A saint without, within a devil.
Whoe'er secures said John McKeogn,
(Provided I should get my own),
Shall have from me in cash paid down
Five dollar bills, and half-a-crown."
Mary Nelson is the owner and poet, or, in the fashion of the day, I should
say poetess, and perhaps _owneress_, as I find it recorded of Mary Goddard
that she was postmistress of Baltimore and _Printress_ and _Editress_ of
the _Baltimore Journal_.
The world moves. The auction-block, and the runaway slave, with his
bundle on his back, have disappeared from among the pictures in the
advertising column; the packet has given way to the ocean steamer; the
horse to the bicycle; the stage coach to the railroad; the little
provincial gazettes, with their coarse gray paper and blurred type, to the
great dailies, as large as the Bible and as doubtful as the Apocrypha. I
wonder if another century will have such astounding tales to tell of
progress in news, trade and travel!
His Friends and Foes
[Illustration: His Friendes and Foes.]
The early adventurers had never seen anything of savage life till they
touched the shores of Virginia. Everything connected with the strange
beings there was full of interest. They set down faithfully whatever they
saw, and a good deal more besides.
The Susquehannocks impressed them most of all the Indian tribes. Their
enormous height and fine proportions made them look like giants, and their
attire was as impressive as their persons. One who saw them, writes home
in those first pioneer days: "Their attire is the skinnes of Beares and
Woolves. Some have Cassacks made of Beares heads and skinnes that a mans
head goes through the skinnes neck, and the eares of the Beare fastened to
his shoulders, the nose and teeth hanging downe his breast, another Beares
face split behind him, and at the end of the nose hung a Pawe. The half
sleeves comming to the elbowes were the neckes of Beares and the armes
through the mouth with pawes hanging at their noses. One had the head of
a Wolfe hanging in a chaine for a Iewell."
One of their chiefs specially impressed the English. He was a giant among
giants. The calf of his leg was three-quarters of a yard round, and "the
rest of his limbs answerable to that proportion." His arrows were five
quarters long, and he wore a wolf's skin at his back for a quiver. The
picture of this Indian Hercules accompanied the maps which Captain Smith
sent home to enlighten the Company in England.
The stories of the different adventurers were gathered together and
printed as "The General History of Virginia." The volume was adorned (I
cannot say illustrated) by a series of woodcuts, which make us laugh aloud
by their inaccuracy. The Indians are simply gigantic Englishmen naked and
beardless, with the hair standing in a stiff ridge on top of the head,
like a cock's comb. The wigwams look like haystacks, and the canoes like
bathtubs. What a collection of pictures we might have had, if a kodak had
been among the possessions of Captain Smith and his company! We should see
King Pamaunche with "the chaine of pearles round his necke thrice double,
the third parte of them as bygg as pease," and catch a view of his
"pallace" with its hundred-acre garden set with beans, pease, tobacco,
gourdes, pompions, "and other thinges unknowne to us in our tongue." We
should have the interiors of the smoky wigwams which Spelman and Archer
visited, the forms of the squaws dimly outlined against the grimy mat, as
they pounded corn, or dropped the bread into the kettle to boil.
Thanks to John Smith's graphic pen, we have a picture of Powhatan, that
fierce old ancestor of so many first families of Virginia, almost as vivid
as a photograph. Smith went to visit him, and found him proudly tying upon
a bedstead a foot high, upon ten or twelve mats. "At head sat a woman, at
his feet another. On each side, sitting upon a mat upon the ground, were
ranged his chief men, on each side the fire, five or ten in rank, and
behind them as many young women, each a great chaine of white beads over
their shoulders, their heads painted in red, and with such a grave and
majestical countenance as drove us into admiration to see such state in a
naked savage."
We might suppose these last words applied to the women, instead of to
Powhatan, did we not know how little state and majesty were allowed these
copper-colored Griseldas. The Indian squaws were little more than slaves.
When the braves moved, it was the squaws who carried the wigwams and set
them up in the new camp. When the men sat at meals, they spread the mats,
waited upon their masters, and finally contented their appetites with the
remnants of the feast. In the field, too, they bore the brunt of the toil:
"Let squaws and hedgehogs scratch the ground," said an old warrior; "man
was made for war and the chase."
Yet, wretched and abused as these women were, they seemed content with
their lot, and when their husbands died, they not only mourned for them,
but seemed quite ready to enter the same servitude with a new master. "I
once saw a young widow," said Jefferson, "whose husband, a warrior, had
died about eight days before, hastening to finish her grief, and who, by
tearing her hair, beating her breast, and drinking spirits, made the tears
flow in great abundance in order that she might grieve much in a short
space of time, and be married that evening to another young warrior."
Spelman, a Virginia adventurer who, in the course of one of his exploring
trips, witnessed an Indian wedding, has left us an account of the
ceremony. "Ye man," he says, "goes not unto any place to be married, but
ye woman is brought to him where he dwelleth. At her coming, her father or
cheefe frend ioynes the hands togither, and then ye father, or cheefe
frend of the man, bringeth a longe string of beades and, measuringe his
armes leangth thereof, doth breake it over ye handes of those that ar to
be married while their handes be ioyned together and gives it unto ye
woman's father or him that brings hir. And so, with much mirth and
feastinge they go togither."
This "longe string of beades" of which Spelman spoke, was probably made of
the _peak_ and _roanoke_, which made the riches of the Indian, and served
him at once for money and ornament. Both were made from shell--one dark,
the other white. The darker was the more valuable, and was distinguished
as _wampum_ peak. The English traders accepted it as coinage, and reckoned
its value at eighteen pence a yard, while the white peak sold for
ninepence. In the proceedings of the Maryland Council we find Thomas
Cornwaleys licensed to trade with the Indians for corn, roanoke, and peak.
When the red men wished to make bargains with the English, before
interpreters had been trained to speak both languages, the counting was
done by dropping beans, one by one, amid total silence. Woe to the
offender who interrupted an Indian during this critical operation, or
indeed at any time! An interruption was looked upon as an unpardonable
affront. Once, in the time of Bacon's Rebellion, an Indian chief,
accompanied by several of his tribe, came to negotiate a treaty of peace
with the English. In the course of the Werrowance's address, one of his
attendants ventured to put in a word. Instantly, the chief snatched a
tomahawk from his girdle, split the poor fellow's skull, motioned to his
companions to carry him out, and continued his speech as calmly as though
nothing had happened.
The lack of ceremony in the white men's address, and the frequency with
which they interrupted, struck the Indian as amazing and unpardonable.
There is a tradition that one of the early preachers strove to teach an
old Indian brave the doctrine of the Trinity. The Indian heard him calmly
to the end, and then began in his turn to tell of the Great Spirit who
spoke in the thunder, and whose smile was the sunshine. In the midst of
his discourse, the clergyman broke in, "But all this is not true." The
Indian, turning to the circle around, remarked: "What sort of man is this?
He has been talking for an hour of his three Gods, and now he will not let
me tell of my one."
The character of the Indian was a strange mixture of apparent
contradictions. He would hunt and fish for a season, and then feast and
make merry night and day while his supplies lasted. When they were
exhausted, he would gird up his loins, and fast for a period long enough
to end the life of a white man. He had an inordinate love of finery, upon
which the English traded from the first. He would barter away a whole
Winter's provisions of corn for a scarlet blanket or a bunch of
gay-colored beads. Yet he was not without a natural shrewdness which
enlightened him when he was being cheated. The story runs that some of the
early missionaries taught the savages that their salvation depended on
catching for them shad, which they sold to the settlers. In the course of
time the Indians discovered the trick, and drove out the deceivers. Years
afterward, another mission was established, and the first priest took as
his text, "Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters!" The
Indians gathered round the preacher when the sermon was ended, and one of
the tribe said: "White man, you speak in fine words of the waters of life;
but before we decide on what we have heard, we would like to know _whether
any shad swim in those waters_!"
It must be confessed that the Indians appear to better advantage than the
English, in the early transactions. When Hamor went to visit King
Powhatan, he was received with royal courtesy. The chief sent one of his
attendants to bring what food he could find, though he explained that, as
they were not expecting visitors, they had not kept anything ready.
"Presently," Hamor recounts, "the bread was brought in two great wodden
bowls, the quantity of a bushel sod bread, made up round, of the bygnesse
of a tenise-ball, whereof we eat some few." After this repast, Hamor and
his comrades were regaled with "a great glasse of sacke," and then were
ushered into the wigwam appropriated to them for the night. English and
Indian ideas of comfort did not correspond, however, for Hamor complains:
"We had not bin halfe an hour in the house, before the fleas began so to
torment us that we could not rest there, but went forth and under a broade
oake, upon a mat, reposed ourselves that night."
Hamor took with him on this visit, as an offering to the Indian chief,
five strings of blue and white beads, two pieces of copper, five wooden
combs, ten fishhooks, and a pair of knives. In return for these costly
presents, this pious English gentleman asked Powhatan, who had already
given Pocahontas to the whites, to send them another daughter, really as a
hostage, but nominally as a wife to Sir Thomas Dale, the worthy governor
of Virginia, regardless of the slight objection that there was already a
Lady Dale in England. Pocahontas had good reason for saying to Smith when
she met him in London, "Your countrymen will lie much."
To the early settlers the savage seemed a strange being, not more than
half human, who happened to be in possession of the land they coveted.
They thought they did God service when they flung to the Indian a Bible
and a handful of beads, in exchange for the land which had been his
birthright for centuries. They cheated and cajoled him when he was angry,
as they might have wheedled an angry tiger; yet, strange to say, they were
quite off their guard when, at length, the tiger made his spring, and
glutted the vengeance he had been nursing so long.
When the news of the Indian massacre reached England, it roused a frenzy
of revenge equal in fury to that of the savages. The Virginia Company
quite forgot that they had set forth in their charter that the conversion
of the Indians was one of the main objects of the new adventure, or if
they remembered it at all, it was only to apologize lamely for a complete
change of base. "We condemn their bodies," they wrote to the colonists,
"the saving of whose souls we have so zealously affected. Root them out
from being any longer a people.... War perpetually without peace or truce:
yet spare the young for servants" (the Englishman even in a rage has an
eye to the main chance). "Starve them by destroying their corn, or reaping
it for your own use! Pluck up their weirs! Obstruct their hunting! Employ
foreign enemies against them at so much a head! Keep a band of your own
men continually upon them, to be paid by the colony, which is to have half
of their captives and plunder!"
These short, nervous sentences fell like hammer-strokes on the ears of the
Englishmen in America, and they found an echo in their hearts. It is easy
for us to characterize their revengeful spirit as inconsistent and
unchristian. It is easy to tolerate a bear in a menagerie, or an Indian on
a reservation. It is quite another thing to exercise toleration toward
either in the life-and-death grip of a frontier struggle.
These men had seen their homes go up in flames. They had heard the
blood-curdling war-whoop. They had counted the bloody scalps hanging at
the Indian's belt, and marked on them the hair of those they loved. It was
idle to preach toleration to them. Henceforward for many years it was war
to the knife.
Yet, both as friend and foe, the Indian had given the colonists many
lessons. He had taught them the culture of maize and tobacco, he had
taught them to stalk the deer, to trap the bear, and to blaze the forest
path. Many a lesson in woodcraft the settlers learned from him.
Washington's shrewdness in borrowing native methods of warfare, would, had
his advice been taken, have saved Braddock's army from utter rout in the
Western forests. The very enmity of the Indian was a help to the Colonial
Cavalier, whose ease-loving temperament might easily have sunk into sloth
had it not felt the spur of danger and the necessity for being on the
alert. The docility of the negro was a perpetual temptation to the white
man to the abuse of arbitrary power, but the resistance of the Indian was
a constant reminder that here was a force unsubdued and unsubduable.
Of the influence of the white men on the Indian, the less said the better.
They eradicated none of his vices, and they lent him many of their own.
They found him abstinent, and they made him a guzzler of firewater. They
found him hospitable, and they made him suspicious and vindictive. They
found him in freedom, the owner of a great country; they robbed him of the
one, and crowded him out of the other.
An old sachem in the eighteenth century, meeting a surveyor, said to him:
"The French claim all the land on one side of the Ohio, the English claim
all the land on the other side. Now, where does the Indian's land lie?"
The savages exchanged their corn and tobacco for the rum-cask and the
firearms of civilization, and a strange jumble of a new religion, whose
ceremonies they grafted onto their own, with grotesque results. It is hard
to say whether they fared worst as the white man's friends or foes. When
the English made a treaty with the Chickahomanies, "a lustie and a daring
people," these were the terms offered them by the whites:
"First: They should for ever bee called Englishmen and bee true
subjects to King James and his Deputies.
"Secondly: Neither to kill nor detaine any of our men, nor cattell,
but bring them home.
"Thirdly: To bee alwaies ready to furnish us with three hundred men,
against the Spaniards or any.
"Fourthly: They shall not enter our townes, but send word they are new
Englishmen.
"Fifthly: That every fighting man, at the beginning of harvest shall
bring to our store two bushels of corne for tribute, for which they
shall receive so many hatchets.
"Lastly: The eight chiefe men should see all this performed or receive
the punishment themselves; for their diligence they should have a red
coat, a copper chaine, and King James his picture, and be accounted
his noblemen."
This shameful bargain is recorded by the English with evident
self-satisfaction, and apparently without a suspicion that they need blush
for the transaction. Yet when the Indian met treachery with treachery,
and fraud with guile, the civilized settlers were ablaze with indignation
for no better reason than that the savages had learned of them, and
bettered their instructions.
His Amusements
[Illustration: His Amusements.
'Let your Recreations Be Manful/
not Sinful.']
Of all the amusements of the Colonial Cavalier, none was so popular as
gambling. The law strove in vain to break it up. This statute in the
Colonial Record, tells its own story: "Against gaming at dice and cardes,
be it ordained by this present assembly that the winners and loosers shall
forfaicte ten shillings a man, one ten shillings thereof to go to the
discoverer, and the rest to pious uses." I fear very little was ever
collected for pious uses. The difficulty lay in the fact that, as every
one played, there was no one to act the spy.
This passion for gaming in the colonies was only a reflection of the craze
in England. For more than a century after the return of Charles the
Second, the rattle of the dice-box, and the shuffling of cards were the
most familiar sounds in every London chocolate-house. Young sinners and
old spent their fortunes, and misspent their lives, playing for money at
Brooke's or Boodle's. When a man fell dead at the door of White's, he was
dragged into the hall amid bets as to whether he were dead or alive, and
the surgeon's aid was violently opposed, on the ground of unfairness to
those betting on the side of death. The Duke of St. Albans, at eighty, too
blind to see the cards, went regularly to a gambling-house with an
attendant. Lady Castlemaine lost twenty-five thousand pounds in one
night's play. General Braddock's sister, having gamed away her fortune at
Bath, finished the comedy by hanging herself. When her affectionate
brother heard the news, he remarked jocularly, "Poor Fanny, I always
thought she would play till she was forced to tuck herself up."
I offer all this testimony to show that our Colonial Cavalier was only the
child of his age, when he too shook the dice, and shuffled the cards.
Being short of cash, his bets were generally made in tobacco, or, failing
that, in flesh and blood. Many a slave found a new master in the morning,
because his old master had been unlucky at play the night before.
In a community so absorbed in the excitement of hazard, the lottery of
course took deep hold. The first plantation in America was aided by a
grand "standing lottery," with along list of "welcomes, prises and
rewards," amounting to more than ten thousand crowns. The declaration sets
forth that "all prises, welcomes and rewards drawne wherever they dwell,
shall of the treasurer have present pay, and whosoever under one name or
poesie payeth three pound in ready money, shall receive six shillings and
eight pence, or a silver spoone of that value at his choice."
"The money for the Adventurers is to be paid to Sir Thomas Smith, Knight,
and Treasurer for _Virginia_, or such officers as he shall appoint in City
or Country, under the common seale of the company for the receit thereof."
The example thus set, was followed whenever the colonies felt a pressure
for money. In Virginia a lottery was established to meet the expenses of
the French and Indian War--the drawing directed to be "in the Burgesses'
Room of the Capital at Williamsburgh at ten in the morning. Prizes current
money from £5 to £2000. The lucky numbers to be published in the
_Gazette_."
In Maryland, in the eighteenth century, a "Scheme of Lottery is humbly
proposed to the Public for Raising the sum of 510 pounds, current money,
to be applied towards completeing the Market-House in Baltimore-Town in
Baltimore Co., buying two Fire-Engines and a parcel of Leather-Buckets for
the use of the said Town, enlarging the present Public Wharf and Building
a new one."
If gambling was a favorite pastime and the lottery a popular excitement,
the Cavalier was not a stranger to manlier sports. Of a brave and ardent
temper, and a fine physique, he found at once his work and play in the
hardy amusements of the chase. He had learned from the Indian to stalk the
deer, walking stealthily behind his horse till a good chance offered to
shoot close at hand, and lay the unsuspecting deer at his feet. Sometimes,
in the bright October weather, the air would be blue with the smoke of the
fires built to start the game. Now, in his heavy leather boots, he would
start afoot after wild hare, or by the light of the moon, with a band of
servants and dogs, he would hunt the 'possum and the coon. This habit of
hunting was so universal that the Colonial Cavalier well merited the
sarcasm of _The Spectator_, which described the English country gentleman
as lying under the curse pronounced in the words of Goliath, "I will give
thee to the fowls of the air and to the beasts of the field." Hunting as a
sport may not be spiritualizing, but it certainly is not brutalizing, and
as much cannot be said for all the sports of that day, in the Southern
colonies of America.
The cock-fight and the gouging-match never lacked as eager a throng of
spectators, as gathers to-day at a football game; yet both were brutal and
disgusting. They roused the amazement of every foreigner, that such
things should be tolerated in a civilized country. The gouging-match was
simply a fight of the lowest order. Not only were fists freely used, but
the test of success was the ability of the stronger bully to gouge out the
eye of his adversary. The under man could only save his sight by
humiliating himself to cry out, "Kings Cruse!" or "Enough!"
Anbury, who witnessed several of these matches, says: "I have seen a
fellow, reckoned a great adept in gouging, who constantly kept the nails
of both his thumb and second finger long and pointed; nay, to prevent
their breaking or splitting, he hardened them every evening in a candle."
So familiar was this brutal practice that it supplied a Southern orator in
after years with a rhetorical climax when, inciting his countrymen to make
war on the mercantile interests of Great Britain, he exclaimed: "Commerce
is the apple of England's eye. There let us gouge her!"
The cock-fight was scarcely less degrading than the gouging-match. When a
fight was announced, the news spread like lightning, and from all over the
country people came thronging, some bringing cocks to be entered in the
match, but all with money or tobacco to bet on the result. The scene was
one of wild excitement. Men and boys cheered on their favorites, and
watched with delight, while the furious cocks thrust at each other with
their long spurs of cruel steel.
It is pleasant to turn away from such scenes and sports as these, to read
of the _Knights of the Golden Horseshoe_ riding up into the wild
fastnesses of the Blue Ridge Mountains with Governor Spotswood. It was a
right knightly expedition, and one of the most picturesque in American
history. They wound through the forest, and forded the rivers, and climbed
rocky mountains, and took possession of peak after peak in the name of
"His Majesty George the Third." Their horses were shod with iron, which
was not usual in those days, and on their return, Governor Spotswood
presented each of the Cavaliers as a memento of the journey, with a tiny
gold horse-shoe, set with jewels, and bearing the legend, "_Sic juvat
transcendere montes_." The thrifty old king disapproved of this
extravagance, and left the Governor to pay for the mementoes out of his
own pocket.
Riding on horseback was the chief recreation, as well as the chief mode of
getting about, at the South. As the planters grew richer, they delighted
to own fine horses and outfits. Washington's letter-book contains an order
sent to London for elaborate equipments: "1 man's riding saddle, hogskin
seat, large plated stirrups, double-reined bridle and Pelham bit plated. A
very neat and fashionable Newmarket saddle-cloth. A large and best
portmanteau, saddle, bridle and pillion, cloak-bag, and surcingle. A
riding-frock of a handsome drab-coloured broadcloth with plain double gilt
buttons. A riding waistcoat of superfine scarlet cloth and gold lace, with
buttons like those of the coat. A blue surtout coat. A neat switch whip,
silver cap. Black velvet cap for servant."