Prudence Patterson was born in 1743 (either in Wales or in County Antrim, Ireland) and emigrated to America with her parents. In 1763, she married another immigrant, John Hall, in York, South Carolina. They had eight or nine children. Their children's names were James, John, Prudence, Jennet, Margaret, William Henry, Alexander Brown, Josiah, and Major Temple.

John Hall appears on the U.S. Revolutionary War Rolls as a private in the 2nd South Carolina Regiment. He died in 1784. Prudence appears as the head of family in York in the 1790 Federal Census, residing there with her children and a slave.

Carol Berkin, a historian at Baruch College, mentions Prudence Patterson in her 2005 book, Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America's Independence:

"Far to the south, as the British besieged the South Carolina capital of Charleston in early 1776, Harriet Prudence Patterson Hall and three of her friends made their way past enemy soldiers surrounding the city. When the sentries topped them, Hall explained that they were on their way to purchase medicine from a Charleston apothecary. What the redcoats saw gave them little reason to be suspicious: standing before them were four well-dressed matrons, on an errand that took them into the city. The British soldiers stepped aside, giving the women permission to pass. With that, Harriet Hall walked into Charleston, an important message for the American commander safely hidden inside her petticoat."

For this information, Berkin' cites the Year Book, 2003-2004, of the Harriet Prudence Patterson Hall Chapter of the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution of North Little Rock, Arkansas. You might contact the Prudence Hall Chapter through their website and ask them about the source of their information. According to their website, Harriet Hetley West, a descendant of Prudence and John Hall, emigrated to Arkansas in the 1850s, and it was through her and her descendants that the North Little Rock Chapter of the DAR was formed in 1963.

Another source for more information would be the Southern Revolutionary War Institute, at the McCelvey Center in York, South Carolina, at the Museum of York County. A description on their website of their holdings of family histories related to York County, says they have a copy of The Hall Family, by Claudia Hall O'Driscoll, which may never have been published, since it doesn't show up in online library catalogs. I would guess that your ancestor appears in it, perhaps with some documentation.

It is from this book, presumably, that O'Driscoll family researchers have copied a letter from Prudence Hall's descendant Annie Farris Lumpkin to Daisy West Watkins, dated April 23, 1933, Rock Hill, South Carolina, and posted it on the Ancestry.com website:

Our notable ancestress, Harried [sic] Prudence Patterson, born in the year 1743, was of Welsh and English descent. On the maternal side she was Welsh, on the paternal, English. The Patterson family emigrated to America when Prudence was a child. The family first settled in Maryland, and later moved to Pennsylvania. She was 15 years of age when the family moved from Maryland to Pennsylvania. She rode horseback all the way and drove the cows behind the covered wagons. Later they moved to South Carolina and settled near Charles Town where she grew to young womanhood and met and married John Hall, also of an English family. John Hall was six years his wife's senior, having been born in 1737. Patterson was 20 years of age and John Hall 26 when their marriage took place in 1763.

Sometime prior to the American Revolution they left Charles Town and moved to upper South Carolina and settled in York District. Here they bought land on Little Allison Creek and built their home among a large grove of fine old trees, near a big spring of cool sparkling water, an ideal place for a residence and, strange as it may seem, this very place was destined to play an important part in the history of the American Revolution. Here a big brick store was erected, which not only served the people for miles around as a trading point, but also became the distribution point for salt. Salt was a scarce article in those days. During the Revolution, women rode horseback from as far as Camden to this place to purchase a supply of salt, which was limited to a certain amount for each family. The salt was hauled in wagons from Virginia by slaves. Here Prudence became a heroine of her day. She saved the life of a man whom the Indians had scalped and left to die. She had a number of milk cows ranging at large. One of the cows failed to come home at milking time. She mounted her horse and rode out through the dense woods to find her. She heard a moaning and groaning of someone in great distress. Being a pioneer woman of a fearless and intrepid character, she rode on till she found the man laying in water. She rode quickly back and spread the news. The man was rescued and nursed back to life. His name was John Forbess. He lived to a ripe old age and is buried in Ebenezer Cemetery.

Prudence would often walk the ten miles to attend services at Bethel Presbyterian Church, where she is now buried in Clover, South Carolina.

Prudence and two other women rode horseback to Charlestown [that is, Charleston] during the war under the guise of purchasing medicine. They were held up by the British as spies, but their story of being out to purchase medicine they were allowed to pass the British ranks. They got their medicine and returned, but not until Prudence had delivered an important message to the American Army, which she had carried sewn up in her petticoat. She had outwitted the British, and oh how they hated her. I wish I could remember the little doggerel rhyme the British made about these three woman, but I can only remember the line "Prudence Hall, Peggy Strain and Beckie McCall."

After John Hall died, Prudence moved to Union County to a place called "Sylvan Springs," a sort of summer resort. There she married a man by the name of [Robert] Harris, but soon separated from him. She ran a boarding house.

The unsourced material about Prudence Hall you see on the web is almost certainly derived from this letter.

Corroborating Prudence's wartime adventures may be difficult. A researcher from the Patterson family, however, in a comment on the Genealogy Forum website, raises two issues:

There is no record showing Prudence Hall with a first name Harriet. That appears to come from researchers of the [Hall] family, but no records (John Hall's will & estate papers nor Prudence Hall Harris' own will & estate records) indicate such a first name. … One of my Farris cousins (Annie Farris Lumpkin) was interested in family history and was a Hall descendant through Harriet Hetley West. She told a story about a Prudence Hall saving a wounded militiaman named John Forbes (my ancestor) during the Revolutionary War. But from the description of "Prudie Hall" it was a young woman (John & Prudence's daughter Prudence?), not Prudence Patterson Hall herself.

Berkin's brief account in Revolutionary Mothers places Prudence Hall's ride to Charleston during the first British siege of that city in 1776. That siege was repulsed at the Battle of Sullivan's Island on June 29th. The American forces were under the command of Major General Charles Lee, who was not at Sullivan's Island itself, but across the harbor in Charleston, exchanging dispatches with Colonel William Moultrie, who was commanding the garrison on the harbor side of Sullivan's Island.

Annie Lumpkins' letter, however, does not say when the letter-in-the-petticoat incident occurred. Nor does the letter say that the message that Prudence delivered found its way to an American "General," as do some of the unsourced sites on the web. Perhaps the Hall family history at the Southern Revolutionary War Institute or information held by the Prudence Hall Chapter of the DAR gives more detail.

At any rate, the British conducted another siege of Charleston, from April through May of 1780, which was successful. Among the more than 5,000 colonial soldiers under Major General Benjamin Lincoln who surrendered to the British on May 12th was the 2nd South Carolina Regiment, which was John Hall's unit. For more on this siege (although there is no mention of John and Prudence Hall), see Carl P. Borick's A Gallant Defense: The Siege of Charleston, 1780 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2003) and Walter J. Fraser's Patriots, Pistols, and Petticoats: "Poor Sinful Charles Town" During the Revolutionary War Era (Columbia, SD: University of South Carolina Press, 2003).

The British commander of both sieges of Charleston was Sir Henry Clinton. His collected papers eventually found their way to the Clements Library at the University of Michigan. From Clinton's papers, the library has created a fascinating web exhibit, Spy Letters of the American Revolution. The exhibit has no documentation on Prudence Hall, but it draws on only a very small number of items in the collection.

I’m not sure how to answer this. I wouldn’t want to take anything away from your daughter’s project by doing her research for her. But the subject is complicated and I think I can say a few things that might help with her research.

The issues around the passage of the 14th Amendment, as they appeared to women’s rights activists, are well covered, with transcripts of Congressional debates, and details of the petitions and organizing activities of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and others, in the History of Woman Suffrage, Volume 2, Chapter 17, pages 90-151, which your daughter can read at the link. In addition, if your public library, or a nearby academic library, has online access to the ProQuest historical newspapers collection, she might find it useful to take a look at The New York Times reporting on the announcement of—and speeches given at—the 11th National Woman’s Rights Convention, held in New York City, as detailed in the articles, “Woman’s Rights. The Eleventh National Woman’s Rights Convention” (April 2, 1866) and “The May Anniversaries” (May 11, 1866).

In order to supplement these sources and to more fully understand the Congressional debates over the language of the 14th Amendment, I think it is important to note that the essential purpose of the amendment was not to define the principle on which the right of suffrage was based, but rather to craft a means by which the country could be “reconstructed,” which is to say that the joint House and Senate “Committee of Fifteen” (which included Representative John A. Bingham of Ohio) that put together the language of the amendment and brought it to the Congress as a whole for a vote was recommending a way for the southern states that had seceded to be re-admitted to the Union, a very urgent issue at the time.

When they were re-admitted, these states’ representatives would have to be seated in Congress. But there was a problem with doing that: According to the Constitution, the number of slaves in the southern states had figured into the counting of the states’ population for the purpose of deciding the number of Congressional representatives from those states (the “three-fifths clause”). But with the end of the war and the passage of the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery, there were no longer any slaves to count.

If, then, the sheer number of persons living in the southern states were now to be used to determine the number of representatives these states could send to Congress, these states would gain a very considerable advantage over what they had before the war because the ex-slaves would then be counted as “full” persons, even though, in these states, they were not allowed to vote. The result would be an actual increase in the legislative power of these states, whose strengthened congressional delegations would still be drawn from the same class of white landowners whose “retrograde” views had played a decisive role in the events leading to the war. This would have been plainly unacceptable, as it would have seemed that the South had actually been rewarded as a result of the war.

To solve this problem, the Committee of Fifteen created a condition for these states re-admittance to the Union, which is described in section 2 of the constitutional amendment it proposed:

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

In other words, the committee was saying, “Okay, maybe we can’t force you southern states to give Blacks the vote, but if you don’t, we’ll just deduct the Black population from your total population when counting how many congressional representatives you get, so you don’t get any advantage over us; in fact, you’ll be disadvantaged, because now you won’t be able to count your Black population at all whereas before you could count three-fifths of it (more or less) in figuring out how many congressional representatives you could have.” This seemed like a fair, if somewhat convoluted, compromise to the committee. The committee thought it would stand a good chance of being passed.

In fact, essentially the same sort of scheme had already passed Congress as part of a civil rights law, but Congressman Bingham, who was both a lawyer and a judge, was convinced that that law would be found by the courts to be unconstitutional for a number of reasons (including the fact that it infringed on the rights of states to determine which of its citizens could vote), so he had actually opposed its passage in Congress and argued that it needed to be passed as a constitutional amendment instead. That is why it was deliberated on by the Committee of Fifteen—actually called the Committee on Reconstruction—of which he was an influential member, and was proposed by it. It was part of the committee’s plan for how the southern states could be brought back into the fold: If these states’ legislatures reaffirmed their allegiance to the United States and voted to accept the conditions in the proposed amendment, then they would be re-admitted.

I cannot find a source that gives Bingham himself the responsibility for inserting the word “male” in the language of the amendment. Perhaps you have found such a source. The material in the History of Woman Suffrage appear to me to suggest otherwise, that it was simply the result of the committee’s long hours in trying to craft precise language that would do no more than what the committee intended the amendment to do, without inadvertently opening the door to a storm of objections surrounding the much larger principles of suffrage, whether it was a universal “human right” or not, that would most probably have derailed the amendment’s chance of passage.