YOUNG MEN AND MAIDENS OF THE OLD DOMINION
The social setting for Mary Ball--now a young lady--is easily
defined. It matters little whether she did or did not visit her
brother in England. She certainly belonged to the society of
Westmoreland, "the finest," says Bishop Meade, "for culture and
sound patriotism in the Colony." Around her lived the families of
Mason, Taliaferro, Mountjoy, Travers, Moncure, Mercer, Tayloe,
Ludwell, Fitzhugh, Lee, Newton, Washington, and others well known
as society leaders in 1730. If she was, as her descendants claim
for her, "The Toast of the Gallants of Her Day," these were the
"Gallants,"--many of them the fathers of men who afterward shone
like stars in the galaxy of revolutionary heroes.
The gallants doubtless knew and visited their tide-water
friends,--the Randolphs, Blands, Harrisons, Byrds, Nelsons, and
Carters,--and, like them, followed the gay fashions of the day.
They wrote sonnets and acrostics and valentines to their Belindas,
Florellas, Fidelias, and Myrtyllas--the real names of Molly, Patsy,
Ann, and Mary being reckoned too homespun for the court of Cupid.
These gallants wore velvet and much silk; the long vests that
Charles the Second had invented as "a fashion for gentlemen of all
time"; curled, powdered wigs, silver and gold lace; silken hose and
brilliant buckles. Many of them had been educated abroad, or at
William and Mary College,--where they had been rather a refractory
set, whose enormities must be winked at,--even going so far as to
"keep race-horses at ye college, and bet at ye billiard and other
gaming tables." Whatever their sins or shortcomings, they were
warm-hearted and honorable, and most chivalrous to women. It was
fashionable to present locks of hair tied in true-lovers' knots,
to tame cardinal-birds and mocking-birds for the colonial damsels,
to serenade them with songs and stringed instruments under their
windows on moonlight nights, to manufacture valentines of thinnest
cut paper in intricate foldings, with tender sentiments tucked shyly
under a bird's wing or the petal of a flower.
With the youthful dames themselves, in hoop, and stiff bodice,
powder and "craped" tresses, who cut watch-papers and worked
book-marks for the gallants, we are on terms of intimacy. We know
all their "tricks and manners," through the laughing Englishman,
and their own letters. An unpublished manuscript still circulates
from hand to hand in Virginia, under oath of secrecy, for it
contains a tragic secret, which reveals the true character of the
mothers of Revolutionary patriots. These letters express high
sentiment in strong, vigorous English, burning with patriotism
and ardent devotion to the interests of the united colonies--not
alone to Virginia. The spelling, and absurdly plentiful capitals,
were those of the period, and should provoke no criticism. Ruskin
says, "no beauty of execution can outweigh one grain or fragment
of thought." Beauty of execution and good spelling, according to
modern standards, do not appear in the letters of Mary Ball and her
friends, but they are seasoned with many a grain of good sense and
thought.
Of course we cannot know the names of her best friends. Her social
position entitled her to intimacy with the sisters of any or all of
the "gallants" we have named. She might have known Jane Randolph,
already giving her heart to plain Peter Jefferson, and destined
to press to her bosom the baby fingers that grew to frame the
Declaration of Independence; or Sarah Winston, whose brilliant
talents flashed in such splendor from the lips of Patrick Henry; or
ill-starred Evelyn Byrd, whose beauty had fired the sluggish veins
of George II and inspired a kingly pun upon her name, "Much have I
heard, lady, of thy fair country, but of the beauty of its birds I
know but now,"--all these and more; to say nothing of the mother
of Sally and Molly Cary, of Lucy Grymes, of Betsy Fauntleroy, and
of Mary Bland, each of whom has been claimed by Lossing and others
to be the Lowland beauty, to whom her illustrious son wrote such
wonderful sonnets, but quite impossible in the case of Mary Bland,
seeing she was born in 1704, and was some years older than his
mother.
They were a light-hearted band of maidens in these pre-Revolutionary
days in the "Old Dominion!" They had no dreams sadder than mystic
dreams on bride's cake, no duties except those imposed by affection,
no tasks too difficult, no burdens too heavy. They sang the old-time
songs, and danced the old-time dances, and played the old-time
English games around the Christmas fires, burning nuts, and naming
apple seeds, and loving their loves "with an A or a B," even
although my Lady Castlemaine, of whom no one could approve, had so
entertained her very doubtful friends a hundred years before. They
had the Pyrrhic dances, but they had the Pyrrhic phalanx as well!
The "nobler and manlier lessons" were not forgotten in all the
light-hearted manners of the age.