THE PERIOD OF SETTLEMENT
We have now reached the point in our consideration of the women of our
own land where we are free to turn to the story of the American woman as
she is generally known the woman of the United States. Of course
scientific ethnology recognizes no such nomenclature, giving the title
of "American" only to the aborigines of this continent; but we who write
and read this work are not concerned to be scientific but rather
perspicacious on the one side and perspicuous on the other, and the
generally accepted nomenclature will be adopted here and the woman of
the United States and the mother-colonies spoken of as being, by right
as well as acceptation, the American woman to all other lands and ages.
Before entering upon the history of the woman of our country, it seems
needful to cast a glance upon some general conditions which must be
reckoned with in our estimate and appreciation of the women of America
and their history. As a preliminary, the story of the Blue Fairy will be
related,--a story so old that it may be new to most of the readers of
this volume and which, fairy story though it be, has yet a meaning in
the study of the history of women, if we will but seek it out. Here is
the story, as told by Stahl:
"One day the Blue Fairy descended to earth with the courteous intention
of distributing to all the young girls of in the different nations the
treasures of beauty that she brought with her.
"Her dwarf Amaranth sounded his horn, and instantly a young girl of
every nation presented herself at the foot of the Blue Fairy's throne.
Then, after having made a short speech, she proceeded to distribute her
gifts.
"She gave to the young girl who represented all the Castiles locks so
black and long that she could make a mantilla of them.
"To the Italian she gave eyes as bright and burning as an eruption of
Vesuvius in the middle of the night.
"To the Turkish girl, a figure as round as the moon and as soft as
eider-down.
"To the English girl, an aurora borealis to tint her cheeks, her lips,
and her shoulders.
"To the German, teeth like her own, and a tender heart.
"To the Russian, the dignity of a queen.
"Then, going into details, she put gayety on the lips of the Neapolitan
_wit in the brain of the Irish girl_ good sense in the heart of the
Flemish girl; and, when nothing remained to be given, she arose to take
her flight.
"'And I?' said the Parisian to her, detaining her by the floating border
of her tunic.
"'I had forgotten you.'
"'Entirely forgotten, madam.'
'"I overlooked you. But what can I do? My bag of gifts is empty.'
"She reflected an instant, and then called around her the recipients of
her gifts, told them the situation, and asked them to share their
treasures with their unfortunate sister. Who could refuse a fairy, and
above all the Blue Fairy? So, with the graciousness always conferred by
happiness, these girls in turn approached the neglected Parisian and as
they passed her one threw her a part of her black hair, another a tint
of her rosy complexion; this one a beam of her joyousness, that one a
touch of her sensibility; and thus it came about that the Parisian, so
poor, so obscure, so eclipsed by her sisters, found herself in an
instant, by this generous division, richer and more attractively endowed
than any of her companions."
Now this charming little parable is by courtesy true of the Parisienne;
but it is far truer of the American woman, for of her it might have been
written as a parable indeed. The product of no one blood, no isolated
race, she has been given by the fusion of variant races in her ancestry
an origin and a tradition, both physical and mental, such as has been
granted to no other woman of whom history tells us. Into the ancestry of
the English woman entered the elements of the Celtic blood, Brythonic
and Goidal, of the Saxons and Teutons, of the later Normans and even
Provençals, while through all, perhaps, ran the strain of the primitive
Briton and Pict; but not even in this mingling of races can she compare
with her American sister in diversity of racial source. Moreover, the
English stock, which we unite in calling--incorrectly--the Anglo-Saxon,
has remained permanent in type and fount; but this is not so with the
American. This latter is in constant process of modification by the
introduction of new progenital elements, and it cannot now be prophesied
when there will be a clearly-defined race, with individual and permanent
characteristics, established upon this side of the great seas.
Therefore the American woman is the heir of the ages in a sense never
before true of anyone. As with the Parisian in the story, so with the
American woman in truth, all races have united in bringing her of their
best gifts. It is for her to make of these the best that she may;
certainly none of her sisters has ever begun her career with such
fortune brought her by destiny as a birth-gift.
It must not, however, be forgotten or unnoted that, while the American
woman is thus rich in a heritage unequalled by that granted to any of
her sisters, being world-heir instead of heir to a race, she has some
corresponding disadvantages to overcome in her effort to influence as a
racial representative the currents of world-thought and world-progress.
She has behind her no national tradition stretching far back into a past
so remote that it has ceased to be effect and has become merely
foundation. The American woman, alone of all the representatives of the
higher cultures, has no effective nationality to shape her trend. She is
a product of her time only, not of time and ancient tradition mingled;
she has no distinct nationality of growth and line of progress. Every
other woman of Caucasian race has a past to which to refer as
inspiration and cause, a past which is a story of upward growth, of
ever-increasing culture. The American woman found her culture ready for
her--was already, at her birth, the child and expression of the highest
civilization known to her day. She had no need of exerting formative
influence upon her race; all was already done to her hand. Thus she
lacks the greatest of all traditions--the tradition of growth and
development.
Yet, though not of native production, though lacking the influence of
constant-trending nationality, the American woman is and always has been
strongly individual. While she is not an indigenous development, not a
result of racial growth and broadening, yet her development has been
essentially characteristic. She has reached forward upon lines of
variant trend from those of her sisters of other cultures, and she is
truly a product of her country in that she has been shaped by the
conditions of the time and circumstances of that country's birth. There
was breathed into her from the first the informing spirit of the typical
American civilization the spirit of freedom. And into her nature has
also come another spirit distinctively American--the spirit of the
wilderness subdued and conquered, of a barren land made to yield its
treasures to the arm of the pioneer the spirit of conquest. There is no
new gift of mind or soul brought to her by other nations that has not
been modified by these twin spirits. Thus, though heir to all nations
and peoples, though product of all cultures, she remains typically
American in dominant traits, in the path in which she has chosen to set
her feet. Latin and Teuton, Slav and Celt, she has in her veins the
blood of them all; but she is still less their result than their
modification, and she is still the child of America even more than of
the world which has given her life.
The conditions under which the northern continent of America was first
settled were somewhat peculiar as contrasted with those of any other
settlement whose full history we know. It was entirely different, for
example, from the settlement of South America or Mexico. In both the
latter cases there was what may be described as a blow and a victory;
there was a conquest over a primitive, even if remarkably civilized
people, and that was the end of the matter save for the mere formal
colonization which followed. This was not the case with the colonization
of North America. There was no overt or complete conquest; on the
contrary, there was at first overture of peace between the inhabitants
of the country and the newcomers. This did not last; the whole of the
first history of the colonization of North America may be summed up, at
least in its most prominent aspect, in one word--war. But this warfare
was not decisive; it was not waged against a nation, but against
nations, fighting individually and jealously of each other indeed,--else
they must have prevailed at first,--but yet constantly bringing forward
new disputants of the title of the newcomers to the land.
The country had to be won from its original owners step by step, not by
one or many blows; the process of reclamation was by a steady pushing
back of the aborigines, not by a conquest such as that of Norman over
Saxon or even Englishman over Maori. There was no conquered race to
become eventually amalgamated with its conquerors; the history of all
the first period of settlement is the history of civilization driving
barbarism before it as it marched on. But for such methods there was
need of a somewhat peculiar and very strenuous civilization; the desired
result was not to be won by any graces or abstractions, but by the
prevailing of white stamina, bravery, and ingenuity over red cunning and
tradition and honesty--of the axe over the tomahawk, of the rifle over
the bow. It was the triumph of the knowledge rather than the principles
belonging to a higher culture than that which was going down; it was
Friar Bacon with his gunpowder, not Francis Bacon with his learning, who
was fighting the battle of the white against the red, and was affecting
the progress of the world.
In conditions arising from strife woman has but little place. She may
indeed be present, and even be a part of the conditions which are
inevitable in times of conquest; but she is there only as an accident,
not as a requisite. The elimination of the influence of woman from the
trend of present civilization would be fatal to all approach to any
worthy goal; but in the time of the beginnings of our country's story
woman was a hindrance rather than a help to progress, since by her
presence and the consequent anxiety and by her weakness in physical
prowess she enfeebled the fighting powers of the garrison or village.
Even so, she had her part, and an honorable one, in the events which
established white dominance in America; but it was one that was
necessarily subordinate in the eyes of the chroniclers of those times,
and so we hear but little of women in the flush of our country's dawn.
It is not to be questioned that in the first colonies planted by England
in the New World there were women--perhaps nearly as many as men. We are
apt to forget, by the way, that Virginia was originally settled by the
Spaniards under Menendez, the perpetrator of the terrible massacre in
Florida by which his name is best remembered, and that the Latin races,
both Spanish and French, long anticipated the English in colonization of
our country. It is quite certain that in all these early Latin colonies
there were women and that these bore no inconsiderable part in the
events which were trending, though sometimes by devious paths, to the
establishment of Caucasian empire in America; but their names are
unknown to us and we are even ignorant of their place in the history of
their time. The story of southern settlement, as far as this has any
effect upon the present, begins for us with the settlement of Roanoke
Island by Sir Walter Raleigh's ill-fated colony. The tale of its
mysterious disappearance is too well known to call for recapitulation
here; but before that sudden and final ending of its story we have
chronicles which tell us that among these pioneer pilgrims were women,
mostly wives of the men settlers, who bore their part in the burden and
heat of the day,--and those days were toilsome and full of peril,--as
well as their more active lords. Also to that lost colony belongs the
honor of having reared the first alien child born on American soil, the
forerunner of the race that was to make that soil its own,--Virginia
Dare, the little maiden whose passing was as mysterious as her coming
was ominous. The first of the enormous army of the conquering palefaces
who were to overrun the land like locusts, she passed away into the
mysterious silence of the woods as the standard bearer of the advance,
leaving her name to be a shadowy record for all future ages and the very
embodiment of the spirit of romance that was in the story of the
subjugation of America. Had she lived the normal life of the woman
pioneer, her memory would have lacked something of romance; but her
unknown fate, and her position in the van of the great coming nation of
Americans, keep her in remembrance.
Jamestown was founded on May 13, 1607, and with its foundation began the
real era of English rule in America. We know but little of the place of
woman in the first days of the colony, and it is not until 1608 that we
find any record of female influence or even presence. At this time,
Captain Newport, who had brought from England the first fleet and in
whose honor Newport News--originally Newport Ness--was named, made his
reappearance with a number of fresh settlers, among them being Mistress
Forrest and her maid, Anne Burras by name, who was shortly afterward
wedded to Master John Laydon and thus won for herself fame as the first
woman of English blood to be married on American soil. By this time,
Jamestown had grown to have a population of more than five hundred
souls, of whom not more than two hundred were fighting men; so that the
proportion of women and children must have been far larger than might be
supposed by those looking at the circumstances of colonization and
existence. It must have taken a stout heart in a woman's breast to face
the unknown dangers of the unknown world; and soon the women of the
infant colony had need for all their bravery. There is no doubt that the
women played a noble part in the terrible days that followed the Indian
siege of Jamestown--the days which were afterward known as the "Starving
Time." Not more than sixty of the original five hundred souls remained
at the end of that period; and its record presents the probably unique
account of women of the higher civilizations descending to the horrors
of cannibalism, the "common kettel" at last containing the bodies of
Indians and even of kinsmen. Indeed, there was one foul deed of that
time wherein a woman was directly concerned, though as victim, not
principal: a colonist killed his wife and had eaten part of the body
before he was discovered. He was burned alive; but those who punished
him for his crime looked fearfully forward to the day when their own
temptations might become too strong. At last came succor; and there
seems to be for us assurance of the temper and mettle of the women of
that time when we find that of the sixty survivors a fair proportion was
of the weaker sex. There were children also, witnesses to the devotion
of their mothers in their care.
The colony was abandoned; but only for three days, and then began the
time of uninterrupted English dominance. There is, however, in its
history nothing of importance to our subject until we reach 1621,--very
near the limit which has been set as the end of the "period of
settlement." At this time there occurred an event so peculiar and so
far-reaching in its social results and withal so intimately connected
with the general, though not the particular, chronicle of woman in the
early colonies that it may be set forth in some fulness, even though it
was one that does not give us any instance of feminine development. But
it was so typical of its time and so ominous of the mothers that moulded
the characters of the native-born pioneers in the southern settlements
that it has its legitimate place in a history of American women. That
event is the coming of the "maids," as they were called in the old
chronicle from which we draw most of our knowledge concerning the early
settlers of Virginia.
Sir Edwin Sandys, being at the head of the London Company, in whose
hands were now the interests of the Virginia plantations, devised the
plan of sending out as wives to the Virginia adventurers a number of
respectable young women. It is probable that Sandys was instigated by
the thought of the dangers of mixed marriages with the Indians, which
were apt to result from the paucity of women of Caucasian race,--for
many young men had of late been tempted to try their fortunes in the New
World, and the proportion of women had failed among the settlers. Sandys
was in every way a believer in vigorous immigration, and in one year he
sent out one thousand two hundred and sixty-one new settlers; these he
was desirous of attaching to the soil of their new country,--a thing
that could be done only by aiding them there to establish a home. So he
secured a cargo of young women, ninety in number, who were willing to go
to a far land in search of husbands. Whether he had great difficulty in
finding such women, or whether matrimony as a prospect, even though with
an indeterminate partner, was so attractive to the average spinster of
the day as to make her eager to embrace any opportunity which held
certainty of result, cannot be known; but the "maids" went, though under
somewhat peculiar and even, to modern eyes, degrading conditions. For
the thrifty company was not minded that the prospective husbands should
have their wives as free gifts; no, they must pay for them as for any
other chattel, and the price fixed was one hundred and twenty pounds of
tobacco each, the value of this amount of the weed being about eighty
dollars at present values. One would think that, if the matter was to be
one of barter, the company might have set a higher price upon a wife,
even if only out of compliment to the sex; but doubtless the company
knew the true value of the goods which it purveyed.
It must be admitted that the worshipful company, notwithstanding its
parsimonious spirit in the matter of vend, acted in good faith with both
prospective husbands and present "maids." It had already made many
regulations intended to promote matrimony by distinguishing in favor of
married men; and in the selection and care of the feminine cargo
exported it took the utmost precautions to ensure the purity of the
women offered as wives. Moreover, the "maids" were carefully guarded
from imposition or force. Orders were straitly given that "In case they
cannot be presently married, we desire that they may be put with several
householders that have wives until they can be supplied with
husbands.... We desire that the marriage be free, according to nature,
and we would not have these maids deceived and married to servants, but
only such freemen and tenants as have means to maintain them... not
enforcing them to marry against their wills." However, there was very
little need for these precautions, since the men of the settlement
flocked in crowds to the sale of the ladies, and the only difficulty was
that there were more suitors than there were fair ones to make them
happy. The scene presented must have been very much like that to be
found at the old hiring fairs of England, and there does not seem to
have been more embarrassment on the part of the "maids" while their
charms were being appraised by their suitors than if they had been
merely disposing of their services for a short time and in menial
capacity. It is impossible to suppose that women who would seek
matrimony under such circumstances were of a very refined type; but, on
the other hand, they must have been possessed of bravery and
independence beyond the common lot of women of whatever class. Later,
sixty other "maids," "young, handsome, and chaste," according to the
chronicle, were induced to come out to the colony under the same
conditions, and these and their predecessors were among the founders of
the race which developed into the soldiers of the Revolution and of the
yet more terrible struggle of later years.
Unfortunately, there were at this time introduced into the young colony
two elements that were to affect it, one slightly and temporarily only,
the other profoundly and for as long as there was in the South a
distinctiveness of culture. These were the practice of sending criminals
to Virginia and the introduction of slavery. To the first number of
settlers sent over by Sandys, James I. added one hundred felons, and
this was by no means the last shipload of criminals to be exported to
the Virginias. These criminals included both men and women, and their
introduction among the colonists, though on the pretence of their being
indented servants, was an evil which for long found results in the lower
strata of the growing civilization. The women, generally of the lowest
dregs of English life,--where not political convicts, who were of course
of entirely different stamp,--were "hired" by the more dissolute of the
unmarried male colonists, and became openly their mistresses; and thus
there came into existence a social element which was to do important if
insidious work in the undermining of the older morals of the settlement.
Slavery, however, was of far more import, and affected all the future
civilization. In August, 1619, twenty negroes were sold as slaves to
some of the planters, the blacks having been brought by a Dutch ship.
This was the rise of the African cloud, as yet no bigger than a man's
hand, but in time to grow to most portentous dimensions, and to bear the
whirlwind as its legitimate progeny. It may be questioned why note is
made of the rise of slavery in a book devoted to the history of woman;
but to those who will trouble to think the reason is evident. The woman
is always at once a formative cause and a product of her civilization;
and the civilization of the South was built upon the institution of
slavery. To comprehend the culture even the nature of the Southern lady
we must keep constantly in mind the influence of the national
institution, so that, as its effects will have to be frequently noted in
the future, it is not amiss to chronicle here the small root which
afterward spread to such upas growth.
Turning to matters more immediately of the time with which we are at
present concerned, a proclamation of Governor Wyat, issued shortly
before the fall of the Virginia Company and the consequent beginning of
the real colonial period, is worthy of note as bearing upon the
universal story of women. Though including men as well as women in its
provisions, the proclamation was aimed chiefly at the latter, and its
intent was the breaking up of the seemingly common habit of becoming
engaged to more than one person at a time. A man was to be whipped for
doing so vile an action, though a woman might escape with a fine. The
worthy governor forbade women "to contract themselves to two several men
at one time," for the reason that "women are yet scarce and in much
request, and this offense has become very common, whereby great disquiet
has arisen between parties and no small trouble to the government." It
was further proclaimed that "Every minister should give notice in his
church that what man or woman soever should use any word or speech
tending to a contract of marriage to two several persons at one time...
as might entangle or breed scruples in their consciences, should for
such their offense either undergo corporal correction or be punished by
fine or otherwise, according to the quality of the person so offending."
Such a regulation would not be popular nowadays; but coquetry seems to
have been of more serious moment then. That flirtation should threaten
the government itself suggests a singular state of affairs indeed.
It is now time to turn to a consideration of another settlement--the
only one that rivalled that of Virginia in effectiveness of result and
continuity. For the settlements in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania,
and others--with one exception, to be reserved for later brief
consideration--did not continue the civilization which they established,
but took their later culture, that which survives, from the more
prepotent colonies of Virginia and New England. Therefore they do not
enter into our present inquiry, since they produced no feminine type or
even individual of note; it is to the more northern and southern
settlements that we must look for the foundations and matrices of
American femininity. We have glanced at that of the South; let us glean
what we may of the story of women in that of the North.
It was on November 11, 1620, that the Pilgrim Fathers, as they have come
to be known to history, united in an agreement which was the foundation
of constitutional government in America. They had been brought, rather
as it seemed by Divine Providence than by their own guidance, to a more
northern shore than that to which they had intended voyaging, and they
had determined to make that place their colonial abode. Tradition
records that the first to step on the famous Plymouth Rock was a woman,
Mary Chilton by name, and the circumstance has brought her name down to
us of this day. It would not seem a difficult manner of attaining
immortality, that of stepping from a boat to a rock; most women, being
gifted with the ordinary means of locomotion, could do as much; but
circumstances decide the value of every action, and so Mary Chilton
achieved fame by one of the simplest and most natural acts of her whole
existence. There are those who deny the very existence of Mary Chilton
and sneer at the tradition that makes a woman lead the way to the
florescence of American nationality; and it must be confessed that Mary
Chilton, having taken the step which was to preserve her from
forgetfulness, disappears as completely as if she had never lived. But
we like to think the legend true, for it was most appropriate that a
woman should head the march to that land where women were destined to be
such a controlling force and where, as in no other country, women were
to lead in many of the greatest movements that have crowned the
civilization of our own day. One likes to believe in Mary Chilton; and
it is something in favor of the story that the name of James Chilton is
found attached to the document which has already been referred to and
that it would be quite in keeping with Puritan superstition to send a
young and pure maiden before them as their advance guard into the
unknown land which was to be won by strength of soul as well as of arm.
At least we know that there were women, and those in due proportion,
among the settlers. The total number of pilgrims has always been stated
as small, and the _Mayflower_, their little vessel, is said to have been
of but one hundred and eighty tons burden; but it is evident that there
has been error in both these matters, judging by the large number of New
Englanders whose ancestors "came over in the _Mayflower_." If half these
genealogical tracings are founded on fact, the supposed tiny _Mayflower_
must have been the forerunner of our present huge ocean liners; but, be
this as it may, we have record that the first of these many descendants
was born on the day following the arrival of the vessel. It was not a
girl this time, as had been the case with the first child born of
English parents on Virginia soil; it was a boy, and he was appropriately
named Peregrine, which signifies "pilgrim." While not directly germane
to our subject--save so far as having been born of woman makes all men
contributory to the history of women--it may be interesting to state
that this first child of the Pilgrims lived to the age of eighty-three
years, and died at Marshfield, where later died the greatest of New
Englanders.
The influence of the women of the colonists was doubtless great in
maintaining the courage and constancy of the men; but, as was the case
with the early settlers in Virginia, we have little or no particular
record of the feminine portion of the settlement. We are told of
Priscilla, "the Puritan Maiden" in Longfellow's poem, _The Courtship of
Miles Standish_, and we are entirely at liberty to account her a real
personage if we desire to do so. It is at least certain that Miles
Standish was the valiant captain pictured by the poet and that John
Alden to whom the poet ascribes the office of deputy-wooer was one of
the Pilgrim Fathers--whether the latter _in esse_ or _in futuro_ we are
not told, though knowledge on this point might have bearing upon the
authenticity of the story of Priscilla and if the rest of the legend is
not true it is at least well imagined. Moreover, it may be asserted that
it is true in the deeper sense of truth, whether or not it be loyal to
mere fact. The picture drawn for us of the Puritan maiden is typically
true and therefore worthy of quotation even in a volume dedicated to the
Muse of history rather than to her of poesy:
"Ever of her he thought, when he read in his Bible on Sunday
Praise of the virtuous woman, as she is described in the Proverbs--
How the heart of her husband doth safely trust in her always,
How all the days of her life she will do him good and not evil,
How she seeketh the wool and the flax and worketh with gladness,
How she layeth her hand to the spindle and holdeth the distaff,
How she is not afraid of the snow for herself or her household,
Knowing her household are clothed with the scarlet cloth of her weaving."
For they were no idle butterflies of fashion, no languid great dames,
these wives and daughters of the Pilgrims. Their hands knew the rush of
the thread on the wheel, the touch of the distaff, and were even not
unacquainted at need with the weight of musket and bird-gun. They were
cast to some extent in the fine old Spartan mould, these Pilgrim
mothers; they feared God--and nothing else--and they bent their energies
to the performance of their sole aspiration, that of "doing their duty
in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call them." It was
a state of life that held peril and toil and little reward for these
things; but they cared nothing for this, these splendid pilgrim dames,
but lived their lives bravely and died with the consciousness that they
had done their best to make noble the birth of a new land which should
shelter their children forever.
The first authentic record that we have of an individual woman in the
time of the first northern settlement comes to us in the shape of a
death, as the first feminine name of the Roanoke settlers came to us
connected with a birth. It was in 1630, when the settlement of
Massachusetts Bay had begun to take some aspect of permanency, that
there came into its harbor a fleet of some ten or eleven ships, the
flagship, a vessel of three hundred and fifty tons, being named the
_Arabella_. She was thus called because of the presence on board of Lady
Arabella Johnson, wife of a commoner called Isaac Johnson. The pair had
come to America to breathe a purer atmosphere of freedom in religion
than they had been able to find at home; but Lady Arabella was not
destined long to enjoy the liberty she sought. The words of Cotton
Mather may be quoted in regard to her, the first of noble blood to
succumb to the rigors of the new climate:
"Of those who soon dyed after their first arrival, not the least
considerable was the lady Arabella, who left an earthly paradise in the
family of an _Earldom_, to encounter the sorrows of a wilderness, for
the entertainments of a _pure worship_ in the house of God; and then
immediately left that wilderness for the Heavenly paradise, whereto the
compassionate Jesus, of whom she was a follower, called her. We have
read concerning a noble woman of Bohemia, who forsook her friends, her
plate, her house and all, and because the gates of the city were
guarded, crept through the common sewer, that she might enjoy the
institutions of our Lord at another place where they might be had. The
spirit which acted that noble woman, we may suppose carried this blessed
lady thus to and through the hardships of an American desart. But as for
her virtuous husband, Isaac Johnson, Esq.,
'"Hetry'd
To live without her, lik'd it not, and dy'ed.'
"His mourning for the death of his honourable consort was too bitter to
be extended a year; about a month after _her_ death _his_ ensued, unto
the extreme loss of the whole plantation."
There is here much cause for smiling, especially in old Dr. Mather's
unconscious snobbery as to the "paradise of an earldom," even to
italicising the important word, and to his wonder how anyone could leave
such delights for the goal of a "desart"; but there is also some moving
if equally unconscious pathos, and for this, as well as for the fact of
Lady Arabella's being the first feminine name to come down to us from
Plymouth in the dignity of history, her virtues and fate are here
recorded. Moreover, that otherwise unfamed lady from Bohemia who left
her "plate" behind her in her search for religious liberty deserves to
be rescued from oblivion.
[Illustration 4: THE COURTSHIP OF MILES STANDISH.
After the painting by C. Y. Turner.
_We are told of Priscilla, "the Puritan Maiden" in Longfellow's poem_
The Courtship of Miles Standish, _and we are entirely at liberty to
account her a real personage if we desire to do so. It is at least
certain that Miles Standish was the valiant captain pictured by the poet
and that John Alden to whom the poet ascribes the office of deputy-wooer
was of the Pilgrim Fathers._]
In the same vessel that brought Lady Arabella to the inhospitable shores
of America there came another woman whose name better deserves memorial,
as far as is concerned lasting influence of life, than does that of the
saintly lady commemorated by Cotton Mather. Anne Dudley was the daughter
of an old servitor of the Count of Lincoln, the father of Lady Arabella,
and was herself married to Simon Bradstreet, destined to be governor of
Massachusetts. She was as devout and devoted as Lady Arabella herself,
and she was of yet finer stamp in that she was a poet. She was a Puritan
of the Puritans; her father was later elected to be governor of the
colony, preceding his son-in-law in that distinguished position, so that
Anne Bradstreet must have been from the beginning of her life permeated
with the very spirit of Puritanism. One would not think that such
training and environment would be favorable to the fostering of the
poetic faculty; severity of creed and the aesthetic soul do not often go
hand in hand. Yet she was the first professional poet of New
England,--indeed, probably of America; and, if fault be found for
calling her a poet of America when she was not a native product, answer
may be made that the New Englanders strenuously claimed her as their own
under the title of the Tenth Muse, and that she was, if not a product of
the soil of Massachusetts, at least a product of the spirit that made
that soil sacred. She was very young, not yet twenty, when she arrived
at Plymouth, and most of her poems were written during the first decade
of her residence in the colony. Since, in this portion of our history
there are few feminine names upon which to expatiate, it may not be a
waste of space to give in full the title page of the first volume of
poems issued by the "American Sappho":
"THE TENTH MUSE--Lately sprung up in America; or Severall Poems,
compiled with great variety of Wit and Learning, full of delight.
Wherein especially is contained a complete discourse and description of
(ELEMENTS.
THE FOUR (CONSTITUTIONS.
(AGES OF MAN.
(SEASONS OF THE YEAR.
Together with an Exact Epitomie of the Four Monarchies,
(ASSYRIAN.
THE (PERSIAN.
(GRECIAN.
(ROMAN.
Also a Dialogue between Old England and New, concerning the late
troubles, With divers other pleasant and serious Poems. By a Gentlewoman
in those parts. Printed at London for Stephen Bowtell at the Signe of
the Bible in Popes Head Alley. 1650."
It will be noticed that the gifted poet was forced to have recourse to
her native land to produce her works, and it may be for the repute of
her modesty, it is to be hoped that it was that she never saw the title
page until it had been printed. However, it would seem that there were
many of her time who believed that she had some just cause to claim the
title which had been given her. One of her admirers wrote in more or
less admirable verse a long compliment to her which contained the
notable though undeniably plagiarized line:
"None but her self must dare commend her parts."
Apart from its too close resemblance to
"None but himself could be his parallel,"
it strikes one that Mrs. Bradstreet's admirer pays a poor compliment to
the lady's modesty, however he may praise her ability; and another and
abler critic, the Rev. Nathaniel Ward, takes occasion in paying his
respects to the singer to cast a slur upon her sex:
"It half revives my chill frost-bitten blood
To see a Woman once do aught that's good;"
which could hardly be described as fulsome praise. It must be remembered
that in those days it was rare to see a woman attempt anything with the
pen, and the prologue to the volume contains some deprecatory reference
to this state of affairs:
"I am obnoxious to each carping tongue
Who says my hand a needle better fits,
A Poet's pen all scorn I thus should wrong,
For such despite they cast on Female wits;
If what I do prove well, it won't advance,
They'll say it's stoln, or else it was by chance."
This strikes the judicious reader as better sarcasm than poetry; and,
indeed, when one looks through the volume it is difficult to understand
the enthusiasm roused by the production. It is a very ambitious affair;
the Elements, as promised by the title page, have a great deal to say,
and most of it is said in the right Ercles vein. Here, for example, is
the manner in which Fire ends her little speech:
"What shall I say of Lightning and of Thunder
Which kings and mighty ones amaze with wonder,
Which make a Cæsar (Romes) the worlds proud head,
Foolish Caligula creep under 's bed.
And in a word, the world I shall consume
And all therein at that great day of Doom."
This is not impressive; and we may gladly skip the rest of the remarks
made by the Elements. The second quaternion of poems, as shown by the
title page, is concerned with the four Ages of man, wherein the first
Age exclaims:
"What gripes of wind mine infancy did pain
What tortures I in breeding teeth sustain!"
which is very excellent realism, but not highly poetical, either in
sentiment or expression. The Seasons have but little more claim to a
hearing than the Elements, and in the poem on the Four Monarchies, which
is merely a rhymed version of Raleigh's History of the World, the only
notable lines are those containing Mrs. Bradstreet's defence of her sex:
"Now say, have Women worth? or have they none?
Or had they some, but with our Queen is't gone?
Nay Masculines, you have thus taxed us long;
But she, though dead, will vindicate our wrong.
Let such as say our Sex is void of Reason,
Know 'tis Slander now but once was Treason."
The queen to whom these lines refer is of course Elizabeth; and we can
well believe that in her day so to asperse the sex as to decline to
admit their possession of the attribute of reason may well have been
treason sufficient, if reported to the highest quarter, to be punished
by the _terrible peine forte et dure_. Although we may entirely
sympathize with Mrs. Bradstreet's vigorous defence of her sex from the
foul slanders of the "Masculines," it is difficult to see wherein she
makes good her claim to be considered the Tenth Muse, or the Hundred and
Tenth, if so many could be named. Nevertheless, at her death sermons
laudatory of her life and work were preached in nearly every church in
New England, and her afflicted family must have been greatly comforted
by the number and expressions of the elegies with which they were fairly
deluged. Here is a specimen from the pen of the Rev. John Norton:
"A Funeral Eulogy, upon that Pattern and Patron of Virtue, the truly
pious, peerless and matchless Gentlewoman
MRS. ANNE BRADSTREET, RIGHT PANARETES,
Mirror of her Age, Glory of her Sex, whose Heaven-born-Soul leaving its
earthly Shrine, chose its native home, and was taken to its Rest, upon
the 16th Sept. 1672."
All of which strikes us as a little hyperbolic, while the phrase "Patron
of Virtue" does not appear as very happily chosen, and the reference of
the reverend gentleman in the body of his "poem" to the
"Black, fatal, dismal, inauspicious day"
would be a little overdone if applied to a general catastrophe. Yet even
this balderdash is of interest as showing us the estimate in which was
held America's first woman of letters the first at least to attain note
and thus worthy, in that respect at least, to be held as patron saint by
all the lady writers of our day and country.
There were a few other women writers during the period of settlement;
but they were very few. As may be gathered from the tenor of the quoted
lines from Anne Bradstreet's prologue, the spirit of Puritanism was
opposed to literary pursuits by a woman, at least to the degree of a
profession. Indeed, it is probable that there was widespread sympathy
with the sentiments of the chronicler of the following incident, in
which is to be seen the regard in which were held feminine _litterati_:
"The Governor of Hartford upon Connecticut came to Boston, and brought
his wife with him (a godly young woman and of special parts) who was
fallen into a sad infirmity, the loss of her understanding and reason,
which had been growing upon her divers years by occasion of her giving
herself wholly to reading and writing, and had written many books. Her
husband being very loving and tender of her was loath to grieve her; but
he saw his error when it was too late. For if she had attended to her
household affairs, and such things as belong to women, and not gone out
of her way and calling to meddle in such things as are proper for men,
whose minds are stronger, she had kept her wits and might have improved
them usefully and honorably in the place God had set her."
It was Governor Winthrop whose domestic affliction arose from such a
strange cause; and it is not unlikely that he inspired the words here
set down. At all events, the comments are amusing. If all the women now
writing books were to suffer like penalty with Mistress Winthrop the
insane asylums would have to be considerably enlarged; but authorship
seems to have grown less fatal to the fair sex of late years.
For the rest, we must regard these mothers of the country in the mass
rather than as individuals; and this is in accord with their true
natures. They were not given to "brawling in the streets" or to
"contention upon the housetops," these women of the old Puritans; they
did their duties in their household and left the management of the
weightier affairs of the young colony to the men. Yet they guided these
same men in ways which they hardly knew; and they were in all ways
fitted to be the mothers of the nation which was even then beginning to
stretch its infant arms in growing strength. They were grave, decorous,
and terribly strong, those wives and daughters of the Pilgrims. They
took upon themselves the cares of the household, and these were not
slight in those days when all provision must be garnered by the sweat of
the eater's brow. There were then no shops to which one might send in
search of luxuries or even necessities; the Puritan woman usually
brought with her on her ship some store of household goods, some chests
of clothing, some plate perhaps to furnish forth her table; for all the
rest she depended upon the energy and skill of her husband, the work of
her own hands, and the blessing of that God to worship whom in freedom
she and hers had sought the wilderness as their home. And the spirit of
that wilderness entered into her as she dwelt in its boundaries; she
drew from its breast some of its quiet and strength and truth, even as
the aborigines had imbibed these qualities in their long communion with
nature at her best. There was to come a time, and that right soon, when
the reclamation of the wilderness should have so far progressed that
there would be town life, on its borders at least, and the Puritan woman
would lose some of the qualities which had been imparted to her by the
land to which she had come as an alien and where she remained as a
daughter; but until the coming of that time she was true to the
inspiration of the country in which her lot was cast. America was then a
land of mystery; back from the Atlantic stretched miles upon miles of
untrodden, unknown wood and plain and hill and lake and river; and the
power of the unknown was felt over that little strip of coast which
acknowledged though not in entire subjection the control of the white
race. So the Pilgrim Mother had ever the sense of the mysterious, the
unfathomable, pressing upon her, ever ready to whisper new secrets in
her ear; and though she was as a rule stern and unimaginative, she was
more profoundly affected by this mystery than she knew. It was to bear
terrible fruit in after time in the horrors of Salem witchcraft; but for
the present it only tried and proved and hardened the courage of the
women who faced it with confidence in the strength of their husbands and
in the protection of their God.
So to New England and Virginia there came the founders of a race led
forth from home by different motives, bringing different qualities of
body and mind and spirit to the formation of the people, but both
foundations possessing strength upon which could be built a mighty
nation. And not the men of Jamestown or Roanoke, with their fighting and
their tilling, not the Pilgrim Fathers, with their stern courage and
their strait creed, but the women of Virginia and the Pilgrim Mothers
were those to whom must look that new nation for all its best. It was
not the blood of kings and princes that came to vitalize this our land
in the period of its rescue from the dominion of the lesser races, but
the blood of yeomen and peasants, sprung from generations of fighters
with the soil rather than with men, yet soldiers too, and so in all ways
fitted for the battles they must wage with men and beasts and the earth
itself ere they could win an empire for their race. And this blood comes
down to us through the women of that day--the Mothers of a Nation.