Read an Excerpt of Cokie Roberts' New Book

Cokie Roberts' book celebrates the lives of early America's influential women.

ByABC News via logo
February 9, 2009, 11:05 AM

April 9, 2008— -- ABC News political correspondent and best-selling author Cokie Roberts continues the story of early America's influential women that she began in "Founding Mothers" (2004). In her new book. "Ladies of Liberty," she draws on personal correspondence, private journals and many previously unpublished primary sources to capture the lives of extraordinary women, including Abigail Adams, Martha Jefferson, Dolley Maddison, Elizabeth Monroe, Eliza Hamilton, Theodosia Burr, Louisa Livingston, Rosalie Calvert, Rebecca Gratz, Louise Catherien Admas, Margaret Bayard Smith, Sacajawea and others.

Roberts is also the author of the national best-seller "We Are Our Mother's Daughters."

Read the introduction to Cokie Robert's "Ladies of Liberty" below or click here to browse inside the book and find several of the chapters in full.

The new American nation bristled with expectation and exploration at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century. But the Old World looked with such skepticism at the upstart across the sea that the country was forced to fight what amounted to a second war of in dependence. In this unsettled, still self-defining time women were in the middle of everything—contributing to the culture as writers and educators, shaping the society as reformers and religious, expanding the nation as settlers and seekers. And though they possessed no official power—not only were women denied the right to vote, married women could not even own property—their considerable political influence is evident in their own words and those of the men in their lives. Take, for example, the great trader John Jacob Astor's letter to Dolley Madison in 1812, after war had been declared, thanking her for following through on a promise: "He well remembers Mrs. Madison's assurances that all Mr. Astor's ships should arrive and he is happy to say that they have arrived from Canton with valuable cargos." The First Lady had been the one to guarantee his ships' safe passage. Everyone seemed to take it for granted that these elite women would be called upon to play essential parts. Soon after Elizabeth Pinckney married William Lowndes, her father, statesman and General Thomas Pinckney, charged her with studying her husband's plantation books because public life would soon call him: "Lowndes cannot escape it, for the country will demand it, and you must learn to manage his business for him."

As central as they were to the survival of the country, the women have been almost completely obscured by America's best- known politicians—the men we call the Founding Fathers. Not only have there been countless volumes analyzing their actions, they remain a daily part of American political life, invoked in legislative chambers, consulted in courtrooms, lauded in political campaigns. I have written about politics and Congress for more than three decades, and the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution have become my close acquaintances. That's one of the reasons why I wrote Founding Mothers a few years ago. I wanted to know what the women were up to while the men were thinking their great thoughts. Unsurprisingly, it turned out that the women were heroic in a time when heroic acts were called for in resisting the British, enforcing boycotts, enduring war, sacrificing for the cause. I had expected that book to end with the election of John Quincy Adams—when the torch of the American presidency passed to a new generation. But it was getting to be much too big a book, and I would never have made the deadline. I stopped with the inauguration of his father instead, after the first contested presidential election testing the new Constitution.

Now that I've learned about the women of this next period—from Adams to Adams—I'm so glad I didn't give them short shrift by jamming them into the end of that book. The years from the presidency of John Adams to the election of his son are not as dramatic as the Revolutionary period, but in many ways they're more important. It's much easier to band together, as the Founding Fathers did, to fight against an outside enemy than to hold together while differing philosophically and politically on ends as well as means—on what kind of country would and should emerge from this American experiment. At various points over these years fierce partisanship and regional jealousies threatened our nationhood when it was too young and fragile to withstand the blows easily. But even as the men were literally ready to kill each other, to fight duels over political arguments—the women continually tried to provide wise counsel and cool the passions. Exception: Abigail Adams, who was considerably more partisan than her husband. But she is the exception who proves the rule—with her intemperate advice and her failure to act as an ameliorator, her husband lost reelection.

Washington women used the world of society, from formal receptions to casual card parties, to bring men together to effect political ends. In the fledgling federal city everything was still evolving in terms of who played what role. In that fluid situation, the worlds of state and society overlapped so thoroughly that it was impossible to tell where one left off and the other began. As a reporter, I went digging for the best sources on all of this activity and found them to be the women themselves plus their friends and relatives. With only a handful of exceptions, every quotation in this book is either written by a woman, to a woman, or about a woman. It turns out that the men consulted the women constantly. Aaron Burr sought his daughter's guidance about his amours; Rosalie Calvert's father needed her business acumen for his investments. In fact, the way fathers benefited from their daughters' wisdom turned out to be one of the many happy surprises of this book.

Like metamorphosed witches!

Clothed in the dignity of state,

And eke! In coat and breeches!