Hey folks, Libba here with a throwback episode from our YouTube channel from last year with Doctor Tom Scott, all about the legend of Nancy Hart. So if you've lived in Georgia for a while, you have likely come across the legend of Nancy Hart. It's this rebellious heroine of the american revolution who may or may not have actually existed. But the stories of her bravery, cleverness and grit have been passed down since the early 18 hundreds. And Doctor Tom Scott from the Department of History at Mercer University joins us to reveal what we do know and what we don't know about this mythic figure as well as what she symbolized since her rise in the popular imagination. So I hope you enjoy this interview and we'll be back with fresh interviews next week.

Doctor Scott, if you could just give us a little overview of how did you become a interested in Nancy Hart? How did this legend first come to your mind and what got you fascinated about her?

So I've taught at Mercer for 31 years now. So I've lived in Georgia and I'm an early american historian by trade. And much of my early work dealt with the revolutionary and early national period, the founding period. And I've always been interested in all my work, in what historians sometimes call sort of secondary figures. So people like Washington and Lincoln, these are primary figures in american history, but I've always been interested in sort of secondary figures, folks who are known but maybe not are known as well as some of the primary figures. So Nancy Hart fits into and to what I've done most of my career. To be honest, though, I was introduced to Nancy Hart in an academic way simply by asked to write an article about her for a volume that was produced over a decade or so ago about Georgia women. And so one of my colleagues at Mercer was the editor for that project and she thought that I would be a good fit for this project. And I was very happy. I didn't know a lot about Nancy Hart at the time, but as I got into it, I was fascinated to learn not just the stories themselves, but also learn about where the stories came from and how they've been used in Georgia history and american history really over the last century. So it's a fascinating tale. The story of the stories to me is as interesting as the stories themselves.

That's what I found as well. And I suppose for anyone who is not familiar with the story of Nancy Hart, as many legends go, there's a few variations of the story. But at its core, could you tell us what each story has in common? What is the basic story of our legend of Nancy Hart.

So there are a collection of stories. They're not just one single story. There are about seven stories that focus on events during the American Revolution, and they're all set in northeast Georgia, up near present Park county, late in the war of 1780 117, 82, when the war came to Georgia, or came to that part of Georgia. And they all involve this figure. Nancy Hart, who was a later historian, described her as a honey of a patriot, but a devil of a woman. And so she is described as big and forceful, sometimes masculine. She will not take any kind of sass from anyone. She is her own person, brave, quick witted, quick thinking. She really is this sort of legendary figure, one historian, compared to sort of ancient greek women who sometimes fought alongside the men. And so that's the sort of overall picture of Nancy Hart, a woman who was very patriotic, and that's emphasized over and over, loved her country, fought for her country in ways that she could fight, not in a formal army, but as we get into the stories, we'll see some of the examples. But was willing to fight for what she thought was right, hated Tories, the loyalists, as they were called, and just strong, forceful, brave, intelligent, quick witted woman. So that's the sort of overall picture of Nancy Hart in terms of the stories, anyway.

Right. So we have this very formidable character. And the story that, the most basic version of the story that I'm familiar with is that Nancy Hart is at her home. She is protecting her home from the loyalists. And there's this image that I have even right behind me that's very well known of this moment, of I'm a woman, I've got my gun, I am protecting my home from these loyalists. And it's this very, like, brave, courageous, patriotic vision of this woman. Now, could you tell us, what is that the story that is most well known or that got out there the most in the public mind, is that these Tories are coming to this woman in northeast Georgia's home, and she is the sole protector of this property, her land, her home. Could you sort of give us the narrative of that very well known version of it?

Sure. This is easily the best known of the stories. It's called the capture story, where she captures some tories in her home, and it's illustrated here. There's a painting in the early 20th century that's up, used to be in the state capitol, then it was in the governor's mansion. It's kind of been moved around in the recent past. But here's the basic story of the capture story. Nancy Hart and her daughter were. Her daughter Suki were in their cabin one day, not nearly as elaborate houses. This is depicted here, more of a log cabin. And she was doing domestic work when a group of Tories showed up and came into her house and demanded that she feed them. They were hungry, they were tired, and they wanted to be fed. At first, she cursed at them and said she would not do anything. She hated Tories. I hope they would all perish. But eventually she struck upon the idea instead of tricking them and attempting to capture them. So she settled them in, put them at a table, gave them some drink, started to prepare food. We began to make nice with them. Meanwhile, though, she sent her daughter Suki out into the swamp, ostensibly to go get some water. But as the story goes, there was a conch shell that had been hidden out in the swamp that could be blown as a signal to anyone around that there was trouble and that help was needed. So she sends Suki out to blow the conch shell, which she apparently does. And meanwhile, they're drinking, she's providing them food. And as they get more and more relaxed, they eventually decide to stack their weapons against the wall in the cabin. And once she's served them some food and there they seem at ease, she begins to steal away the weapons to hand them to Suki, to hand them out the door. And after about the third weapon or so, they discover what she's doing. And so she grabs the weapon, and as the picture here depicts, points the weapon at the soldiers and promises that if anybody makes a move on her, she will shoot him dead. And so apparently, one of the soldiers attempted to rush her, and she shot him dead, so the story goes, and immediately grabbed another weapon. Remember that in these days, all these weapons are muzzle loaded. They have one shot and one shot only. So it's important that she had multiple weapons there available to them. So she grabs the second weapon and again warns them, if anybody makes a move on me, I will shoot him dead. And apparently a second soldier decided, well, I'll give it a go. And she shot him dead as well, and grabbed a third weapon. So after she shot the second soldier, the story then takes a bit of a comedic turn. One of the descriptions of Nancy Hart was that she was cross eyed, or at least partially cross eyed. And apparently, as the story goes, the soldiers at this point were uncertain at whom she was pointing the weapon. And so because they didn't know which one would be shot if she shot someone again, they decided at this point, to not rush her. Soon thereafter, her husband showed up at the cabin with support. Suki had blown the conch shell. They'd heard it, they came, but the husband sort of quipped comically, basically, I can see I'm not needed here. Then the story takes a bit of a dark turn because Nancy is so incensed that these soldiers have invaded her home that she did not believe that capturing them was sufficient and insisted instead that they be hanged. And indeed, that's as, again, as the story is related, that's what occurred. The soldiers were hanged outside the cabin, out in the woods at her insistence. So it's a story that is packed with, certainly bravery, with quick thinking, certainly with the sort of loyalty to her new country. It has a bit of a comedic element, but it also has this sort of darker element to it at the end there. But that is by far the most famous of the Nancy Hart stories.

Yes, and, I mean, it's very sensational. I would imagine that this would be a very entertaining story to tell, to read about. And it seems to have quite, like you were saying, quite a few different themes. I mean, and some surprising twists and turns. I mean, first of all, we have this woman as our protagonist who is protecting her home sort of in this more masculine, more man's role, and she's been depicted more masculine, not very feminine. And I'm wondering why that is the case. I mean, what did this kind of story mean to readers at the time? What was its agenda? If you, if we can kind of piece together an agenda, what would this have meant to people of the time when the story was popularized? And perhaps you could tell us, when was the story popularized?

So this is where the story of the stories gets quite interesting. There is no current written record of the stories until 1848.

Wow.

Almost 75 years after the story and the other stories would have taken place. There are later references. Two later historians claim to have read about these stories in the 1820s, but that source material does not seem to exist. So the best thinking is that these stories circulated, uh, at least for about 50 years or so, 40 or 50 years simply as oral tradition, and they would have been powerful. So we're dealing sort of 1782 to about 1840. And in Georgia, that's a time period that's known as this, as the frontier period. So Georgia at the end of the revolution existed mostly of just a strip along the Augusta river, along the Savannah river, and along the coast. But over the next 30 years, from the 1780s into the 1820s, Euro Georgians began moving west. Now, this, of course, prompted the removal of the Native Americans, ending tragically, of course, in the trail of tears and the displacement to Oklahoma. But for the Euro Americans, this was the frontier period, a time when self reliance values like self reliance strength, both male and female strength, the need to protect your own home, there's no police force, there's no army around. And so these kind of values during frontier Georgia, I think, would have been well liked. They would have been understood to be important values in that kind of rough and tumble frontier setting. Gender roles are not as clearly defined as they would be once you get sort of more civilized areas. And again, everybody had to be strong in a frontier setting. So during the oral phase, that's probably what really appealed to the circulation of the stories.

Oh, that totally makes sense. Like you said, when you're out in the frontier, everybody has to do their part. Everybody has to be strong and courageous against the wilderness and the threats. And, of course, with the story going from an oral history tradition and then being written down, I'm curious, who was the first to actually write these stories down? Am I correct in understanding that there was a female authority?

Yes. So the first person to write these stories down, at least, is what we have in terms of sources, was a woman named Elizabeth Ellet. Now, Elizabeth Ellet was a lead figure in the women's rights movement in the United States in the 1840s. That sort of culminated with the 1848 Seneca Falls convention that had a declaration about women's rights. And Ellet, as part of that movement, wrote a book about women in the American Revolution that told stories of different women's contributions to the American Revolution. And it's in that context that she picked up the Nancy Hart stories and began and published them. She published them in this book. And there was also a very famous magazine of the day called Goatee's Ladies Magazine, Godey's Lady's journal. And so it was published there as well. And so for Elizabeth Ellet, this seemed to be part of her desire to see women elevated in american society, particularly in terms of. Of rights. Again, we have someone fighting in the revolution that's supposed to be about individual rights. And then Elizabeth Ellet in the 1840s is part of a movement that is pushing forward women's rights, what's known as first wave feminism in american history. And so, yeah, she's the first one to pick, picked the stories up. But soon after that, a couple of Georgia based folks picked the stories up. In the 1850s. There were two, two Georges, George White and George Gilmer. And they seemed to be more interested in the stories as a way to elevate Georgia, the state of Georgia, as a kind of valuable partner in the revolution. So I always tell my students when I teach Georgia history, the sort of sad story is that Georgia didn't really play a crucial part in the American Revolution. Most of the action was elsewhere. And so Georgians were constantly looking for ways to try to elevate the state of Georgia, its history, its prominence. And this seems to have been, in the 1850s, one of the ways that they could, thought they could sort of equal the playing field. Look, we have our own revolutionary heroines in this case. And it was in the 1850s that the state legislature created park county. And so there is this. There's this sort of movement in Georgia in the 1850s to institutionalize and memorialize Nancy Hart. So it has, in the pre civil war period, has a bit of a women's rights, of elevation to it, but also sort of bringing Georgia to prominence.

It's really interesting how this one story, going back to the american revolution, then used for various reasons, you know, women's rights, the sort of patriotism of Georgia, to say, hey, we're important, too. We were a part of this, too. But then it's even used past the pre civil war era and into the civil war and even the reconstruction era in the south. And how is it used in that era, the story that goes all the way back to the American Revolution?

Sure. So there are at least two instances, records of two instances during the Civil War itself in Georgia, where the term Nancy Hartz as a sort of designation of a group of women who are defending their homes. Two stories that came up. One was in northeast Georgia. It's a bit of a comical, farcical story. The story is that a group of women who were going to kind of play a trick on an old man in the area, they sort of dressed up as soldiers, scared him into thinking that it was a Union army that had showed up. The town got all kind of wound up about it, and it turned out to be a bit of a joke, a bit of a farce. The other story centers on events in Lagrange, Georgia, right at the end of the war. The story here is that a group of women did actually arm themselves. So at the end of the war, in the spring of 1865, Georgia had been invaded. Sherman's march to the sea was from November to December 1864. And there were units of the Union army pushing in from Alabama in towards sort of western central Georgia, towards Lagrange area. And with most of the men of the town gone or injured, or dead from the war. This group of women took it upon themselves to arm themselves so as to try to protect their town. And when the Union army showed up, they opened a parlay with the Union commander. And eventually, as the story goes, he agreed not to destroy the town if they would lay down their arms. Of course, Sherman had burnt Atlanta to the ground, and so protecting their town was a victory. The curious thing about these two stories is while there is period documentation for the first story, there's not period documentation for this second story, and we only know it from later tellings. But in both, especially in the second story, it fits with the idea of defending hearth and home, defending your town, your land, your area. And that story was much of what the south claimed it was doing during the civil war, that it was the party that had been invaded and that it was simply defending itself from northern invaders. So a group. Right, this idea of defending one's home, whether it's your actual house or your town or your state, all of that fit very well with the kind of civil war ethos that the south was putting forward about what it was doing in the war. So, yes, the Nancy Hart stories do seem to have been picked up in the civil war as part of let's do what Nancy did. Let's defend our home against invaders that we don't like.

Yeah. So, I mean, here's the story that embodies this more general idea of, like you said, to protect one's home, to show courage or bravery against the perceived enemies. So it seems like this story really has some staying power because of how often it can be used and can sort of embody the time, various times in history. Now, one question we have yet to answer is, did she really exist? Was there actually a Nancy Hart that can be documented who may have inspired these stories? But was there a woman named Nancy Hart in northeast Georgia at any time during this era of history?

Yes, there was a Nancy Hart, and we know this best because of the work of a very famous 20th century Georgia historian named E. Merton Coulter. In between the time of the civil war and the middle of the 20th century, the Nancy Hart stories faded for a while. But around the turn of the 20th century, they became very popular again, and there began to be all sorts of programs. The dar, the daughters of the American Revolution, got a hold of the stories, and there was a Nancy Hart chapter of the dar created in Milledgeville. And so they. In the. In the teens and twenties, these stories became very popular again. And finally, by the 1950s, E. Merton Coulter said, okay, I'm going to find out as best I can. Was there a Nancy Hart? Because by this point, it was. There was some questioning as to whether Nancy Hart ever existed. There had been a historian around 1900 who had forcefully said there never was a Nancy Hart. And Coulter wanted to find out. So he did an extensive search of public records and other records at the time, and he very clearly established that there was a Nancy Hart who lived in the area, probably moved there from North Carolina sometimes prior to the war, lived in northeast Georgia. Eventually, after the war, moved down to the Brunswick area and then finally removed all the way to Henderson, Kentucky, which is on the Ohio river in sort of southwestern Kentucky, and even was able to discover that the Dar had located her grave in Henderson, Kentucky. And so, yes, there absolutely was a real person named Nancy Hart. Now, whether that Nancy Hart bore any physical or legendary resemblance is a, you know, sort of different question, but she's. She's not made up whole cloth. There was a. Was a person, and Coulter himself was quite convinced that there, for the stories to have had the staying power that they did, that they circulated by oral tradition for 50 or more years, that there probably had to have been some level of veracity to the stories, probably embellished, to be sure. But Coulter was fairly convinced that there was some level of truth to some of these various stories.

Well, that's fascinating. And it brings to mind the threat that Nancy Hart faced. Did people in northeast Georgia really have a fear that was based in some reality of loyalists coming to their home? Was this something that could have easily have happened or likely have happened, or would this have been surprising to someone in northeast Georgia during the American Revolution?

Yeah. Now, one of the reasons why the stories work so well is because what they described fits exactly what was going on in northeast Georgia. Again, in the sort of 1781 82 period, Georgia had been reoccupied by the British. The British had fled Georgia in 76, but in the late seventies, reoccupied Georgia. And about 17 81, 82, it began to break out again in the Augusta northeast, along the Savannah river there a really very bloody and brutal conflict between local patriot forces and local Tory forces. Now, this was mostly not regulars. You didn't have armies, hundreds or thousands of people marching around northeast Georgia. Most of this were small bands of people, sort of guerrilla warfare, quick raids, trying to do really more intimidate, frighten, dispirit the other side rather than win some big military victory on a battlefield. And so all of the Nancy Hart stories, the one we've talked about, there are others where she's defending her cabin. There's one where she's, she and a group of people trying to fight off a group of Tories. They're in a sort of earthen fort, and she discovers a cannon and is able to fire the cannon and scare them away. There's another story where she dresses up as a man and acts in a sort of a wild and insane fashion and infiltrates the Tory camp and learns intelligence. So it's these kinds of stories that would have fit very well if the stories had been about her putting together a company of soldiers and joining the army that wouldn't have tracked with what was going on. But the war was particularly brutal and ugly in northeast Georgia in 17, 81, 82. So, yes, the stories track very closely with the kinds of events that would have occurred in the war in that time period.

Right. So this certainly spoke directly to the people who were passing this story through oral tradition. It's spoken to people of the women's suffrage movement. It's spoken to those in the south of the civil war and even in the Reconstruction era. I wonder, have you seen instances of Nancy Hart's story being used in more modern times in the present day? And if so, how has that story been utilized for people today?

So the early 20th century, as I mentioned earlier, was a bit, there was a big sort of push of Nancy Hart memorabilia. There was a Nancy Hart highway. That was the period when the DAR actually bought property. There was supposed to be where the Nancy Hart cabin was, and that's a state park today. You can go visit where her cabin was supposed to have been. There was a Nancy Hart train for a while, a racehorse named after Nancy Hart. Just a whole conglomeration. There was apparently a tv show. I was not able to locate a recording of the tv show from the 1950s about Nancy Hart. The Hartwell area did produce a big parade in the 1950s, and there were instances, there are images, but one woman in particular sort of became the embodiment of Nancy Hart in the sixties and seventies. And there's actually a photograph of her with Joe Tory, who was the Atlanta Braves manager in the 1980s. She had gone, this is Nancy Hart Day at the Atlanta Braves in the 1980s. So it has continued to bubble up. There was a women's group in Atlanta in the 1990s that named her as one of Georgia's great women citizens. And so you will occasionally still bubble up. I'll have to say I've lived in Georgia for 30 years. I don't, I can't say that it's a kind of constant topic, at least in middle Georgia. Maybe it is more in northeast Georgia. You could probably tell me more about whether to what extent it bubbles up in northeast Georgia. So, yes, it continued to have legs all through the 20th century in all sorts of imaginative kinds of ways.

Yes. And I know that we do get asked about Nancy Hart, which is one of the reasons that we wanted to do this program, to shed some more light on what we can know and what the legends are. And for those who are interested in learning even more, of course, I would certainly recommend Doctor Scott's article, which if you have a JSTOR account, which is free, then you can certainly read that and the link in the description will be available. But Doctor Scott, are there any other resources or perhaps anything else that you wish that people knew about this legend or that that you, that you want to share with us today before we conclude?

Sure. So, you know, the best, my article is more about the stories and the provenance of the stories. The emergenculter article that I mentioned earlier. And it also should be available on JSTOR, published by the Georgia Historical Quarterly. So you should be able to find that article as well. And that's the sort of best about the person of Nancy Hart, less so than the stories of Nancy Hart. You know, I think the thing I'll go back to sort of where I began. To me, the story of the stories is as interesting as the stories themselves. Because what you really see is how, how humans and historians use stories to relay and support messages, different messages that they want to support. Humans love to tell stories. We tell all kinds of stories about what we had for lunch yesterday or where we went on vacation, or, I mean, you have social media now where people post Instagram and Facebook, and they're just telling a story about their lives. And so stories are very powerful message bearers, not just the narrative of the story, what happened, but the meaning behind the story, and how sometimes the same story can be used for a lot of different purposes. We talked about how it was used in the 1840s to push forward women's rights. In the 1850s. It was used to sort of bolster Georgia's reputation around the turn of the 20th century. As I mentioned, the Dar picked it up. And this was a period of sometimes ugly american patriotism. So there was a phrase from the time period, 100% american, and it was used as a kind of anti immigrant slogan. And Nancy Hart was, her stories were used for that purpose as well. This is a sort of true american. So the stories can, you know, stories can be used for good or they can be used for ill. None of this, of course, is Nancy Hart's fault. She had, she didn't do anything about the writing of the stories as far as we know. But yeah, I think it's, her tale is a testimony to the power of stories and how they have, they have historical value, but they also have civic value, they have personal value. These are inspiring stories. To the extent that they are true, they can be quite inspiring.

Well, Doctor Scott, thank you so much for joining us and sharing all of this about Nancy Hart and to our members. I encourage you to read Doctor Scott's article. The link will be in the description, and I'll also include a link to the you said it was authored by E. Merton Coulter. E. Merton Coulter. So that I'll put that in the link description as well. And we encourage you to dive in and learn even more. Because like Doctor Scott said, this is a story that carries a message and who knows how it will be used in the future. And by knowing even more about the story's history, you can be a bit more connected to how it's going to be used in the future. And even right now, who knows who's using.

Then again, this is a production of the Northeast Georgia History center in Gainesville, Georgia. Our podcast by Andrew our digital insight program real pleasure made possible by the AdA May Ioster Education center. Please join us next week for another episode of then again.