ATTIRE OF VIRGINIA DAMES AND THEIR NEIGHBORS
I
t is a matter of deep regret that no “Lists of Apparel” were made out
for the women emigrants in any of the colonies. Doubtless many came who
had a distinct allotment of clothing, among them the redemptioners. We
know one case, that of the “Casket Girls,” of Louisiana, where a group
of “virtuous, modest, well-carriaged young maids” each had a casket or
box of clothing supplied to her as part of her payment for emigration.
I wish we had these lists, not that I should deem them of great value
or accuracy in one respect since they would have been made out
naturally by men, but because I should like to read the struggles of
the average shipping-clerk or supercargo, or even shipping-master or
company’s president, over the items of women’s dress. One reason why
the lists we have in the court records are so wildly spelled and often
vague is, I am sure, because the recording-clerks were always men. Such
hopeless puzzles as droll or drowlas, cale or caul or kail, chatto or
shadow, shabbaroon or chaperone, have come to us through these poor
struggling gentlemen.
There are not to my knowledge any portraits in existence of the wives
of the first Dutch settlers of New Netherland. They would have been
dressed, I am sure, in the full dress of Holland vrouws. We can turn to
the court records of New Netherland to learn the exact item of the
dress of the settlers. Let me give in full this inventory of an
exceptionally rich and varied wardrobe of Madam Jacob de Lange of New
Amsterdam, 1662:—
£; s. d. One under petticoat with a body of red bay 1 7
One under petticoat, scarlet 1 15 One petticoat, red cloth with
black lace 2 15 One striped stuff petticoat with black
lace 2 8 Two colored drugget petticoats with gray
linings 1 2 Two colored drugget petticoats with white
linings 18 One colored drugget petticoat with pointed
lace 8 One black silk petticoat with ash gray silk
lining 1 10 One potto-foo silk petticoat with black silk
lining 2 15 One potto-foo silk petticoat with taffeta
lining 1 13 One silk potoso-a-samare with lace 3 One tartanel
samare with tucker 1 10 One black silk crape samare with
tucker 1 10 Three flowered calico samares 2 17 Three calico
nightgowns, one flowered, two red 7 One silk waistcoat, one
calico waistcoa. 14 One pair of bodices 4 Five pair white
cotton stockings 9 Three black love-hoods 5 One white
love-hood 2 6 Two pair sleeves with great lace 1 3 Four
cornet caps with lace 3 One black silk rain cloth cap 10 One
black plush mask 1 6 Four yellow lace drowlas 2
This is a most interesting list of garments. The sleeves with great
lace must from their price have been very rich articles of dress. The
yellow lace drowlas, since there were four of them (and no other
neckerchiefs, such as gorgets, piccadillies, or whisks are named), must
have been neckwear of some form. I suspect they are the lace drowls or
drolls to which I refer in a succeeding chapter on A Vain Puritan
Grandmother. The rain cloth cap of black silk is curious also, being
intended to wear over another cap or a love-hood. The cornet caps with
lace are a Dutch fashion. The “lace” was in the form of lappets or
pinners which flapped down at the side of the face over the ears and
almost over the cheeks. Evelyn speaks of a woman in “a cornet with the
upper pinner dangling about her cheeks like hound’s ears.” Cotgrave
tells in rather vague definition that a cornet is “a fashion of Shadow
or Boone Grace used in old time and to this day by old women.” It was
not like a bongrace, nor like the cap I always have termed a shadow,
but it had two points like broad horns or ears with lace or gauze
spread over both and hanging from these horns. Cornets and corneted
caps are often in Dutch inventories in early New York. And they can be
seen in old Dutch pictures. They were one of the few distinctly Dutch
modes that lingered in New Netherland; but by the third generation from
the settlement they had disappeared.
Mrs. Livingstone. Mrs. Livingstone.
What the words “potto-foo” and “potoso-a-samare” mean I cannot
decipher. I have tried to find Dutch words allied in sound but in vain.
I believe the samare was a Dutch fashion. We rarely find samares worn
in Virginia and Maryland, but the name frequently occurs in the first
Dutch inventories in New Netherland and occasionally in the Connecticut
valley, where there were a few Dutch settlers; occasionally also in
Plymouth, whose first settlers had been for a number of years under
Dutch influences in Holland; and rarely in Salem and Boston, whose
planters also had felt Dutch influences through the settling in Essex
and Suffolk of opulent Flemish and Dutch “clothiers”—cloth-workers.
These Dutchmen had married Englishwomen, and their presence in English
homes was distinctly shown by the use then and to the present day of
Dutch words, Dutch articles of dress, furniture, and food. From these
Dutch-settled shires of Essex and Suffolk came John Winthrop and all
the so-called Bay Emigration.
I am convinced that a samare was a certain garment which I have seen in
French, Dutch, and English portraits of the day. It is a tight-fitting
jacket or waist or bodice—call it what you will; its skirt or portion
below the belt-line is four to eight inches deep, cut up in tabs or
oblong flaps, four on each side. These slits are to the belt line. It
is, to explain further, a basque, tight-fitting or with the waist laid
in plaits, and with the basque skirt cut in eight tabs. These laps or
tabs set out rather stiffly and squarely over the full-gathered
petticoats of the day.
I turn to a Dutch dictionary for a definition of the word “samare,”
though my Dutch dictionary being of the date 1735 is too recent a
publication to be of much value. In it a samare is defined simply as a
woman’s gown. Randle Holme says, rather vaguely, that it is a short
jacket for women’s wear with four side-laps, reaching to the knees. In
this rich wardrobe of the widow De Lange, twelve petticoats are
enumerated and no overdress-jacket or doublet of any kind except those
samares. Their price shows that they were not a small garment. One
“silk potoso-a-samare with lace” was worth £;3. One “tartanel samare
with tucker” was worth £;1 10s. One “black silk crape samare with
tucker” was worth £;1 10s., and three “flowered calico” samares were
worth £;2 10s. They were evidently of varying weights for summer and
winter wear, and were worn over the rich petticoat.
The bill of the Salem tailor, William Sweatland (1679), shows that he
charged 9s. for making a scarlet petticoat with silver lace; for making
a black broadcloth gown 18s.; while “new-makeing a plush somar for
Mistress.” (which was making over) was 6s.; “making a somar for your
Maide” was 10s., which was the same price he charged for making a gown
for the maid.
The colors in the Dutch gowns were uniformly gay. Madam Cornelia de Vos
in a green cloth petticoat, a red and blue “Haarlamer” waistcoat, a
pair of red and yellow sleeves, a white cornet cap, green stockings
with crimson clocks, and a purple “Pooyse” apron was a blooming
flower-bed of color.
Mrs. Magdalen Beekman. Mrs. Magdalen Beekman.
I fear we have unconsciously formed our mental pictures of our Dutch
forefathers through the vivid descriptions of Washington Irving. We
certainly cannot improve upon his account of the Dutch housewife of New
Amsterdam:—
“Their hair, untortured by the abominations of art, was scrupulously
pomatumed back from their foreheads with a candle, and covered with a
little cap of quilted calico, which fitted exactly to their heads.
Their petticoats of linsey-woolsey were striped with a variety of
gorgeous dyes, though I must confess those gallant garments were rather
short, scarce reaching below the knee; but then they made up in the
number, which generally equalled that of the gentlemen’s small-clothes;
and what is still more praise-worthy, they were all of their own
manufacture,—of which circumstance, as may well be supposed, they were
not a little vain.
“Those were the honest days, in which every woman stayed at home, read
the Bible, and wore pockets,—ay, and that, too, of a goodly size,
fashioned with patchwork into many curious devices, and ostentatiously
worn on the outside. These, in fact, were convenient receptacles where
all good housewives carefully stored away such things as they wished to
have at hand; by which means they often came to be incredibly crammed.
“Besides these notable pockets, they likewise wore scissors and
pincushions suspended from their girdles by red ribbons, or, among the
more opulent and showy classes, by brass and even silver chains,
indubitable tokens of thrifty housewives and industrious spinsters. I
cannot say much in vindication of the shortness of the petticoats; it
doubtless was introduced for the purpose of giving the stockings a
chance to be seen, which were generally of blue worsted, with
magnificent red clocks; or perhaps to display a well-turned ankle and a
neat though serviceable foot, set off by a high-heeled leathern shoe,
with a large and splendid silver buckle.
“There was a secret charm in those petticoats, which no doubt entered
into the consideration of the prudent gallants. The wardrobe of a lady
was in those days her only fortune; and she who had a good stock of
petticoats and stockings was as absolutely an heiress as is a
Kamtschatka damsel with a store of bear-skins, or a Lapland belle with
plenty of reindeer.”
A Boston lady, Madam Knights, visiting New York in 1704, wrote also
with clear pen:—
“The English go very fashionable in their dress. But the Dutch,
especially the middling sort, differ from our women, in their habitt go
loose, wear French muches which are like a Capp and headband in one,
leaving their ears bare, which are sett out with jewells of a large
size and many in number; and their fingers hoop’t with rings, some with
large stones in them of many Coullers, as were their pendants in their
ears, which you should see very old women wear as well as Young.”
The jewels of one settler of New Amsterdam were unusually rich (in
1650), and were enumerated thus:—
£; s. d. One embroidered purse with silver bugle and chain to
the girdle and silver hook and eye 1 4 One pair black pendants,
gold nocks 10 One gold boat, wherein thirteen diamonds &; one
white coral chain 16 One pair gold stucks or pendants each with
ten diamonds 25 Two diamond rings 24 One gold ring with clasp
beck 12 One gold ring or hoop bound round with
diamonds 2 10
These jewels were owned by the wife of an English-born citizen; but
some of the Dutch dames had handsome jewels, especially rich
chatelaines with their equipages and etuis with rich and useful
articles in variety. When we read of such articles, we find it
difficult to credit the words of an English clergyman who visited
Albany about the year 1700; namely, that he found the Dutch women of
best Albany families going about their homes in summer time and doing
their household work while barefooted.
Many conditions existed in Maryland which were found nowhere else in
the colonies. These were chiefly topographical. The bay and its many
and accommodative tide-water estuaries gave the planters the means, not
only of easy, cheap, and speedy communication with each other, but with
the whole world. It was a freedom of intercourse not given to any other
_agricultural_ community in the whole world. It was said that every
planter had salt water within a rifle-shot of his front gate—therefore
the world was open to him. The tide is never strong enough on this
shore to hinder a sailboat nor is the current of the rivers
perceptible. The crop of the settlers was wholly tobacco—indeed, all
the processes of government, of society, of domestic life, began and
ended with tobacco. It was a wonderfully lucrative crop, but it was an
unhappy one for any colony; for the tobacco ships arrived in fleets
only in May and June, when the crops were ready for market. The ships
could come in anywhere by tide-water. Hence there were two or three
months of intense excitement, or jollity, lavishness, extravagance,
when these ships were in; a regular Bartholomew Fair of disorder,
coarse wit, and rough fun; and the rest of the year there was nothing;
no business, no money, no fun. Often the planter found himself after a
month of June gambling and fun with three years’ crops pledged in
advance to his creditors. The factor then played his part; took a
mortgage, perhaps, on both crops and plantation; and invariably ended
in owning everything. A striking but coarse picture of the traffic and
its evils is given in _The Sot-weed Factor_, a poem of the day.
Lady Anne Clifford. Lady Anne Clifford.
Land and living were cheap in this tobacco land, but labor was needed
for the sudden crops; so negro slaves were bought, and warm invitations
were sent back to England for all and every kind of labor. Convicts
were welcomed, redemptioners were eagerly sought for; and the
scrupulous laws which were made for their protection were blazoned in
England. Many laborers were “crimped,” too, in England, and brought of
course, willy-nilly, to Maryland. Landlords were even granted lands in
proportion to their number of servants; a hundred acres per capita was
the allowance. It can readily be seen that an ambitious or unscrupulous
planter would gather in in some way as many heads as possible.
Maryland under the Baltimores was the only colony that then admitted
convicts—that is, admitted them openly and legally. She even greeted
them warmly, eager for the labor of their hands, which was often
skilled labor; welcomed them for their wits, albeit these had often
been ill applied; welcomed them for their manners, often amply refined;
welcomed them for their possibilities of rehabilitation of morals and
behavior.
The kidnapped servants did not fare badly. Many examples are known
where they worked on until they had acquired ample means; still the
literature of the day is full of complaints such as this in _The
Sot-weed Factor_:—
“Not then a slave; for twice two years
My clothes were fashionably new.
Nor were my shifts of linen blue.
But Things are Changed. Now at the Hoe
I daily work; and Barefoot go.
In weeding Corn, or feeding Swine
I spend my melancholy time.”
Cheap ballads were sold in England warning English maidens against
kidnapping.
In the collection of Old Black Letter Ballads in the British Museum is
one entitled _The Trappan’d Maiden or the Distressed Damsel_. Its date
is believed to be 1670.
“The Girl was cunningly trappan’d
Sent to Virginny from England.
Where she doth Hardship undergo;
There is no cure, it must be so;
But if she lives to cross the Main
She vows she’ll ne’er go there again.
Give ear unto a Maid
That lately was betray’d
And sent unto Virginny O.
In brief I shall declare
What I have suffered there
When that I was weary, O.
The cloathes that I brought in
They are worn so thin
In the Land of Virginny O.
Which makes me for to say
Alas! and well-a-day
When that I was weary, O.”
The indentured servant, the redemptioner, or free-willer saw before
him, at the close of his seven years term, a home in a teeming land; he
would own fifty acres of that land with three barrels, an axe, a gun,
and a hoe—truly, the world was his. He would have also a suit of
kersey, strong hose, a shirt, French fall shoes, and a good hat,—a
Monmouth cap,—a suit worthy any man. Abigail had an equal start, a
petticoat and waistcoat of strong wool, a perpetuana or callimaneo, two
blue aprons, two linen caps, a pair of new shoes, two pairs of new
stockings and a smock, and three barrels of Indian corn.
We find that many of these redemptioners became soldiers in the
colonial wars, often distinguished for bravery. This was through a law
passed by the British government that all who enlisted in military
service in the colonies were released by that act from further bondage.
Lady Herrman. Lady Herrman.
In the year 1659, on an autumn day, two white men with an Indian guide
paddled swiftly over the waters of Chesapeake Bay on business of much
import. They had come from Manhattan, and bore despatches from Governor
Stuyvesant to the governor of Maryland, relating to the ever
troublesome query of those days, namely, the exact placing of boundary
lines. One of these men was Augustine Herrman, a man of parts, who had
been ambassador to Rhode Island, a ship-owner, and man of executive
ability, which was proven by his offer to Lord Baltimore to draw a map
of Maryland and the surrounding country in exchange for a tract of land
at the head of the bay. He was a land-surveyor, and drew an excellent
map; and he received the four thousand acres afterwards known as
Bohemia Manor. His portrait and that of his wife exist; they are
wretched daubs, as were many of the portraits of the day, but,
nevertheless, her dress is plainly revealed by it. You can see a copy
of it here. The overdress, pleated body, and upper sleeve are green.
The little lace collar is drawn up with a tiny ribbon just as we see
collars to-day. Her hair is simplicity itself. The full undersleeves
and heavy ear-rings give a little richness to the dress, which is not
English nor is it Dutch.
It is easy to know the items of the dress of the early Virginian
settlers, where any court records exist. Many, of course, have perished
in the terrible devastations of two long wars; but wherever they have
escaped destruction all the records of church and town in the various
counties of Virginia have been carefully transcribed and certified, and
are open to consultation in the Virginia State Library at Richmond,
where many of the originals are also preserved. Many have also been
printed. Mr. Bruce, in his fine book, _The Economic History of Virginia
in the Seventeenth Century_, has given frequent extracts from these
certified records. From them and from the originals I gain much
knowledge of the dress of the planters at that time. It varied little
from dress in the New England colonies save that Virginians were richer
than New Englanders, and so had more costly apparel. Almost nothing was
manufactured in Virginia. The plainest and simplest articles of dress,
save those of homespun stuffs, were ordered from England, as well as
richer garments. We see even in George Washington’s day, until he was
prevented by war, that he sent frequent orders, wherein elaborately
detailed attire was ordered with the pettiest articles for household
and plantation use.
Elizabeth Cromwell. Elizabeth Cromwell.
Mrs. Francis Pritchard of Lancaster, Virginia (in 1660), we find had a
representative wardrobe. She owned an olive-colored silk petticoat,
another of silk tabby, and one of flowered tabby, one of velvet, and
one of white striped dimity. Her printed calico gown was lined with
blue silk, thus proving how much calico was valued. Other bodices were
a striped dimity jacket and a black silk waistcoat. To wear with these
were a pair of scarlet sleeves and other sleeves of ruffled holland.
Five aprons, various neckwear of Flanders lace, and several rich
handkerchiefs completed a gay costume to which green silk stockings
gave an additional touch of color. Green was distinctly the favorite
color for hose among all the early settlers; and nearly all the
inventories in Virginia have that entry.
Mrs. Sarah Willoughby of Lower Norfolk, Virginia, had at the same date
a like gay wardrobe, valued, however, at but £;14. Petticoats of
calico, striped linen, India silk, worsted prunella, and red, blue, and
black silk were accompanied with scarlet waistcoats with silver lace, a
white knit waistcoat, a “pair of red paragon bodices,” and another pair
of sky-colored satin bodices. She had also a striped stuff jacket, a
worsted prunella mantle, and a black silk gown. There were distinctions
in the shape of the outer garments—mantles, jackets, and gowns. Hoods,
aprons, and bands completed her comfortable attire.
Though so much of the clothing of the Virginia planters was made in
England, there was certain work done by home tailors; such work as
repairs, alterations, making children’s common clothing, and the like,
also the clothing of upper servants. Often the tailor himself was a
bond-servant. Thus, Luke Mathews, a tailor from Hereford, England, was
bound to Thomas Landon for a term of two years from the day he landed.
He was to have sixpence a day while working for the Landon family, but
when working for other persons half of whatever he earned. In the
Lancaster County records is a tailor’s account (one Noah Rogers) from
the year 1690 to 1709; it was paid, of course, in tobacco. We may set
the tobacco as worth about twopence a pound. It will be thus seen from
the following items that prices in Virginia were higher than in New
England:—
Pounds For making seven womens’ Jacketts 70 For making a Coat for
y’r Wife 60 For altering a Plush Britches 20 For Y’r Wife &;
Daughturs Jackett 30 For y’r Britches 20 Coat 40 Y’r Boys
Jacketts 20 Y’r Sons britches 25 Y’r Eldest Sons Ticking
Suite 60 To making I Dimity Waistcoat, Serge suite 2 Cotton
Waistcoats and y’r Dimity Coat 185 For a pr of buff Gloves 100
For I Neck Cloth 12 A pr of Stockings 120 A pr Callimmaneo
britches 60
Another bill of the year 1643 reads:—
Pounds To making a suit with buttons to it 80 1 ell canvas 30 for
dimothy linings 30 for buttons &; silke 50 for points 50 for
taffeta 58 for belly pieces 40 for hooks &; eies 10 for
ribbonin for pockets 20 for stiffinin for a collar 10 —- Sum 378
The extraordinary prices of one hundred and twenty pounds of tobacco
for making a pair of stockings, and one hundred for a pair of gloves,
when making a coat was but forty, must remain a seventeenth-century
puzzle. This coat was probably a petticoat. It is curious, too, to find
a tailor making gloves and stockings at any price. I think both buff
gloves and stockings were of leather. Perhaps he charged thus broadly
because it was “not in his line.” Work in leather was always well paid.
We find tailors making leather breeches and leather drawers; the latter
could not be the garments thus named to-day. Tailors became prosperous
and well-to-do, perhaps because they worked in winter when other
Virginia tradesfolk were idle; and they acquired large tracts of land.
The conditions of settlement of Virginia were somewhat different from
those of the planting of New England. We find the land of many
Massachusetts towns wholly taken up by a group of settlers who
emigrated together from the Old World and gathered into a town together
in the New. It was like the transferal of a neighborhood. It brought
about many happy results of mutual helpfulness and interdependence.
From it arose that system of domestic service in which the children of
friends rendered helpful duty in other households and were called help.
Nothing of the kind existed in Virginia. There was far less
neighborhood life. Plantations were isolated. Lines of demarcation in
domestic service were much more definite where black life slaves and
white bond-servants for a term of years performed all household
service. For the daughter of one Virginia household to “help” in the
work in another household was unknown. Each system had its benefits;
each had its drawbacks. Neither has wholly survived; but something
better has been evolved, in spite of our lamentations for the good old
times.
Life is better ordered, but it is not so picturesque as when negro
servants swarmed in the kitchen, and German, Scotch, and Irish
redemptioners served in varied callings. There was vast variety of
attire to be found on the Virginia and Maryland plantations and in the
few towns of these colonies. The black slaves wore homespun cloths and
homespun stuff, crocus and Virginia cloth; and the women were happy if
they could crown their simple attire with gay turbans. Indians stalked
up to the plantation doors, halted in silence, and added their gay
dress of the wild woods. German sectaries and mystics fared on garbed
in their simple peasant dress. Irish sturdy beggars idled and fiddled
through existence, in dress of shabby gentility, with always a wig.
“Wild-Irish” came in brogues and Irish trousers. Sailors and pirates
came ashore gayly dressed in varied costume, with gay sashes full of
pistols and cutlasses, swaggering from wharf to plantation. Queer
details of dress had all these varied souls; some have lingered to
puzzle us.
A year ago I had sent to me, by a descendant of an old Virginia family,
a photograph of a curious gold medal or disk, a family relic which was
evidently a token of some importance, since it bore tiny holes and had
marks of having been affixed as an insignia. Though I could decipher
the bold initials, cut in openwork, I could judge little by the
colorless photograph, and finally with due misgivings and great
precautions in careful packing, insurance, etc., the priceless family
relic was intrusted to an express company for transmission to my
inspection. Glad indeed was I that the owner had not presented it in
person; for the decoration of honor, the insignia of rank, the trophy
of prowess in war or emblem of conquest in love, was the pauper’s badge
of a Maryland or Virginia parish. It was not a pleasant task to write
back the mortifying news; but I am proud of the letter which I
composed; no one could have done the deed better.
There was an old law in Virginia which ran thus:—
“Every person who shall receive relief from the parish and be sent to
the said alms-house, shall, upon the shoulder of the right sleeve of
his uppermost garment in an open and visible manner, wear a badge with
the name of the parish to which he or she belongs, cut in red, blue or
green cloth, as the vestry or church wardens shall direct. And if any
poor person shall neglect or refuse to wear such badge, such offense
may be punished either by ordering his or her allowance to be abridged,
suspended or withdrawn, or the offender to be whipped not exceeding
five lashes for one offense; and if any person not entitled to relief
as aforesaid, shall presume to wear such badge, he or she shall be
whipped for every such offense.”
This law did not mean the full name of the parish, but significant
initials. Sometimes the initials “P P” were employed, standing for
public pauper. In other counties a metal badge was ordered, often cast
in pewter. In one case a die-cutter was made by which an oblong brass
badge could be cut, and stamps of letters to stamp the badges
accompanied it. Sometimes these badges were three inches long.
The expression, “the badge of poverty,” became a literal one when all
persons receiving parochial relief had to wear a large Roman “P” with
the initial of their parish set on the right sleeve of the uppermost
garment in an open and visible manner. Likewise all pensioners were
ordered to wear their badges “so they may be seen.” A pauper who
refused to do this might be whipped and imprisoned for twenty-one days.
Moreover, if the parish beadle neglected to spy out that the badge was
missing from some poor pensioner, he had to pay half a crown himself.
This legality was necessitated by actions like that of the English
goody, who, when ordered to wear this pauper’s badge, demurely fastened
it to her flannel petticoat. For this law, like all the early Virginia
statutes, was simply a transcript of English laws. In New York, for
some years in the eighteenth century, the parish poor—there were no
paupers—were ordered to wear these badges.
This mode of stigmatizing offenders as well as paupers was in force in
the earlier days of all the colonies. Its existence in New England has
been immortalized in _The Scarlet Letter_. I have given in my book,
_Curious Punishments of By-gone Days_, many examples of the wearing of
significant letters by criminals in various New England towns, in
Plymouth, Salem, Taunton, Boston, Hartford, New London, also in New
York. It offered a singular and striking detail of costume to see
William Bacon in Boston, and Robert Coles in Roxbury, wearing “hanged
about their necks on their outerd garment a D made of Ridd cloth sett
on white.” A Boston woman wore a great “B,” not for Boston, but for
blasphemy. John Davis wore a “V” for viciousness. Others were forced to
wear for years a heavy cord around the neck, signifying that the
offender lived under the shadow of the gallows and its rope.
But return we to the metal badge which has caused this diversion to so
gloomy a subject as crime and punishment. It was simply an oblong plate
about three and one-half inches long, of humble metal—pinchbeck, or
alchemy—but plated heavily with gold, therefore readily mistaken for
solid gold; upon it the telltale initials “P P” had been stamped with a
die, while smaller letters read “St. J. Psh.” These confirmed my
immediate suspicions, for I had seen an order of relief for a stricken
wanderer—an order for two weeks’ relief, where the wardens of “St. J.
Psh.” ordered the sheriff to send the pauper on—to make him “move
along” to some other parish. This gold badge was not unlike the metal
badges worn on the left arm by “Bedlam beggars,” the licensed beggars
of Bethlehem Hospital, the half-cured patients of that asylum for
lunatics.
The owner of this badge with ancient letters had not idly accepted
them, or jumped at the conclusion that it was a decoration of honor for
his ancestor. He had searched its history long, and he had found in
Hall’s _Chronicles of the Pageants and Progress of the English Kings_
ample reference to similar letters, but not as pauper’s badges. Indeed,
like many another well-read and intelligent person, he had never heard
of pauper’s badges. He read:—
“In this garden was the King and five with him apparyelled in garments
of purpull satyn, every edge garnished with frysed golde and every
garment full of posyes made of letters of fine gold, of bullion as
thick as might be. And six Ladyes wore rochettes rouled with crymosyn
velvet and set with lettres like Carettes. And after the Kyng and his
compaignions had daunsed, he appointed the Ladies, Gentlewomen, and
Ambassadours to take the lettres off their garments in token of
liberalyte. Which thing the common people perceiving, ranne to them and
stripped them. And at this banket a shypman of London caught certayn
lettres which he sould to a goldsmith for £;3. 14s. 8d.”
All this was pleasing to the vanity of our friend, who fancied his
letters as having taken part in a like pageant; perhaps as a gift of
the king himself. We must remember that he believed his badge of pure
gold. He did not know it was a base metal, plated. He proudly pictured
his forbears taking part in some kingly pageant. He scorned so modern
and commonplace a possibility as a society like Knights of the Golden
Horseshoe, which was formed of Virginian gentlefolk.
It plainly was a relic of some romance, and in the strangely
picturesque events of the early years in this New World need not,
though a pauper’s badge, have been a badge of dishonor. What strange
event or happening, or scene had it overlooked? Why had it been covered
with its golden sheet? Was it in defiance or in satire, in remorse, or
in revenge, or in humble and grateful recognition of some strange and
protecting Providence? We shall never know. It was certainly not an
agreeable discovery, to think that your great-grandmother or
grandfather had probably been branded as a public pauper; but there
were strange exiles and strange paupers in those days, exiles through
political parties, through the disfavor of kings, through religious
conviction, and the pauper of the golden badge, the pauper of “St. J.
Psh.,” may have ended his days as vestryman of that very church.
Certain it was, that no ordinary pauper would have, or could have, thus
preserved it; and from similar reverses and glorifying equally base
objects came the subjects of half the crests of English heraldry.
Pocahontas. Pocahontas.
The likeness of Pocahontas (here) is dated 1616. It is in the dress of
a well-to-do Englishwoman, a woman of importance and means. This
portrait has been a shock to many who idealized the Indian princess as
“that sweet American girl” as Thackeray called her. Especially is it
disagreeable in many of the common prints from it. One flippant young
friend, the wife of an army officer, who had been stationed in the far
West, said of it, in disgust, remembering her frontier residence, “With
a man’s hat on! just like every old Indian squaw!” This hat is
certainly displeasing, but it was not worn through Indian taste; it was
an English fashion, seen on women of wealth as well as of the plainer
sort. I have a score of prints and photographs of English portraits,
wherein this mannish hat is shown. In the original of this portrait of
Pocahontas, the heavy, sombre effect is much lightened by the gold
hatband. These rich hatbands were one of the articles of dress
prohibited as vain and extravagant by the Massachusetts magistrates.
They were costly luxuries. We find them named and valued in many
inventories in all the colonies, and John Pory, secretary of the
Virginia colony, wrote about that time to a friend in England a
sentence which has given, I think to all who read it, an exaggerated
notion of the dress of Virginians:—
“Our cowekeeper here of James citty on Sundays goes accoutred all in
ffreshe fflaminge silke, and a wife of one that had in England
professed the blacke arte not of a Scholler but of a Collier weares her
rough beaver hatt with a faire perle hatband, and a silken sute there
to correspond.”
Corroborative evidence of the richness and great cost of these hatbands
is found in a letter of Susan Moseley to Governor Yardley of Virginia,
telling of the exchange of a hatband and jewel for four young cows, one
older cow and four oxen, on account of her “great want of cattle.” She
writes on “this Last July 1650, at Elizabeth River in Virginia”:—
“I had rayther your wife should weare them then any gentle woman I yet
know in ye country; but good Sir have _no_ scruple concerninge their
rightnesse, for I went my selfe from Rotterdam to ye haugh (The Hague)
to inquire of ye gould smiths and found y’t they weare all Right,
therefore thats without question, and for ye hat band y’t alone coste
five hundred gilders as my husband knows verry well and will tell you
soe when he sees you; for ye Juell and ye ringe they weare made for me
at Rotterdam and I paid in good rex dollars sixty gilders for ye Juell
and fivety and two gilders for ye ringe, which comes to in English
monny eleaven poundes fower shillings. I have sent the sute and Ringe
by your servant, and I wish Mrs. Yeardley health and prosperity to
weare them in, and give you both thanks for your kind token. When my
husband comes home we will see to gett ye Cattell home, in ye meantime
I present my Love and service to your selfe &; wife, and commit you all
to God, and remaine,
“Your friend and servant,
“SUSAN MOSELEY.”
The purchasing value of five hundred guilders, the cost of the hatband,
would be equal to-day to nearly a thousand dollars.
In the portrait of Pocahontas in the original, there is also much
liveliness of color, a rich scarlet with heavy braidings; these all
lessen somewhat the forbidding presence of the stiff hat. She carries a
fan of ostrich feathers, such as are depicted in portraits of Queen
Elizabeth.
These feather fans had little looking-glasses of silvered glass or
polished steel set at the base of the feathers. Euphues says, “The
glasses you carry in fans of feathers show you to be lighter than
feathers; the new-found glass chains that you wear about your necks,
argue you to be more brittle than glass.”
These fans were, in the queen’s hands, as large as hand fire-screens;
many were given to her as New Year’s gifts or other tokens, one by Sir
Francis Drake. This makes me believe that they were a fashion taken
from the North American Indians and eagerly adopted in England; where,
for two centuries, everything related to the red-men of the New World
was seized upon with avidity—except their costume.
The hat worn by Pocahontas, or a lower crowned form of it, is seen in
the Hollar drawing of Puritan women (here), where it seems specially
ugly and ineffective, and on the Quaker Tub-preacher. It lingered for
many years, perched on top of French hoods, close caps, kerchiefs, and
other variety of head-gear worn by women of all ranks; never elegant,
never becoming. I can think of no reason for its long existence and
dominance save its costliness. It was not imitated, so it kept its
place as long as the supply of beaver was ample. This hat was also
durable. A good beaver hat was not for a year nor even for a
generation. It lasted easily half a century. But we all know that the
beaver disappeared suddenly from our forests; and as a sequence the
beaver hat was no longer available for common wear. It still held its
place as a splendid, feather-trimmed, rich article of dress, a hat for
dress wear, and it was then comely and becoming. Within a few years,
through national and state protection, the beaver, most interesting of
wild creatures, has increased and multiplied in North America until it
has become in certain localities a serious pest to lumbermen. We must
revive the fashion of real beaver hats—that will speedily exterminate
the race.
Duchess of Buckingham and her Two Children. Duchess of Buckingham and
her Two Children.
It always has seemed strange to me that, in the prodigious interest
felt in England for the American Indian, an interest shown in the
thronging, gaping sight-seers that surrounded every taciturn red-man
who visited the Old World, no fashions of ornament or dress were copied
as gay, novel, or becoming. The Indian afforded startling detail to
interest the most jaded fashion-seeker. The _Works of Captain John
Smith_, Strachey’s _Historie of Travaile into Virginia_, the works of
Roger Williams, of John Josselyn, the letters of various missionaries,
give full accounts of their brilliant attire; and many of these works
were illustrated. The beautiful mantles of the Virginia squaws, made of
carefully dressed skins, were tastefully fringed and embroidered with
tiny white beads and minute disks of copper, like spangles, which, with
the buff of the dressed skin, made a charming color-study—copper and
buff—picked out with white. Sometimes small brilliant shells or
feathers were added to the fringes. An Indian princess, writes one
chronicler, wore a fair white deerskin with a frontal of white coral
and pendants of “great but imperfect-colored and worse-drilled
pearls”—our modern baroque pearls. A chain of linked copper encircled
her neck; and her maid brought to her a mantle called a “puttawas” of
glossy blue feathers sewed so thickly and evenly that it seemed like
heavy purple satin.
A traveller wrote thus of an Indian squaw and brave:—
“His wife was very well favored, of medium stature and very bashful.
She had on her back a long cloak of leather, with the fur side next to
her body. About her forehead she had a band of white coral. In her ears
she had bracelets of pearls hanging down to her waist. The rest of her
women of the better sort had pendants of copper hanging in either ear,
and some of the children of the King’s brother and other noblemen, had
five or six in either ear. He himself had upon his head a broad plate
of gold or copper, for being unpolished we knew not which metal it
might be, neither would he by any means suffer us to take it off his
head. His apparel was like his wife’s, only the women wear their hair
long on both sides of the head, and the men on but one side. They are
of color yellowish, and their hair black for the most part, and yet we
saw children who had very fine auburn and chestnut colored hair.”
John Josselyn wrote of tawny beauties:—
“They are girt about the middle with a Zone wrought with Blue and White
Beads into Pretty Works. Of these Beads they have Bracelets for the
Neck and Arms, and Links to hang in their Ears, and a Fair Table
curiously made up with Beads Likewise to wear before their Breast.
Their Hair they combe backward, and tye it up short with a Border about
two Handsfull broad, wrought in works as the Other with their Beads.”
Powhatan’s “Habit” still exists. It is in England, in the Tradescant
Collection which formed the nucleus of the Ashmolean Collection. It was
probably presented by Captain John Smith himself. It is made of two
deerskins ornamented with “roanoke” shell-work, about seven feet long
by five feet wide. Roanoke is akin to wampum, but this is made of West
Indian shells. The figures are circles, a crude human figure and two
mythical composite animals. He also wore fine mantles of raccoon skins.
A conjurer’s dress was simply a girdle with a single deerskin, while a
great blackbird with outstretched wings was fastened to one ear—a
striking ornament. I am always delighted to read such proof as this of
a fact that I have ever known, namely, that the American Indian is the
most accomplished, the most telling _poseur_ the world has ever known.
The ear of the Indian man and woman was pierced along the entire outer
edge and filled with long drops, a fringe of coral, gold, and pearl.
The wives of Powhatan wore triple strings of great pearls close around
their throats, and a long string over one shoulder, while their mantles
were draped to show their full handsome neck and arms. Altogether, with
their carefully dressed hair, they would have made in full dress a fine
show in a modern opera-box, and, indeed, the Indian squaws did cause
vast exhibition of curiosity and delight when they visited London and
were taken sight-seeing and sight-seen.
As early as 1629 an Indian chief with his wife and son came from Nova
Scotia to England. Lord Poulet paid them much attention in
Somersetshire, and Lady Poulet took Lady Squaw up to London and gave
her a necklace and a diamond, which I suppose she wore with her blue
and white beads.
Be the story of the saving of John Smith by Pocahontas a myth or the
truth, it forever lives a beautiful and tender reality in the hearts of
American children. Pocahontas was not the only Indian squaw who played
a kindly part in the first colonization of this country. There were
many, though their deeds and names are forgotten; and there was one
Indian woman whose influence was much greater and more prolonged than
was that of Pocahontas, and was haloed with many years of exciting
adventure as well as romance. Let me recount a few details of her life,
that you may wonder with me that the only trace of Indian life marked
indelibly on England was found on the swinging signs of inns known by
the name of “The Bell Savage,” “La Belle Sauvage,” and even “The Savage
and Bell.”
This second Indian squaw was a South Carolina neighbor of our beloved
Pocahontas; she had not, alas, the lovely disposition and noble
character of Powhatan’s daughter. She was systematically and
constitutionally mischievous, like a rogue elephant, so I call her a
rogue squaw. Her name was Coosaponakasee. The name is too long and too
hard to say with frequency, so we will do as did her English friends
and foes—call her Mary. Indeed, she was baptized Mary, for she was a
half-breed, and her white father had her reared like a Christian, had
her educated like an English girl as far as could be done in the little
primitive settlement of Ponpon, South Carolina. It will be shown that
the attempt was not over-successful.
She was a princess, the niece of crafty old Brim, the king of two
powerful tribes of Georgia Indians, the Creeks and Uchees. In 1715,
when she was about fifteen years old, a fierce Indian war broke out in
the early spring, and at the defeat of the Indians she promptly left
her school and her church and went out into the wilds, a savage among
savages, preferring defeat and a wild summer in the woods with her own
people to decorous victory within doors with her fellow Christians.
A Woman’s Doublet. A Woman’s Doublet. Mrs. Anne Turner.
The following year an Englishman, Colonel John Musgrove, accompanied by
his son, went out as a mediator to the Creek Indians to secure their
friendship, or at any rate their neutrality. The young squaw, Mary,
served as interpreter, and the younger English pacificator promptly
proved his amicable disposition by falling in love with her. He did
what was more unusual, he married her; and soon they set up a large
trading-house on the Savannah River, where they prospered beyond
belief. On the arrival of the shipload of emigrants sent out by the
Trustees of Georgia the English found Mary Musgrove and her husband
already carrying on a large trade, in securing and transacting which
she had served as interpreter. When Oglethorpe landed, he at once went
to her, and asked permission to settle near her trading-station. She
welcomed him, helped him, interpreted for him, and kept things in
general running smoothly in the settlement between the English and the
Indians. The two became close friends, and as long as generous but
confiding Oglethorpe remained, all went well in the settlement; but in
time he returned to England, giving her a handsome diamond ring in
token of his esteem. Her husband died soon after and she removed to a
new station called Mount Venture. Oglethorpe shortly wrote of her:—
“I find that there is the utmost endeavour by the Spaniards to destroy
her because she is of consequence and in the King’s interests; therefor
it is the business of the King’s friends to support her; besides which
I shall always be desirous to serve her out of the friendship she has
shown me as well as the colony.”
In a letter of John Wesley’s written to Lady Oglethorpe, and now
preserved in the Georgia Historical Society, he refers frequently to
Mary Musgrove, saying:—
“I had with me an interpreter the half-breed, Mary Musgrove, and daily
had meetings for instruction and prayer. One woman was baptized. She
was of them who came out of great tribulation, her husband and all her
three children having been drowned four days before in crossing the
Ogeechee River. Her happiness in the gospel caused me to feel that,
like Job, the widow’s heart had been caused to sing for joy. She was
married again the day following her baptism. I suggested longer days of
mourning. She replied that her first husband was surely dead; and that
his successor was of much substance, owning a cornfield and gun. I
doubt the interpreter Mary Musgrove, that she is yet in the valley and
shadow of darkness.”
One can picture the excitement of the Choctaw squaw to lose her husband
and children, and to get another husband and religion in a week’s time.
Her reply that her husband “was surely dead” bears a close resemblance
to the hackneyed story of the response to a charivari query of the
Dutch bridegroom who had been a widower but a week, “Ain’t my vife as
deadt as she ever vill be?”
Her usefulness continued. If a “talk” were had with the Indians in
Savannah, Fredonia, or any other settlement, Mary had to be sent for;
if Indian warriors had to be hired, to keep an army against the Spanish
or marauding Indians, Mary obtained them from her own people. If land
were bought of the Indians, Mary made the trade. She soon married
Captain Matthews, who had been sent out with a small English troop to
protect her trading-post; he also speedily died, leaving her free,
after alliances with trade and war, to find a third husband in
ecclesiastical circles, in the person of one Chaplain Bosomworth, a
parson of much pomposity and ambition, and of liberal education without
a liberal brain. He had had a goodly grant of lands to prompt and
encourage him in his missionary endeavors; and he was under the
direction and protection of the Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel. His mission was to convert the Indians, and he began by
marrying one; he then proceeded to break the law by bringing in the
first load of negro slaves in that colony, a trade which was positively
prohibited by the conditions and laws of the colony. When his illegal
traffic was stopped, he got his wife to send in back claims to the
colony of Georgia for $25,000 as interpreter, mediator, agent, etc.,
for the English. She had already been paid about a thousand dollars.
This demand being promptly refused, the hitherto pacific and friendly
Mary, edged on by that sorry specimen of a parson, her husband, began a
series of annoying and extraordinary capers. She declared herself
empress of Georgia, and after sending her half-brother, a full-blooded
Indian, as an advance-courier, she came with a body of Indians to
Savannah. The Rev. Thomas Bosomworth, decked in full canonical robes,
headed the Indians by the side of his empress wife, dressed in Indian
costume; and an imposing procession they made, with plenty of
theatrical color. At first the desperate colonists thought of seizing
Mary and shipping her off to England to Oglethorpe, but this notion was
abandoned. As the English soldiers were very few at that special time,
and the Indian warriors many, we can well believe that the colonists
were well scared, the more so that when the Indians were asked the
reason of their visit, “their answers were very trifling and very
dark.” So a feast was offered them, but Mary and her brother refused to
come and to eat; and the dinner was scarcely under way when more armed
Indians appeared from all quarters in the streets, running up and down
in an uproar, and the town was in great confusion. The alarm drums were
beaten, and it was reported that the Indians had cut off the head of
the president as they sat together at the feast. Every man in the
colony turned out in full arms for duty, the women and children
gathered in groups in their homes in unspeakable terror. Then the
president and his assistants who had been at the dinner, and who had
gone unarmed to show their friendly intent, did what they should have
done in the beginning, seized that disreputable specimen of an English
missionary, the Rev. Mr. Bosomworth, and put him in prison; and we
wonder they kept their hands off him as long as they did. Still trying
to settle the matter without bloodshed, the president asked the Indian
chiefs to adjourn to his house “to drink a glass of wine and talk the
matter over.” Into this conference came Mary, bereft of her husband,
raging like a madwoman, threatening the lives of the magistrates,
swearing she would annihilate the colony. “A fig for your general,”
screamed she, “you own not a foot of land in this colony. The whole
earth is mine.” Whereupon the Empress of Georgia, too, was placed under
military guard.
Then a harassing week of apprehension ensued; the Indians were fed, and
parleyed with, and reasoned with, and explained to. At last Mary’s
brother Malatche, at a conference, presented as a final demand a paper
setting forth plainly the claims of the Indians. The sequel of this
presentation is almost comic. The paper was so evidently the production
of Bosomworth, and so wholly for his own personal benefit and not for
that of the Indians, and the astonishment of the president and his
council was so great at his vast and open assumption, that the Indians
were bewildered in turn by the strange and unexpected manner of the
white men upon reading the paper; and childishly begged to have the
paper back again “to give to him who made it.” A plain exposition of
Bosomworth’s greed and craft followed, and all seemed amicably
explained and settled, and the Creeks offered to smoke the pipe of
peace; when in came Mary, having escaped her guards, full of rum and of
rancor. The president said to her in a low voice that unless she ceased
brawling and quarrelling he would at once put her into close
confinement; she turned in a rage to her brother, and translated the
threat. He and every Indian in the room sprang to their feet, drew
tomahawks, and for a short time a complete massacre was imminent. Then
the captain of the guard, Captain Noble Jones, who had chafed under all
this explaining diplomacy, lost his much-tried patience, and like a
brave and fearless English soldier ordered the Indians to surrender
arms. Though far greater in number than the English, they yielded to
his intrepidity and wrath; and the following night and day they sneaked
out of the town, as ordered, by twos and threes.
For one month this fright and commotion and expense had existed; and at
last wholly alone were left the two contemptible malcontents and
instigators of it all. Mr. and Mrs. Bosomworth thereafter ate very
humble pie; he begged sorely and cried tearfully to be forgiven; and he
wailed so deeply and promised so broadly that at last the two were
publicly pardoned.
Yet, after all, they had their own way; for they soon went to London
and cut an infinitely fine figure there. Mary was the top of the mode,
and there Bosomworth managed to get for his wife lands and coin to the
amount of about a hundred thousand dollars.
The prosperous twain returned to America in triumph, and built a
curious and large house on an island they had acquired; in it the
Empress did not long reign; at her death the Rev. Mr. Bosomworth
married his chambermaid.
Such is the sorry tale of the Indian squaw and the English parson, a
tale the more despicable because, though she had been reared in English
ways, baptized in the English faith, had been the friend of English men
and women, and married three English husbands; yet when fifty years old
she returned at vicious suggestion with promptitude and fierceness to
violent savage ways, to incite a massacre of her friends. And that
suggestion came not from her barbarian kin, but from an English
gentleman—a Christian priest.