The Colonial Cavalier
Or
Southern Life Before
the Revolution
By Maud Wilder Goodwin
Illustrated by
Harry Edwards
New York
Lovell, Coryell & Company
1894
COPYRIGHT, 1894,
BY
UNITED STATES BOOK COMPANY.
_All Rights Reserved._
Contents
PAGE
Preface, 7
His Home, 13
Sweethearts and Wives, 43
His Dress, 73
News, Trade and Travel, 97
His Friends and Foes, 125
His Amusements, 141
His Man-Servants and His Maid-Servants, 165
His Church, 189
His Education, 221
Laws, Punishments and Politics, 243
Sickness and Death, 273
The Colonial Cavalier
Preface
Two great forces have contributed to the making of the Anglo-American
character. The types, broadly classed in England as Puritan and Cavalier,
repeated themselves in the New World. On the bleak Massachusetts coast,
the Puritan emigrants founded a race as rugged as their environment.
Driven by the force of compelling conscience from their homes, they came
to the new land, at once pilgrims and pioneers, to rear altars and found
homes in the primeval forest. It was not freedom of worship alone they
sought, but their own way. They found it and kept it. Such a race produced
a strong and hardy type of manhood, admirable if not always lovable.
But there was another force at work, moulding the national character, a
force as persistent, a type as intense as the Puritan's own, and its exact
opposite. The men who settled the Southern Colonies, Virginia, Maryland,
and the Carolinas, were Cavaliers; not necessarily in blood, or even in
loyalty to the Stuart cause, but Cavalier in sympathies, in the general
view of life, in virtues and vices. So far as the provinces could
represent the mother country, Virginia and Maryland reflected the
Cavaliers, as Massachusetts and Connecticut reflected the Puritans.
Their settlers came, impelled by no religious motives, and driven by no
persecution. They lacked, therefore, the bond of a common enthusiasm and
the still stronger tie of a common antipathy. Above all, they lacked the
town-meeting. Separated by the necessities of plantation life, they formed
a series of tiny kingdoms rather than a democratic community. To the
Puritan, the village life of Scrooby and its like was familiar and
therefore dear; but to the Southern settlers, the ideal was the great
estate of the English gentry whose descendants many of them were.
The term, "Cavalier," came into vogue in the struggle between Charles the
First and his Parliament, but the type itself was already well-developed
in the reign of James, and under the fostering influence of Buckingham. A
great deal of energy has been wasted in the discussion as to how much of
this Cavalier blood was found among the early settlers. It is enough that
we know that, between the coming of the first adventurers and the
Restoration, the number of "gentlemen" was sufficient to direct the policy
of the State, and color the life of its society.
When the earliest colonists left England, the Cavalier was at the height
of his glory. Now he represents a lost cause, "and none so poor to do him
reverence." The sceptre of royal authority is shattered; society has grown
dull and decorous. Even in dress, the Puritan has prevailed. The people
who speak of Cromwell's followers as "Roundheads" and "Cropped Ears," go
closer cropped than they, and the costume of a gentleman of to-day is
uglier and gloomier than any the Puritan ever dreamed of introducing.
These concessions of the modern world make the Puritan a familiar figure,
as he stands out in the page of Hawthorne, or on the canvas of Boughton.
But the Cavalier fades into the dim and shadowy background of the past. We
cannot afford to have him slip away from us so, if we wish really to
understand the history of our country; we must know both sides of its
development.
Hitherto, the real comprehension of the Colonial Cavalier has been
hindered by the florid enthusiasm of the South, and the critical coldness
of the North. His admirers have painted him as a theatrical personage,
always powdered and be-ruffled, fighting duels as frequently as he changed
his dress, living in lordly state in a baronial mansion, or dancing in the
brilliant halls of fashion in the season at the capital. All this is, of
course, seen to be absurd, as one comes to study the conditions under
which he lived. We find the "capital" a straggling village, the "estate" a
half-cultivated farm, and the "host of retainers" often but a mob of black
slaves, clad in motley, or lying half-naked in the sun. Does it follow,
then, that the lives of these men are not worth serious study? Surely not.
It is in the very primitiveness of environment that the chief interest of
the study of that early life lies. Here were men who brought to the New
World a keen appreciation of the luxuries and refined pleasures of life,
who had not eschewed them for conscience's sake like the Puritan, yet who
relinquished them all bravely and cheerfully, to face the hardships and
dangers of a pioneer life; and when their descendants, growing rich with
the increasing prosperity of the country, had once more surrounded
themselves with beautiful homes and wide acres, they too stood ready to
sacrifice them all at the call of Liberty. If we would understand
Washington, and Jefferson, and the Lees, George Mason, and John Randolph,
we must study them as the "Autocrat" tells us we should all be studied,
for at least a century before birth.
The Colonial Cavalier must be painted, like a Rembrandt, with high lights
and deep shadows. It is idle to ignore his weaknesses or his vices. They
are of the kind that insist on notice. Yet, with all his faults, he will
surely prove well worth our serious consideration, and however wide we
open our eyes to his defects, however we seek to brush away the illusions
with which tinsel hero-worship has surrounded him, we shall still find
him, judged as he has a right to be, at his best, closely approaching
Lowell's definition of a gentleman: "A man of culture, a man of
intellectual resources, a man of public spirit, a man of refinement, with
that good taste which is the conscience of the mind, and that conscience
which is the good taste of the soul."
This little volume makes no pretensions to the dignity of a history. It
aims only, through local gossip and homely details of life and customs, to
open a side-door, through which we may, perchance, gain a sense of
fireside intimacy with _The Colonial Cavalier_.
His Home
[Illustration: The Colonial Cavalier
His Home]
I stood in the wide hall of the old brick mansion built, a century and a
half ago, by "King Carter," on the shore of the James River.
It was Autumn. The doors at either end of the saloon were open, and their
casements framed the landscape like a picture. From the foot of the
moss-grown steps at the rear, the drive stretched its length, under
several closed gates, for half a mile, till it joined the little travelled
high-road. From the porch in front, the ground fell away, in what had once
been a series of terraces, to the brink of the river, across whose western
hills the November sun was setting red. Not a ripple stirred the surface
of the water--the dead leaves on the ground never rustled. All was still;
solitary, yet not melancholy. The place seemed apart from the present--a
part of the past.
Within doors, everything was mellowed by the softening touch of twilight
and age. The hospitable fire which blazed in the great throat of the
library chimney, cast odd shadows on the high wainscot, and the delicately
wrought mouldings over the chimney-breast, and its reflections danced in
the small panes of the heavily framed windows as though the witches were
making tea outside.
The dark staircase wound upward in the centre of the hallway, its handrail
hacked by the swords of soldiers in the Revolution. As I glanced at it,
and then out along the long avenue, I seemed to see Tarleton's
scarlet-clad dragoons dashing up to surround the house. Then, as I turned
westward, imagination travelled still further into the past, and pictured
the slow approach of a British packet, gliding peacefully up to the little
wharf down yonder, to discharge its household freight of tea and spices,
of India muslins and "callamancoes" before it proceeded on its way to the
town of Williamsburg, a few miles farther up the river.
At the period of which I was dreaming, Williamsburg was the capital of the
province, with a wide street named in honor of the Duke of Gloucester, and
a college named after their late majesties, William and Mary, with a jolly
Raleigh tavern and a stately Governor's Palace; but all this had come
about some fifty years before the building of _Carter's Grove_.
[Illustration: Hall in Carter's Grove James River Va.]
In the middle of the seventeenth century it was far more
primitive,--indeed, it was not Williamsburg at all, but only "The Middle
Plantation," with a few pioneer houses surrounded by primeval forests,
from which savage red faces now and then peered out, to the terror of the
settlers; while at nightfall the heavy wooden shutters had been closed,
lest the firelight should prove a shining mark for the Indian's arrow. If
the traveller found Williamsburg in the eighteenth century "a straggling
village," and its mansions "houses of very moderate pretensions," what
would he have thought of those first modest homes, where the horse-trough
was the family wash-basin; where stools and benches, hung against the
wall, constituted the furniture; where the kitchen-table served for
dining-table as well, and was handsomely set out with bowls, trenchers,
and noggins of wood, with gourds and squashes daintily cut, to add color
to the meal; while the family was counted well off that could muster a few
spoons, and a plate or two of shining pewter! But those pioneers and their
wives felt pride in their little homes, for they realized how favorably
they contrasted with the cabins built at "James Cittie" by Wingfield and
Smith and their fellow-adventurers. They had indeed more cause for honest
pride than the stay-at-homes in England could ever realize, for such knew
nothing of the infinite toil and the difficulty of founding a settlement
in a new country, thousands of miles from civilization, with forests to be
cleared and savages to be fought, turbulent followers to be ruled, and
food, shelter, and clothing to be provided.
No sooner were the "Ancient Planters," as the chronicles call the first
settlers, fairly ashore on their island, than the Company at home opened
its battery of advice upon them: "Seeing order is at the same price with
confusion," the secretary wrote, setting down a very dubious proposition
as an aphorism, "it shall be advisably done to set your houses even and by
a line, that your streets may have a good breadth, and be carried square
about your market-place, and every street's end opening into it, that from
thence, with a few field-pieces, you may command every street throughout;
which market-place you may also fortify, _if you think it needful_." It
must have seemed grimly humorous to those pioneers, huddling their cabins
together within the shelter of the wooden fence, dignified by the name of
a palisade, and mounted with all the guns they could muster, to be thus
advised from a distance of three thousand miles to construct at once a
model English village, and fortify the market-place, _if they thought
best_. An Italian proverb has it that "it is easy to threaten a bull from
a window," and so the Virginia Company found no difficulty in regulating
the affairs of the colonists and the Indians, from their window in London.
The settlers paid as little heed as possible to their interference, and
struggled on through the sickness and the starving-time, as best they
could, clearing away the brush, and felling trees, and putting up houses.
But building went on so slowly that in 1619, "In James Cittie were only
those houses that Sir Thomas Gates built in the tyme of his government
(1610), with one wherein the governor allwayes dwelt, and a church built
wholly at the charge of the inhabitants of the citye, of timber, being
fifty foote in length and twenty in breadth." The report from the town of
Henrico was still less encouraging, for there were found only "three old
houses, a poor ruinated church, with some few poore buildings on the
islande."
Yet, in spite of hindrances and drawbacks, the colony prospered. Lord De
la Warre reported that all the enterprise needed was "a few honest
laborers burdened with children"; and such alluring inducements were held
out to immigrants, that I cannot understand how the London poor, swarming
in their black alleys, could resist the invitation to come over to a land
where pure air and plenty were to be had for nothing. Ralph Hamor wrote
home: "The affairs of the colony being so well ordered and the hardest
tasks already overpast, that whosoever, now or hereafter, shall happily
arrive there, shall finde a handsome house of some four roomes or more, if
he have a family, to repose himselfe in, rent-free, and twelve English
acres of ground adjoining thereunto, very strongly impailed; which ground
is only allotted unto him for roots, gardaine-herbs and corne; neither
shall he need to provide himselfe victuals. He shall have for himselfe and
family a competent twelvemonths' provision delivered unto him." In
addition to all this, the colonist was to be furnished with tools of all
sorts, and "for his better subsistence, he shall have poultry and swine,
and if he prefer, a goate or two, and perhaps a cowe given him." I am at a
loss to understand why all England did not emigrate at once to the land
where such a gift-enterprise was on foot. Perhaps the readers distrusted
Hamor's authority; perhaps they thought some extraordinary risks or
dangers must lurk behind such fair promises, and when the Indian massacre
came, they possibly nodded their wise heads and said, "I told you so."
The agent of the Maryland Company worked on a very different system from
this gilded Virginia offer. He published a pamphlet giving detailed
directions to "intending settlers." They were not to depend on the
resources of the colony, even for the first year, but to bring with them
laborers and watch-dogs, grains and seeds of all kinds, and meal enough to
last while their houses were a-building.
[Illustration]
I find that I gain the best idea of what these first houses in America
were like, by asking myself how I should have built, in the conditions
under which the settlers worked, dropped down in a little forest-clearing,
the ocean before and the Indians behind, with few and imperfect tools, and
with a pressure all the while of securing food for to-day, and sowing
grain for to-morrow. I am sure I should have put up a shelter of the
rudest kind that could be trusted to withstand the winds of Autumn, and
the storms of Winter. I should not have planed my beams, nor matched my
floorboards. Only my doors and shutters I should have made both strong and
stout, to meet the gales from the sea, or a sudden dash from lurking
savages in the bush. This I find, therefore, without surprise, was just
what the settlers did. They divided the house into a kitchen and a
bedroom, with a shed joined on for the goats and pigs, or, if the owner
were so lucky, a cow. Their chimneys were chiefly constructed out of twigs
plastered on both sides with clay, which dried in the sun, and served for
some time, before it crumbled again to dust. As there were no mills, the
corn-grinding had to be done at home; so the settlers, learning the trick
from the Indians, improvised a mortar, by burning out the stump of a tree
into a hollow, and hanging over it a log, suspended from the limb of a
tree close at hand, for a pestle. This was hard work, and the grinding in
the little hand-mills brought from England was scarcely easier. A dying
man, leaving his children to their uncle's care, expressly stipulated that
they should not be put to the drudgery of pounding corn.
[Illustration]
Within the house, stood the great and small wheels for wool and flax, the
carding-comb and the moulds for making those candles, of green myrtleberry
wax which, as Beverly writes, "are never greasie to the touch, nor melt
with lying in the hottest weather. Neither does the snuff of these ever
offend the smell, like that of a tallow-candle; but instead of being
disagreeable, if an accident puts a candle out, it yields a pleasant
fragrancy to all that are in the room, insomuch that nice people often put
them out on purpose to have the incense of the expiring snuff."
It was no pitiable life that those pioneers lived, even in those most
primitive days. Their out-of-door existence was full of a wild charm, and
their energy soon improved conditions indoors. Every ship from England
brought over conveniences and luxuries. The cabin was exchanged for a
substantial house. First pewter, and then silver plate began to shine on
sideboards of polished oak. Four-post bedsteads decorated the sleeping
rooms, and tapestry curtains kept out the cold.
A Maryland record of 1653 tells of a bargain between T. Wilford and Paul
Sympson, by which, in consideration of twenty thousand pounds of tobacco
received from Sympson, Wilford agrees to support him for the rest of his
life "like a gentleman." This gentleman-like provision consisted of a
house fifteen feet square, with a Welsh chimney, and lined with riven
boards; a handsome joined bedstead, bedding and curtains; one small table,
six stools, and three wainscot chairs; a servant to wait on him; meat,
apparel, and washing; and every year an anker (ten gallons) of drams, one
tierce of sack, and a case of English spirits for his own use.
It is hard to imagine what more of luxury, an annuity could furnish to a
gentleman of the nineteenth century, if indeed Heaven had blessed him with
a stomach capable of consuming such an "intolerable deal of sack."
The next fifty years still further increased the elegance of living; and
style as well as comfort began to be considered. In an inventory of
household goods belonging to a Virginian in 1698, I find included, "a
feather-bed, one sett Kitterminster curtains, and Vallens bedstead, one
pair white linen sheets with two do. pillow biers, 2 Rusha-leather
chaires, 5 Rush-bottom chaires, a burning glass, a flesk fork, and 6
Alchemy spoones" (alchemy being a mixed metal, originally supposed to be
gold made by magic). In addition to these articles, the list includes a
brass skimer and 2 pairs of pot-hooks, and, as its crowning glory, "1 old
silver Dram-cup." No doubt the possessor had sat with his boon companions
on many a cold night, by the great chimney, plunging the hot poker into
the fire.--
"And nursed the loggerhead, whose hissing dip,
Timed by nice instinct, creamed the mug of flip."
The house of a planter in Virginia at the end of the seventeenth century,
was substantial and comfortable. The inventory of such a planter
mentions, as belonging to the homestead, a "parlor chamber, chamber over
sd. chamber, chamber over the parlor, nursery, old nursery, room over the
Ladyes chamber, Ladyes chamber, entry, store, home house quarter, home
house, quarter over the creek, Smiths shopp, Barne, kitchen, Dary, chamber
over the old Dary, flemings quarter, Robinsons quarter, Whitakers quarter,
Black Wallnut Quarter."
By this time, the house of the rich in the towns boasted a parlor, but its
furnishing was of the simplest. A white floor sprinkled with clean white
sand, large tables, and heavy high-backed chairs of solid, dark oak
decorated a parlor enough for anybody, says the chronicler of Baltimore.
William Fitzhugh directs Mistress Sarah Bland in London (1682) to procure
him a suit of tapestry hangings for a room twenty feet long, sixteen feet
wide, and nine feet high; "and half a dozen chairs suitable."
The kitchen had long ago been separated from the dining-room, and, in the
better houses, set off in a separate building, that its odours might not
fill the other rooms when warm weather made open doors and windows
necessary. The dining-room, with its broad buffet, its well-filled
cellarette, its silver plate, and its quaint old English furniture, was
generally the pleasantest room in the house. Opening out of the
dining-room, between it and the parlor, ran the wide hall, with doors at
either end, with carved stairway and panelled walls, often hung with
family portraits.
Early in the eighteenth century, Spotswood came over as Governor of
Virginia, and a new era of more elaborate living was introduced. His
"palace" at Williamsburg, according to the contemporary report of the
Reverend Hugh Jones--not to be taken, however, without a grain of
salt--was "a magnificent structure, built at the publick expense,
furnished and beautified with gates, fine gardens, offices, walks, a fine
canal, orchards, etc," and most impressive of all, in those days, when Sir
Christopher Wren set the architectural fashions, "a cupola or lanthorn"
illuminated on the King's birthnight, or other festival occasion. At
Germanna, a little settlement of Germans clustered round the Spotswood
iron-works, the Governor built him a house so fine that Colonel Byrd
speaks of it as _The Enchanted Castle_, and has left an amusing account of
a visit he made him there. "I arrived," he says, "about three o'clock, and
found only Mrs. Spotswood at home. I was carried into a room elegantly set
off with pier glasses, the largest of which came soon after to an odd
misfortune. Amongst other favorite animals that cheered this lady's
solitude, a brace of tame deer ran familiarly about the house, and one of
them came to stare at me as a stranger. But unluckily, spying his own
figure in the glass, he made a spring over the tea-table that stood under
it and shattered the glass to pieces, and, falling back upon the
tea-table, made a terrible fracas."
What a change is here, from the hewn timbers and bare walls and wooden
trenchers of the pioneer, to enchanted castles and mirrors, and china and
tea-tables!
This Colonel Byrd, who writes so genially of his visit to Germanna, was a
typical cavalier--not godly, but manly--with a keen enjoyment of a jest,
as the pucker at the corners of the lips in his portrait clearly shows,
with a hearty good-will toward his neighbor and especially his neighbor's
wife, with a fine, healthy appetite, and a zest for all good things to eat
and drink. In his boundary-line trip to Carolina and his journey to the
mines, he smacks his lips over the fat things that fall in his way. Now it
is a prime rasher of bacon, fricasseed in rum; now a capacious bowl of
bombo. In one and the same paragraph, he tells how he commended his family
to the care of the Almighty, fortified himself with a beefsteak, and
kissed his landlady for good luck, before setting out on his travels.
Roughing it in camp, he dreams of the fine breakfast he will make on a fat
doe, and a two-year-old bear, killed over night. At a stopping-place he
records, "Our landlady cherished us with roast-beef and chicken-pie."
Having eaten these with a relish, he pours down a basin of chocolate,
wishes peace to that house, and takes up his line of march for home. There
is something refreshing to our jaded generation in the hearty enjoyment
that our ancestors took in their food.
I am struck in all these old gastronomic records with the immense amount
of meat, in proportion to the vegetables used. No wonder gout was a common
disease, and the overheated blood needed to be reduced by cupping and
leeching. The out-of-door life, the riding and hunting of Maryland and
Virginia, enabled the men to eat freely and drink deep, and the Southern
table was always lavishly provided. A foreigner having remarked of Mrs.
Madison that her table was like a Harvest-Home, she replied that, as the
profusion which amused the visitor was the outgrowth of her country's
prosperity, she was quite willing to sacrifice European elegance to
Virginia liberality. Good housekeeping in those days consisted chiefly in
setting a bountiful table, and the Colonial dame, in spite of her troop of
servants, was kept busy in planning the meals, the breakfasts of hot
bread and griddle-cakes, the afternoon dinner, and "the bite before
bedtime." To her it fell, to carry the keys, to portion out the rations
for the negro quarters, and to lay aside the materials from which the
turbanned queen of the kitchen should compound the savory sausage, the
fried chicken, the sauces, and dumplings, and cakes, which have made
Southern cooking famous.
The domestic life of women on those old plantations must have been rather
monotonous. The travellers who visited them, describe them as sharing
little in the amusements of their husbands, and brothers, and sons.
Chastellux says that, like the English, they are very fond of their
_infants_, but care little for their _children_; but the annals and
biographies do not bear out his statement. George Wythe learned his Greek
at home, from a Testament, while his mother held an English copy in her
hand and prompted him as he went on. John Mason, too, bore through life
the impress of his mother's influence. He was only seven years old when
she died, yet through life, "mother's room" was perfectly distinct to him,
the old chest of drawers distinguished as _gown_ drawer, _shirt_ drawer,
and _jacket_ drawer, the closet known as mistress' closet, containing his
mother's dresses, and another cupboard, known as _the_ closet, in which
hung a small green horsewhip with a silver head, carried by Mrs. Mason
when she rode, and on other occasions used for purposes of correction, so
that the children nicknamed it "the green doctor." An old letter recalls
another "mother's room" in those eighteenth-century days: "On one side
sits the chambermaid with her knitting; on the other a little colored pet,
learning to sew. An old decent woman is there, with her table and shears,
cutting out the negroes' winter clothes, while the old lady directs them
all, incessantly knitting."
Home, rather than Church, was the sacred spot to the Colonial Cavalier, in
spite of his theoretical reverence for Mother Church. It was at home that
most of the baptisms and funerals occurred, and Hugh Jones complains that
"in houses also they most commonly marry, without regard to the time of
the day, or season of the year." The central idea of the Puritan religion
was fear of God; the centre of the Cavalier's religion was love of man.
From this root sprung a radiant cheerfulness, an open-handed liberality,
and an unbounded hospitality. If it be true that the best ornaments of a
house are its guests, never were houses more brilliantly decorated than
those Southern mansions. The names of Brandon, and Berkeley, and Westover,
and Mont Clare, and Doughoregan call up the procession of guests who have
walked, and danced, and dined, and slept under their roofs. We see
stately men, in lace and ruffles, pacing the minuet with powdered dames,
in "teacup time of hood and hoop, and when the patch was worn." We see
lovers and maidens, brides and bridegrooms spending the honeymoon under
the sheltering trees, and patriot Continentals arming in their halls for
the struggle with the enemies of their country.
[Illustration]
Not the lofty alone, but the lowly as well, could claim a welcome at those
always open doors. Indians, half-breeds, and leather-clad huntsmen hung
round the kitchen of Greenaway Court, while Washington and Lord Fairfax
dined in the saloon. Not even acquaintance was considered necessary to
ensure a cordial reception. "The inhabitants," wrote Beverly, "are very
courteous to travellers, who need no other recommendation than being human
creatures. A stranger has no more to do but to inquire upon the road where
any gentleman or good housekeeper lives, and there he may depend upon
being received with hospitality. This good-nature is so general among
their people, that the gentry, when they go abroad, order their principal
servants to entertain all visitors with everything the plantation affords;
and the poor planters who have but one bed, will often sit up, or lie upon
a form, or couch, all night, to make room for a weary traveller to repose
himself after his journey."
In Winter, the fire blazed high on the hearth, and the toddy hissed in the
noggin; in Summer, the basket of fruit stood in the breeze-swept hall, and
lightly clad black boys tripped in, bearing cool tankards of punch and
sangaree. The guest need only enter in, to be at home. No one was
considered so contemptible, as he who consented to receive money for
entertaining visitors. Keeping an inn or "ordinary" was looked upon
askance, and the law dealt with the proprietor rigorously, as with one who
probably would cheat if he got a chance. His charges were carefully
regulated, and he was subject to fine, and even imprisonment, if he went
beyond them. A Maryland statute provides that "noe Ordinary-Keeper within
this Province shall at any Time charge anything to account for Boles of
Punch, but shall only Sell the Severall Ingredients to the Said Mixture
according to the Rates before in this Act Ascertained." A traveller, in
those good old days, might ride from Maryland to Georgia, and never put up
at an Ordinary at all, sure, whenever he wished to stop by the way, of a
cordial welcome at a private house. Some planters even kept negroes posted
at their gate, to give warning of a rider's approach, that he might be
invited in, and that the household might be in readiness to receive him.
Such promiscuous hospitality could only exist in a community with a happy
faculty for taking life easily, an ability to dispense with the slavery to
method, and to be contented though things went wrong. The fastidious
European found some of the manners and customs a little trying. "In
private houses as well as inns," writes a traveller, "several people are
crowded together in the same room; and in the latter it very commonly
happens that after you have been some time in bed, a stranger of any
condition comes into the room, pulls off his clothes, and places himself
without ceremony between your sheets."
Another visitor says that the Virginia houses are spacious, but the
apartments are not commodious, "and they make no ceremony of putting three
or four persons into the same room, nor do these make any objections to
being thus heaped together."
The Colonial Cavalier was gregarious by nature. He was warmly social, and,
being so much shut off by plantation life from intercourse with his
fellows, he welcomed a guest as a special providence, to relieve the
monotony of his life. The gentleman-planter in affluent circumstances had
nothing to do, and he did it in a very leisurely way. His occupations were
such as could be shared by a guest. An observant traveller has left us a
vivid picture of the daily routine of such an individual: "He rises about
nine o'clock. He may perhaps make an excursion to walk as far as his
stable to see his horses, which is seldom more than fifty yards from his
house. He returns to breakfast between nine and ten, which is generally
tea or coffee, bread and butter, and very thin slices of venison, ham, or
hung beef. He then lies down on a pallet on the floor in the coolest room
in the house, in his shirt and trousers only, with a negro at his head,
and another to fan him and keep off the flies. Between twelve and one, he
takes a draught of toddy or bombo, a liquor composed of water, sugar, rum
and nutmeg, which is made weak, and kept cool. He dines between two and
three, and at every table, whatever else there may be, a ham and greens,
or cabbage, is always a standing dish. At dinner he drinks cider, toddy,
punch, port, claret, and Madeira, which is generally excellent here.
Having drunk some few glasses of wine after dinner, he returns to his
pallet, with his two blacks to fan him, and continues to drink toddy or
sangaree all the afternoon. He does not always drink tea. Between nine and
ten in the evening, he eats a light supper of milk and fruit or wine,
sugar and fruit, etc., and almost immediately retires to bed for the
night."
All this sounds as if Smyth must have made his visit to Virginia in
midsummer, and fancied that the habits were the same all the year round,
as in that semi-tropical season. As a picture, it is truer of Carolina
than of any section farther North. As we go South we find the character
more indolent, the energies more relaxed, and even the houses changing
their expression. The stately brick manor-houses, modelled on the English
mansion, with their deep mullioned windows and heavy doors, give place to
Italian villas, with white pillars and porches gleaming from their green
points of land up and down the rivers. Under this shady porch the planter
might lie at his ease, watching the boats on the streams as they come and
go, and breathing the perfume from the garden at his feet. The garden of
those days was laid out also on the Italian pattern, in shapes of
horseshoes, or stars, or palm-leaves, with avenues leading down bordered
by tulips trees, with box-hedged paths, wherein Corydon and Phyllis might
wander, quite hidden from the lounger on the portico. In its centre stood
often a summer-house, where successive generations plighted troth, and
exchanged love-tokens. Everything about the garden, as about the house,
suggested England. The lawn was sown with the seed of the silvery grass,
so familiar in the great English parks. Even birds were imported from the
mother country. When Spotswood came over, he brought with him a number of
larks to delight his ears with their familiar strain, but either the
climate was unpropitious, or the stronger native birds resented the coming
of the foreigners, for the larks died out, and left only here and there a
lonely descendant to startle the traveller as he rode along the solitary
forest roads at sunrise, with a flow of melody that called up the leafy
lanes of the old home.
[Illustration]
Sweethearts and Wives
[Illustration: SWEETEHEARTS _and_ WIVES]
The first settlers in America had no homes, for the first requisite for a
home is a wife. They soon learned that "a better half, alone, gives better
quarters." The Indian squaws were almost the only women known to the
voyagers on the _Susan Constant_ and her sister ships; and though the
adventurers wrote home in glowing terms of their dusky charms, they looked
askance upon the idea of marriage with the heathen natives. We cannot
help, however, echoing the sentiments of Colonel Byrd of Westover, when he
says: "Morals and all considered, I can't think the Indians much greater
heathens than the first adventurers," who, he adds, "had they been good
Christians, would have had the charity to take this only method of
converting the natives to Christianity. For, after all that can be said, a
sprightly lover is the most prevailing missionary that can be sent amongst
these, or any other infidels. Besides," he proceeds candidly, "the poor
Indians would have had less reason to complain that the English took away
their lands, if they had received them by way of portion with their
daughters."
It was, in truth, a great benefit both to the English and to the Indians,
when "Bright-Stream-Between-two-Hills"--called in the native dialect
"Pocahontas"--married John Rolfe, with the approbation of both races. To
this union some of the proudest families in Virginia trace their descent.
Poor little Princess! The first romance of America casts its pathetic
charm around you. However apocryphal the legend of your saving Smith's
life, it is hard to resist the impression of your cherishing a sentimental
attachment for the gallant captain, and a suspicion that you were tricked
into a marriage with Rolfe.
Smith records a sad interview with Pocahontas when she was being lionized,
under the name of Lady Rebecca, as a royal visitor in London. "Being about
this time preparing to set sail for New England," he writes, "I could not
stay to do her that service I desired, and she well deserved; but,
hearing she was at Bradford with divers of my friends, I went to see her.
After a modest salutation without any bow, she turned about, obscured her
face as not seeming well contented. But not long after, she began to talk,
and remembered me well what courtesies she had done, saying: 'You did
promise Powhatan what was yours should be his, and he the like to you; you
called him Father--being in his land a stranger--and by the same reason so
must I doe you.'" Smith objects on the ground of her royal lineage, which
had well-nigh brought Rolfe to grief, and she responds: "Were you not
afraid to come into my father's countrie and cause feare in him and all
his people but mee, and feare you here I should call you Father? I tell
you then I will; and you shall call me childe; and soe will I be forever
and ever your countrieman. They did tell me always you were dead, and I
knew no other till I came to Plymouth. Yet Powhatan did command
Ottamatomakkin to seek you and know the truth, because your countriemen
will lie much." So ended the parting; and soon afterward the poor little
Princess died a stranger in a strange land. "She came to Gravesend, to her
end and grave."
The first English wedding on American soil was solemnized between John
Laydon, a laborer, and Anne Buras, maid to Mistress Forest. They were
"marry'd together" in 1608. Eleven years later came a ship bearing "ye
maides," a company of ninety young women, "pure and uncorrupt," sent over
to Virginia, at the expense of the company in London, to be married to
such settlers as were able and willing to support them, and to refund to
the company the cost of passage. A little later, sixty more "maides"
followed; and though the cost of a wife rose from a hundred and twenty, to
a hundred and fifty pounds of tobacco, there was no slackening in the
demand. In Maryland, as late as 1660, the market was equally brisk. "The
first planters," says the record, "were so far from expecting money with a
woman, that 'twas a common thing for them to buy a deserving wife, that
carried good testimonials of her character, at the price of a hundred
pound, and make themselves believe they had a bargain."
We read of an adventurous young lady of some social consequence, being a
niece of Daniel Defoe, who, suffering from an unfortunate love-affair in
England, ran away from home, and came to Maryland as a "redemptioner." Her
services were engaged by a farmer named Job, in Cecil County, and soon
after, according to a frequent custom of the country, she married into the
family of her employer. A Maryland record of November 2, 1638, runs thus:
"This day came William Lewis, planter, and made oath that he is not
recontracted to any other woman than Ursula Gifford; and that there is no
impediment why he should not be married to the said Ursula Gifford--and,
further, he acknowledged himself to owe unto the Lord Proprietary a
thousand pounds of tobacco, in case there be any precontract or other
lawful impediment whatsoever, as aforesaid, either on the part of William
Lewis or Ursula Gifford."
This arrangement of making the bridegroom responsible for the good faith
of the lady as well as his own, is quite refreshing in these days of equal
rights and responsibilities. The woman's rights question, however, was at
the front in Maryland, in the seventeenth century; and the strong-minded
woman who introduced it, was Mistress Margaret Brent, cousin to Governor
Calvert, who had such confidence in her business sagacity and ability,
that he appointed her his executrix, with the brief instructions, "Take
all: pay all." She made application to the Maryland Assembly to grant her
a vote in the House for herself, and another as his Lordship's attorney.
The request was peremptorily refused by Governor Greene; but, nothing
daunted, "the sd. Mrs Brent protested against all proceedings in this
present assembly unlesse shee may be present and have a vote as
aforesaid." Another woman of force in those days was Virlinda Stone. In
the Maryland archives still exists a letter from her to Lord Baltimore,
praying for an investigation of a fight in Anne Arundel County, during
which her husband was wounded. At the end of the business-like document,
she adds a fiery and altogether feminine postscript, in which she declares
that "Hemans, the master of the _Golden Lion_, is a very knave: and that
will be made plainly for to appeare to your Lordship, for he hath abused
my husband most grossly." Such women as these were not to be trifled with.
No wonder Alsop says: "All complimental courtships drest up in critical
Rarities are meer strangers to them. Plain wit comes nearest to their
genius; so that he that intends to court a Maryland girle, must have
something more than the tautologies of a long-winded speech to carry on
his design, or else he may fall under the contempt of her frown and his
own windy discourse."
The Virginia women were as high-spirited as their Maryland sisters. They
had no idea of being commanded into matrimony. When Governor Nicholson
became infatuated with one of the fair daughters of Master Lewis Burwell
and demanded her hand with royally autocratic manner, neither she nor her
parents were disposed to comply. The suitor became furious, and persisted
for years in his determination, which seems to have been as much a matter
of pride, as of sentiment. He took pains to wreak his wrath on every one
who opposed the match, going so far as to threaten the lives of the
unwilling young woman's father and brother. To Commissary Blair he
declared that, if she married any one but himself, he would cut the
throats of three men--the bridegroom, the minister, and the justice who
issued the license. Strangely enough, the damsel was not attracted by this
wild wooing; and, as a candid friend wrote to the furious lover, "It is
not here, as in some barbarous countries, where the tender lady is dragged
into the Sultan's arms reeking with the blood of her relatives." Though
this affair created such a stir throughout the Colony of Virginia and
lasted so long a time, no record has remained of the young heroine's after
fate, except the fact that she did not become Lady Nicholson; not even her
Christian name has come down to posterity, to whom she remains a shadowy
divinity.
A noticeable feature of Colonial life in Virginia, is the belleship of
widows. The girls seem to have stood no chance against their fascinations.
Washington, and Jefferson, and Madison each married one. In the preceding
century, Sir William Berkeley, who had brought no lady with him across the
water, was taken captive by a young widow of Warwick County, a certain
Dame Frances Stevens, who, after thirty-two years of married life, being
again left a widow by Berkeley's death, wedded with her late husband's
secretary, Philip Ludwell--holding fast, however, to her title of Lady
Berkeley. Lord Culpeper writes in a letter of 1680, "My Lady Berkeley is
married to Mr. Ludwell; and thinks no more of our world." It is to be
hoped that the secretary whom the lady took for her third husband, proved
a more amiable companion than the fiery old Governor, whose pride and
bitter obstinacy wrought such havoc after Bacon's rebellion, that the
reports of his cruelties echoed to the shores of England. Edmund Cheesman,
a follower of Bacon's, being brought up for trial, Berkeley asked him:
"Why did you engage in Bacon's designs?" Before Cheesman could answer, his
young wife, falling on her knees, exclaimed: "My provocation made my
husband join in the cause for which Bacon contended. But for me he had
never done what he has done. Let me bear the punishment, but let my
husband be pardoned!" Where was the chivalry of that Cavalier blood on
which Berkeley prided himself? We read that her prayer availed her husband
nothing, and procured only insult to herself.
Our sympathy with Bacon, in his rebellion against Berkeley's tyranny,
makes us doubly regretful that he should have stained his career by a deed
of cowardice and cruelty. It was one of those blunders worse than crimes,
and gave him and his followers the contemptuous appellation of "White
Aprons." When Bacon made his sudden turn on Sir William Berkeley, he
established his headquarters at _Green Spring_, Berkeley's own mansion.
There he threw up breastworks in front of his palisades, and then sent out
detachments of horsemen, who scoured the country and brought back to camp
the wives of prominent Berkeleyites. Among these dames were Madam Bray,
Madam Page, Madam Ballard, and Madam Bacon--the last, the wife of the
rebel's kinsman. Bacon then sent one of the dames to the town under a flag
of truce, to inform the husbands that he intended to place them in front
of his men while he constructed his earthworks. "The poor gentlewomen were
mightily astonished, and neather were their husbands void of amazement at
this subtile invention. The husbands thought it indeed wonderful that
their innocent and harmless wives should thus be entered a white garde to
the Divell"--the _Divell_, of course, being General Bacon, who, thus
protected by _The White Aprons_, finished his fortifications in security;
gaining a reputation for "subtility," but tarnishing his character for
gallantry.
As society grew more stable, it grew also more complex. The buying of
wives gave way to sentimental courtships, and men also began to learn the
advantages of a single life. In Maryland so many took this view, that we
find the old statutes imposing a tax on bachelors over twenty-five years
of age, of five shillings, for estates under three hundred pounds
sterling, or twenty shillings when over; a tax which seems to have been
more successful as a means of raising money than of promoting matrimony;
for we find the record of its payment by a surprising number of bachelors,
St. Ann's parish vestry-books alone showing thirty-four such derelicts.
Perhaps, however, this celibacy did not indicate so much aversion to
marriage, as inability to meet the growing demands for luxury. The
obstinate bachelors may have felt with regard to matrimony as Alsop did
with regard to liberty, that "without money it is like a man opprest with
the gout--every step he takes forward puts him to pain." The Abbé Robin at
a later day says of Annapolis: "Female luxury here exceeds what is known
in the provinces of France. A French hair-dresser is a man of importance;
it is said a certain dame here, hires one of that craft at a thousand
crowns a year salary." The very rumors of such extravagance must have
frightened frugal young men!
The Colonial maiden came into society and married, at an age which now
seems surprisingly early. Chief-Justice Marshall met and fell in love with
his wife when she was fourteen, and married her at sixteen. An unmarried
woman of over twenty-five, was looked upon as a hopeless and confirmed old
maid and spoken of, like Miss Wilkins, of Boston, as "a pitiable
spectacle." It may be that this extreme youth of the maids explains the
attraction of the widows, who had more social experience. Burnaby writes
in a very unhandsome manner of his impressions of the Virginia ladies whom
he met in his American tour, and generalizes with true British freedom on
slight acquaintance with the facts. He admits grudgingly that the women of
Virginia are handsome, "though not to be compared with our fair
countrywomen in England. They have but few advantages, and consequently
are seldom accomplished. This makes them reserved and unequal to any
interesting or refined conversation. They are immoderately fond of
dancing, and, indeed, it is almost the only amusement they partake of; but
even in this, they discover great want of taste and elegance, and seldom
appear with that gracefulness and ease which these movements are so
calculated to display. Toward the close of an evening, when the company
are pretty well tired with contra-dances, it is usual to dance jigs--a
practice originally borrowed, I am informed, from the negroes. The
Virginia ladies, excepting these amusements, and now and then a party of
pleasure into the woods to partake of a barbecue, cheerfully spend their
time in sewing and taking care of their families."
Another traveller makes a better report, and draws more favorable
conclusions.