Skip to main content

Author: Taggart, Cynthia

Biography:

TAGGART, Cynthia (1801-49: ancestry.com)

Born in Middletown RI, she was one of four daughters of William Taggart (1755-1833), a veteran of the Revolutionary War, and his wife Elizabeth Macomber (1767-1841). In 1810 he was ordained a deacon in the Second Baptist Church that they attended, but by 1832 when Baptist clergy of the area took an interest in the family, one of the daughters had died and the surviving members were in serious financial distress. The wife and daughters were invalids, two of them (including Cynthia) bedridden and one of them mentally ill. The father's military pension had been cut off and only recently restored. He died in November 1833 but he wrote an account of his life, signed and dated 24 Oct. 1833, that was included in the volume of Cynthia Taggart's verses published shortly afterwards for the benefit of the family. Advance publicity and the prefatory material in the book emphasize their poverty and her piety and suffering--relieved only by faith and the comfort she found in dictating her poetry. Two editions were published in 1834 and a third in the author's lifetime (1848). She died in Middletown and is buried in the episcopal cemetery there, unlike the other members of the family who are buried in a private burial plot. (ancestry.com 9 Nov. 2020; findagrave.com 10 Nov. 2020; Poems [1834], [1848])

 

Books written (2):

Providence [RI]: Cranston and Hammond, 1834
2nd edn. Cambridge [MA]: printed by Charles Folsom, 1834