Elizabeth Lichtenstein Johnston (1764-1848): "Shot Round the World but Not Heard"

Abstract

First paragraph: “No one could possibly claim,” explained Rev. Arthur Wentworth Eaton in his 1901 preface, that Elizabeth Johnston and her Recollections “are of very wide historical or even biographical interest.” She did not fire any cannons or act heroically, did not enter into personal correspondence with great figures, did not influence the course of political events, or in any other ways stake a claim to historical significance. Indeed, Eaton felt the need to justify her significance through her progeny, reeling off a long chain of her descendants who had subsequently held weighty positions in Canada – chief justices and Supreme Court judges, reverends, senators, and physicians “of the highest professional and social standing.”1 Now, more than a century after Eaton’s pronouncement, scholars have successfully challenged the kinds of assumptions and biases in his definition of what constitutes “interesting” history. Reaching out beyond the high-profile powerful men has brought immense rewards in better understanding the everyday workings of societies in the past: their organisation, their interior values, their evolution – in short, their history. The rich rewards to be gained from this widening of historical and biographic “interest” are often hard-earned and contested, mined, as they must be, from limited deposits in the historical record. Historians of women, gender, families, and households in the colonial south first struck on quantitative sources to explore social relationships, and have since been meticulously panning and filtering qualitative sources – diaries, letters, and wills, among others – in search of answers to a host of questions about the nature of early southern family life, women’s roles in society, and the significance of gender and sexuality to individual and communal identities.2 Placed in the context of this new scholarship, Elizabeth Johnston’s Recollections can tell us much about the shifting social boundaries of life in colonial and revolutionary Georgia.