Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton

Sarah was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in August 1759. She was the third of ten children born to James Apthorp (1731–1799), a merchant and slave-trader, and Sarah Wentworth (1735–1820), whose family owned Wentworth Manor in Yorkshire. Her father was one of eighteen children born to her paternal grandparents, Charles Apthorp (1698–1758), a British-born merchant in 18th-century Boston, and Grizzelle (née Eastwicke) Apthorp (1709–1796). Her maternal grandfather was Samuel Wentworth (1708–1766), also a Boston merchant, and his father was John Wentworth (1671–1730), the colonial lieutenant governor of New Hampshire who lived in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. ==Writing==

In 1792, she wrote an anti-slavery poem entitled The African Chief, which was, in fact, an elegy on a slain African at St. Domingo in 1791. before it was proven to have been written by her neighbor, William Hill Brown. ==Personal life==

(1808) In 1781, she married Boston lawyer Perez Morton (1751–1837) at Trinity Church, Boston. Morton served as the speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, from 1806 to 1808 and again from 1810 to 1811, and was the Massachusetts attorney general from 1810 to 1832. The couple lived on a family mansion on State Street. From around 1796 to around 1803, the Mortons owned a house on Dudley Street in Dorchester; the house may have been designed by Charles Bulfinch. Together, they were the parents of five children who lived to maturity, including: • Sarah Apthorp Morton (1782–1844), who married Richard Cunningham, son of John Cunningham, in Nova Scotia. • Anna Louisa Morton (1783–1843). a lawyer, financier, and speculator. Sarah died on May 14, 1846, in Braintree, Massachusetts. She was buried at King's Chapel Burying Ground in Boston. Fanny left a suicide note proclaiming her "guilty innocence" that was published in newspapers shortly after her death. In spite of this reconciliation, fifteen years later Sarah had an affair with founding father Gouverneur Morris. Legacy and descendants Her Dorchester home is a site on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail. Through her daughter Sarah, she is the great-great grandmother of Frederick Bradlee (1892–1970), an American football player who was a first-team All-American while attending Harvard University in 1914. Frederick was the father of American journalist Ben Bradlee (1921–2014) and the grandfather of journalist Ben Bradlee Jr. (b. 1948) and filmmaker Quinn Bradlee (b. 1982). ==Selected works==

• Ouabi; Or the Virtues of Nature: An Indian Tale in Four Cantos 1790 • The African Chief, 1792. • Beacon Hill. A Local Poem, 1797. • The Virtues of Society. A Tale Founded on Fact, 1799. • My Mind and Its Thoughts, in Sketches, Fragments, and Essays, 1823. ==References==