Author: Cynthia A. Kierner

professor of history, George Mason University.
ENTRY

Hannah Lee Corbin (1728–1782)

Hannah Lee Corbin was a member of the Virginia gentry and an early advocate of women’s rights. She was born on February 6, 1728, at Machodoc, the Westmoreland County plantation of her parents, Thomas Lee and Hannah Ludwell Lee, and grew up at Stratford Hall. In about 1747, she married Gawin Corbin, a cousin from another prominent Virginia family. Gawin Corbin died sometime during the winter of 1759–1760, and Hannah Corbin was left control of his vast property until their one daughter came of age with the stipulation that she not move from Westmoreland County or remarry. She took part in the Baptist revivals of the 1760s as her plantation Peckatone thrived under her management. She lived at Peckatone with Richard Lingan Hall, a Baptist physician. Corbin supported the American Revolution, and in 1778 wrote to her brother Richard Henry Lee questioning why propertied widowed women such as herself should be taxed without representation since they did not have the right to vote. However, unlike some other Baptists and Virginia revolutionaries, she did not free her enslaved laborers and owned sixty-four people at the time of her death around early October 1782.

ENTRY

Martha Jefferson Randolph (1772–1836)

Martha Jefferson Randolph was the daughter of Thomas Jefferson and the wife of Thomas Mann Randolph, who served as governor of Virginia from 1819 to 1822. She grew up at Monticello and spent time in Williamsburg, Richmond, and Philadelphia before accompanying her widowed father to Paris, France, where she attended the Abbaye Royale de Panthemont, a prestigious convent school. After she returned to Virginia, she married and bore twelve children, eleven of whom survived to adulthood. Although she was the daughter of a president, the wife of a governor, and arguably the most highly educated woman in Virginia, Randolph’s life was in many ways representative. Widely admired for her intelligence, sociability, and conversational skills, she was an exemplar of genteel white womanhood who was said to possess a “perfect temper” and who immersed herself in the trials and joys of marriage, motherhood, and plantation life. Randolph and her children lived mainly at Monticello, although her husband owned the nearby plantation Edgehill. Occasionally during her father’s presidency, and throughout his retirement, she acted as hostess. Her presence reinforced Jefferson’s image as a devoted family man with a stable domestic life, though fulfilling this role in her father’s life may have exacerbated her already strained marriage. Both father and husband struggled and ultimately failed to remain solvent. After their deaths in 1826 and 1828, respectively, Randolph lived with her married children. She died at Edgehill on October 10, 1836.

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