Born: 11 June 1769, United States
Died: 1 October 1854
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Anne Newport
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Another prominent travel writer of the time was Anne Newport Royall, an American born in 1769 who was also a social critic, satirist, and journalist. After her husband’s death in 1813, Royall began exploring the United States in her 50s. The ten “Black Books” she published about her travels from 1826 to 1831 were popular for their sardonic humor as well as being descriptive and informative. They are still considered a valuable source of social history; her first book, about a trip to Alabama, is credited with introducing the word “redneck” into popular usage. She also published a novel, The Tennessean (1827), and a play, The Cabinet.
In 1829, the 60-year-old Royall was brought to trial in a Washington, D.C. court for being an “evil disposed person” and a “common scold”—in other words, being a woman who spoke her mind. It has been described as one of the most bizarre trials in D.C. history. Considered one of the most notorious writers of the time, “she could always say something,” one editor declared, “which would set the ungodly in a roar of laughter.” As recounted by Smithsonian Magazine almost two centuries later,
“The Jacksonian era’s most outlandish trial underscored an alarming witch hunt in the press, singling out Royall’s “unruly” boldness as a funny, foul-mouthed, politically charged and outspoken woman in a volatile period of religious fervor. Tossed to the heap of “hysterical” women, Royall was brandished by the federal court and subsequent historians with the shame of drunkards, prostitutes, cranks—the original nasty woman … Women were to be laughed at, lampooned, and satirized—not the opposite.”
In the end, she was convicted. In response, Royall became one of the first women to publish a newspaper in the country, Paul Pry in 1831, followed by The Huntress from 1836 to 1854. She used these as a platform to advocate against government incompetence and corruption and promote states’ rights, access to education, religious tolerance, and Sunday mail service, with President John Quincy Adams referring to her as a “virago errant in enchanted armor.” The New York Observer called her a “giantess of literature.” Decades after her 1854 death, The Washington Post ran a story about her that declared “She was a Holy Terror: Her Pen was as Venomous as a Rattlesnake’s Fangs; Former Washington Editress: How Ann Royall Made Life a Burden to the Public Men of Her Day.” For her part, Royall saw it a bit differently. “The editress has only to say that if the people will do their duty to themselves as faithfully as has been done by them, all will yet be well,” she wrote. “But let no man sleep at his post.”
The following is republished from the Library of Congress. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
In 1831, when very few women worked in any aspect of journalism, Anne Newport Royall boldly entered the field in Washington, DC.
Royall was already known in the nation’s capital for voicing her political opinions. In 1829, she was tried and arrested for the offense of a “common scold,” the crime of a woman who disturbs the public peace by noisy behavior. Her penalty was to be ducked, but the sentence was suspended.
Her four-page weekly newspaper, Paul Pry, later the Huntress, ran for twenty-five years and was described as a forerunner of the modern Washington gossip columns (Mott, American Journalism).