Ann Eliza Schuyler was born in Oct. 1752 at New York City, New York County, New York. She and
Johannes Jacob Bleecker obtained a marriage license on 21. Mar. 1769 at New York City, New York County, New York. Ann Eliza Schuyler married
Johannes Jacob Bleecker on 29. Mar. 1769 at Dutch Reformed Church, New York City, New York County, New York. Ann Eliza Schuyler died on 23. Nov. 1784 at Tomhannock, Rensselaer County, New York, at age 32. Ann Eliza Bleecker
BLEECKER, Ann Eliza, poet, born in New York city in October 1752 ; died in Tomhannoek, near Albany, New York, 23 November 1783. She was the youngest &mightier of Brandt Schuyler, of New York, and passed her early life in that city. In 1769 she married John J. Bleeeker, of New Rochelle, and, after a year's residence in Poughkeepsie, settled in Tomhannock. Here her life was very happy until the arrival of Burgoyne's army in 1777, when she fled with her young children under conditions of great suffering, reaching Albany at first, and then Red Hook, where she remained until after the surrender of Burgoyne. Soon after returning to her home at Tomhannoek she was taken sick and died° Her poems, devoted principally to domestic topics, were rather melancholy, and were written as the occasion suggested, without any intention of publication. A number of these, however, appeared in the "New York Magazine." Some years after her death her stories and poems were collected and published under the title of "Posthumous Works of Ann Eliza Bleecker in Prose and Verse," with a memoir by her daughter, Margaretta V. Faugeres (new ed., New York, 1809). BLEECKER, Anthony, author, born in New York city in October 1770; died there 13 March 1827. He was the son of Anthony Lispenard Bleecker, who resided on the estate through which Bleecker street now passes, and from which it has taken its name. He was graduated at Columbia in 1761 and studied law, but never was a successful practitioner on account of his unconquerable diffidence, His natural tastes led him to the pursuit of letters, and for thirty years he was a prolific contributor of both prose and verse to the periodical literature of New York and Philadelphia. The "Narrative of the Brig Commerce" is one of his best-known works. He was one of the founders of the New York Historical Society, and excelled all his associates, except Pintard, in devotion to the interests of the new institution; also a trustee of the New York Society Library from 1810 till 1826. The poet Bryant wrote in 182a: "Anthony Bleecker, who read everything that came out, and sometimes wrote for the magazines, was an amusing companion, always ready with his puns, of whom Miss Eliza Fenno, before her marriage to Verplanck in 1811, wrote that she had gone into the country to take refuge from Anthony Bleecker's puns."*His nephew, Richard Wade, born in New York City, 27 August 1821; died there, 21 April 1875o He was engaged in business in New York City, and for some time was president, of the North American Fire Insurance Company. He was an active patron of the arts and sciences, and the literary receptions held at his residence wore attended by prominent artists and authors. Mr. Bleecker was a member of the New York Historical Society, a fellow of the National Academy of Design, a member of the American Institute, and also of other art and historical societies both at home and abroad. Ann Eliza Bleecker
(1752-1783)
Ann Eliza Bleecker never published anything in her lifetime. Instead, she enclosed her numerous poems and narratives in letters that she circulated among a small group of family and friends. With her fictionalized Indian captivity narrative, The History of Maria Kittle, she took this strategy one step further, presenting the story itself as a letter to her half-sister Susan Ten Eyck. She begins with the salutation “Dear Susan” and interrupts the plot intermittently to address Susan directly and comment on the action. In addition, Bleecker later included the narrative in another letter to her cousin, where she suggested that, like Susan, her young cousin might also benefit from the story. Indian captivity stories, such as those of Hannah Dustan and Mary Rowlandson, were tremendously popular in the late eighteenth century, and Bleecker’s fictionalized account invigorated the genre by giving it an explicitly didactic dimension that links it to the emerging genre of the didactic novel. Bleecker’s mode of expression was influenced heavily by the eighteenth-century British cult of sensibility, and she wrote in the mannered, often hyperbolic, language of feeling popular in didactic fiction.
Bleecker was born in October 1752 in New York City to Margarette van Wyck and Brandt Schuyler, a prosperous merchant, and at a young age she acquired a local reputation for her precocious poetic talent. She often composed “extempore” in the midst of company and at the request of friends. Her poetry ranged from the sophisticated and witty to the satirical and sentimental, as illustrated by the samples in the Heath Anthology. . At seventeen she married John J. Bleecker, and the couple settled on a bucolic estate in Tomhanick, a town eighteen miles north of Albany where John Bleecker had inherited land. Geographically isolated and far from the familiar urban context of her family and friends, Bleecker addressed all her work to friends to alleviate her loneliness. The move to Tomhanick represented the first in a series of losses that seemed to Bleecker to characterize her life. Her involvement in her grief suggests that she was self-consciously fashioning a poetic identity that drew heavily on the era’s “sentimental” virtues.
The central event that provoked Bleecker’s melancholia occurred early in the American Revolution, in the summer of 1777. Threatened by the approaching British troops of General John Burgoyne, who led an expedition from Canada against the colonies, the Bleecker family was forced to flee on foot to Albany with their two daughters, six-year-old Margaretta and the infant Abella. In the course of their journey, Abella died of dysentery. They continued on and were joined by Bleecker’s mother in Red Hook, who also died on the journey. This death was followed by that of Bleecker’s sister, Caty Swits, who had joined them for their return trip to Tomhanick. Every generation in Bleecker’s supportive circle of women had been devastated. Four years later, in 1781, John Bleecker was kidnapped by a band of wandering British soldiers. Though he was soon returned to his family, the trauma of the event led Bleecker to miscarry. From that summer in 1777 until her death in 1783, Bleecker suffered from intense bouts of depression, and maternal loss figures prominently in much of her writing.
Maria Kittle contains many typical features of the Indian captivity narrative: it presents graphic scenes of violence, depicts Native Americans as treacherous savages who mercilessly slay infants and women, and recounts the hardships of Maria’s journey as a captive. Yet in the last third of the narrative, Maria Kittle diverges from the genre by representing Maria’s experiences in Canada after she has been redeemed. Indeed, the story of her captivity carries less emotional weight than this final section in which three colonial women tearfully recount their tales of maternal loss to a sympathetic group of British and French women. Significantly, these stories bear a number of similarities to Bleecker’s experience of losing her own daughter as a result of the invasion of anti-insurrectionary British troops. In transposing her tale of maternal loss onto the Indian captivity narrative, Bleecker expresses the desire for a redemptive community of women who achieve a degree of agency through the acts of telling, hearing, and responding “appropriately” to stories. Yet this agency relies on the racist conventions of Indian captivity narratives that demonize Native Americans, and Bleecker deploys the powerful rhetorical strategies of sentimentalism in the construction of a national identity.
After her death in 1783, her daughter, Margarette Faugères, also a poet (see her poetry in this anthology), published a significant portion of Bleecker’s work, which included twenty-three letters, thirty-six poems, an unfinished short historical novel, The History of Henry and Ann, and The History of Maria Kittle. This material first appeared in The New-York Magazine in 1790 and 1791 and then in a collection entitled The Posthumous Works of Ann Eliza Bleecker in 1793. That Maria Kittle was republished separately in 1797 attests to its popularity.