to his health and died in 1781 at the age of 51, before the official end of the war. The Boudinot-Stockton families were also connected through Annis's younger brother Elias Boudinot. He had studied law with her husband to prepare for the bar. After establishing himself as an attorney, Elias married Hannah Stockton, Richard's younger sister. Boudinot became a statesman from New Jersey and was elected as President of the Continental Congress in 1782–1783. He signed the Treaty of Paris. Literary career Annis Boudinot Stockton was one of the first female published poets in the Thirteen Colonies. She published 21 poems in the "most prestigious newspapers and magazines of her day." They addressed political and social issues, and she used the wide variety of genres considered integral to neoclassical writing: odes, pastorals, elegies, sonnets, epitaphs, hymns, and epithalamia. Her works were read both in the colonies and internationally, in England and in France. She was well known as a prolific writer among her Middle Atlantic writing circle, which included Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, Benjamin Young Prime, Samuel Stanhope Smith, Philip Freneau, and Hugh Henry Brackenridge. Stockton's connection to Fergusson also linked her to such women writers as Anna Young Smith, Susanna Wright, Milcah Martha Moore and Hannah Griffitts. At the time, many of these writers passed most of their works to each other in manuscript. This was particularly true of women. Because of that, they were not as well known to later scholars as writers whose works were published, but they represented an active and influential part of the literary culture. In the late twentieth century, more manuscripts of their works have been made available to the public and some have been published. In 1984 Christine Carolyn McMillan Cairnes and her husband George H. Cairnes donated a large manuscript copybook containing numerous poems and other pieces by Stockton to the New Jersey Historical Society. The following year, this copybook was made available to researchers for the first time. Before then, Stockton was known to have written 40 poems, but the pieces in the copybook expanded the total of her works threefold. In 1995 the scholar Carla Mulford published a collection of 125 poems, all of Stockton's known pieces; she also provided a lengthy introduction that provided insights into the poet's time and late eighteenth-century society. A patriot in her own right, Stockton rescued and hid important papers of the American Whig