Lida Dutton, Lizzie Dutton, and Sarah Steer: Champions of the First Amendment

By Linda Harris Sittig

This month, one hundred sixty years ago, three young women from the tiny hamlet of Waterford, Virginia, exercised their right to freedom of the press by publishing an underground newspaper.

The year was 1864, and the United States had completed the third year of the Civil War. Sarah and Lizzie were in their 20s, and Lida was only nineteen. All three were Quakers, and as such, their families sided with the ideals of the Union, even though they lived in Confederate territory.

Waterford was a small, predominantly Quaker farming village about 50 miles west of Washington, D.C. The 1860 census recorded 999 residents. The Meeting, to which many residents belonged, stood united in its beliefs, forbidding the ownership of enslaved people. Although Virginia voted to secede from the Union, the Quakers of Waterford remained steadfast in their support of it.

This is not to say that Confederate patriotism did not exist in the Village; it did among other residents.

As of June 1, 1861, the United States Postmaster General suspended all mail delivery in states that had joined the Confederacy. Letters, newspapers, and written communication rapidly ceased. Three years later, in late April of 1864, Lida, Lizzie, and Sarah met in the Dutton home and drafted the first issue of what would become The Waterford News.

The paper was four pages long and featured patriotic editorials, poetry, riddles, local news, and bits of humor to cheer the weary reader. Its price was 10 cents, and the proceeds were sent to the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a non-government organization that provided Union troops with medical care.

Copies of their newspaper needed to be smuggled north across the Potomac River to be printed by The Baltimore American, for it would have been impossible for the girls to distribute the pro-Union paper from their homes.

It is not surprising that they devised a newspaper, as all three girls were quite literate, according to the Quaker tradition of equal education for girls and boys. But they must have realized the danger of publishing an underground newspaper.

Copies of The Waterford News traveled north, and Horace Greeley, publisher of the New York Tribune, praised their efforts. One of its eight issues made its way to the White House to President Abraham Lincoln.

The girls wrote about life in Waterford and the deprivations of war that had touched every family. They mentioned the few stores, defunct due to the war, and how residents relied on what they could grow to feed their families.

In late November of 1864, Union General Ulysses Grant authorized a crushing raid on Waterford and western Loudoun County. Union soldiers were ordered to burn barns and fields and kill or take livestock in an attempt to deny Confederate troops any means of sustenance. For the residents of this part of Virginia, the raid meant devastation to Confederate as well as Union supporters. Starvation does not choose sides.

Once the war was over, it would take Waterford (and countless other southern towns and villages) years to recover from the overwhelming destruction of lives from a country that had fought against itself.

And, whether you favor the Confederate or Union point of view, the importance of Lida Dutton, Lizzie Dutton, and Sarah Steer is that they followed their convictions of publishing news and leaving a detailed account of life in a small southern town engulfed by the atrocities of war.

Thank you to John Divine, Meredith Bean McMath, Bronwyn Souders, John Souders, and the Waterford Foundation, from whose work I was able to research and write this month’s blog. A special thank you goes to the women of the Waterford Book Club, who suggested Lida, Lizzie, and Sarah as this month’s Strong Women.

And, just in case you may be wondering about any attachment I might have to Waterford, it is where I was married 51 years ago, in a small brick church that survived the Civil War.

~ Linda

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Cut From Strong Cloth, Last Curtain Call, Counting Crows, B-52 DOWN, and Opening Closed Doors.

My current in progress is a WWII story about Rory Sullivan and the women who built the Liberty Ships, which carried cargo to our soldiers overseas.