Poet. One of the most prolific and widely published women writers in 18th Century America, Stockton's poems in the English Neoclassical style remain the best known of her works, which also include a play, and numerous articles written for the leading newspapers and magazines of her day. A friend and correspondent of George Washington, and the wife of Richard Stockton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, she was the only woman to be admitted to the American Whig Society, a tribute, in part, to her safekeeping of vital political documents during the Revolutionary War. Born Annis Boudinot in Darby, Pennsylvania, she was the daughter of Elias Boudinot (d.1770), a wealthy merchant and silversmith of Huguenot descent, who later moved his family to Princeton, New Jersey. There the young Annis thrived in the town's stimulating academic atmosphere, published her first poem at age 16, and in 1757 married the brilliant young lawyer Richard Stockton, a friend of her brother Elias, who would also distinguish himself in American politics. The Stocktons made a strikingly attractive couple, and their marriage was a happy one which produced 6 children. Their elegant Princeton home, which Annis named "Morven", became a gathering place for the nation's founders, and still later, a residence of the governors of New Jersey. The Stocktons paid dearly for their revolutionary activities, however. Forced to flee from the British, who had captured her husband and destroyed both his health and estate, Annis was widowed by his untimely death in 1781. Despite grief and impoverishment, she continued to devote her pen and her energies to the American cause. Her final years were spent at "White Hill", a mansion overlooking the Delaware River in present day Fieldsboro, New Jersey, where she had resided with her daughter Abigail Stockton Field. After her death at age 64, her body was taken across the river to Philadelphia and laid in the plot of Dr. Benjamin Rush, who had married another Stockton daughter, Julia, in 1776. Among other distinctions, Mrs. Stockton was the mother-in-law as well as the wife of a signer of the Declaration of Independence.