Sarah Wentworth Morton

Abstract

Sarah Wentworth Morton (b. 1759–d. 1846) was born in Boston, Massachusetts to James Apthorp and Sarah Wentworth. She was well known as a poet of the early US republic, publishing in periodicals like The Massachusetts Magazine and self-publishing three long history poems during the 1790s. Both the Apthorps and Wentworths were prominent merchants with ties to the slave trade. Morton’s family had Tory leanings during the American Revolution, while Morton had Patriot sympathies, as did her husband, Perez Morton, a Revolutionary leader who pursued a successful career in law and politics. Her marriage to Perez was marked by a notorious scandal—his affair with Sarah’s sister, Frances, who committed suicide after giving birth to their child. This scandal has shaped critical approaches to Morton’s work, most significantly when she was misidentified during the latter half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth as the author of The Power of Sympathy, a seduction novel by William Hill Brown that treated both her family scandal and the death of Elizabeth Whitman, which later inspired Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette. Especially during the 1790s, Morton’s poetry was self-consciously that of the new republic, focusing on American topics framed by classical and world-historical exempla. Her three long poems are particularly ambitious in this regard, with Beacon Hill and The Virtues of Society focusing on battles of the American Revolution in epic terms that highlight US geography and political organization, while Ouâbi represents American vigor and virtue through the heroic sacrifice of a Native American chief. Morton’s shorter abolitionist poem, “The African Chief,” also focuses on the tragic death of a heroic leader. Morton’s contributions to an emerging American imaginary are inseparable from changing opportunities for women writers and the rise of periodical publication during this period, much of it sustained by the works of women writers, including Judith Sargent Murray and Mercy Otis Warren, whom Morton mentions in her works. In 1823, Morton published My Mind and Its Thoughts in Sketches, Fragments, and Essays, a collection of poems, aphoristic reflections, and short essays that demonstrates her ongoing literary ambitions as well as her mature reflections on a life marked by loss and personal challenges. Morton’s life and work shed light on efforts to develop a literary culture to match the political and social aspirations of a new nation as well as opportunities and limitations shaping women’s writing during the early US republic. The author wishes to thank Audrey Morales for her assistance on this project.