A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

The period preceding that in which Martha Ballard composed her diary was tumultuous for the fledgling United States. Martha was born in Oxford, Massachusetts, in 1735, while the United States was still firmly under the control of British colonial power. Ephraim Ballard, Martha’s husband, worked as a land surveyor for the still-uncolonized lands of New England and moved to Maine in 1775. He followed many other family members north, including one of his own brothers, one of Martha’s brothers, and Martha’s brother-in-law. The rest of the Ballard family arrived in Hallowell, Maine, in the Kennebec Valley in 1777, during the Revolutionary War that would resolve with the Battle of Yorktown in 1781. In 1783, the British signed the Treaty of Paris, officially recognizing the United States of America as a sovereign nation and formally ending the military conflict. Politically, Ephraim Ballard was aligned with the “Tory” cause, the American colonists who were loyal to the British during the conflict. He did not engage directly in the war effort, though, which safeguarded his and his family’s safety and success in the Kennebec Valley. 

At the start of the period covered in Martha’s diary, the United States remained in a state of flux; the Constitution had yet to be written and ratified, so the only national governmental document was the Articles of Confederation, which left most of the governing powers to the individual states. In Maine, the Ballards’ lives were shaped most concretely by their immediate community; this is evident throughout Martha’s diary and the references to local authorities and the justice system of the town of Hallowell, namely in Ephraim’s and later their son Jonathan’s time in debtor’s jail. By 1788, the Constitution was ratified, and George Washington was elected the first president in 1789. The United States began to take its now-familiar shape with the emergence of the federal government, though these monumental changes do not make many direct appearances in Martha’s diary. Ulrich contrasts the lack of history in Martha’s diary with the abundance of history in Henry Sewall’s, who served as town clerk of Hallowell and Augusta: “[B]ut the political events that inhabit so much of the foreground in Sewall’s diary are only a hazy background, if that, in hers” (42). Martha surely was aware of the monumental changes happening around her, but her diary was a space for her to write about her day-to-day life, particularly the minutiae of surviving in a frontier-like setting. 

The diary ends with Martha’s death in 1812, nine days before war broke out again between the United States and the British Empire, aptly called the War of 1812. History bookends Martha’s diary with war and battles and bloodshed, yet her diary recounts not the momentous pieces of history that fill textbooks but the day-to-day of a real woman that paints a portrait of her community, nestled on the icy riverbank.