode. And I think scholars are excited to learn more about her and for her to become a household name, that would be awesome.

[A]

Love to help that happen.

[B]

So in our own work, we sometimes fall in love with one of our subjects maybe halfway through doing research about them. You know, we've been looking deeply into their lives. We almost feel now like we're friends with them. I'm wondering if there's anyone, a quote character in any of the 12 hours that you sort of regard as a friend that you are glad you met.

[C]

That's such a nice question, such a nice way to phrase it. I mean, I care about so many of the different people in the film. Elizabeth Freeman, who was a woman in Massachusetts who was enslaved and went to court for her rights after the Revolution, is a great story and very moving. I think for me, having made the film, I actually am more interested personally in wanting to talk to some of the more famous people of the time to sort of be at a dinner table with John and Abigail Adams and her good friend Merci Odis Warren and just be in the room where it happened, as they say in Hamilton.

[A]

Right.

[C]

Like just listening to these conversations, see where these were young people making it up as they went. They had no idea how the history was going to turn out. And they were young and we know them as really famous and realized human beings. They weren't that. And so I think the debates they were having amongst themselves, being in the room where it happened, the conversations that helped birth our country, those are the things I kind of take away and when I'm in my imagination, think about not to discount the different characters I care about or who move me or who I'd like to get to know better or go back to history and meet. But I think it's really, as Hamilton says, being in the room where it all happened, I think is where my imagination goes in this subject.

[B]

We say that sometimes that historical figures are not the butterflies on pins framed on the wall. They're actually people that had to flap around randomly to get there.

[A]

You.

[B]

They certainly weren't all perfectly.

[C]

No. And they didn't know how it was going to turn out.

[A]

No, no.

[C]

I mean after Lexington and Concord and the shot heard around the world or however we learn about it, it took first of all, a year and two months after that battle for them to declare independence they didn't know if they were going to declare independence. They didn't know if they were going to try to get a foreign ally to help them. They couldn't possibly fight off the biggest empire on earth. I mean, it's just totally surprising and unlikely. And they made it amongst themselves.

[B]

They're not one. They were more like 13 little countries, weren't they? And not one powerful force all thinking the exact same.

[C]

John Adams has a quote saying exactly that.

[B]

Susan, I think we probably have time for maybe two more questions. Do you want to.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

You know what I would like to talk to you about? It's not about the revolution, it's about your life. But as a woman in leadership behind the camera, have you found the industry shifting in the terms of representation or voice? I mean, you've been in it for a while now. Have you seen much difference?

[C]

I mean, I think it's probably changed a little bit over time. I work in a, in an industry that actually has a lot of women in pretty powerful positions. And you know, sometimes people think we're bossy where they would not say that if it was a man behind the camera. But I really love the collaborative nature of film. I love the collaborative nature of the art form that we get to go out and work with every day. And I also like being decisive and knowing what I think quickly to help the team. So I think having women have powerful, important decision making roles, you know, we stand on the shoulders of a lot of women and we have a lot of work left to do, but we've also done a lot and I, I love inspiring and giving the younger women around me the biggest wings I can and nothing is more satisfying, honestly.

[A]

Can't disagree with that at all. Becca, do you have one more question?

[B]

Okay, well, let, let us just wrap it up maybe what in your opinion to. Actually, this is a two part question. What would you say is the overarching theme of the series? And then follow up to that? Maybe if you had to choose the most important thing that the audience should take from the show, what would that be?

[C]

So the tagline on our poster for the American Revolution is a story 250 years in the making. America is a great experiment. We are still getting our sea legs. Our country changes all the time in small and big ways. I think it is a deeply inspiring, informative, instructive, complicated, surprising, exciting and honestly, deeply patriotic story. We have a really, really special country. We need to take good care of it.

[B]

Thank you so much for being here. I'm like.

[A]

Yes, thank you so much.

[B]

And that will bring us to the end of our coverage of Betsy Ambler. Thanks so much for listening.

[A]

Bye.

[B]

Sa Sam Sa.