Judith Sargent Murray and John Murray
By Bonnie Hurd Smith, author of From Gloucester to Philadelphia in 1790: Observations, anecdotes, and thoughts from the 18th-century letters of Judith Sargent Murray
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1.Introduction
In Russell Miller’s opening paragraph in The Larger Hope about John Murray’s 1770 arrival in America he writes, “Little did he realize that he was to be the instrument by which a new and unique religious body was to be created, denominated Universalism, which was to challenge the grim Calvinism inherited from sixteenth-century Europe. Neither was he aware that the denomination which he would eventually help to found in America was to offer the hope of a spiritual democracy for a new nation.”
And what of democracy for women – spiritual and political? The historian Susan Branson calls Judith Sargent Murray “the most important female essayist of the New Republic.” While John was preaching, traveling, organizing, and generally spreading the “good news” of Universalism, as taught to him by James Relly, Judith was publishing essays, plays, and a three-volume book (The Gleaner, 1798) to spread the “good news” of female equality, improving female education, and the “new era in female history” that young women were forging.
These two extraordinary people first met in 1774, when Judith’s father, Winthrop Sargent, invited John to preach in Gloucester to a small group of “adherents” to Universalism. At the time, Judith was a 23-year-old married woman. John was 33, a widower, and an itinerant preacher from England who had been traveling throughout the colonies since 1770. After meeting the Gloucester Universalists, who were well organized and committed to Universalism, John decided to make the seaport town his home.
While the bulk of John Murray’s personal letters do not survive, Judith’s letters reveal the pivotal importance of their initial meeting. Her first letter to him, written on November 14, 1774, sets the stage for what was to come:
My Dear Sir
If I am not mistaken in the character of the person I have the pleasure to address, it will be most agreeable to him, that I should lay aside all that awe, and reverence, which his unquestionable superiority demands, and approach him with the freedom of a sister, conversing with a brother whom she entirely esteems — I am not much accustomed to writing letters, especially to your sex, but if there be neither male nor female in the Emmanuel you promulgate, we may surely, and with the strictest propriety, mingle souls upon paper — I acknowledge a high sense of obligation to you, Sir, I have been instructed by your scriptural investigations, and I have a grateful heart — Your revered friend, Mr Relly, had taught me by his writings, the rudiments of the redeeming plan; but you have enlarged my views, expanded my ideas, dissipated my doubts, and led me to anticipate, and with sublime, and solemn pleasure, the coming of the resurrection… I have to request — if your leisure will allow, that you would honour me by a line and I pray you to believe me with all sentiments of esteem your most obedient &c &c
Judith Sargent and John Murray became devoted to each other -- as pastor and congregant, and as friends for 14 years, then as husband and wife for 27 years. They respected and supported each other as equals. They each had transformational work to do in the world. As Judith once wrote to her parents, they knew they were “in their path of duty.”
