LETTERS: Correspondence Archive, 1874-1883.
"I visit Miss Anthony I think she ought to come to Washington and look after the 16th Amendment"
Jane Spofford to Mrs. Julia [Smith] Parker, May 21, [1882]
Smith, Julia E. Archive of 62 Letters to Julia E. Smith, later Mrs. Julia Parker. [Various Places: 1877-1883].
Archive of letters from friends and family to this extraordinary woman. Sixty-two holograph letters, various sizes, many half sheet (5" x7 ¾"), most with envelopes; written from various places to Julia E. Smith/Julia Smith Parker; includes two suffrage related newspaper clippings. Some foxing, slight tears along some folds, generally very good/fine.
Julia Smith (1792-1886), the first person to translate without assistance the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, was one of five daughters born to Zephaniah Hollister Smith and Hannah Hadassah Hickok Smith. Zephaniah, a Yale graduate, had left the Congregational ministry after concluding that it was against his conscience to receive money for preaching and joined the Christian sect founded in Scotland by John Glas (1695-1773) and his son-in-law, Robert Sandeman (1718-1771). Zephaniah was also a lawyer and farmer, and his wife Hannah an amateur poet, linguist, mathematician and accomplished astronomer. Their daughters, and most especially Julia, shared their independent thought and diversity of interests.
Hannah and Zephania were abolitionists; the daughters supported that cause and later, as did so many others, were counted among the early advocates of woman suffrage. By 1873 the two elderly sisters, then in their 80s, were the only surviving siblings; they lived on the family farm in Glastonbury, Connecticut tending their Alderney cows from which they made their own cheese and butter. They received notice from the tax collector of a tax increase. Curiously, only properties owned by women had been assessed higher taxes. The Smith sisters attended the next town meeting. While Abby was allowed to speak, her pleas regarding the unfair tax increase were ignored. The sisters refused to pay the taxes, after being officially advised that if they paid the interest on the taxes during their appeals, no court action would be taken. This was not the case. The town promptly auctioned off their Alderney cows. Abby and Julia continued to resist the unjust assessment against their farm, however. At the next town meeting, the sisters were not allowed to speak, and the tax collector foreclosed on their farm for non-payment of taxes and auctioned it off at a price far below the land's actual value.
The sisters sued the tax collector and as their suits were being adjudicated, Samuel Bowles of the Springfield, Massachusetts Republican learned of their plight and took up their cause. Soon newspapers across the country were publishing accounts of how the Glastonbury town fathers singled out two little old ladies for special taxes. Suffrage leaders such as Abby Foster Kelley, Isabella Beecher Hooker, Lucy Stone weighed in on their behalf, and the sisters found themselves invited to speak at suffrage gatherings and elsewhere. Eventually the sisters won their case. Julia compiled everything related to the case in a pamphlet, Abby Smith and Her Cows, which became a key women's rights document.
During this episode, in 1876, Julia paid for the printing and publication of one of her five (two from Hebrew, two from Greek, one from Latin) translations (completed some 20 years earlier) of the Old and New Testaments, thereby becoming the first and only woman [or man] to translate the entire Bible from the original Hebrew and Greek into English unassisted. Publication (at her expense) came about at the height of the "taxation without representation" cow controversy. In fact, Julia intended her translation to be a Feminist document. Called by wags at the time "The Alderney Edition," it was the first feminist Bible. The American Publishing Co. (who published Twain) had the book typeset by a woman, the press run by a woma
Print Inquire
