Judson, Ann Hasseltine

Judson, Ann Hasseltine was born at Bradford, Mass., Oct. 22, 1789. She was married to Adoniram Judson on Feb. 5, 1812, and was the first American woman to devote herself to foreign mission service. She became "intimately associated with her husband, in all his plans of benevolence, and bore an important part in their accomplishment" (Wayland's Judson, 1, 414), in 1824, in consequence of protracted ill health, leaving her husband in Burmah, she proceeded. alone to America, where she remained, adding, however, much to the interest and advancement of missions by the publication of a very interesting account of the history of the Burman Mission in a series of letters to Mr. Butterworth, a member of Parliament, whose hospitality she enjoyed while in England, till 1823, when she rejoined her husband at Rangoon, and proceeded with him to Ava. It was during, the trying scenes of the succeeding two years that her "devoted love, consummate tact, and heroic resolution were so manifest. Her whole time, with the exception of twenty days when she was confined by the birth of her child, was devoted to the alleviation of the sorrows of her husband and his fellow prisoners." She was perfectly familiar with the Burmese language, and possessed of a "presence which commanded respect even from savage barbarians, and encircled her with a moral atmosphere in which she walked unharmed in the midst of a hostile city with no earthly protector" (Wayland, 1, 329). Her influence was acknowledged as contributing largely to the submission to the English terms of peace by the Burmese government. She died at Amherst on Oct. 24, 1826, during the absence of her husband, of disease which her sufferings and prostration at Ava had rendered her constitution incapable of resisting. "To great clearness of intellect, large powers of comprehension, and intuitive female sagacity, ripened by the constant necessity of independent action, she added that heroic disinterestedness which naturally loses all consciousness of self in the prosecution of a great object. These elements were, however, all held in reserve, and were hidden from public view by a veil of unusual feminine delicacy." (J.T.G.)