305F Fall 2026 GMU Retired Faculty Association: The Tory’s Wife

Jane Welborn Spurgin was a patriotic supporter of the American Revolution who welcomed the Continental Army general Nathaneal Greene to her North Carolina home. Jane’s husband, William, was a Tory whose loyalist militia unit would soon engage Greene’s army in battle at Guilford Courthouse. After the war, Jane remained in North Carolina while William fled to Canada. Most historians see the American Revolution as a brutal civil war that divided communities and even families. In the Spurgins’ case, the war that ended their marriage also nearly left their large family homeless. But the resilient Jane fought to reclaim the disgraced William’s confiscated property as her own. In the process, she claimed the rights of citizenship—an unusual, even radical, claim for a woman of her era.

Cynthia Kierner is a professor of History at George Mason University, where she teaches courses on early America, women and gender, and disasters in history. Her most recent book, The Tory’s Wife, was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize and winner of the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize from the Southern Association for Women Historians.