COLONIAL DAMES
AND
GOOD WIVES

WRITTEN BY
ALICE MORSE EARLE

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY
THE RIVERSIDE PRESS CAMBRIDGE

Copyright, 1895,
By ALICE MORSE EARLE.

All rights reserved.

TO
THE MEMORY OF THE COLONIAL DAMES
Whose blood runs in my veins
Whose spirit lives in my work
Elizabeth Morse, Joanna Hoar, Esther Mason, Deborah
Atherton, Sarah Wyeth, Anne Adams, Elizabeth
Browne, Hannah Phillips, Mary Clary, Silence
Heard, Judith Thurston, Patience Foster,
Martha Bullard, Barbara Sheppard,
Seaborn Wilson

CONTENTS

COLONIAL DAMES AND GOODWIVES.

CHAPTER I.
CONSORTS AND RELICTS.

In the early days of the colony of Massachusetts Bay, careful lists were sent back to old England by the magistrates, telling what “to provide to send to New England” in order to ensure the successful planting and tender nourishing of the new settlement. The earliest list includes such homely items as “benes and pese,” tame turkeys, copper kettles, all kinds of useful apparel and wholesome food; but the list is headed with a most significant, a typically Puritan item, Ministers. The list sent to the Emigration Society by the Virginian colonists might equally well have been headed, to show their most crying need, with the word Wives.

The settlement of Virginia bore an entirely different aspect from that of New England. It was a community of men who planted Jamestown. There were few women among the early Virginians. In 1608 one Mistress Forrest came over with a maid, Anne Burraws, who speedily married John Laydon, the first marriage of English folk in the new world. But wives were few, save squaw-wives, therefore the colony did not thrive. Sir Edwin Sandys, at a meeting of the Emigration Society in London, in November, 1619, said that “though the colonists are seated there in their persons some four years, they are not settled in their minds to make it their place of rest and continuance.” They all longed to gather gold and to return to England as speedily as possible, to leave that state of “solitary uncouthness,” as one planter called it. Sandys and that delightful gentleman, the friend and patron of Shakespeare, the Earl of Southampton, planned, as an anchor in the new land, to send out a cargo of wives for these planters, that the plantation might “grow in generations and not be pieced out from without.” In 1620 the Jonathan and the London Merchant brought ninety maids to Virginia on a venture, and a most successful venture it proved.

There are some scenes in colonial life which stand out of the past with much clearness of outline, which seem, though no details survive, to present to us a vivid picture. One is this landing of ninety possible wives—ninety homesick, seasick but timidly inquisitive English girls—on Jamestown beach, where pressed forward, eagerly and amorously waiting, about four hundred lonely emigrant bachelors—bronzed, sturdy men, in leather doublets and breeches and cavalier hats, with glittering swords and bandoleers and fowling-pieces, without doubt in their finest holiday array, to choose and secure one of these fair maids as a wife. Oh, what a glorious and all-abounding courting, a mating-time, was straightway begun on the Virginian shore on that happy day in May. A man needed a quick eye, a ready tongue, a manly presence, if he were to succeed against such odds in supply and demand, and obtain a fair one, or indeed any one, from this bridal array. But whosoever he won was indeed a prize, for all were asserted to be “young, handsome, honestly educated maids, of honest life and carriage”—what more could any man desire? Gladly did the husband pay to the Emigration Company the one hundred and twenty pounds of leaf tobacco, which formed, in one sense, the purchase money for the wife. This was then valued at about eighty dollars: certainly a man in that matrimonial market got his money’s worth; and the complaining colonial chronicler who asserted that ministers and milk were the only cheap things in New England, might have added—and wives the only cheap things in Virginia.

It was said by old writers that some of these maids were seized by fraud, were trapanned in England, that unprincipled spirits “took up rich yeomans’ daughters to serve his Majesty as breeders in Virginia unless they paid money for their release.” This trapanning was one of the crying abuses of the day, but in this case it seems scarcely present. For the girls appear to have been given a perfectly fair showing in all this barter. They were allowed to marry no irresponsible men, to go nowhere as servants, and, indeed, were not pressed to marry at all if against their wills. They were to be “housed lodged and provided for of diet” until they decided to accept a husband. Naturally nearly all did marry, and from the unions with these young, handsome and godly-carriaged maids sprang many of our respected Virginian families.

No coquetry was allowed in this mating. A girl could not promise to marry two men, under pain of fine or punishment; and at least one presumptuous and grasping man was whipped for promising marriage to two girls at the same time—as he deserved to be when wives were so scarce.

Other ship-loads of maids followed, and with the establishment of these Virginian families was dealt, as is everywhere else that the family exists, a fatal blow at a community of property and interests, but the colony flourished, and the civilization of the new world was begun. For the unit of society may be the individual, but the molecule of civilization is the family. When men had wives and homes and children they “sett down satysfied” and no longer sighed for England. Others followed quickly and eagerly; in three years thirty-five hundred emigrants had gone from England to Virginia, a marked contrast to the previous years of uncertainty and dissatisfaction.

Virginia was not the only colony to import wives for its colonists. In 1706 His Majesty Louis XIV. sent a company of twenty young girls to the Governor of Louisiana, Sieur de Bienville, in order to consolidate his colony. They were to be given good homes, and to be well married, and it was thought they would soon teach the Indian squaws many useful domestic employments. These young girls were of unspotted reputation, and upright lives, but they did not love their new homes; a dispatch of the Governor says:—

The men in the colony begin through habit to use corn as an article of food, but the women, who are mostly Parisians, have for this kind of food a dogged aversion which has not been subdued. Hence they inveigh bitterly against his Grace the Bishop of Quebec who they say has enticed them away from home under pretext of sending them to enjoy the milk and honey of the land of promise.

I don’t know how this venture succeeded, but I cannot fancy anything more like the personification of incompatibility, of inevitable failure, than to place these young Parisian women (who had certainly known of the manner of living of the court of Louis XIV.) in a wild frontier settlement, and to expect them to teach Western squaws any domestic or civilized employment, and then to make them eat Indian corn, which they loathed as do the Irish peasants. Indeed, they were to be pitied. They rebelled and threatened to run away—whither I cannot guess, nor what they would eat save Indian corn if they did run away—and they stirred up such a dissatisfaction that the imbroglio was known as the Petticoat Rebellion, and the governor was much jeered at for his unsuccessful wardship and his attempted matrimonial agency.

In 1721 eighty young girls were landed in Louisiana as wives, but these were not godly-carriaged young maids; they had been taken from Houses of Correction, especially from Paris. In 1728 came another company known as filles à la cassette, or casket girls, for each was given by the French government a casket of clothing to carry to the new home; and in later years it became a matter of much pride to Louisianians that their descent was from the casket-girls, rather than from the correction-girls.

Another wife-market for the poorer class of wifeless colonists was afforded through the white bond-servants who came in such numbers to the colonies. They were of three classes; convicts, free-willers or redemptioners, and “kids” who had been stolen and sent to the new world, and sold often for a ten years’ term of service.

Maryland, under the Baltimores, was the sole colony that not only admitted convicts, but welcomed them. The labor of the branded hand of the malefactor, the education and accomplishments of the social outcast, the acquirements and skill of the intemperate or over-competed tradesman, all were welcome to the Maryland tobacco-planters; and the possibilities of rehabilitation of fortune, health, reputation, or reëstablishment of rectitude, made the custom not unwelcome to the convict or to the redemptioner. Were the undoubted servant no rogue, but an honest tradesman, crimped in English coast-towns and haled off to Chesapeake tobacco fields, he did not travel or sojourn, perforce, in low company. He might find himself in as choice companionship, with ladies and gentlemen of as high quality, albeit of the same character, as graced those other English harbors of ne’er-do-weels, Newgate or the Fleet Prison. Convicts came to other colonies, but not so openly nor with so much welcome as to Maryland.

All the convicts who came to the colonies were not rogues, though they might be condemned persons. The first record in Talbot County, Maryland, of the sale of a convict, was in September, 1716, “in the third Yeare of the Reign of our Sovereign Lord King George.” And it was for rebellion and treason against his Majesty that this convict, Alexander MacQueen, was taken in Lancashire and transported to America, and sold to Mr. Daniel Sherwood for seven years of service. With him were transported two shiploads of fellow-culprits, Jacobites, on the Friendship and Goodspeed. The London Public Record Office (on American and West India matters, No. 27) records this transportation and says the men were “Scotts Rebells.” Earlier still, many of the rebels of Monmouth’s rebellion had been sold for transportation, and the ladies of the court of James had eagerly snatched at the profits of the sale. Even William Penn begged for twenty of these rebels for the Philadelphia market. Perhaps he was shrewd enough to see in them good stock for successful citizens. Were the convict a condemned criminal, it did not necessarily follow that he or she was thoroughly vicious. One English husband is found petitioning on behalf of his wife, sentenced to death for stealing but three shillings and sixpence, that her sentence be changed to transportation to Virginia.

The redemptioners were willing immigrants, who contracted to serve for a period of time to pay the cost of their passage, which usually had been prepaid to the master of the ship on which they came across-seas. At first the state of these free-willers was not unbearable. Alsop, who was a redemptioner, has left on record that the work required was not excessive:—

Five dayes and a halfe in the summer is the allotted time that they worke, and for two months, when the Sun is predominate in the highest pitch of his heat, they claim an antient and customary Priviledge to repose themselves three hours in the day within the house. In Winter they do little but hunt and build fires.

and he adds, “the four years I served there were not to me so slavish as a two-year’s servitude of a handicraft apprenticeship in London.”

Many examples can be given where these redemptioners rose to respected social positions. In 1654, in the Virginia Assembly were two members and one Burgess who had been bond-servants. Many women-servants married into the family of their employers. Alsop said it was the rule for them to marry well. The niece of Daniel Defoe ran away to escape a marriage entanglement in England, sold herself on board ship as a redemptioner when but eighteen years old, was bought by a Mr. Job of Cecil County, Maryland, and soon married her employer’s son. Defoe himself said that so many good maid-servants were sold to America that there was a lack for domestic service in England.

Through the stealing of children and youths to sell in the plantations, it can plainly be seen that many a wife of respectable birth was furnished to the colonists. This trade, by which, as Lionel Gatford wrote in 1657, young people were “cheatingly duckoyed by Poestigeous Plagiaries,” grew to a vast extent, and in it, emulating the noble ladies of the court, women of lower rank sought a degrading profit.

In 1655, in Middlesex, England, one Christian Sacrett was called to answer the complaint of Dorothy Perkins:—

She accuseth her for a spirit, one that takes upp men women and children, and sells them a-shipp to be conveyed beyond the sea, having inticed and inveigled one Edward Furnifall and Anna his wife with her infant to the waterside, and putt them aboard the ship called the Planter to be conveied to Virginia.

Sarah Sharp was also asserted to be a “common taker of children and setter to Betray young men and maydens to be conveyed to ships.”

The life of that famous rogue, Bamfylde-Moore Carew, shows the method by which servants were sold in the plantations. The captain, with his cargo of trapanned Englishmen, among whom was Carew, cast anchor at Miles River in Talbot County, Maryland, ordered a gun to be fired, and a hogshead of rum sent on board. On the day of the sale the men prisoners were all shaved, the women dressed in their best garments, their neatest caps, and brought on deck. Each prisoner, when put up for sale, told his trade. Carew said he was a good rat-catcher, beggar, and dog-trader, “upon which the Captain hearing takes the planter aside, and tells him he did but jest, being a man of humour, and would make an excellent schoolmaster.” Carew escaped before being sold, was captured, whipped, and had a heavy iron collar, “called in Maryland a pot-hook,” riveted about his neck; but he again fled to the Indians, and returned to England. Kidnapped in Bristol a second time, he was nearly sold on Kent Island to Mr. Dulaney, but again escaped. He stole from a house “jolly cake, powell, a sort of Indian corn bread, and good omani, which is kidney beans ground with Indian corn, sifted, put into a pot to boil, and eaten with molasses.” Jolly cake was doubtless johnny cake; omani, hominy; but powell is a puzzle. He made his way by begging to Boston, and shipped to England, from whence he was again trapanned.

In the Sot-Weed Factor are found some very coarse but graphic pictures of the women emigrants of the day. When the factor asks the name of “one who passed for chambermaid” in one planter’s house in “Mary-Land,” she answered with an affected blush and simper:—

In better Times, ere to this Land

I was unhappily Trapanned,

Perchance as well I did appear

As any lord or lady here.

Not then a slave for twice two year.

My cloaths were fashionably new,

Nor were my shifts of Linnen blue;

But things are changed, now at the Hoe

I daily work, and barefoot go.

In weeding corn, or feeding swine,

I spend my melancholy time.

Kidnap’d and fool’d I hither fled,

To shun a hated nuptial Bed.

And to my cost already find

Worse Plagues than those I left behind.

Another time, being disturbed in his sleep, the factor finds that in an adjoining room,—

... a jolly Female Crew

Were Deep engaged in Lanctie Loo.

Soon quarreling over their cards, the planters’ wives fall into abuse, and one says scornfully to the other:—

... tho now so brave,

I knew you late a Four Years Slave,

What if for planters wife you go,

Nature designed you for the Hoe.

The other makes, in turn, still more bitter accusations. It can plainly be seen that such social and domestic relations might readily produce similar scenes, and afford opportunity for “crimination and recrimination.”

Still we must not give the Sot-Weed Factor as sole or indeed as entirely unbiased authority. The testimony to the housewifely virtues of the Maryland women by other writers is almost universal. In the London Magazine of 1745 a traveler writes, and his word is similar to that of many others:—

The women are very handsome in general and most notable housewives; everything wears the Marks of Cleanliness and Industry in their Houses, and their behavior to their Husbands and Families is very edifying. You cant help observing, however, an Air of Reserve and somewhat that looks at first to a Stranger like Unsociableness, which is barely the effect of living at a great Distance from frequent Society and their Thorough Attention to the Duties of their Stations. Their Amusements are quite Innocent and within the Circle of a Plantation or two. They exercise all the Virtues that can raise Ones Opinion of too light a Sex.

The girls under such good Mothers generally have twice the Sense and Discretion of the Boys. Their Dress is neat and Clean and not much bordering upon the Ridiculous Humour of the Mother Country where the Daughters seem Dress’d up for a Market.

Wives were just as eagerly desired in New England as in Virginia, and a married estate was just as essential to a man of dignity. As a rule, emigration thereto was in families, but when New England men came to the New World, leaving their families behind them until they had prepared a suitable home for their reception, the husbands were most impatient to send speedily for their consorts. Letters such as this, of Mr. Eyre from England to Mr. Gibb in Piscataquay, in 1631, show the sentiment of the settlers in the matter:—

I hope by this both your wives are with you according to your desire. I wish all your wives were with you, and that so many of you as desire wives had such as they desire. Your wife, Roger Knight’s wife, and one wife more we have already sent you and more you shall have as you wish for them.

This sentence, though apparently polygamous in sentiment, does not indicate an intent to establish a Mormon settlement in New Hampshire, but is simply somewhat shaky in grammatical construction, and erratic in rhetorical expression.

Occasionally, though rarely, there was found a wife who did not long for a New England home. Governor Winthrop wrote to England on July 4, 1632:—

I have much difficultye to keepe John Gallope heere by reason his wife will not come. I marvayle at her womans weaknesse, that she will live myserably with her children there when she might live comfortably with her husband here. I pray perswade and further her coming by all means. If she will come let her have the remainder of his wages, if not let it be bestowed to bring over his children for soe he desires.

Even the ministers’ wives did not all sigh for the New World. The removal of Rev. Mr. Wilson to New England “was rendered difficult by the indisposition of his dearest consort thereto.” He very shrewdly interpreted a dream to her in favor of emigration, with but scant and fleeting influence upon her, and he sent over to her from America encouraging accounts of the new home, and he finally returned to England for her, and after much fasting and prayer she consented to “accompany him over an ocean to a wilderness.”

Margaret Winthrop, that undaunted yet gentle woman, wrote of her at this date (and it gives us a glimpse of a latent element of Madam Winthrop’s character), “Mr. Wilson cannot yet persuade his wife to go, for all he hath taken this pains to come and fetch her. I marvel what mettle she is made of. Sure she will yield at last.” She did yield, and she did not go uncomforted. Cotton Mather wrote:—

Mrs. Wilson being thus perswaded over into the difficulties of an American desart, her kinsman Old Mr. Dod, for her consolation under those difficulties did send her a present with an advice which had in it something of curiosity. He sent her a brass counter, a silver crown, and a gold jacobus, all severally wrapped up; with this instruction unto the gentleman who carried it; that he should first of all deliver only the counter, and if she received it with any shew of discontent, he should then take no notice of her; but if she gratefully resented that small thing for the sake of the hand it came from, he should then go on to deliver the silver and so the gold, but withal assure her that such would be the dispensations to her and the good people of New England. If they would be content and thankful with such little things as God at first bestowed upon them, they should, in time, have silver and gold enough. Mrs. Wilson accordingly by her cheerful entertainment of the least remembrance from good old Mr. Dod, gave the gentleman occasion to go through with his whole present and the annexed advice.

We could not feel surprised if poor homesick, heartsick, terrified Mrs. Wilson had “gratefully resented” Mr. Dod’s apparently mean gift to her on the eve of exile in our modern sense of resentment; but the meaning of resent in those days was to perceive with a lively sense of pleasure. I do not know whether this old Mr. Dod was the poet whose book entitled A Posie from Old Mr. Dod’s Garden was one of the first rare books of poetry printed in New England in colonial days.

We truly cannot from our point of view “marvayle” that these consorts did not long to come to the strange, sad, foreign shore, but wonder that they were any of them ever willing to come; for to the loneliness of an unknown world was added the dread horror of encounter with a new and almost mysterious race, the blood-thirsty Indians, and if the poor dames turned from the woods to the shore, they were menaced by “murthering pyrates.”

Gurdon Saltonstall, in a letter to John Winthrop of Connecticut, as late as 1690, tells in a few spirited and racy sentences of the life the women lead in an unprotected coast town. It was sad and terrifying in reality, but there is a certain quaintness of expression and metaphor in the narrative, and a sly and demure thrusting at Mr. James, that give it an element of humor. It was written of the approach of a foe “whose entrance was as formidable and swaggering as their exit was sneaking and shamefull.” Saltonstall says:—

My Wife & family was posted at your Honʳˢ a considerable while, it being thought to be ye most convenient place for ye feminine Rendezvous. Mr James who Commands in Chiefe among them, upon ye coast alarum given, faceth to ye Mill, gathers like a Snow ball as he goes, makes a Generall Muster at yor Honʳˢ, and so posts away with ye greatest speed, to take advantage of ye neighboring rocky hills, craggy, inaccessible mountains; so that Wᵗᵉᵛᵉʳ els is lost Mr James and yᵉ Women are safe.

All women did not run at the approach of the foe. A marked trait of the settlers’ wives was their courage; and, indeed, opportunities were plentiful for them to show their daring, their fortitude, and their ready ingenuity. Hannah Bradley, of Haverhill, Mass., killed one Indian by throwing boiling soap upon him. This same domestic weapon was also used by some Swedish women near Philadelphia to telling, indeed to killing advantage. A young girl in the Minot House in Dorchester, Mass., shovelled live coals on an Indian invader, and drove him off. A girl, almost a child, in Maine, shut a door, barred, and held it while thirteen women and children escaped to a neighboring block-house before the door and its brave defender were chopped down. Anthony Bracket and his wife, captured by savages, escaped through the wife’s skill with the needle. She literally sewed together a broken birch-bark canoe which they found, and in which they got safely away. Most famous and fierce of all women fighters was Hannah Dustin, who, in 1697, with another woman and a boy, killed ten Indians at midnight, and started for home; but, calling to mind a thought that no one at home, without corroborative evidence, would believe this extraordinary tale, they returned, scalped their victims, and brought home the bloody trophies safely to Haverhill.

Some Englishwomen were forced to marry their captors, forced by torture or dire distress. Some, when captured in childhood, learned to love their savage husbands. Eunice Williams, daughter of the Deerfield minister, a Puritan who hated the Indians and the church of Rome worse than he hated Satan, came home to her Puritan kinsfolk wearing two abhorred symbols, a blanket and crucifix, and after a short visit, not liking a civilized life, returned to her Indian brave, her wigwam, and her priest.

I have always been glad that it was my far-away grandfather, John Hoar, who left his Concord home, and risked his life as ambassador to the Indians to rescue one of these poor “captivated” English wives, Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, after her many and heart-rending “savage removes.” I am proud of his “very forward spirit” which made him dare attempt this bold rescue, as I am proud of his humanity and his intelligent desire to treat the red men as human beings, furnishing about sixty of them with a home and decent civilizing employment. I picture him “stoutly not afraid,” as he entered the camp, and met the poor captive, and treated successfully with her savage and avaricious master, and then I see him tenderly leading her, ragged, half-starved, and exhausted, through the lonely forests home—home to the “doleful solemn sight” of despoiled Lancaster. And I am proud, too, of the noble “Boston gentlewomen” who raised twenty pounds as a ransom for Mary Rowlandson, “the price of her redemption,” and tenderly welcomed her to their homes and hearts, so warmly that she could write of them as “pitiful, tender-hearted, and compassionate Christians,” whose love was so bountiful that she could not declare it. If any one to-day marvels that English wives did not “much desire the new and doleful land,” let them read this graphic and thrilling story of the Captivity, Removes, and Restauration of Mary Rowlandson, and he will marvel that the ships were not crowded with disheartened settlers returning to their “faire English homes.”

A very exciting and singular experience befell four dignified Virginian wives in Bacon’s Rebellion, not through the Indians but at the hands of their erstwhile friends. It is evident that the women of that colony were universally and deeply stirred by the romance of this insurrection and war. We hear of their dramatic protests against the tyranny of the government. Sarah Drummond vowed she feared the power of England no more than a broken straw, and contemptuously broke a stick of wood to illustrate her words. Major Chriesman’s wife, “the honor of her sex,” when her husband was about to be put to death as a rebel, begged Governor Berkeley to kill her instead, as he had joined Bacon wholly at her solicitation. One Ann Cotton was moved by the war to drop into literary composition, an extraordinary ebullition for a woman in her day, and to write an account of the Rebellion, as she deemed “too wordishly,” but which does not read now very wordishly to us. But for these four dames, the wives of men prominent in the army under Governor Berkeley—prime men, Ann Cotton calls them—was decreed a more stirring participation in the excitements of war. The brilliant and erratic young rebel, Bacon, pressed them into active service. He sent out companies of horsemen and tore the gentlewomen from their homes, though they remonstrated with much simplicity that they were “indisposed” to leave; and he brought them to the scene of battle, and heartlessly placed them—with still further and more acute indisposition—on the “fore-front” of the breastworks as a shield against the attacks of the four distracted husbands with their soldiers. We read that “the poor Gentlewomen were mightily astonished at this project; neather were their husbands void of amazements at this subtill invention.” The four dames were “exhibited to the view of their husbands and ffriends in the towne upon the top of the smalle worke he had cast up in the night where he caused them to tarey till he had finished his defence against the enemy’s shott.” There stood these four innocent and harmless wives,—“guardian angells—the white gardes of the Divell,” shivering through the chill September night till the glimmering dawn saw completed the rampart of earth and logs, or the leaguer, as it was called by the writers with that exactness and absolute fitness of expression which, in these old chronicles, gives such delight to the lover of good old English. One dame was also sent to her husband’s camp as a “white-aproned hostage” to parley with the Governor. And this hiding of soldiers behind women was done by the order of one who was called the most accomplished gentleman in Virginia, but whom we might dub otherwise if we wished, to quote the contemporary account, to “oppose him further with pertinances and violent perstringes.”

I wish I could truthfully say that one most odious and degrading eighteenth century English custom was wholly unknown in America—the custom of wife-trading, the selling by a husband of his wife to another man. I found, for a long time, no traces or hints of the existence of such a custom in the colonies, save in two doubtful cases. I did not wholly like the aspect of Governor Winthrop’s note of the suggestion of some members of the church in Providence, that if Goodman Verin would not give his wife full liberty to go to meeting on Sunday and weekly lectures as often as she wished, “the church should dispose her to some other man who would use her better.” I regarded this suggestion of the Providence Christians with shocked suspicion, but calmed myself with the decision that it merely indicated the disposition of Goodwife Verin as a servant. And again, in the records of the “Pticuler Court” of Hartford, Conn., in 1645, I discovered this entry: “Baggett Egleston for bequething his wyfe to a young man is fyned 20 shillings.” Now, any reader can draw his conclusions as to exactly what this “bequething” was, and I cannot see that any of us can know positively. So, though I was aware that Baggett was not a very reputable fellow, I chose to try to persuade myself that this exceedingly low-priced bequeathing did not really mean wife-selling. But just as I was “setting down satysfyed” at the superiority in social ethics and morality of our New England ancestors, I chanced, while searching in the Boston Evening Post of March 15, 1736, for the advertisement of a sermon on the virtues of our forbears, entitled New England Tears and Fears of Englands Dolours and Horrours, to find instead, by a malicious and contrary fate, this bit of unwelcome and mortifying news not about old England but about New England’s “dolours and horrours.”

Boston. The beginning of last Week a pretty odd and uncommon Adventure happened in this Town, between 2 Men about a certain woman, each one claiming her as his Wife, but so it was, that one of them had actually disposed of his Right in her to the other for Fifteen Shillings this Currency, who had only paid ten of it in part, and refus’d to pay the other Five, inclining rather to quit the Woman and lose his Earnest; but two Gentlemen happening to be present, who were Friends to Peace, charitably gave him half a Crown a piece, to enable him to fulfil his Agreement, which the Creditor readily took, and gave the Woman a modest Salute, wishing her well, and his Brother Sterling much Joy of his Bargain.

The meagre sale-money, fifteen shillings, was the usual sum which changed hands in England at similar transactions, though one dame of high degree was sold for a hundred guineas. In 1858 the Stamford Mercury gave an account of a contemporary wife-sale in England, which was announced through the town by a bellman. The wife was led to the sale with a halter round her neck, and was “to be taken with all her faults.” I am glad to say that this base British husband was sharply punished for his misdemeanor.

It seems scarcely credible that the custom still exists in England, but in 1882 a husband sold his wife in Alfreton, Derbyshire; and as late as the 13th July, 1887, Abraham Boothroyd, may his name be Anathema maranatha, sold his wife Clara at Sheffield, England, for five shillings.

A most marked feature of social life in colonial times was the belleship of widows. They were literally the queens of society. Fair maids had so little chance against them, swains were so plentiful for widows, that I often wonder whence came the willing men who married the girls the first time, thus offering themselves as the sacrifice at the matrimonial altar through which the girls could attain the exalted state of widowhood. Men sighed sometimes in their callow days for the girl friends of their own age, but as soon as their regards were cast upon a widow, the girls at once disappear from history, and the triumphant widow wins the prize.

Another marked aspect of this condition of society was the vast number of widows in early days. In the South this was accounted for by one of their own historians as being through the universally intemperate habits of the husbands, and consequently their frequent early death. In all the colonies life was hard, exposure was great to carry on any active business, and the excessive drinking of intoxicating liquors was not peculiar to the Southern husbands any more than were widows. In 1698 Boston was said to be “full of widows and orphans, and many of them very helpless creatures.” It was counted that one sixth of the communicants of Cotton Mather’s church were widows. It is easy for us to believe this when we read of the array of relicts among which that aged but actively amorous gentleman, Judge Sewall, found so much difficulty in choosing a marriage partner, whose personal and financial charms he recounted with so much pleasurable minuteness in his diary.

A glowing tribute to one of these Boston widows was paid by that gossiping traveller, John Dunton, with so much evidence of deep interest, and even sentiment, that I fancy Madam Dunton could not have been wholly pleased with the writing and the printing thereof. He called this Widow Breck the “flower of Boston,” the “Chosen exemplar of what a Widow is.” He extols her high character, beauty, and resignation, and then bridles with satisfaction while he says, “Some have been pleas’d to say That were I in a single state they do believe she wou’d not be displeas’d with my addresses.” He rode on horseback on a long journey with his fair widow on a pillion behind him, and if his conversation on “Platonicks and the blisses of Matrimony” was half as tedious as his recounting of it, the road must indeed have seemed long. He says her love for her dead husband is as strong as death, but Widow Breck proved the strength of her constancy by speedily marrying a second husband, Michael Perry.

As an instance of the complicated family relations which might arise in marrying widows, let me cite the familiar case of the rich merchant, Peter Sergeant, the builder of the famous Province House in Boston. I will use Mr. Shurtleff’s explanation of this bewildering gallimaufrey of widows and widowers:—

He was as remarkable in his marriages as his wealth; for he had three wives, the second having been a widow twice before her third venture; and his third also a widow, and even becoming his widow, and lastly the widow of her third husband.

To this I may add that this last husband, Simon Stoddart, also had three wives, that his father had four, of whom the last three were widows,—but all this goes beyond the modern brain to comprehend, and reminds us most unpleasantly of the wife of Bath.

These frequent and speedy marriages were not wholly owing to the exigencies of colonial life, but were the custom of the times in Europe as well. I read in the diary of the Puritan John Rous, in January, 1638, of this somewhat hasty wooing:—

A gentleman carried his wife to London last week and died about eight o’clock at night, leaving her five hundred pounds a year in land. The next day before twelve she was married to the journeyman woolen-draper that came to sell mourning to her.

I do not believe John Rous made special note of this marriage simply because it was so speedy, but because it was unsuitable; as a landed widow was, in social standing, far above a journeyman draper.

As we approach Revolutionary days, the reign of widows is still absolute.

Washington loved at fifteen a fair unknown, supposed to be Lucy Grimes, afterward mother of Gen. Henry Lee. To her he wrote sentimental poems, from which we gather (as might be expected at that age) that he was too bashful to reveal his love. A year later he writes:—

I might, was my heart disengaged, pass my time very pleasantly as there’s a very agreeable Young Lady Lives in the same house; but as thats only adding fuel to the fire it makes me more uneasy; for by often and unavoidably being in Company with her revives my former Passion for your Lowland Beauty; whereas was I to live more retired from young women, I might in some measure eliviate my sorrows by burying that chast and troublesome passion in the grave of oblivion or eternal forgetfulness.

The amorous boy of sixteen managed to “bury this chast and troublesome passion,” to find the “Young Lady in the house” worth looking at, and when he was twenty years old, to write to William Fantleroy thus of his daughter, Miss Bettie Fantleroy:—

I purpose as soon as I recover my strength (from the pleurisy) to wait on Miss Bettie in hopes of a reconsideration of the former cruel sentence, and to see if I cannot obtain a decision in my favor. I enclose a letter to her.

Later he fell in love with Mary Phillipse, who, though beautiful, spirited, and rich, did not win him. This love affair is somewhat shadowy in outline. Washington Irving thinks that the spirit of the alert soldier overcame the passion of the lover, and that Washington left the lists of love for those of battle, leaving the field to his successful rival, Colonel Morris. The inevitable widow in the shape of Madam Custis, with two pretty children and a fortune of fifteen thousand pounds sterling, became at last what he called his “agreeable partner for life,” and Irving thinks she was wooed with much despatch on account of the reverses in the Phillipse episode.

Thomas Jefferson was another example of a President who outlived his love-affair with a young girl, and married in serenity a more experienced dame. In his early correspondence he reveals his really tumultuous passion for one Miss Becca Burwell. He sighs like a furnace, and bemoans his stammering words of love, but fair Widow Martha Skelton made him eloquent. Many lovers sighed at her feet; two of them lingered in her drawing-room one evening to hear her sing a thrilling love-song to the accompaniment of Jefferson’s violin. The love-song and music were so expressive that the two disconsolate swains plainly read the story of their fate, and left the house in defeat.

James Madison, supposed to be an irreclaimable old bachelor, succumbed at first sight to the charms of fair Widow Dorothy Todd, twenty years his junior, wooed her with warmth, and made her, as Dolly Madison, another Mrs. President. Benjamin Franklin also married a widow.

The characteristic glamour which hung round every widow encircled Widow Sarah Syms, and Colonel Byrd gives a spirited sketch of her in 1732:—

In the evening Tinsley conducted me to Widow Syms’ house where I intended to take up my quarters. This lady at first suspecting I was some lover put on a gravity that becomes a weed, but as soon as she learned who I was brightened up with an unusual cheerfulness and serenity. She was a portly handsome dame, of the family of Esau, and seemed not to pine too much for the death of her husband. This widow is a person of lively and cheerful conversation with much less reserve than most of her country women. It becomes her very well and sets off her other agreeable qualities to advantage. We tossed off a bottle of honest port which we relished with a broiled chicken. At nine I retired to my devotions, and then slept so sound that fancy itself was stupefied, else I should have dreamed of my most obliging land-lady.

This “weed” who did not pine too much for her husband, soon married again, and became the mother of Patrick Henry; and the testimony of Colonel Byrd as to her lively and cheerful conversation shows the heredity of Patrick Henry’s “gift of tongues.”

Hie! Betty Martin! tiptoe fine,

Couldn’t get a husband for to suit her mind!

was a famous Maryland belle, to whom came a-courting two friends, young lawyers, named Dallam and Winston. It was a day of much masculine finery and the two impecunious but amicable friends possessed but one ruffled shirt between them, which each wore on courting-day. Such amiability deserved the reward it obtained, for, strange to say, both suitors won Betty Martin. Dallam was the first husband,—the sacrifice,—and left her a widow with three sons and a daughter. Winston did likewise, even to the exact number of children. Daughter Dallam’s son was Richard Caswell, governor of South Carolina, and member of Congress. Daughter Winston’s son was William Paca, governor of Maryland, and member of the Continental Congress. Both grandsons on their way to and from Congress always visited their spirited old grandmother, who lived to be some say one hundred and twenty years old.

There must have been afforded a certain satisfaction to a dying husband—of colonial times—through the confidence that, by unwavering rule, his widow would soon be cared for and cherished by another. There was no uncertainty as to her ultimate settlement in life, and even should she be unfortunate enough to lose her second partner, he still had every reason to believe that a third would speedily present himself. The Reverend Jonathan Burr when almost moribund, piously expressed himself to “that vertuous gentlewoman his wife with confidence” that she would soon be well provided for; and she was, for “she was very shortly after very honourably and comfortably married unto a gentleman of good estate,” a magistrate, Richard Dummer, and lived with him nearly forty years. Provisions were always made by a man in his will in case his wife married again; scarcely ever to remove the property from her, but simply to re-adjust the division or conditions. And men often signed ante-nuptial contracts promising not to “meddle” with their wives’ property. One curious law should be noted in Pennsylvania, in 1690, that a widow could not marry till a year after her husband’s death.

There seem to have been many advantages in marrying a widow—she might prove a valuable inheritance. The second husband appeared to take a real pride in demanding and receiving all that was due to the defunct partner. As an example let me give this extract from a court record. On May 31st, 1692, the governor and council of Maryland were thus petitioned:—

James Brown of St Marys who married the widow and relict of Thomas Pew deceased, by his petition humbly prays allowance for Two Years Sallary due to his Predecessor as Publick Post employed by the Courts, as also for the use of a Horse, and the loss of a Servant wholly, by the said Pew deputed in his sickness to Officiate; and ran clear away with his Horse, some Clothes &c., and for several months after not heard of.

Now we must not be over-critical, nor hasty in judgment of the manners and motives of two centuries ago, but those days are held up to us as days of vast submissiveness and modesty, of patient long-suffering, of ignorance of extortion; yet I think we would search far, in these degenerate days, for a man who, having married a relict, would, two years after his “Predecessor’s” death, have the colossal effrontery to demand of the government not only the back salary of said “Predecessor,” but pay for the use of a horse stolen by the Predecessor’s own servant—nay, more, for the value of the said servant who elected to run away. Truly James Brown builded well when he chose a wife whose departing partner had, like a receding wave, deposited much lucrative silt on the matrimonial shore, to be thriftily gathered in and utilized as a bridal dower by his not-too-sensitive successor.

In fact it may plainly be seen that widows were life-saving stations in colonial social economy; one colonist expressed his attitude towards widows and their Providential function as economic aids, thus:—

Our uncle is not at present able to pay you or any other he owes money to. If he was able to pay he would; they must have patience till God enable him. As his wife died in mercy near twelve months since, it may be he may light of some rich widow that may make him capable to pay; except God in this way raise him he cannot pay you or any one else.

It certainly must have been some satisfaction to every woman to feel within herself the possibility of becoming such a celestial agent of material salvation.

I wish to state, in passing, that it is sometimes difficult to judge as to the marital estate of some dames, to know whether they were widows at the time of the second marriage or not, for the prefixed Mrs. was used indifferently for married and single women, and even for young girls. Cotton Mather wrote of “Mrs. Sarah Gerrish, a very beautiful and ingenious damsel seven years of age.” Rev. Mr. Tompson wrote a funeral tribute to a little girl of six, which is entitled and begins thus:—

A Neighbors Tears dropt on ye grave of an Amiable Virgin, a pleasant Plant cut down in the blooming of her Spring viz; Mrs Rebecka Sewall Anno Aetatis 6, August ye 4ᵗʰ 1710.

I saw this Pritty Lamb but t’other day

With a small flock of Doves just in my way

Ah pitty tis Such Prittiness should die

With rare alliances on every side.

Had Old Physitians liv’d she ne’er had died.

The pious old minister did not really mean by this tribute to the old-school doctors, that Mrs. Rebecka would have achieved earthly immortality. He modestly ends his poetic tribute thus:—

Had you given warning ere you pleased to Die

You might have had a Neater Elegy.

These consorts and relicts are now but shadows of the past:—

their bones are dust,

Their souls are with the saints, I trust.

The honest and kindly gentlemen who were their husbands, sounded their virtues in diaries and letters; godly ministers preached their piety in labored and dry-as-dust sermons. Their charms were sung by colonial poets in elegies, anagrams, epicediums, acrostics, threnodies, and other decorous verse. It was reserved for a man of war, and not a very godly man of war either, to pæan their good sense. Cervantes says that “womans counsel is not worth much, yet he who despises it is no wiser than he should be.” With John Underhill’s more gallant tribute to the counsel of a consort, we may fitly end this chapter.

Myself received an arrow through my coat sleeve, a second against my helmet on the forehead; so as if God in his Providence had not moved the heart of my wife to persuade me to carry it along with me (which I was unwilling to do) I had been slain. Give me leave to observe two things from hence; first when the hour of death is not yet come, you see God useth weak means to keep his purpose unviolated; secondly let no man despise advice and counsel of his wife though she be a woman. It were strange to nature to think a man should be bound to fulfil the humour of a woman, what arms he should carry; but you see God will have it so, that a woman should overcome a man. What with Delilahs flattery, and with her mournful tears, they must and will have their desire, when the hand of God goes along in the matter, and this to accomplish his own will. Therefore let the clamor be quenched that I hear daily in my ears, that New England men usurp over their wives and keep them in servile subjection. The country is wronged in this matter as in many things else. Let this precedent satisfy the doubtful, for that comes from the example of a rude soldier. If they be so courteous to their wives as to take their advice in warlike matters, how much more kind is the tender affectionate husband to honor his wife as the weaker vessel. Yet mistake not. I say not they are bound to call their wives in council, though they are bound to take their private advice (so far as they see it make for their advantage and good). Instance Abraham.

CHAPTER II.
WOMEN OF AFFAIRS.

The early history of Maryland seems singularly peaceful when contrasted with that of other colonies. There were few Indian horrors, few bitter quarrels, comparatively few petty offences. In spite of the influx of convicts, there was a notable absence of the shocking crimes and equally shocking punishments which appear on the court records of other provinces; it is also true that there were few schools and churches, and but scanty intellectual activity. Against that comparatively peaceful background stands out one of the most remarkable figures of early colonial life in America—Margaret Brent; a woman who seemed more fitted for our day than her own. She was the first woman in America to demand suffrage, a vote, and representation.

She came to the province in 1638 with her sister Mary (another shrewd and capable woman), her two brothers, and nine other colonists. The sisters at once took up land, built manorhouses, and shortly brought over more colonists; soon the court-baron and court-leet were held at Mary Brent’s home, St. Gabriel’s Manor, on old Kent Island. We at once hear of the sisters as active in business affairs, registering cattle marks, buying and selling property, attending with success to important matters for their brothers; and Margaret soon signed herself “Attorney for my brother, &c., &c.,” and was allowed the right so to act. The Brents were friends and probably kinsfolk of Lord Baltimore, and intimate friends, also, of the governor of Maryland, Leonard Calvert. When the latter died in 1647, he appointed by nuncupation one Thomas Greene as his successor as governor, and Margaret Brent as his sole executrix, with the laconic instruction to “Take all and Pay all,” and to give one Mistress Temperance Pypott a mare colt. His estate was small, and if he had made Greene executor, and Mistress Margaret governor, he would have done a much more sensible thing; for Greene was vacillating and weak, and when an emergency arose, he had to come to Margaret Brent for help. The soldiers, who had assisted the government in recent troubles, were still unpaid, and Governor Calvert had pledged his official word and the property of Lord Baltimore that they should be paid in full. After his death an insurrection in the army seemed rising, when Mistress Brent calmly stepped in, sold cattle belonging to the Proprietary, and paid off the small but angry army. This was not the only time she quelled an incipient mutiny. Her kinsman, Lord Baltimore, was inclined to find bitter fault, and wrote “tartly” when the news of her prompt action and attendant expenditure reached his ears; but the Assembly sent him a letter, gallantly upholding Mistress Brent in her “meddling,” saying with inadvertent humour, that his estate fared better in her hands than “any man elses.”

Her astonishing stand for woman’s rights was made on January 21, 1647-48, two centuries and a half ago, and was thus recorded:—

Came Mrs Margaret Brent and requested to have vote in the House for herself and voyce allsoe, for that on the last Court 3rd January it was ordered that the said Mrs Brent was to be looked upon and received as his Ldp’s Attorney. The Governor deny’d that the s’d Mrs Brent should have any vote in the house. And the s’d Mrs Brent protested against all proceedings in this present Assembly unlesse she may be present and have vote as afores’d.

With this protest for representation, and demand for her full rights, this remarkable woman does not disappear from our ken. We hear of her in 1651 as an offender, having been accused of killing wild cattle and selling the beef. She asserted with vigor and dignity that the cattle were her own, and demanded a trial by jury.

And in 1658 she makes her last curtsey before the Assembly and ourselves, a living proof of the fallacy of the statement that men do not like strong-minded women. For at that date, at the fully ripened age of fifty-seven, she appeared as heir of an estate bequeathed to her by a Maryland gentleman as a token of his love and affection, and of his constant wish to marry her. She thus vanishes out of history, in a thoroughly feminine rôle, that of a mourning sweetheart; yet standing signally out of colonial days as the most clear-cut, unusual, and forceful figure of the seventeenth century in Maryland.

Another Maryland woman of force and fearlessness was Verlinda Stone. A letter from her to Lord Baltimore is still in the Maryland archives, demanding an investigation of a fight in Anne Arundel County, in which her husband was wounded. The letter is businesslike enough, but ends in a fiery postscript in which she uses some pretty strong terms. Such women as these were not to be trifled with; as Alsop wrote:—

All Complemental 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.

Elizabeth Haddon was another remarkable woman; she founded Haddonfield, New Jersey. Her father had become possessed of a tract of land in the New World, and she volunteered to come alone to the colony, and settle upon the land. She did so in 1701 when she was but nineteen years old, and conducted herself and her business with judgment, discretion, and success, and so continued throughout her long life. She married a young Quaker named Esthaugh, who may have been one of the attractions of the New World. Her idealized story has been told by L. Maria Child in her book The Youthful Emigrant.

John Clayton, writing as early as 1688 of “Observables” in Virginia, tells of several “acute ingenious gentlewomen” who carried on thriving tobacco-plantations, draining swamps and raising cattle and buying slaves. One near Jamestown was a fig-raiser.

In all the Southern colonies we find these acute gentlewomen taking up tracts of land, clearing them, and cultivating their holdings. In the settlement of Pennsylvania, Mary Tewee took two thousand five hundred acres in what is now Lancaster County. She was the widow of a French Huguenot gentleman, the friend of William Penn, and had been presented at the court of Queen Anne.

New England magistrates did not encourage such independence. In the early days of Salem, “maid-lotts” were granted to single women, but stern Endicott wrote that it was best to abandon the custom, and “avoid all presedents & evil events of granting lotts vnto single maidens not disposed of.” The town of Taunton, Mass., had an “ancient maid” of forty-eight years for its founder, one Elizabeth Poole; and Winthrop says she endured much hardship. Her gravestone says she was a “native of old England of good family, friends and prospects, all of which she left in the prime of her life to enjoy the religion of her conscience in this distant wilderness. A great proprietor of the township of Taunton, a chief promoter of its settlement in 1639. Having employed the opportunity of her virgin state in piety, liberality and sanctity of manners, she died aged 65.”

Lady Deborah Moody did not receive from the Massachusetts magistrates an over-cordial or very long-lived welcome. She is described as a “harassed and lonely widow voluntarily exiling herself for conscience’ sake.” Perhaps her running in debt for her Swampscott land and her cattle had quite as much to do with her unpopularity as her “error of denying infant baptism.” But as she paid nine hundred or some say eleven hundred pounds for that wild land, it is no wonder she was “almost undone.” She was dealt with by the elders, and admonished by the church, but she “persisted” and finally removed to the Dutch, against the advice of all her friends. Endicott called her a dangerous woman, but Winthrop termed her a “wise and anciently religious woman.” Among the Dutch she found a congenial home, and, unmolested, she planned on her Gravesend farm a well-laid-out city, but did not live to carry out her project. A descendant of one of her Dutch neighbors writes of her:—

Tradition says she was buried in the north-west corner of the Gravesend church yard. Upon the headstone of those who sleep beside her we read the inscription In der Heere entslapen—they sleep in the Lord. We may say the same of this brave true woman, she sleeps in the Lord. Her rest has been undisturbed in this quiet spot which she hoped to make a great city.

It seems to be plain that the charge of the affairs of Governor John Winthrop, Jr., in New Haven was wholly in the hands of Mrs. Davenport, the wife of the minister, Rev. John Davenport. Many sentences in her husband’s letters show her cares for her friends’ welfare, the variety of her business duties, and her performance of them. He wrote thus to the Governor in 1658:—

For your ground; my wife speedily, even the same day she received your letter, spake with sundry about it, and received this answer, that there is no Indian corne to be planted in that quarter this yeare. Brother Boykin was willing to have taken it, but saith it is overrun with wild sorrell and it will require time to subdue it, and put it into tillage, being at present unfit to be improved. Goodman Finch was in our harbour when your letter came, & my wife went promptly downe, and met with yong Mr Lamberton to whom she delivered your letter. He offered some so bad beaver that my wife would not take it. My wife spake twise to him herself. My wife desireth to add that she received for you of Mr Goodenhouse 30s worth of beaver & 4s in wampum. She purposeth to send your beaver to the Baye when the best time is, to sell it for your advantage and afterwards to give you an account what it comes to. Your letter to Sarjiunt Baldwin my wife purposeth to carry to him by the 1st opportunity. Sister Hobbadge has paid my wife in part of her debt to you a bushel of winter wheate.

The letters also reveal much loving-kindness, much eagerness to be of assistance, equal readiness to welcome new-comers, and to smooth the rough difficulties in pioneer housekeeping. Rev. Mr. Davenport wrote in August, 1655, from New Haven to Gov. Winthrop at Pequot:—

Hon’ᵈ Sir,—We did earnestly expect your coming hither with Mrs. Winthrop and your familie, the last light moone, having intelligence that a vessel wayted upon you at Pequot for that end, and were thereby encouraged to provide your house, that it might be fitted in some measure, for your comfortable dwelling in it, this winter.

My wife was not wanting in her endeavors to set all wheeles in going, all hands that she could procure on worke, that you might find all things to your satisfaction. Though she could not accomplish her desires to the full, yet she proceeded as farr as she could; whereby many things are done viz. the house made warme, the well cleansed, the pumpe fitted for your use, some provision of wood layed in, and 20 loades will be ready, whensoever you come; and sundry, by my wife’s instigation, prepared 30 bush. of wheate for the present and sister Glover hath 12 lb of candles ready for you. My wife hath also procured a maid servant for you, who is reported to be cleanly and saving, her mother is of the church, and she is kept from a place in Connectacot where she was much desired, to serve you....

If Mrs. Winthrop knew how wellcome she will be to us she would I believe neglect whatsoever others doe or may be forward to suggest for her discouragement. Salute her, with due respect, in my name and my wife’s, most affectionately.

Madam Davenport also furnished the rooms with tables and “chayres,” and “took care of yor apples that they may be kept safe from the frost that Mrs. Winthrop may have the benefit of them,” and arranged to send horses to meet them; so it is not strange to learn in a postscript that the hospitable kindly soul, who thus cheerfully worked to “redd the house,” had a “paine in the soles of her feet, especially in the evening;” and a little later on to know she was “valetudinarious, faint, thirsty, of little appetite yet cheerful.”

All these examples, and many others help to correct one very popular mistake. It seems to be universally believed that the “business woman” is wholly a product of the nineteenth century. Most emphatically may it be affirmed that such is not the case. I have seen advertisements dating from 1720 to 1800, chiefly in New England newspapers, of women teachers, embroiderers, jelly-makers, cooks, wax-workers, japanners, mantua-makers,—all truly feminine employments; and also of women dealers in crockery, musical instruments, hardware, farm products, groceries, drugs, wines, and spirits, while Hawthorne noted one colonial dame who carried on a blacksmith-shop. Peter Faneuil’s account books show that he had accounts in small English wares with many Boston tradeswomen, some of whom bought many thousand pounds’ worth of imported goods in a year. Alice Quick had fifteen hundred pounds in three months; and I am glad to say that the women were very prompt in payment, as well as active in business. By Stamp Act times, the names of five women merchants appear on the Salem list of traders who banded together to oppose taxation.

It is claimed by many that the “newspaper-woman” is a growth of modern times. I give examples to prove the fallacy of this statement. Newspapers of colonial times can scarcely be said to have been edited, they were simply printed or published, and all that men did as newspaper-publishers, women did also, and did well. It cannot be asserted that these women often voluntarily or primarily started a newspaper; they usually assumed the care after the death of an editor husband, or brother, or son, or sometimes to assist while a male relative, through sickness or multiplicity of affairs, could not attend to his editorial or publishing work.

Perhaps the most remarkable examples of women-publishers may be found in the Goddard family of Rhode Island. Mrs. Sarah Goddard was the daughter of Ludowick Updike, of one of the oldest and most respected families in that State. She received an excellent education “in both useful and polite learning,” and married Dr. Giles Goddard, a prominent physician and postmaster of New London. After becoming a widow, she went into the printing business in Providence about the year 1765, with her son, who was postmaster of that town. They published the Providence Gazette and Country Journal, the only newspaper printed in Providence before 1775. William Goddard was dissatisfied with his pecuniary profit, and he went to New York, leaving the business wholly with his mother; she conducted it with much ability and success under the name Sarah Goddard & Company. I wish to note that she carried on this business not under her son’s name, but openly in her own behalf; and when she assumed the charge of the paper, she printed it with her own motto as the heading, Vox Populi Vox Dei.

William Goddard drifted to Philadelphia, where he published the Pennsylvania Chronicle for a short season, and in 1773 he removed to Baltimore and established himself in the newspaper business anew, with only, he relates, “the small capital of a single solitary guinea.” He found another energetic business woman, the widow Mrs. Nicholas Hasselbaugh, carrying on the printing-business bequeathed to her by her husband; and he bought her stock in trade and established The Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser. It was the third newspaper published in Maryland, was issued weekly at ten shillings per annum, and was a well-printed sheet. But William Goddard had another bee in his bonnet. A plan was formed just before the Revolutionary War to abolish the general public post-office and to establish in its place a complete private system of post-riders from Georgia to New Hampshire. This system was to be supported by private subscription; a large sum was already subscribed, and the scheme well under way, when the war ended all the plans. Goddard had this much to heart, and had travelled extensively through the colonies exploiting it. While he was away on these trips he left the newspaper and printing-house solely under the charge of his sister Mary Katharine Goddard, the worthy daughter of her energetic mother. From 1775 to 1784, through the trying times of the Revolution, and in a most active scene of military and political troubles, this really brilliant woman continued to print successfully and continuously her newspaper. The Journal and every other work issued from her printing-presses were printed and published in her name, and it is believed chiefly on her own account. She was a woman of much intelligence and was also practical, being an expert compositor of types, and fully conversant with every detail of the mechanical work of a printing-office. During this busy time she was also postmistress of Baltimore, and kept a bookshop. Her brother William, through his futile services in this postal scheme, had been led to believe he would receive under Benjamin Franklin and the new government of the United States, the appointment of Secretary and Comptroller of the Post Office; but Franklin gave it to his own son-in-law, Richard Bache. Goddard, sorely disappointed but pressed in money matters, felt forced to accept the position of Surveyor of Post Roads. When Franklin went to France in 1776, and Bache became Postmaster-General, and Goddard again was not appointed Comptroller, his chagrin caused him to resign his office, and naturally to change his political principles.

He retired to Baltimore, and soon there appeared in the Journal an ironical piece (written by a member of Congress) signed Tom Tell Truth. From this arose a vast political storm. The Whig Club of Baltimore, a powerful body, came to Miss Goddard and demanded the name of the author; she referred them to her brother. On his refusal to give the author’s name, he was seized, carried to the clubhouse, bullied, and finally warned out of town and county. He at once went to the Assembly at Annapolis and demanded protection, which was given him. He ventilated his wrongs in a pamphlet, and was again mobbed and insulted. In 1779, Anna Goddard printed anonymously in her paper Queries Political and Military, written really by General Charles Lee, the enemy and at one time presumptive rival of Washington. This paper also raised a tremendous storm through which the Goddards passed triumphantly. Lee remained always a close friend of William Goddard, and bequeathed to him his valuable and interesting papers, with the intent of posthumous publication; but, unfortunately, they were sent to England to be printed in handsome style, and were instead imperfectly and incompletely issued, and William Goddard received no benefit or profit from their sale. But Lee left him also, by will, a large and valuable estate in Berkeley County, Virginia, so he retired from public life and ended his days on a Rhode Island farm. Anna Katharine Goddard lived to great old age. The story of this acquaintance with General Lee, and of Miss Goddard’s connection therewith, forms one of the interesting minor episodes of the War.

Just previous to the Revolution, it was nothing very novel or unusual to Baltimoreans to see a woman edit a newspaper. The Maryland Gazette suspended on account of the Stamp Act in 1765, and the printer issued a paper called The Apparition of the Maryland Gazette which is not Dead but Sleepeth; and instead of a Stamp it bore a death’s head with the motto, “The Times are Dismal, Doleful, Dolorous, Dollarless.” Almost immediately after it resumed publication, the publisher died, and from 1767 to 1775 it was carried on by his widow, Anne Katharine Green, sometimes assisted by her son, but for five years alone. The firm name was Anne Katharine Green & Son: and she also did the printing for the Colony. She was about thirty-six years old when she assumed the business, and was then the mother of six sons and eight daughters. Her husband was the fourth generation from Samuel Green, the first printer in New England, from whom descended about thirty ante-Revolutionary printers. Until the Revolution there was always a Printer Green in Boston. Mr. Green’s partner, William Rind, removed to Williamsburg and printed there the Virginia Gazette. At his death, widow Clementina Rind, not to be outdone by Widow Green and Mother and Sister Goddard, proved that what woman has done woman can do, by carrying on the business and printing the Gazette till her own death in 1775.

It is indeed a curious circumstance that, on the eve of the Revolution, so many southern newspapers should be conducted by women. Long ere that, from 1738 to 1740, Elizabeth Timothy, a Charleston woman, widow of Louis Timothy, the first librarian of the Philadelphia Library company, and publisher of the South Carolina Gazette, carried on that paper after her husband’s death; and her son, Peter Timothy, succeeded her. In 1780 his paper was suspended, through his capture by the British. He was exchanged, and was lost at sea with two daughters and a grandchild, while on his way to Antigua to obtain funds. He had a varied and interesting life, was a friend of Parson Whitefield, and was tried with him on a charge of libel against the South Carolina ministers. In 1782 his widow, Anne Timothy, revived the Gazette, as had her mother-in-law before her, and published it successfully twice a week for ten years till her death in 1792. She had a large printing-house, corner of Broad and King Streets, Charleston, and was printer to the State; truly a remarkable woman.

Peter Timothy’s sister Mary married Charles Crouch, who also was drowned when on a vessel bound to New York. He was a sound Whig and set up a paper in opposition to the Stamp Act, called The South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal. This was one of the four papers which were all entitled Gazettes in order to secure certain advertisements that were all directed by law “to be inserted in the South Carolina Gazette.” Mary Timothy Crouch continued the paper for a short time after her husband’s death; and in 1780 shortly before the surrender of the city to the British, went with her printing-press and types to Salem, where for a few months she printed The Salem Gazette and General Advertiser. I have dwelt at some length on the activity and enterprise of these Southern women, because it is another popular but unstable notion that the women of the North were far more energetic and capable than their Southern sisters; which is certainly not the case in this line of business affairs.

Benjamin and James Franklin were not the only members of the Franklin family who were capable newspaper-folk. James Franklin died in Newport in 1735, and his widow Anne successfully carried on the business for many years. She had efficient aid in her two daughters, who were quick and capable practical workers at the compositor’s case, having been taught by their father, whom they assisted in his lifetime. Isaiah Thomas says of them:—

A gentleman who was acquainted with Anne Franklin and her family, informed me that he had often seen her daughters at work in the printing house, and that they were sensible and amiable women.

We can well believe that, since they had Franklin and Anne Franklin blood in them. This competent and industrious trio of women not only published the Newport Mercury, but were printers for the colony, supplying blanks for public offices, publishing pamphlets, etc. In 1745 they printed for the Government an edition of the laws of the colony of 340 pages, folio. Still further, they carried on a business of “printing linens, calicoes, silks, &c., in figures, very lively and durable colors, and without the offensive smell which commonly attends linen-printing.” Surely there was no lack of business ability on the distaff side of the Franklin house.

Boston women gave much assistance to their printer-husbands. Ezekiel Russel, the editor of that purely political publication, The Censor, was in addition a printer of chap-books and ballads which were sold from his stand near the Liberty Tree on Boston Common. His wife not only helped him in printing these, but she and another young woman of his household, having ready pens and a biddable muse, wrote with celerity popular and seasonable ballads on passing events, especially of tragic or funereal cast; and when these ballads were printed with a nice border of woodcuts of coffins and death’s heads, they often had a long and profitable run of popularity. After his death, Widow Russel still continued ballad making and monging.

It was given to a woman, Widow Margaret Draper, to publish the only newspaper which was issued in Boston during the siege, the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston News Letter. And a miserable little sheet it was, vari-colored, vari-typed, vari-sized; of such poor print that it is scarcely readable. When the British left Boston, Margaret Draper left also, and resided in England, where she received a pension from the British government.

The first newspaper in Pennsylvania was entitled The American Weekly Mercury. It was “imprinted by Andrew Bradford” in 1719. He was a son of the first newspaper printer in New York, William Bradford, Franklin’s “cunning old fox,” who lived to be ninety-two years old, and whose quaint tombstone may be seen in Trinity Churchyard. At Andrew’s death in 1742, the paper appeared in mourning, and it was announced that it would be published by “the widow Bradford.” She took in a partner, but speedily dropped him, and carried it on in her own name till 1746. During the time that Cornelia Bradford printed this paper it was remarkable for its good type and neatness.

The Connecticut Courant and The Centinel were both of them published for some years by the widows of former proprietors.

The story of John Peter Zenger, the publisher of The New York Weekly Journal, is one of the most interesting episodes in our progress to free speech and liberty, but cannot be dwelt on here. The feminine portion of his family was of assistance to him. His daughter was mistress of a famous New York tavern that saw many remarkable visitors, and heard much of the remarkable talk of Zenger’s friends. After his death in 1746, his newspaper was carried on by his widow for two years. Her imprint was, “New York; Printed by the Widow Cathrine Zenger at the Printing-Office in Stone Street; Where Advertisements are taken in, and all Persons may be supplied with this Paper.”

The whole number of newspapers printed before the Revolution was not very large; and when we see how readily and successfully this considerable number of women assumed the cares of publishing, we know that the “newspaper woman” of that day was no rare or presumptuous creature, any more than is the “newspaper-woman” of our own day, albeit she was of very different ilk; but the spirit of independent self-reliance, when it became necessary to exhibit self-reliance, was as prompt and as stable in the feminine breast a century and a half ago as now. Then, as to-day, there were doubtless scores of good wives and daughters who materially assisted their husbands in their printing-shops, and whose work will never be known.

There is no doubt that our great-grandmothers possessed wonderful ability to manage their own affairs, when it became necessary to do so, even in extended commercial operations. It is easy to trace in the New England coast towns one influence which tended to interest them, and make them capable of business transactions. They constantly heard on all sides the discussion of foreign trade, and were even encouraged to enter into the discussion and the traffic. They heard the Windward Islands, the Isle of France, and Amsterdam, and Canton, and the coast of Africa described by old travelled mariners, by active young shipmasters, in a way that put them far more in touch with these far-away foreign shores, gave them more knowledge of details of life in those lands, than women of to-day have. And women were encouraged, even urged, to take an active share in foreign trade, in commercial speculation, by sending out a “venture” whenever a vessel put out to sea, and whenever the small accumulation of money earned by braiding straw, knitting stockings, selling eggs or butter, or by spinning and weaving, was large enough to be worth thus investing; and it needed not to be a very large sum to be deemed proper for investment. When a ship sailed out to China with cargo of ginseng, the ship’s owner did not own all the solid specie in the hold—the specie that was to be invested in the rich and luxurious products of far Cathay. Complicated must have been the accounts of these transactions, for many were the parties in the speculation. There were no giant monopolies in those days. The kindly ship-owner permitted even his humblest neighbor to share his profits. And the profits often were large. The stories of some of the voyages, the adventures of the business contracts, read like a fairy tale of commerce. In old letters may be found reference to many of the ventures sent by women. One young woman wrote in 1759:—

Inclos’d is a pair of Earrings. Pleas ask Captin Oliver to carry them a Ventur fer me if he Thinks they will fetch anything to the Vally of them; tell him he may bring the effects in anything he thinks will answer best.

One of the “effects” brought to this young woman, and to hundreds of others, was a certain acquaintance with business transactions, a familiarity with the methods of trade. When the father or husband died, the woman could, if necessary, carry on his business to a successful winding-up, or continue it in the future. Of the latter enterprise many illustrations might be given. In the autumn of 1744 a large number of prominent business men in Newport went into a storehouse on a wharf to examine the outfit of a large privateer. A terrible explosion of gunpowder took place, which killed nine of them. One of the wounded was Sueton Grant, a Scotchman, who had come to America in 1725. His wife, on hearing of the accident, ran at once to the dock, took in at a glance the shocking scene and its demands for assistance, and cutting into strips her linen apron with the housewife’s scissors she wore at her side, calmly bound up the wounds of her dying husband. Mr. Grant was at this time engaged in active business; he had agencies in Europe, and many privateers afloat. Mrs. Grant took upon her shoulders these great responsibilities, and successfully carried them on for many years, while she educated her children, and cared for her home.

A good example of her force of character was once shown in a court of law. She had an important litigation on hand and large interests at stake, when she discovered the duplicity of her counsel, and her consequent danger. She went at once to the court-room where the case was being tried; when her lawyer promptly but vainly urged her to retire. The judge, disturbed by the interruption, asked for an explanation, and Mrs. Grant at once unfolded the knavery of her counsel and asked permission to argue her own case. Her dignity, force, and lucidity so moved the judge that he permitted her to address the jury, which she did in so convincing a manner as to cause them to promptly render a verdict favorable to her. She passed through some trying scenes at the time of the Revolution with wonderful decision and ability, and received from every one the respect and deference due to a thorough business man, though she was a woman.

In New York the feminine Dutch blood showed equal capacity in business matters; and it is said that the management of considerable estates and affairs often was assumed by widows in New Amsterdam. Two noted examples are Widow De Vries and Widow Provoost. The former was married in 1659, to Rudolphus De Vries, and after his death she carried on his Dutch trade—not only buying and selling foreign goods, but going repeatedly to Holland in the position of supercargo on her own ships. She married Frederick Phillipse, and it was through her keenness and thrift and her profitable business, as well as through his own success, that Phillipse became the richest man in the colony and acquired the largest West Indian trade.

Widow Maria Provoost was equally successful at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and had a vast Dutch business correspondence. Scarce a ship from Spain, the Mediterranean, or the West Indies, but brought her large consignments of goods. She too married a second time, and as Madam James Alexander filled a most dignified position in New York, being the only person besides the Governor to own a two-horse coach. Her house was the finest in town, and such descriptions of its various apartments as “the great drawing-room, the lesser drawing-room, the blue and gold leather room, the green and gold leather room, the chintz room, the great tapestry room, the little front parlour, the back parlour,” show its size and pretensions.

Madam Martha Smith, widow of Colonel William Smith of St. George’s Manor, Long Island, was a woman of affairs in another field. In an interesting memorandum left by her we read:—

Jan ye 16, 1707. My company killed a yearling whale made 27 barrels. Feb ye 4, Indian Harry with his boat struck a whale and called for my boat to help him. I had but a third which was 4 barrels. Feb 22, my two boats & my sons and Floyds boats killed a yearling whale of which I had half—made 36 barrels, my share 18 barrels. Feb 24 my company killed a school whale which made 35 barrels. March 13, my company killed a small yearling made 30 barrels. March 17, my company killed two yearlings in one day; one made 27, the other 14 barrels.

We find her paying to Lord Cornbury fifteen pounds, a duty on “ye 20th part of her eyle.” And she apparently succeeded in her enterprises.

In early Philadelphia directories may be found the name of “Margaret Duncan, Merchant, No. 1 S. Water St.” This capable woman had been shipwrecked on her way to the new world. In the direst hour of that extremity, when forced to draw lots for the scant supply of food, she vowed to build a church in her new home if her life should be spared. The “Vow Church” in Philadelphia, on Thirteenth Street near Market Street, for many years proved her fulfilment of this vow, and also bore tribute to the prosperity of this pious Scotch Presbyterian in her adopted home.

Southern women were not outstripped by the business women of the north. No more practical woman ever lived in America than Eliza Lucas Pinckney. When a young girl she resided on a plantation at Wappoo, South Carolina, owned by her father, George Lucas. He was Governor of Antigua, and observing her fondness for and knowledge of botany, and her intelligent power of application of her knowledge, he sent to her many tropical seeds and plants for her amusement and experiment in her garden. Among the seeds were some of indigo, which she became convinced could be profitably grown in South Carolina. She at once determined to experiment, and planted indigo seed in March, 1741. The young plants started finely, but were cut down by an unusual frost. She planted seed a second time, in April, and these young indigo-plants were destroyed by worms. Notwithstanding these discouragements, she tried a third time, and with success. Her father was delighted with her enterprise and persistence, and when he learned that the indigo had seeded and ripened, sent an Englishman named Cromwell—an experienced indigo-worker—from Montserrat to teach his daughter Eliza the whole process of extracting the dye from the weed. Vats were built on Wappoo Creek, in which was made the first indigo formed in Carolina. It was of indifferent quality, for Cromwell feared the successful establishment of the industry in America would injure the indigo trade in his own colony, so he made a mystery of the process, and put too much lime in the vats, doubtless thinking he could impose upon a woman. But Miss Lucas watched him carefully, and in spite of his duplicity, and doubtless with considerable womanly power of guessing, finally obtained a successful knowledge and application of the complex and annoying methods of extracting indigo,—methods which required the untiring attention of sleepless nights, and more “judgment” than intricate culinary triumphs. After the indigo was thoroughly formed by steeping, beating, and washing, and taken from the vats, the trials of the maker were not over. It must be exposed to the sun, but if exposed too much it would be burnt, if too little it would rot. Myriads of flies collected around it and if unmolested would quickly ruin it. If packed too soon it would sweat and disintegrate. So, from the first moment the tender plant appeared above ground, when the vast clouds of destroying grasshoppers had to be annihilated by flocks of hungry chickens, or carefully dislodged by watchful human care, indigo culture and manufacture was a distressing worry, and was made still more unalluring to a feminine experimenter by the fact that during the weary weeks it laid in the “steepers” and “beaters” it gave forth a most villainously offensive smell.

Soon after Eliza Lucas’ hard-earned success she married Charles Pinckney, and it is pleasant to know that her father gave her, as part of her wedding gift, all the indigo on the plantation. She saved the whole crop for seed,—and it takes about a bushel of indigo seed to plant four acres,—and she planted the Pinckney plantation at Ashepoo, and gave to her friends and neighbors small quantities of seed for individual experiment; all of which proved successful. The culture of indigo at once became universal, the newspapers were full of instructions upon the subject, and the dye was exported to England by 1747, in such quantity that merchants trading in Carolina petitioned Parliament for a bounty on Carolina indigo. An act of Parliament was passed allowing a bounty of sixpence a pound on indigo raised in the British-American plantations and imported directly to Great Britain. Spurred on by this wise act, the planters applied with redoubled vigor to the production of the article, and soon received vast profits as the rewards of their labor and care. It is said that just previous to the Revolution more children were sent from South Carolina to England to receive educations, than from all the other colonies,—and this through the profits of indigo and rice. Many indigo planters doubled their capital every three or four years, and at last not only England was supplied with indigo from South Carolina, but the Americans undersold the French in many European markets. It exceeded all other southern industries in importance, and became a general medium of exchange. When General Marion’s young nephew was sent to school at Philadelphia, he started off with a wagon-load of indigo to pay his expenses. The annual dues of the Winyah Indigo Society of Georgetown were paid in the dye, and the society had grown so wealthy in 1753, that it established a large charity school and valuable library.

Ramsay, the historian of South Carolina, wrote in 1808, that the indigo trade proved more beneficial to Carolina than the mines of Mexico or Peru to old or new Spain. By the year of his writing, however, indigo (without waiting for extermination through its modern though less reliable rivals, the aniline dyes) had been driven out of Southern plantations by its more useful and profitable field neighbor, King Cotton, that had been set on a throne by the invention of a Yankee schoolmaster. The time of greatest production and export of indigo was just previous to the Revolution, and at one time it was worth four or five dollars a pound. And to-day only the scanty records of the indigo trade, a few rotting cypress boards of the steeping-vats, and the blue-green leaves of the wild wayside indigo, remain of all this prosperity to show the great industry founded by this remarkable and intelligent woman.

The rearing of indigo was not this young girl’s only industry. I will quote from various letters written by her in 1741 and 1742 before her marriage, to show her many duties, her intelligence, her versatility:—

Wrote my father on the pains I had taken to bring the Indigo, Ginger, Cotton, Lucern, and Casada to perfection and had greater hopes from the Indigo, if I could have the seed earlier, than any of ye rest of ye things I had tried.

I have the burthen of 3 Plantations to transact which requires much writing and more business and fatigue of other sorts than you can imagine. But lest you should imagine it too burthensome to a girl in my early time of life, give me leave to assure you I think myself happy that I can be useful to so good a father.

Wont you laugh at me if I tell you I am so busy in providing for Posterity I hardly allow myself time to eat or sleep, and can but just snatch a moment to write to you and a friend or two more. I am making a large plantation of oaks which I look upon as my own property whether my father gives me the land or not, and therefore I design many yeer hence when oaks are more valuable than they are now, which you know they will be when we come to build fleets. I intend I say two thirds of the produce of my oaks for a charity (Ill tell you my scheme another time) and the other third for those that shall have the trouble to put my design in execution.

I have a sister to instruct, and a parcel of little negroes whom I have undertaken to teach to read.

The Cotton, Guinea Corn, and Ginger planted was cutt off by a frost. I wrote you in a former letter we had a good crop of Indigo upon the ground. I make no doubt this will prove a valuable commodity in time. Sent Gov. Thomas daughter a tea chest of my own doing.

I am engaged with the Rudiments of Law to which I am but a stranger. If you will not laugh too immoderately at me I’ll trust you with a Secrett. I have made two Wills already. I know I have done no harm for I conn’d my Lesson perfect. A widow hereabouts with a pretty little fortune teazed me intolerably to draw a marriage settlement, but it was out of my depth and I absolutely refused it—so she got an able hand to do it—indeed she could afford it—but I could not get off being one of the Trustees to her settlement, and an old Gentⁿ the other. I shall begin to think myself an old woman before I am a young one, having such mighty affairs on my hands.

I think this record of important work could scarce be equalled by any young girl in a comparative station of life nowadays. And when we consider the trying circumstances, the difficult conditions, in which these varied enterprises were carried on, we can well be amazed at the story.

Indigo was not the only important staple which attracted Mrs. Pinckney’s attention, and the manufacture of which she made a success. In 1755 she carried with her to England enough rich silk fabric, which she had raised and spun and woven herself in the vicinity of Charleston, to make three fine silk gowns, one of which was presented to the Princess Dowager of Wales, and another to Lord Chesterfield. This silk was said to be equal in beauty to any silk ever imported.

This was not the first American silk that had graced the person of English royalty. In 1734 the first windings of Georgia silk had been taken from the filature to England, and the queen wore a dress made thereof at the king’s next birthday. Still earlier in the field Virginia had sent its silken tribute to royalty. In the college library at Williamsburg, Va., may be seen a letter signed “Charles R.”—his most Gracious Majesty Charles the Second. It was written by his Majesty’s private secretary, and addressed to Governor Berkeley for the king’s loyal subjects in Virginia. It reads thus:—

Trusty and Well beloved, We Greet you Well. Wee have received wᵗʰ much content ye dutifull respects of Our Colony in ye present lately made us by you & ye councill there, of ye first product of ye new Manufacture of Silke, which as a marke of Our Princely acceptation of yoʳ duteys & for yoʳ particular encouragement, etc. Wee have been commanded to be wrought up for ye use of Our Owne Person.

And earliest of all is the tradition, dear to the hearts of Virginians, that Charles I. was crowned in 1625 in a robe woven of Virginia silk. The Queen of George III. was the last English royalty to be similarly honored, for the next attack of the silk fever produced a suit for an American ruler, George Washington.

The culture of silk in America was an industry calculated to attract the attention of women, and indeed was suited to them, but men were not exempt from the fever; and the history of the manifold and undaunted efforts of governor’s councils, parliaments, noblemen, philosophers, and kings to force silk culture in America forms one of the most curious examples extant of persistent and futile efforts to run counter to positive economic conditions, for certainly physical conditions are fairly favorable.

South Carolina women devoted themselves with much success to agricultural experiments. Henry Laurens brought from Italy and naturalized the olive-tree, and his daughter, Martha Laurens Ramsay, experimented with the preservation of the fruit until her productions equalled the imported olives. Catharine Laurens Ramsay manufactured opium of the first quality. In 1755 Henry Laurens’ garden in Ansonborough was enriched with every curious vegetable product from remote quarters of the world that his extensive mercantile connections enabled him to procure, and the soil and climate of South Carolina to cherish. He introduced besides olives, capers, limes, ginger, guinea grass, Alpine strawberries (bearing nine months in the year), and many choice varieties of fruits. This garden was superintended by his wife, Mrs. Elinor Laurens.

Mrs. Martha Logan was a famous botanist and florist. She was born in 1702, and was the daughter of Robert Daniel, one of the last proprietary governors of South Carolina. When fourteen years old, she married George Logan, and all her life treasured a beautiful and remarkable garden. When seventy years old, she compiled from her knowledge and experience a regular treatise on gardening, which was published after her death, with the title The Garden’s Kalendar. It was for many years the standard work on gardening in that locality.

Mrs. Hopton and Mrs. Lamboll were early and assiduous flower-raisers and experimenters in the eighteenth century, and Miss Maria Drayton, of Drayton Hall, a skilled botanist.

The most distinguished female botanist of colonial days was Jane Colden, the daughter of Governor Cadwallader Colden, of New York. Her love of the science was inherited from her father, the friend and correspondent of Linnæus, Collinson, and other botanists. She learned a method of taking leaf-impressions in printers’ ink, and sent careful impressions of American plants and leaves to the European collectors. John Ellis wrote of her to Linnæus in April, 1758:—

This young lady merits your esteem, and does honor to your system. She has drawn and described four hundred plants in your method. Her father has a plant called after her Coldenia. Suppose you should call this new genus Coldenella or any other name which might distinguish her.

Peter Collinson said also that she was the first lady to study the Linnæan system, and deserved to be celebrated. Another tribute to her may be found in a letter of Walter Rutherford’s:—

From the middle of the Woods this Family corresponds with all the learned Societies in Europe. His daughter Jenny is a Florist and Botanist. She has discovered a great number of Plants never before described and has given their Properties and Virtues, many of which are found useful in Medicine and she draws and colours them with great Beauty. Dr. Whyte of Edinburgh is in the number of her correspondents.

N. B. She makes the best cheese I ever ate in America.

The homely virtue of being a good cheese-maker was truly a saving clause to palliate and excuse so much feminine scientific knowledge.

CHAPTER III.
“DOUBLE-TONGUED AND NAUGHTY WOMEN.”

I am much impressed in reading the court records of those early days, to note the vast care taken in all the colonies to prevent lying, slandering, gossiping, backbiting, and idle babbling, or, as they termed it, “brabling;” to punish “common sowers and movers”—of dissensions, I suppose.

The loving neighborliness which proved as strong and as indispensable a foundation for a successful colony as did godliness, made the settlers resent deeply any violations, though petty, of the laws of social kindness. They felt that what they termed “opprobrious schandalls tending to defamaçon and disparagment” could not be endured.

One old author declares that “blabbing, babbling, tale-telling, and discovering the faults and frailities of others is a most Common and evill practice.” He asserts that a woman should be a “main store house of secresie, a Maggazine of taciturnitie, the closet of connivence, the mumbudget of silence, the cloake bagge of rouncell, the capcase, fardel, or pack of friendly toleration;” which, as a whole, seems to be a good deal to ask. Men were, as appears by the records, more frequently brought up for these offences of the tongue, but women were not spared either in indictment or punishment. In Windsor, Conn., one woman was whipped for “wounding” a neighbor, not in the flesh, but in the sensibilities.

In 1652 Joane Barnes, of Plymouth, Mass., was indicted for “slandering,” and sentenced “to sitt in the stockes during the Courts pleasure, and a paper whereon her facte written in Capitall letters to be made faste vnto her hatt or neare vnto her all the tyme of her sitting there.” In 1654 another Joane in Northampton County, Va., suffered a peculiarly degrading punishment for slander. She was “drawen ouer the Kings Creeke at the starne of a boate or Canoux, also the next Saboth day in the tyme of diuine seruis” was obliged to present herself before the minister and congregation, and acknowledge her fault, and ask forgiveness. This was an old Scotch custom. The same year one Charlton called the parson, Mr. Cotton, a “black cotted rascal,” and was punished therefor in the same way. Richard Buckland, for writing a slanderous song about Ann Smith, was similarly pilloried, bearing a paper on his hat inscribed Inimicus Libellus, and since possibly all the church attendants did not know Latin, to publicly beg Ann’s forgiveness in English for his libellous poesy. The punishment of offenders by exposing them, wrapped in sheets, or attired in foul clothing, on the stool of repentance in the meeting-house in time of divine service, has always seemed to me specially bitter, unseemly, and unbearable.

It should be noted that these suits for slander were between persons in every station of life. When Anneke Jans Bogardus (wife of Dominie Bogardus, the second established clergyman in New Netherlands), would not remain in the house with one Grietje van Salee, a woman of doubtful reputation, the latter told throughout the neighborhood that Anneke had lifted her petticoats when crossing the street, and exposed her ankles in unseemly fashion; and she also said that the Dominie had sworn a false oath. Action for slander was promptly begun, and witnesses produced to show that Anneke had flourished her petticoats no more than was seemly and tidy to escape the mud. Judgment was pronounced against Grietje and her husband. She had to make public declaration in the Fort that she had lied, and to pay three guilders. The husband had to pay a fine, and swear to the good character of the Dominie and good carriage of the Dominie’s wife, and he was not permitted to carry weapons in town,—a galling punishment.

Dominie Bogardus was in turn sued several times for slander,—once by Thomas Hall, the tobacco planter, simply for saying that Thomas’ tobacco was bad; and again, wonderful to relate, by one of his deacons—Deacon Van Cortlandt.

Special punishment was provided for women. Old Dr. Johnson said gruffly to a lady friend: “Madam, there are different ways of restraining evil; stocks for men, a ducking-stool for women, pounds for beasts.” The old English instrument of punishment,—as old as the Doomsday survey,—the cucking-stool or ducking-stool, was in vogue here, was insultingly termed a “publique convenience,” and was used in the Southern and Central colonies for the correction of common scolds. We read in Blackstone’s Commentaries, “A common scold may be indicted and if convicted shall be sentenced to be placed in a certain engine of correction called the trebucket, castigatory, or cucking-stool.” Still another name for this “engine” was a “gum-stool.” The brank, or scold’s bridle,—a cruel and degrading means of punishment employed in England for “curst queans” as lately as 1824,—was unknown in America. A brank may be seen at the Guildhall in Worcester, England. One at Walton-on-Thames bears the date 1633. On the Isle of Man, when the brank was removed, the wearer had to say thrice, in public, “Tongue, thou hast lied.” I do not find that women ever had to “run the gauntelope” as did male offenders in 1685 in Boston, and, though under another name, in several of the provinces.

Women in Maine were punished by being gagged; in Plymouth, Mass., and in Easthampton, L. I., they had cleft sticks placed on their tongues in public; in the latter place because the dame said her husband “had brought her to a place where there was neither gospel nor magistracy.” In Salem “one Oliver—his wife” had a cleft stick placed on her tongue for half an hour in public “for reproaching the elders.” It was a high offence to speak “discornfully” of the elders and magistrates.

The first volume of the American Historical Record gives a letter said to have been written to Governor Endicott, of Massachusetts, in 1634 by one Thomas Hartley from Hungar’s Parish, Virginia. It gives a graphic description of a ducking-stool, and an account of a ducking in Virginia. I quote from it:—

The day afore yesterday at two of ye clock in ye afternoon I saw this punishment given to one Betsey wife of John Tucker, who by ye violence of her tongue had made his house and ye neighborhood uncomfortable. She was taken to ye pond where I am sojourning by ye officer who was joyned by ye magistrate and ye Minister Mr. Cotton, who had frequently admonished her and a large number of People. They had a machine for ye purpose yᵗ belongs to ye Parish, and which I was so told had been so used three times this Summer. It is a platform with 4 small rollers or wheels and two upright posts between which works a Lever by a Rope fastened to its shorter or heavier end. At the end of ye longer arm is fixed a stool upon which sᵈ Betsey was fastened by cords, her gown tied fast around her feete. The Machine was then moved up to ye edge of ye pond, ye Rope was slackened by ye officer and ye woman was allowed to go down under ye water for ye space of half a minute. Betsey had a stout stomach, and would not yield until she had allowed herself to be ducked 5 severall times. At length she cried piteously Let me go Let me go, by Gods help I’ll sin no more. Then they drew back ye machine, untied ye Ropes and let her walk home in her wetted clothes a hopefully penitent woman.

I have seen an old chap-book print of a ducking-stool with a “light huswife of the banck-side” in it. It was rigged much like an old-fashioned well-sweep, the woman and chair occupying the relative place of the bucket. The base of the upright support was on a low-wheeled platform.

Bishop Meade, in his Old Churches, Ministers, and Families of Virginia, tells of one “scolding quean” who was ordered to be ducked three times from a vessel lying in James River. Places for ducking were prepared near the Court Houses. The marshal’s fee for ducking was only two pounds of tobacco. The ducking-stools were not kept in church porches, as in England. In 1634 two women were sentenced to be either drawn from King’s Creek “from one Cowpen to another at the starn of a boat or kanew,” or to present themselves before the congregation, and ask forgiveness of each other and God. In 1633 it was ordered that a ducking-stool be built in every county in Maryland. At a court-baron at St. Clements, the county was prosecuted for not having one of these “public conveniences.” In February, 1775, a ducking-stool was ordered to be placed at the confluence of the Ohio and Monongahela Rivers, and was doubtless used. As late as 1819 Georgia women were ducked in the Oconee River for scolding. And in 1824, at the court of Quarter Sessions, a Philadelphia woman was sentenced to be ducked, but the punishment was not inflicted, as it was deemed obsolete and contrary to the spirit of the times. In 1803 the ducking-stool was still used in Liverpool, England, and in 1809 in Leominster, England.

One of the last indictments for ducking in our own country was that of Mrs. Anne Royall in Washington, almost in our own day. She was a hated lobbyist, whom Mr. Forney called an itinerant virago, and who became so abusive to congressmen that she was indicted as a common scold before Judge William Cranch, and was sentenced by him to be ducked in the Potomac. She was, however, released with a fine.

Women curst with a shrewish tongue were often punished in Puritan colonies. In 1647 it was ordered that “common scoulds” be punished in Rhode Island by ducking, but I find no records of the punishment being given. In 1649 several women were prosecuted in Salem, Mass., for scolding; and on May 15, 1672, the General Court of Massachusetts ordered that scolds and railers should be gagged or “set in a ducking-stool and dipped over head and ears three times,” but I do not believe that this law was ever executed in Massachusetts. Nor was it in Maine, though in 1664 a dozen towns were fined forty shillings each for having no “coucking-stool.” Equally severe punishments were inflicted for other crimes. Katharine Ainis, of Plymouth, was publicly whipped on training day, and ordered to wear a large B cut in red cloth “sewed to her vper garment.” In 1637 Dorothy Talbye, a Salem dame, for beating her husband was ordered to be bound and chained to a post. At a later date she was whipped, and then was hanged for killing her child, who bore the strange name of Difficulty. No one but a Puritan magistrate could doubt, from Winthrop’s account of her, that she was insane. Another “audatious” Plymouth shrew, for various “vncivill carriages” to her husband, was sentenced to the pillory; and if half that was told of her was true, she richly deserved her sentence; but, as she displayed “greate pensiveness and sorrow” before the simple Pilgrim magistrates, she escaped temporarily, to be punished at a later date for a greater sin. The magistrates firmly asserted in court and out that “meekness is ye chojsest orniment for a woman.”

Joane Andrews sold in York, Maine, in 1676, two stones in a firkin of butter. For this cheatery she “stood in towne meeting at York and at towne meeting at Kittery till 2 hours bee expended, with her offense written upon a paper in capitall letters on her forehead.” The court record of one woman delinquent in Plymouth, in 1683, is grimly comic. It seems that Mary Rosse exercised what was called by the “painful” court chronicler in a triumph of orthographical and nomenclatory art, an “inthewsiastickall power” over one Shingleterry, a married man, who cringingly pleaded, as did our first father Adam, that “hee must doo what shee bade him”—or, in modern phrase, that she hypnotized him. Mary Rosse and her uncanny power did not receive the consideration that similar witches and works do nowadays. She was publicly whipped and sent home to her mother, while her hypnotic subject was also whipped, and I presume sent home to his wife.

It should be noted that in Virginia, under the laws proclaimed by Argall, women were in some ways tenderly regarded. They were not punished for absenting themselves from church on Sundays or holidays; while men for one offence of this nature had “to lie neck and heels that night, and be a slave to the colony for the following week; for the second offence to be a slave for a month; for the third, for a year and a day.”

It is curious to see how long and how constantly, in spite of their severe and manifold laws, the pious settlers could suffer through certain ill company which they had been unlucky enough to bring over, provided the said offenders did not violate the religious rules of the community. We might note as ignoble instances, Will Fancie and his wife, of New Haven, and John Dandy and his wife, of Maryland. Their names constantly appear for years in the court records, as offenders and as the cause of offences. John Dandy at one time swore in court that all his “controversies from the beginning of the World to this day” had ceased; but it would have been more to the purpose had he also added till the end of the world, for his violence soon brought him to the gallows. Will Fancie’s wife seemed capable of any and every offence, from “stealing pinnes” to stealing the affections of nearly every man with whom she chanced to be thrown; and the magistrates of New Haven were evidently sorely puzzled how to deal with her.

I have noted in the court or church records of all witch-ridden communities, save in the records of poor crazed and bewildered Salem, where the flame was blown into a roaring blaze by “the foolish breath of Cotton Mather,” that there always appear on the pages some plain hints, and usually some definite statements, which account for the accusation of witchcraft against individuals. And these hints indicate a hated personality of the witch. To illustrate my meaning, let me take the case of Goody Garlick, of Easthampton, Long Island. In reading the early court records of that town, I was impressed with the constant meddlesome interference of this woman in all social and town matters. Every page reeked of Garlick. She was an ever-ready witness in trespass, boundary, and slander suits, for she was apparently on hand everywhere. She was present when a young man made ugly faces at the wife of Lion Gardiner, because she scolded him for eating up her “pomkin porage;” and she was listening when Mistress Edwards was called a base liar, because she asserted she had in her chest a new petticoat that she had brought from England some years before, and had never worn (and of course no woman could believe that). In short, Goody Garlick was a constant tale-bearer and barrator. Hence it was not surprising to me to find, when Mistress Arthur Howell, Lion Gardiner’s daughter, fell suddenly and strangely ill, and cried out that “a double-tongued naughty woman was tormenting her, a woman who had a black cat,” that the wise neighbors at once remembered that Goody Garlick was double-tongued and naughty, and had a black cat. She was speedily indicted for witchcraft, and the gravamen appeared to be her constant tale-bearing.

In 1706 a Virginian goody with a prettier name, Grace Sherwood, was tried as a witch; and with all the superstition of the day, and the added superstition of the surrounding and rapidly increasing negro population, there were but three Virginian witch-trials. Grace Sherwood’s name was also of constant recurrence in court annals, from the year 1690, on the court records of Princess Anne County, especially in slander cases. She was examined, after her indictment, for “witches marks” by a jury of twelve matrons, each of whom testified that Grace was “not like yur.” The magistrates seem to have been somewhat disconcerted at the convicting testimony of this jury, and at a loss how to proceed, but the witch asserted her willingness to endure trial by water. A day was set for the ducking, but it rained, and the tenderly considerate court thought the weather unfavorable for the trial on account of the danger to Grace’s health, and postponed the ducking. At last, on a sunny July day, when she could not take cold, the witch was securely pinioned and thrown into Lyn Haven Bay, with directions from the magistrates to “but her into the debth.” Into the “debth” of the water she should have contentedly and innocently sunk, but “contrary to the Judgments of all the spectators” she persisted in swimming, and at last was fished out and again examined to see whether the “witches marks” were washed off. One of the examiners was certainly far from being prepossessed in Grace’s favor. She was a dame who eight years before had testified that “Grace came to her one night, and rid her, and went out of the key hole or crack in the door like a black cat.” Grace Sherwood was not executed, and she did not die of the ducking, but it cooled her quarrelsome temper. She lived till 1740. The point where she was butted into the depth is to this day called Witches Duck.

Grace Sherwood was not the only poor soul that passed through the “water-test” or “the fleeting on the water” for witchcraft. In September, 1692, in Fairfield, Conn., the accused witches “Mercy Disburrow and Elizabeth Clauson were bound hand and foot and put into the water, and they swam like cork, and one labored to press them into the water, and they buoyed up like cork.” Many cruel scenes were enacted in Connecticut, none more so than the persistent inquisition of Goodwife Knapp after she was condemned to death for witchcraft. She was constantly tormented by her old friends and neighbors to confess and to accuse one Goody Staples as an accomplice; but the poor woman repeated that she must not wrong any one nor say anything untrue. She added:—

The truth is you would have me say that goodwife Staples is a witch but I have sins enough to answer for already, I know nothing against goodwife Staples and I hope she is an honest woman. You know not what I know. I have been fished withall in private more than you are aware of. I apprehend that goodwife Staples hath done me wrong in her testimony but I must not return evil for evil.

Being still urged and threatened with eternal damnation, she finally burst into bitter tears, and begged her persecutors to cease, saying in words that must have lingered long in their memory, and that still make the heart ache, “Never, never was poor creature tempted as I am tempted! oh pray! pray for me!”

The last scene in this New England tragedy was when her poor dead body was cut down from the gallows, and laid upon the green turf beside her grave; and her old neighbors, excited with superstition, and blinded to all sense of shame or unwomanliness, crowded about examining eagerly for “witch signs;” while in the foreground Goodwife Staples, whose lying words had hanged her friend, kneeled by the poor insulted corpse, weeping and wringing her hands, calling upon God, and asserting the innocence of the murdered woman.

It is a curious fact that, in an era which did not much encourage the public speech or public appearance of women, they should have served on juries; yet they occasionally did, not only in witchcraft cases such as Grace Sherwood’s and Alice Cartwright’s,—another Virginia witch,—but in murder cases, as in Kent County, Maryland; these juries were not usually to render the final decision, but to decide upon certain points, generally purely personal, by which their wise husbands could afterwards be guided. I don’t know that these female juries shine as exemplars of wisdom and judgment. In 1693 a jury of twelve women in Newbury, Mass., rendered this decision, which certainly must have been final:—

Wee judge according to our best lights and contients that the Death of said Elizabeth was not by any violens or wrong done to her by any parson or thing but by some soden stoping of hir Breath.

In Revolutionary days a jury of “twelve discreet matrons” of Worcester, Mass., gave a decision in the case of Bathsheba Spooner, which was found after her execution to be a wrong judgment. She was the last woman hanged by law in Massachusetts, and her cruel fate may have proved a vicarious suffering and means of exemption for other women criminals.

Women, as well as men, when suspected murderers, had to go through the cruel and shocking “blood-ordeal.” This belief, supported by the assertions of that learned fool, King James, in his Demonologie, lingered long in the minds of many,—indeed does to this day in poor superstitious folk. The royal author says:—

In a secret murther, if the dead carkas be at any time thereafter handled by the murtherer, it will gush out of blood.

Sometimes a great number of persons were made to touch in turn the dead body, hoping thus to discover the murderer.

It has been said that few women were taught to write in colonial days, and that those few wrote so ill their letters could scarce be read. I have seen a goodly number of letters written by women in those times, and the handwriting is comparatively as good as that of their husbands and brothers. Margaret Winthrop wrote with precision and elegance. A letter of Anne Winthrop’s dated 1737 is clear, regular, and beautiful. Mary Higginson’s writing is fair, and Elizabeth Cushing’s irregular and uncertain, as if of infrequent occurrence. Elizabeth Corwin’s is clear, though irregular; Mehitable Parkman’s more careless and wavering; all are easily read. But the most beautiful old writing I have ever seen,—elegant, regular, wonderfully clear and well-proportioned, was written by the hand of a woman,—a criminal, a condemned murderer, Elizabeth Attwood, who was executed in 1720 for the murder of her infant child. The letter was written from “Ipswitch Gole in Bonds” to Cotton Mather, and is a most pathetic and intelligent appeal for his interference to save her life. The beauty and simplicity of her language, the force and directness of her expressions, her firm denial of the crime, her calm religious assurance, are most touching to read, even after the lapse of centuries, and make one wonder that any one—magistrate or priest,—even Cotton Mather—could doubt her innocence. But she was hanged before a vast concourse of eager people, and was declared most impenitent and bold in her denial of her guilt; and it was brought up against her, as a most hardened brazenry, that to cheat the hangman (who always took as handsel of his victim the garments in which she was “turned off”), she appeared in her worst attire, and announced that he would get but a sorry suit from her. I do not know the estate in life of Elizabeth Attwood, but it could not have been mean, for her letter shows great refinement.

CHAPTER IV.
BOSTON NEIGHBORS.

Accounts of isolated figures are often more interesting than chapters of general history, and biographies more attractive than state records, because more petty details of vivid human interest can be learned; so, in order to present clearly a picture of the social life of women in the earliest days of New England, I give a description of a group of women, contiguous in residence, and contemporary in life, rather than an account of some special dame of dignity or note; and I call this group Boston Neighbors.

If the setting of this picture would add to its interest, it is easy to portray the little settlement. The peninsula, but half as large as the Boston of to-day, was fringed with sea-marshes, and was crowned with three conical hills, surmounted respectively with the windmill, the fort, and the beacon. The champaign was simply an extended pasture with few trees, but fine springs of water. Winding footpaths—most interesting of roadways—connected the detached dwellings, and their irregular outlines still show in our Boston streets. The thatched clay houses were being replaced by better and more substantial dwellings. William Coddington had built the first brick house.

On the main street, now Washington Street, just east of where the Old South Church now stands, lived the dame of highest degree, and perhaps the most beautiful personality, in this little group—Margaret Tyndal Winthrop, the “loving faythfull yoke-fellow” of Governor John Winthrop. She was his third wife, though he was but thirty when he married her. He had been first married when but seventeen years old. He writes that he was conceived by his parents to be at that age a man in stature and understanding. This wife brought to him, and left to him, “a large portion of outward estate,” and four little children. Of the second wife he writes, “For her carriage towards myselfe, it was so amiable and observant as I am not able to expresse; it had only this inconvenience, that it made me delight in hir too much to enjoy hir long,”—and she lived with him but a year and a day. He married Margaret in 1618, and when she had borne five children, he left her in 1630, and sailed to New England. She came also the following year, and was received “with great joy” and a day of Thanksgiving. For the remaining sixteen years of her life she had but brief separations from her husband, and she died, as he wrote, “especially beloved of all the country.” Her gentle love-letters to her husband, and the simple testimony of contemporary letters of her relatives and friends, show her to have been truly “a sweet gracious woman” who endured the hardships of her new home, the Governor’s loss of fortune, and his trying political experiences, with unvarying patience and “singular virtue, modesty and piety.”

There lived at this time in Boston a woman who must have been well known personally by Madam Winthrop, for she was a near neighbor, living within stone’s throw of the Governor’s house, on the spot where now stands “The Old Corner Bookstore.” This woman was Anne Hutchinson. She came with Rev. John Cotton from Boston, England, to Boston, New England, well respected and well beloved. She went an outcast, hated and feared by many she left behind her in Boston. For years her name was on every tongue, while she was under repeated trials and examinations for heresy. In the controversy over her and her doctrines, magistrates, ministers, women, soldiers, the common multitude of Boston, all took part, and took sides; through the pursuance of the controversy the government of the colony was changed. Her special offences against doctrines were those two antiquated “heresies,” Antinomianism and Familism, which I could hardly define if I would. According to Winthrop they were “those two dangerous errors that the person of the Holy Ghost dwells in a justified person, and that no sanctification can help to evidence to us our justification.” Her special offences against social and religious routines were thus related by Cotton Mather:—

At the meetings of the women which used to be called gossippings it was her manner to carry on very pious discourses and so put the neighborhood upon examining their spiritual estates by telling them how far a person might go in “trouble of mind,” and being restrained from very many evils and constrained into very many duties, by none but a legal work upon their souls without ever coming to a saving union with the Lord Jesus Christ, that many of them were convinced of a very great defect in the settlement of their everlasting peace, and acquainted more with the “Spirit of the Gospel” than ever they were before. This mighty show and noise of devotion made the reputation of a non-such among the people until at length under pretence of that warrant “that the elder women are to teach the younger” she set up weekly meetings at her house whereto three score or four score people would report....

It was not long before it was found out that most of the errors then crawling like vipers were hatch’d at these meetings.

So disturbed was the synod of ministers which was held early in the controversy, that this question was at once resolved:—

That though women might meet (some few together) to pray and edify one another, yet such a set assembly (as was then the practice in Boston) where sixty or more did meet every week, and one woman (in a prophetical way by resolving questions of doctrines and expounding scripture) took upon her the whole exercise, was agreed to be disorderly and without rule.

As I read the meagre evidences of her belief, I see that Anne Hutchinson had a high supernatural faith which, though mystical at its roots, aimed at being practical in its fruits; but she was critical, tactless, and over-inquisitive, and doubtless censorious, and worst of all she “vented her revelations,” which made her seem to many of the Puritans the very essence of fanaticism; so she was promptly placed on trial for heresy for “twenty-nine cursed opinions and falling into fearful lying, with an impudent Forehead in the public assembly.” The end of it all in that theocracy could not be uncertain. One woman, even though her followers included Governor Sir Henry Vane, and a hundred of the most influential men of the community, could not stop the powerful machinery of the Puritan Church and Commonwealth, the calm, well-planned opposition of Winthrop; and after a succession of mortifying indignities, and unlimited petty hectoring and annoying, she was banished. “The court put an end to her vapouring talk, and finding no hope of reclaiming her from her scandalous, dangerous, and enchanting extravagancies, ordered her out of the colony.”

In reading of her life, her trials, it is difficult to judge whether—to borrow Howel’s expression—the crosier or the distaff were most to blame in all this sad business; the preachers certainly took an over-active part.

Of the personal appearance of this “erroneous gentlewoman” we know nothing. I do not think, in spite of the presumptive evidence of the marked personal beauty of her descendants, that she was a handsome woman, else it would certainly be so stated. The author of the Short Story of the Rise Reigne and Ruine of the Antinomians, Familists, and Libertines that infected the Churches of New England calls her “a woman of a haughty and fierce carriage, of a nimble wit and active spirit, and a very voluble tongue, more bold than a man, though in understanding and judgment inferior to many women.” He also termed her “the American Jezebel,” and so did the traveller Josselyn in his Account of Two Voyages to New England; while Minister Hooker styled her “a wretched woman.” Johnson, in his Wonder-Working Providence, calls her the “masterpiece of woman’s wit.” Governor Winthrop said she was “a woman of ready wit and bold spirit.” Cotton Mather called her a virago, cunning, canting, and proud, but he did not know her.

We to-day can scarcely comprehend what these “double weekly lectures” must have been to these Boston women, with their extreme conscientiousness, their sombre religious belief, and their timid superstition, in their hard and perhaps homesick life. The materials for mental occupation and excitement were meagre; hence the spiritual excitement caused by Anne Hutchinson’s prophesyings must have been to them a fascinating religious dissipation. Many were exalted with a supreme assurance of their salvation. Others, bewildered with spiritual doubts, fell into deep gloom and depression; and one woman in utter desperation attempted to commit a crime, and found therein a natural source of relief, saying “now she was sure she should be damned.” Into all this doubt and depression the wives—to use Cotton Mather’s phrase—“hooked in their husbands.” So; perhaps, after all it was well to banish the fomenter of all these troubles and bewilderments.

Still, I wonder whether Anne Hutchinson’s old neighbors and gossips did not regret these interesting meetings, these exciting prophesyings, when they were sternly ended. I hope they grieved for her when they heard of her cruel death by Indian massacre; and I know they remembered her unstinted, kindly offices in time of sickness and affliction; and I trust they honored “her ever sober and profitable carriage,” and I suspect some of them in their inmost hearts deplored the Protestant Inquisition of their fathers and husbands, that caused her exile and consequent murder by the savages.

Samuel Johnson says, “As the faculty of writing is chiefly a masculine endowment, the reproach of making the world miserable has always been thrown upon women.” As the faculty of literary composition at that day was wholly a masculine endowment, we shall never know what the Puritan women really thought of Anne Hutchinson, and whether they threw upon her any reproach.

We gain a slight knowledge of what Margaret Winthrop thought of all this religious ecstasy, this bitter quarrelling, from a letter written by her, and dated “Sad-Boston.” She says:—

Sad thoughts possess my sperits, and I cannot repulce them; wch makes me unfit for anythinge, wondringe what the Lord meanes by all these troubles among us. Shure I am that all shall worke to the best to them that love God, or rather are loved of hime, I know he will bring light out of obcurity and make his rituusnesse shine forth as clere as the nounday; yet I find in myself an aferce spiret, and a tremblinge hart, not so willing to submit to the will of God as I desyre. There is a time to plant, and a time to pull up that which is planted, which I could desyre might not be yet.

And so it would seem to us to-day that it was indeed a doubtful beginning to tear up with such violence even flaunting weeds, lest the tender and scattered grain, whose roots scarce held in the unfamiliar soil, might also be uprooted and wither and die. But the colony endured these trials, and flourished, as it did other trials, and still prospered.

Though written expression of their feelings is lacking, we know that the Boston neighbors gave to Anne Hutchinson that sincerest flattery—imitation. Perhaps her fellow-prophets should not be called imitators, but simply kindred religious spirits. The elements of society in colonial Boston were such as plentifully to produce and stimulate “disordered and heady persons.”

Among them was Mary Dyer, thus described by Winthrop:—

The wife of William Dyer, a milliner in the New Exchange, a very proper and fair woman, notoriously infected with Mrs Hutchinsons errors, and very censorious and troublesome. She being of a very proud spirit and much addicted to revelations.

Another author called her “a comely grave woman, of a goodly personage, and of good report.”

Some of these Boston neighbors lived to see two sad sights. Fair comely Mary Dyer, after a decade of unmolested and peaceful revelations in Rhode Island, returned to her early home, and persistently preached to her old friends, and then walked through Boston streets hand in hand with two young Quaker friends, condemned felons, to the sound of the drums of the train band, glorying in her companionship; and then she was set on a gallows with a halter round her neck, while her two friends were hanged before her eyes; this was witnessed by such a multitude that the drawbridge broke under the weight of the returning North-enders. And six months later this very proper and fair woman herself was hanged in Boston, to rid the commonwealth of an intolerable plague.

A letter still exists, written by William Dyer to the Boston magistrates to “beg affectionately the life of my deare wife.” It is most touching, most heart-rending; it ends thus, “Yourselves have been husbands of wife or wives, and so am I, yea to one most dearlye beloved. Oh do not you deprive me of her, but I pray you give me her out againe. Pitye me—I beg it with teares.”

The tears still stain this poor sorrowful, appealing letter,—a missive so gentle, so timid, so full of affection, of grief, that I cannot now read it unmoved and I do indeed “pitye” thee. William Dyer’s tears have not been the only ones to fall on his beautiful, tender words.

Another interesting neighbor living where Washington Street crossed Brattle Street was the bride, young Madam Bellingham, whose marriage had caused such a scandal in good society in Boston. Winthrop’s account of this affair is the best that could be given:—

The governour Mr Bellingham was married. The young gentlewoman was ready to be contracted to a friend of his who lodged in his house, and by his consent had proceeded so far with her, when on a sudden the governour treated with her, and obtained her for himself. He excused it by the strength of his affection, and that she was not absolutely promised to the other gentleman. Two errors more he committed upon it. 1. That he would not have his contract published where he dwelt, contrary to the order of court. 2. That he married himself contrary to the constant practice of the country. The great inquest prosecuted him for breach of the order of the court, and at the court following in the fourth month, the secretary called him to answer the prosecution. But he not going off the bench, as the manner was, and but few of the magistrates present, he put it off to another time, intending to speak with him privately, and with the rest of the magistrates about the case, and accordingly he told him the reason why he did not proceed, viz., that being unwilling to command him publicly to go off the bench, and yet not thinking it fit he should sit as a judge, when he was by law to answer as an offender. This he took ill, and said he would not go off the bench except he were commanded.

I think the young English girl, Penelope Pelham, must have been sadly bewildered by the strange abrupt ways of the new land, by her dictatorial elderly lover, by his autocratic and singular marriage with her, by the attempted action of the government against him. She had a long life thereafter, for he lived to be eighty years old, and she survived him thirty years.

A very querulous and turbulent neighbor who lived on Milk Street was Mistress Ann Hibbins, the wife of one of Boston’s honored citizens. Her husband had been unsuccessful in business matters, and this “so discomposed his wife’s spirit that she was scarce ever well settled in her mind afterwards,” and at last was put out of the church and by her strange carriage gave occasion to her superstitious neighbors to charge her with being a witch. She was brought to trial for witchcraft, convicted, sentenced, and hung upon a Thursday lecture day, in spite of her social position, and the fact that her brother was Governor Bellingham. She had other friends, high in authority, as her will shows, and she had the belongings of a colonial dame, “a diamond ring, a taffety cloke, silk gown and kirtle, pinck-colored petticoat, and money in the deske.” Minister Beach wrote to Increase Mather in 1684:—

I have sometimes told you your famous Mr Norton once said at his own table before Mr Wilson, Elder Penn and myself and wife who had the honour to be his guests—that the wife of one of your magistrates, I remember, was hanged for a witch only for having more wit than her neighbors. It was his very expression; she having as he explained it, unhappily guessed that two of her prosecutors, whom she saw talking in the street were talking about her—which cost her her life, notwithstanding all he could do to the contrary.

It would naturally be thought, from the affectionate and intense devotion of the colonists to the school which had just become “Harvard-Colledge,” that Mr. Nathaniel Eaton, the head-master of the freshly established seat of learning, would be a citizen of much esteem, and his wife a dame of as dignified carriage and honored station as any of her Boston and Cambridge neighbors. Let us see whether such was the case. Mr. Eaton had had much encouragement to continue at the head of the college for life; he had been offered a tract of five hundred acres of land, and liberal support had been offered by the government, and he “had many scholars, the sons of gentlemen and of others of best note in the country.” Yet when he fell out with one of his ushers on very slight occasion, he struck the usher and caused two more to hold the poor fellow while he beat him two hundred stripes with a heavy walnut cudgel; and when poor Usher Briscoe fell a-praying, in fear of dying, Master Eaton beat him further for taking the name of God in vain. When all this cruelty was laid to him in open court “his answers were full of pride and disdain,” and he said he had this unvarying rule, “that he would not give over correcting till he had subdued the party to his will.” And upon being questioned about other malpractices, especially the ill and scant diet provided by him for the students, though good board had been paid by them, he, Adam-like, “put it off to his wife.”

Her confession of her connection with the matter is still in existence, and proves her accomplishments as a generous and tidy housewife about equal to his dignity and lenity as head of the college. It is a most curious and minute document, showing what her duties were, and the way she performed them, and also giving an interesting glimpse of college life in those days. It reads thus:—

For their breakfast that it was not so well ordered, the flower not so fine as it might, nor so well boiled or stirred at all times that it was so, it was my sin of neglect, and want of care that ought to have been in one that the Lord had intrusted with such a work.

Concerning their beef, that was allowed them, as they affirm, which I confess had been my duty to have seen they should have had it, and continued to have had it, because it was my husbands command; but truly I must confess, to my shame, I cannot remember that ever they had it nor that ever it was taken from them.

And that they had not so good or so much provision in my husbands absence as presence, I conceive it was, because he would call sometimes for butter or cheese when I conceived there was no need of it; yet for as much as the scholars did otherways apprehend, I desire to see the evil that was in the carriage of that as in the other and to take shame to myself for it.

And that they sent down for more, when they had not enough, and the maid should answer, if they had not, they should not. I must confess that I have denied them cheese, when they have sent for it, and it have been in the house, for which I shall humbly beg pardon to them, and own the shame, and confess my sin.

And for such provoking words which my servants have given, I cannot own them, but am sorry any such should be given in my house.

And for bad fish, they had it brought to table, I am sorry there was that cause of offence given; I acknowledge my sin in it.... I am much ashamed it should be in the family, and not prevented by myself or my servants, and I humbly acknowledge my negligence in it.

And that they made their beds at any time, were my straits never so great, I am sorry they were ever put to it.

For the Moor, his lying in Sam Hough’s sheet and pillow-bier, it hath a truth in it; he did so at one time and it gave Sam Hough just cause for offence; and that it was not prevented by my care and watchfulness I desire to take the shame and the sorrow for it.

And that they eat the Moor’s crusts, and the swine and they had share and share alike; and the Moor to have beer, and they denied it, and if they had not enough, for my maid to answer they should not, I am an utter stranger to these things, and know not the least foot-steps for them so to charge me; and if my servants were guilty of such miscarriages, had the boarders complained of it unto myself, I should have thought it my sin, if I had not sharply removed my servants and endeavored reform.

And for bread made of sour heated meal, though I know of but once that it was so since I kept house, yet John Wilson affirms that it was twice; and I am truly sorry that any of it was spent amongst them.

For beer and bread that it was denied them by me betwixt meals, truly I do not remember, that ever I did deny it unto them; and John Wilson will affirm that, generally, the bread and beer was free for the boarders to go to.

And that money was demanded of them for washing the linen, tis true that it was propounded to them but never imposed upon them.

And for their pudding being given the last day of the week without butter or suet, and that I said, it was a miln of Manchester in old England, its true that I did say so, and am sorry, that had any cause of offence given them by having it so.

And for their wanting beer betwixt brewings, a week or half a week together, I am sorry that it was so at any time, and should tremble to have it so, were it in my hands to do again.

And whereas they say, that sometimes they have sent down for more meat and it hath been denied, when it have been in the house, I must confess, to my shame, that I have denied them oft, when they have sent for it, and it have been in the house.

Truly a pitiful tale of shiftless stinginess, of attempted extortion, of ill-regulated service, and of overworked housewifery as well.

The Reverend Mr. Eaton did not escape punishment for his sins. After much obstinacy he “made a very solid, wise, eloquent, and serious confession, condemning himself in all particulars.” The court, with Winthrop at the head, bore lightly upon him after this confession, and yet when sentence of banishment from the college, and restriction from teaching within the jurisdiction, was passed, and he was fined £30, he did not give glory to God as was expected, but turned away with a discontented look. Then the church took the matter up to discipline him, and the schoolmaster promptly ran away, leaving debts of a thousand pounds.

The last scene in the life of Mrs. Eaton may be given in Winthrop’s words:—

Mr. Nathaniel Eaton being come to Virginia, took upon him to be a minister there, but was given up to extreme pride and sensuality, being usually drunken, as the custom is there. He sent for his wife and children. Her friends here persuaded her to stay awhile, but she went, notwithstanding, and the vessel was never heard of after.

So you see she had friends and neighbors who wished her to remain in New England with them, and who may have loved her in spite of the sour bread, and scant beer, and bad fish, that she doled out to the college students.

There was one visitor who flashed upon this chill New England scene like a brilliant tropical bird; with all the subtle fascination of a foreigner; speaking a strange language; believing a wicked Popish faith; and englamoured with the romance of past adventure, with the excitement of incipient war. This was Madam La Tour, the young wife of one of the rival French governors of Acadia. The relations of Massachusetts, of Boston town, to the quarrels of these two ambitious and unscrupulous Frenchmen, La Tour and D’Aulnay, form one of the most curious and interesting episodes in the history of the colony.

Many unpleasant and harassing complications and annoyances had arisen between the French and English colonists, in the more northern plantations, when, in 1643, in June, Governor La Tour surprised his English neighbors by landing in Boston “with two friars and two women sent to wait upon La Tour His Lady”—and strange sights they truly were in Boston. He came ashore at Governor Winthrop’s garden (now Fort Winthrop), and his arrival was heralded by a frightened woman, one Mrs. Gibbons, who chanced to be sailing in the bay, and saw the approach of the French boat, and hastened to warn the Governor. Perhaps Mrs. Gibbons had a premonitory warning of the twenty-five hundred pounds her husband was to lose at a later date through his confidence in the persuasive Frenchman. Governor and Madam Winthrop and their two sons and a daughter-in-law were sitting in the Governor’s garden in the summer sunshine, and though thoroughly surprised, they greeted the unexpected visitor, La Tour, with civilities, and escorted him to Boston town, not without some internal tremors and much deep mortification of the Governor when he thought of the weakness and poverty of Boston, with Castle Island deserted, as was plainly shown to the foreigner by the lack of any response to his salute of guns; and the inference was quick to come that the Frenchman “might have spoiled Boston.”

But La Tour’s visit was most friendly; all he wished was free mercature and the coöperation of the English colony. And he desired to land his men for a short time, that they might refresh themselves after their long voyage; “so they landed in small companies that our women might not be affrighted with them.” And the Governor dined the French officers, and the New England warriors of the train-band entertained the visiting Gallic soldiers, and they exercised and trained before each other, all in true Boston hospitable fashion, as is the custom to this day. And the Governor bourgeoned with as much of an air of importance as possible, “being regularly attended with a good guard of halberts and musketeers;” and thus tried to live down the undignified heralding of a fellow-governor by a badly scared woman neighbor. And the cunning Frenchman, as did another of his race, “with sugared words sought to addulce all matters.” He flattered the sober Boston magistrates, and praised everything about the Boston army, and “showed much admiration professing he could not have believed it, if he had not seen it.” And the foreigners were so well treated (though Winthrop was blamed afterwards by stern Endicott and the Rome-hating ministers) that they came again the following summer, when La Tour asked material assistance. He received it, and he lingered till autumn, and barely eight days after he left, Madam La Tour landed in Boston from London; and strange and sad must the little town have seemed to her after her past life. She was in a state of much anger, and at once brought suit against the master of the ship for not carrying her and her belongings to the promised harbor in Acadia; for trading on the way until she nearly fell into the hands of her husband’s enemy, D’Aulnay. The merchants of Charlestown and Salem sided with the ship’s captain. The solid men of Boston gallantly upheld and assisted the lady. The jury awarded her two thousand pounds damages, and bitterly did one of the jury—Governor Winthrop’s son—suffer for it, for he was afterwards arrested in London, and had to give bond for four thousand pounds to answer to a suit in the Court of Admiralty about the Boston decision in favor of the Lady La Tour.

In the mean time ambassadors from the rival Acadian governor, D’Aulnay, arrived in New England, and were treated with much honor and consideration by the diplomatic Boston magistrates. I think I can read between the lines that the Bostonians really liked La Tour, who must have had much personal attraction and magnetism; but they feared D’Aulnay, who had brought against the Massachusetts government a claim of eight thousand pounds damages. The Governor sent to D’Aulnay a propitiatory gift of “a very fair new sedan chair (of no use to us),” and I should fancy scarcely of much more use in Acadia; and which proved a very cheap way of staving off paying the eight thousand pounds.

Madam La Tour sailed off at last with three laden ships to her husband, in spite of D’Aulnay’s dictum that “she was known to be the cause of all her husband’s contempt and rebellion, and therefore they could not let her go to him.” La Tour’s stronghold was captured shortly after “by assault and scalado” when he was absent, and his jewels, plate, and furniture to the amount of ten thousand pounds were seized, and his wife too; and she died in three weeks, of a broken heart, and “her little child and gentlewomen were sent to France.”

I think these Boston neighbors were entitled to a little harmless though exciting gossip two or three years later, when they learned that after D’Aulnay’s death the fascinating widower La Tour had promptly married Widow D’Aulnay, thus regaining his jewels and plate, and both had settled down to a long and peaceful life in Nova Scotia.

CHAPTER V.
A FEARFULL FEMALE TRAVAILLER.

In the autumn and winter of the year 1704, Madam Sarah Knight, a resident of Boston, made a journey on horseback from Boston to New York, and returned in the same manner. It was a journey difficult and perilous, “full of buggbears to a fearfull female travailler,” and which “startled a masculine courage,” but which was performed by this woman with the company and protection only of hired guides, the “Western Post,” or whatever chance traveller she might find journeying her way, at a time when brave men feared to travel through New England, and asked for public prayers in church before starting on a journey of twenty miles. She was probably the first woman who made such a journey, in such a manner, in this country.

Madam Knight was the daughter of Captain Kemble, of Boston, who was in 1656 set two hours in the public stocks as a punishment for his “lewd and unseemly behavior,” which consisted in his kissing his wife “publicquely” on the Sabbath Day, upon the doorstep of his house, when he had just returned from a voyage and absence of three years.

The diary which Madam kept on this eventful trip contains the names of no persons of great historical interest, though many of historical mention; but it is such a vivacious and sprightly picture of the customs of the time, and such a valuable description of localities as they then appeared, that it has an historical interest of its own, and is a welcome addition to the few diaries and records of the times which we possess.

Everything was not all serene and pleasant in the years 1704 and 1705 in New England. Events had occurred which could not have been cheerful for Madam Knight to think of when riding through the lonely Narragansett woods and along the shores of the Sound. News of the frightful Indian massacre at Deerfield had chilled the very hearts of the colonists. At Northampton shocking and most unexpected cruelties had been perpetrated by the red men. At Lancaster, not any too far from Boston, the Indians had been most obstreperous. We can imagine Madam Knight had no very pleasant thoughts of these horrors when she wrote her description of the red men whom she saw in such numbers in Connecticut. Bears and wolves, too, abounded in the lonely woods of Massachusetts and Connecticut. The howls of wolves were heard every night, and rewards were paid by New England towns for the heads of wolves that were killed, provided the heads were brought into town and nailed to the side of the meeting-house. Twenty-one years later than Madam Knight’s journey, in 1725, twenty bears were killed in one week in September, within two miles of Boston, so says the History of Roxbury; and all through the eighteenth century bears were hunted and killed in upper Narragansett. Hence “buggbears” were not the only bears to be dreaded on the lonely journey.

The year 1704 was memorable also because it gave birth to the first newspaper in the colonies, the Boston News-Letter. Only a few copies were printed each week, and each copy contained but four or five square feet of print, and the first number contained but one advertisement—that of the man who printed it.

When Madam Knight’s journal was published in New York by Mr. Theodore Dwight, in 1825, the editor knew nothing of the diarist, not even her family name; hence it was confidently believed by many that the journal was merely a clever and entertaining fiction. In 1852, however, Miss Caulkins published her history of the town of New London, and contradicted that belief, for she gave an account of the last days of Madam Knight, which were spent in Norwich and New London. Madam Knight’s daughter married the Colonel Livingston who is mentioned in the journal, and left no children. From a descendant of Mrs. Livingston’s administratrix, Mrs. Christopher, the manuscript of the journal was obtained for publication in 1825, it having been carefully preserved all those years. In Blackwood’s Magazine for the same year an article appeared, entitled Travelling in America, which reprinted nearly all of Madam Knight’s journal, and which showed a high appreciation of its literary and historical merits. In 1858 it was again printed by request in Littell’s Living Age, with some notes of Madam Knight’s life, chiefly compiled from Miss Caulkins’ History of New London, and again provoked much inquiry and discussion. Recently a large portion of the journal has been reprinted in the Library of American Literature, with many alterations, however, in the spelling, use of capitals, and punctuation, thus detracting much from the interest and quaintness of the work; and most unnecessarily, since it is perfectly easy to read and understand it as first printed, when, as the editor said, “the original orthography was carefully preserved for fear of introducing any unwarrantable modernism.”

The first edition is now seldom seen for sale, and being rare is consequently high-priced. The little shabby, salmon-colored copy of the book which I saw was made interesting by two manuscript accounts of Sarah Knight, which were inserted at the end of the book, and which are very valuable, since they give positive proof of the reality of the fair traveller, as well as additional facts of her life.