Queer Places:
Granary Burying Ground
Boston, Suffolk County, Massachusetts, USA
Sarah Prince Gill (July 16, 1728 – August 5, 1771) was an American Christian prayer group leader and writer. In the early 1750s, Sarah Prince, daughter of a Boston preacher, began a correspondence with Esther Edwards Burr, the daughter of the famous evangelist Jonathan Edwards and mother of the future vice president Aaron Burr. For seven years, the two women exchanged romantic letters and diaries full of sensibility and religious observation. Several years before Burr died of smallpox, the two women poured out their dreams, hopes, and fears, and accounts on their daily lives to each other through an extensive exchange of letters. Rarely together, the two sill shared an intense connection. For example, Burr wrote in one letter "I believe tis true that I love you too much." When Burr died in 1758, Prince recorded her loss: "The Beloved of my heart... My whole prospect in this world are now changed. My whole dependence for comfort in the World are gone. She was dear to me as the apple of my Eye... And she was mine! O the tenderness which tied our hearts! O the comfort I have enyoed in her." Sadly, Prince lived only a few years longer. The correspondence suggest that same-sex relationships, if not sexual ones, were acceptable in late colonial New England as the letters don't seem to indicate that either woman was embarassed by their closeness.
Sarah Prince was the 4th of five children born to Deborah Denny and Thomas Prince.[1] Thomas was the minister at Boston's Old South Church and a part of the Great Awakening.[1][2] Prince was educated at home.[3] Thomas was particularly devoted to his children's education, "it was no small part of his labor and happiness to impress on his children a suitable sense of religion; and properly to form their sentiments, manners and taste."[3] Prince was widely read and likely educated to read Latin.[3] Prince began journaling intermittently in 1734, but her most consistent period of writing lasted from the mid-1750s to 1764.[1] It is believed that she partially revised her journals towards the end of her life in order to polish her writing.[4] Through her father, Prince was introduced to Esther Edwards Burr.[1] Sarah and Esther corresponded throughout the 1750s.[5] Perhaps inspired by Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, the two young women exchanged journals with the goal of helping their self-improvement.[6] They hid their correspondence from many of their acquaintances.[6] According to historian Philip J. Greven, the two women were "as close, if not closer than, sisters."[5] As Esther wrote to Sarah in 1754, "I esteem you one of the best, and in some respects nearer than any Sister I have."[5] Prince also corresponded with Catharine Macaulay.[8] Although multiple men tried to court her, Prince remained singled and living with her parents throughout her twenties.[5] By 1752, Sarah was the only surviving child in the family.[5] After the death of both of her parents, 31 year old Sarah Prince married Moses Gill, a wealthy Boston merchant.[1] She was six years his senior.[9] Sarah Prince Gill died at the age of 43 on August 5, 1771.[1] She had no children.[1]
Moses Gill (1733-1800) was Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts from 1794 until his death. When Governor Increase Sumner died on June 7, 1799, he became Acting Governor. By law, he retained the title of Lieutenant Governor. When Gill himself died in office just one year later, no one was in place to serve after his death. For eight days, the Governor's Council ruled the state until the inauguration of Caleb Strong.
Esther Edwards Burr's letters to Sarah Prince are the most extensive surviving literary criticism written by a colonial American woman.[10] The Journal of Esther Edwards Burr, 1754-1757 were published in 1984 by Yale University Press.[11] In 2005, Prince's conversion narrative was published by the University of Tennessee Press as part of The Silent and Soft Communion: The Spiritual Narratives of Sarah Pierpont Edwards and Sarah Prince Gill, edited by Sue Lane McCulley and Dorothy Zayatz Baker.[4]
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