Her letter is a window into the dawn of the American Revolution

The date Charity Clarke wrote at the bottom of a letter — Dec. 8, 1769 — now seems almost as significant as what she had written above.

This was early in the American colonies’ shift toward their break with Britain: It was not 1775, the year of Lexington, Concord and the shot heard around the world.

It wasn’t 1776, with the high of the Declaration of Independence and the low of the Battle of Long Island, a humiliating defeat for the colonials that left New York City under British control.

This was a year when Clarke, a 22-year-old New Yorker writing to a cousin in London, still identified as British.

But on that December day, she made clear that she did not want to be bossed around by royals and lawmakers who saw the colonists as second-class citizens. “The moment when Liberty is infringed, let us seek it where it may be found,” she wrote.

She stood ready to organize women as a vocal part of the homespun movement — when colonists shunned British goods in the name of patriotism.

The liberty Clarke dreamed of was economic. Her solution was self-sufficiency. The action she had in mind was cutting off the money going back to London through the punishing taxes and tariffs England had imposed after the French and Indian War.

The colonies exported raw cotton and imported finished textiles from Britain. Clarke wrote that she would “try to gather a number of ladies armed with spinning wheels” who would put New Yorkers “beyond the reach of arbitrary power clothed with the work of our hands.” She had already likened herself to Thalestris, the queen of the Amazons, who in Greek mythology were female warriors. Clarke had written previously that she saw herself “at the head of a fighting army of Amazones,” as she spelled the word.

On the day she wrote her December letter, she could have looked out at the orchards that surrounded the farm she lived on, south of what is now midtown Manhattan. Her father, a British officer in the French and Indian War, had purchased the 94-acre farm when she was 3 years old and called it Chelsea Manor, borrowing the name of a soldiers’ hospital in London.

“The King, I hope, is inclined to do us good,” she wrote, even as tensions in New York simmered.

A few weeks after she mailed that letter, British soldiers and colonists in lower Manhattan clashed in an encounter that became known as the Battle of Golden Hill. New York-centric historians consider it the first violent skirmish of the Revolution, six weeks before the Boston Massacre.

Clarke’s letters provide “a specific window into broader dynamics at play in both class and gender,” said Elisabeth Sherman, the chief curator and deputy director of the Museum of the City of New York, who researched Clarke for the exhibition “The Occupied City: New York and the American Revolution.”

The women of the homespun movement were “not your George Washingtons and your Alexander Hamiltons,” she said.

Clarke had written at one point that politics was “out of my province.” So for a woman like her — she came from a relatively wealthy family — it was “unusual” to take up a cause like this, Sherman said.

“You spend your childhood in safety and security and comfort in this presumably bucolic estate on a large parcel of land with a well-connected father,” Sherman said. “We are so often taught in school that the revolution is a fight of ideals, but often what is being fought for is safety, security and comfort.”

Those seemed threatened when Clarke wrote that “I know we can banish everything but the necessaries of life” and rely on domestic raw materials and products.

It was an idea that had support beyond New York.

Several months earlier, in May 1769, the Virginia House of Burgesses had protested British taxes. But after the royal governor of Virginia dissolved the legislature, the ex-Burgesses gathered, in a tavern, and worked out an accord on banning British trade, including imports of ale, beer, cider, wine and hard liquor.

Then the ex-Burgesses raised their glasses with toasts to the king, queen, governor and “a speedy and lasting Union between Great Britain and her Colonies.” Like Clarke, they still saw themselves as British.

She did not want her fervor to snuff out the warmth she felt for her British relatives. She signed the December letter “sincere friend & affectionate cousin” and said that “my papa & mama join me in love to yours, your uncle & sister (she by the way has dropped me as a correspondent).” With those last 10 words, Clarke acknowledged that she was paying a price for her outspokenness.

But she continued gravitating from exasperated loyalist to patriot. And in 1774 — five years after she had written that it was time for action — she wrote: “On what instance pray are the Americans called Rebels? What have they done to deserve the name? They have asserted their rights and are determined to maintain them. Great Britain stands ready to destroy her sons for inheriting her spirit.”

Historian Mary Beth Norton wrote that the chaotic late 1760s had given women a different sense of their “relationship to the public realm.”

“For the first time, women became active — if not equal — participants in discourse on public affairs and in endeavors that carried political significance,” Norton wrote in her book “Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800.”

Women were talking with men and among themselves and “gained both sophistication in political analysis and a new sense of their own role,” she wrote.

Clarke continued her correspondence with her cousin as Britain and the colonists fought the early battles of the Revolutionary War. In 1778 she married the Rev. Benjamin Moore, the pastor of Trinity Church, who became the bishop of New York. He was also briefly the president of his alma mater, King’s College, now Columbia University. Some historians note wryly that he had little to do as a college president: There were no contentious faculty meetings during his tenure because the school was closed during the Revolutionary War.

The couple had a son in 1779, Clement Clarke Moore. Like his mother, he is best remembered for something he wrote: the Christmas poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”