Alexandra Cox

The story of how Clementina Rind became a pivotal figure in early American journalism is one of resilience, intellect and fortitude. Navigating personal loss and political upheaval, this trailblazing female printer and newspaper publisher helped shape the ideological foundations of the American Revolution. Among other accomplishments, Rind published a fierce defense of the rights of the American Colonies by Thomas Jefferson—a pamphlet that is widely viewed as a predecessor to the Declaration of Independence. She also defended the role of the free press in a time of dramatic political conflict by showcasing independent voices and perspectives, including those of women.

Yet she has long been overlooked. As Edward C. Papenfuse, the former archivist for the State of Maryland and the author of an article about Rind, says, “She has not gotten the attention that she deserves … which I think is unfortunate, because she is truly a remarkable individual.”

In January 1756, Rind and her father, the Reverend John Grierson, embarked on a life-altering journey, traveling from England to Annapolis, Maryland, aboard the sloop Greyhound. Convicted in London for conducting clandestine marriages, Grierson was sentenced to 14 years of penal servitude in the American Colonies. The pair’s voyage was fraught with danger; cramped conditions, disease and other threats claimed the lives of around 11 percent of the estimated 50,000 convicts transported to the Colonies in the 18th century. For Rind, the journey was particularly harrowing, as she witnessed her father succumb to illness en route.

A letter from Rind to her friend Augusta Smith
A letter from Rind to a friend back in England Alexandra Cox
A page from one of Rind's letters to her friend Augusta Smith
A page from one of Rind's letters Alexandra Cox

After the Greyhound arrived in Maryland, Rind wrote two letters home. These missives, now housed at the National Archives in London, followed a protracted path back to England: Sent on a ship called the Enterprize, they were seized by a French privateer who captured the vessel on December 8, 1756. Just nine days later, the British retook the Enterprize near Guernsey and arranged for the contents of the ship to be held at the Admiralty Court.

In her letter to her friend Augusta Smith, Rind wrote of the anguish she felt over her father’s death: “The Almighty to complete my sufferings has deprived me of him, and all the comfort I enjoy is that his afflictions are at an end.” Rind’s surviving correspondence, a rare record from an 18th-century woman of her social status and young age, conveys the profound loss and uncertainty she faced in a foreign land. As she told Smith, her time in Maryland involved “more severe troubles than I have yet encountered.”

Like many women of the Colonial era, Rind’s life history must be told in part through accounts of the men she was connected to, whose lives were more frequently documented in the public record. Her experiences were deeply entwined with her father’s Jacobite connections. In the mid-18th century, Charles Edward Stuart, son of the exiled Catholic claimant James Francis Edward Stuart, sought to reassert what he argued was his father’s divine right to the British throne. Better known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, Charles led a Jacobite rebellion (named after the Latin word for James) that garnered support in Scotland and Wales. But the movement faltered after the 1746 Battle of Culloden, in which the British Army dealt a devastating defeat to Charles and his followers.

The Grierson family’s commitment to Jacobite ideals was reflected even in its members’ names. “Clementina” was likely inspired by Maria Clementina Sobieska, Charles’ mother. The family’s surname further reflected its patriarch’s connection to Scotland: He changed it at some point from “Greer,” the Anglicized version of the Scottish name “Grierson.” This legacy of dissent shaped Rind’s worldview, influencing her time in America and her future work in the press.

Jacobite claimant James Francis Edward Stuart
Jacobite claimant James Francis Edward Stuart Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
Charles Edward Stuart, the Jacobite leader better known as Bonnie Prince Charlie
Charles Edward Stuart, the Jacobite leader better known as Bonnie Prince Charlie Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Ordained around 1742, Grierson was a Nonjuror minister, meaning he refused to swear allegiance to Britain’s Protestant monarchs, William and Mary, as well as their heirs. Nonjurors were often suspected of supporting the Jacobite cause, and Grierson’s political allegiances placed him under constant scrutiny. In 1746, authorities investigated Grierson for disseminating Jacobite pamphlets. Although Grierson was not formally prosecuted for spreading Jacobite propaganda, the eyes of the crown were on him.

Prior to his brush with the law, Grierson supported himself and his family by working for Alexander Keith, a minister and Jacobite sympathizer who made a living by marrying people outside of the formal system required by the Church of England. Among other stipulations, the church called for formal announcements (called banns) of upcoming nuptials to be read in a parish three weeks before the ceremony. For those hoping to wed immediately, whether to avoid family scrutiny or cover up an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, clandestine marriages performed by Anglican clergy offered a welcome alternative.

In 1743, Keith was sent to Fleet Prison for his off-the-books activities. While he was imprisoned, he deputized Grierson to conduct marriages on his behalf. Grierson was eventually arrested, too, but was acquitted on charges of “falsely imprisoning [a] spinster in an uninhabited house, in order to get her married, against her will and consent.”

In 1753, Parliament sought to regulate the clandestine marriage trade, which accounted for an estimated one-third of all marriages in Britain in the first half of the 18th century. The resulting Marriage Act, which took effect in March 1754, required couples to obtain a license or organize a reading of banns before participating in a formal ceremony at a parish church.

A caricature of a clandestine marriage
A caricature of a clandestine marriage Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Grierson’s trials began in earnest in 1755. He was arrested and charged with marrying two actors from the Drury Lane Theater, Joseph Vernon and Jane Poitier, without a license or banns. The marriage was controversial because Vernon ultimately informed on Grierson, forcing his arrest and trial at the Old Bailey in London.

Public opinion was largely on Grierson’s side, especially after he published a pamphlet pleading for the townsfolk to be charitable and not let his family starve. At one point, the audience at the Drury Lane booed Vernon off the stage.

Grierson’s legal troubles had a strong effect on his young daughter, who was born around 1737. Writing to a friend after her arrival in Maryland, Rind bemoaned the suffering that her father had endured, noting that “his constitution was broke by the persecutions of his enemies,” and that her own “resolution [was] already almost lost by so long a series of misfortunes.”

In late 1755, Grierson gifted Rind a book by the Nonjuring bishop who’d ordained him, Archibald Campbell. A complex treatise on the principles and commitments of the splinter Orthodox British Church, the text required an advanced level of reading to fully understand. Combined with her later letters, Rind’s ownership of the book is a sign that she was highly literate. In an age when only 40 percent of women in England could read and write, this fact was even more noteworthy. Rind’s copy eventually made its way into the collection of Thomas Jefferson, a famous figure whom she would later befriend.

Rind's signature on the copy of Archibald Campbell's Doctrines of a Middle State Between Death and the Resurrection
Rind's signature on a copy of Archibald Campbell's treatise Library of Congress

Upon arriving in Annapolis in April 1756, Rind found herself a stranger in an unfamiliar world. She described the bleakness of her situation in a letter, writing, “I [am] an entire stranger, nothing but wretchedness and misery before me.” Yet her education and literacy presented her with opportunities. As A. Roger Ekirch, a historian at Virginia Tech, says, Rind was in a similar situation to Benjamin Franklin, “who arrived in Philadelphia practically penniless … but he was literate.”

Annapolis, a prosperous Colonial capital thriving on the tobacco trade, was home to a burgeoning intellectual community. Rind’s connection to William Clajon, a prominent educator in the city, likely provided her with work and social connections. By 1762, she had married William Rind, a printer and bookseller whose own father had been transported to Maryland as a convict in 1716, after he fought in a battle for the Jacobite cause. William had apprenticed with Jonas Green, publisher of the Maryland Gazette, and he shared Rind’s commitment to dissenting ideals.

The tides turned dramatically for the newly married couple when William and Green suspended publication of the Maryland Gazette in protest of the 1765 Stamp Act, which taxed paper goods like legal documents and newspapers. This decision gained the attention of revolutionaries in the neighboring colony, who feared the Virginia Gazette was too loyal to the British. As Jefferson later recalled, “We had but one press, and that having the whole business of the government and no competitor for public favor, nothing disagreeable to the governor could be got into it.” Local patriots recruited William to come to Virginia and publish a new iteration of the newspaper.

A copy of the September 5, 1765, Maryland Gazette, featuring a skull and crossbones in place of a stamp to protest the Stamp Act
A 1765 copy of the Maryland Gazette, featuring a skull and crossbones in place of a stamp in protest of the Stamp Act Maryland State Archives
The December 3, 1772, edition of the Rinds' Virginia Gazette
The December 3, 1772, edition of the Virginia Gazette Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

The Rinds and their young son departed for Virginia’s capital, Williamsburg, where the couple established a printing press. To distinguish his publication from competing papers in the colony, William created the masthead “Open to all parties, but influenced by none.” The newspaper had approximately 600 subscribers, among them George Washington. In addition to publishing the news, the family press also sold books and pamphlets.

Both the Maryland Gazette and the Virginia Gazette facilitated the capture of enslaved people who had run away by publishing advertisements placed by their enslavers. The Rinds themselves enslaved a man named Dick, who appeared in the inventory of William’s estate; evidence suggests that Dick was an active employee of the press, thus making an essential contribution to the development of the newspaper.

Rind’s early influence on the printing press’ editorial practices is clear. Soon after the family moved, William was charged with publishing the annual Virginia Almanack. One of the first changes he made was ensuring that the almanac’s readership included women, expanding the scope of the 1769 edition to include “enigmas, acrostics, rebuses, queries, paradoxes … for the instruction, use and diversion of both sexes.”

This strategy built on the earlier success of the Virginia Gazette in publishing love-letter acrostics. Knowing about Rind’s passion for exchanging letters with her female friends, it is perhaps unsurprising that William wrote that he was “determined to introduce a ladies diary into Virginia, not doubting but many of the ingenious ladies of this colony will not only approve, but encourage such an entertaining and useful work, in which they will have a certain opportunity of carrying on a poetical correspondence with their friends.”

The family press was also active in publishing patriotic materials, like a petition from the Virginia House of Burgesses protesting taxes imposed by Parliament. William’s loyalty to the cause was further displayed through his signature on a nonimportation resolution in 1770.

Clementina Rind: Triumph & Tragedy in Virginia History
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Between 1763 and 1773, Rind gave birth to five children, four of whom survived to adulthood. But the family’s lives changed irrevocably in August 1773, when William died unexpectedly. The life of a printer was not a lucrative one, and William’s will indicates that his estate was worth just under £300 (around $45,000 today)—not an insignificant amount, but not enough to support Rind and her children, who were forced to sell their house within a month. The local Masonic lodge, which William was a member of, eventually stepped in to offer schooling and clothes for two of his sons.

Rind assumed ownership of the press shortly after her husband’s death, imploring subscribers to invest their faith in her as a printer as she resumed publication. Her takeover of the Virginia Gazette arrived at a critical moment, with fundamental questions about the American Colonies’ future relationship with Britain at stake. Newspapers played a crucial role in these debates, not only in terms of facilitating the spread of news across the Colonies but also in publishing the perspectives of loyalists and patriots alike.

Rind’s paper was no exception. She grappled with issues that continue to dominate journalism today, including press freedom and censorship. In December 1773, she came under fire for refusing to publish an anonymous and potentially libelous letter. In response, she made a statement in defense of editorial standards and fact-checking, insisting that it would not “be justifiable to publish, indiscriminately, every piece that may be offered.”

Martha King, a historian at Princeton University, says that Rind’s status as a leader in publishing work that was critical of the British government made her one of the most powerful women in the Colony of Virginia. As King argues, “The fact that she was overwhelmingly given … the Virginia Gazette on her own, not in conjunction with others, is really significant. She proved in that short amount of time that she was quite capable of handling this and had the support of a larger community.”

Colonial Williamsburg interpreter Emma Cross in character as Clementina Rind
Colonial Williamsburg interpreter Emma Cross in character as Clementina Rind Courtesy of Emma Cross
Cross in character as Rind
Cross in character as Rind Courtesy of Emma Cross

Until recently, Rind was portrayed by interpreters in Colonial Williamsburg, among them Nicole Brown, a doctoral candidate in history at the College of William & Mary, and Emma Cross, who now works at William & Mary Law School. Brown found that it was critical to represent Rind as a “fully complex, three-dimensional” woman—a political actor, a woman, a mother and a business owner.

As conflict between the Colonies and Great Britain grew increasingly likely, Rind steered the press toward more active engagement with political issues, offering a robust defense of the Colonies, says Karen A. Weyler, author of Empowering Words: Outsiders and Authorship in Early America. She also began to publish more letters, poetry and prose by women. Rind even redesigned the masthead of the paper to make her own name more prominent and, through the inclusion of an illustration of a merchant ship, signal a stronger endorsement of the principles of free trade.

In May 1774, nine months after her husband’s death, Rind was selected by the House of Burgesses to act as the sole printer for the colony, edging out her male competitors by a substantial number of votes. This made Rind Virginia’s first female printer, though she was far from the only woman operating a press in Colonial America. As early as 1738, Elizabeth Timothy of South Carolina assumed control of her husband’s press after his death. Rind would likely have worked alongside Anne Catharine Hoof Green, the widow of Maryland Gazette publisher Jonas Green, who took over his press after he died in 1767.

In August 1774, delegates to the First Virginia Convention reached out to Rind, asking her to publish a radical pamphlet authored by Jefferson about the rights of the Colonies. At the time, Jefferson was suffering from dysentery, leaving him unable to attend a gathering of leading Virginians, but he’d shared a draft of his planned comments with several other attendees.

Rind's name appears on the title page of Thomas Jefferson's pamphlet.
Rind's name appears on the title page of Thomas Jefferson's pamphlet. Library of Congress
Rind's name on the front page of the Virginia Gazette
Rind added her name to the masthead of the Virginia Gazette. Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

It was a hot summer, and malaria was raging across the city of Williamsburg. “People were on a knife’s edge,” both at the edge of revolution and in fear of an epidemic, says Brown. The delegates saw Jefferson’s pamphlet as too critical not to publish. Titled “A Summary View of the Rights of British America,” the text was one of the most important statements against the tyranny of the British crown that had been published to date, and it became the basis of the Declaration of Independence. Notably, the pamphlet explicitly called for the end of the African slave trade—a stance that was later omitted from the Declaration of Independence.

Just one month after the pamphlet’s publication, Rind died of “a tedious and painful illness,” in the words of a competing newspaper. The pages of the Virginia Gazette, now run by printer John Pinkney, were filled with tributes to her, including two lengthy elegies; the brief obituary published by her rival printers described her as “a lady of singular merit, and universally esteemed.” Though Rind died before the outbreak of the American Revolution in April 1775, she was living “against the backdrop of these world-changing events,” Cross says.

Rind left behind one of the most significant legacies a woman of her time could: a string of publications that would ultimately help lead America to independence. As she wrote in the Virginia Gazette, “I am not conscious of having deviated from that spirit of freedom which I shall always think it my duty to maintain.”

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Alexandra Cox

Alexandra Cox is criminologist at the University of Reading in the U.K. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar. She is the author of Trapped in a Vice: The Consequences of Confinement for Young People (Rutgers University Press).