The
Colonial Cavalier

Or

Southern Life Before the
Revolution

By
Maud Wilder Goodwin

Illustrated by
Harry Edwards

New York
Lovell, Coryell & Company
1894

Copyright, 1894,
BY
UNITED STATES BOOK COMPANY.
All Rights Reserved.

Contents

The Colonial Cavalier

Preface

Two great forces have contributed to the making of the Anglo-American character. The types, broadly classed in England as Puritan and Cavalier, repeated themselves in the New World. On the bleak Massachusetts coast, the Puritan emigrants founded a race as rugged as their environment. Driven by the force of compelling conscience from their homes, they came to the new land, at once pilgrims and pioneers, to rear altars and found homes in the primeval forest. It was not freedom of worship alone they sought, but their own way. They found it and kept it. Such a race produced a strong and hardy type of manhood, admirable if not always lovable.

But there was another force at work, moulding the national character, a force as persistent, a type as intense as the Puritan’s own, and its exact opposite. The men who settled the Southern Colonies, Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas, were Cavaliers; not necessarily in blood, or even in loyalty to the Stuart cause, but Cavalier in sympathies, in the general view of life, in virtues and vices. So far as the provinces could represent the mother country, Virginia and Maryland reflected the Cavaliers, as Massachusetts and Connecticut reflected the Puritans.

Their settlers came, impelled by no religious motives, and driven by no persecution. They lacked, therefore, the bond of a common enthusiasm and the still stronger tie of a common antipathy. Above all, they lacked the town-meeting. Separated by the necessities of plantation life, they formed a series of tiny kingdoms rather than a democratic community. To the Puritan, the village life of Scrooby and its like was familiar and therefore dear; but to the Southern settlers, the ideal was the great estate of the English gentry whose descendants many of them were.

The term, “Cavalier,” came into vogue in the struggle between Charles the First and his Parliament, but the type itself was already well-developed in the reign of James, and under the fostering influence of Buckingham. A great deal of energy has been wasted in the discussion as to how much of this Cavalier blood was found among the early settlers. It is enough that we know that, between the coming of the first adventurers and the Restoration, the number of “gentlemen” was sufficient to direct the policy of the State, and color the life of its society.

When the earliest colonists left England, the Cavalier was at the height of his glory. Now he represents a lost cause, “and none so poor to do him reverence.” The sceptre of royal authority is shattered; society has grown dull and decorous. Even in dress, the Puritan has prevailed. The people who speak of Cromwell’s followers as “Roundheads” and “Cropped Ears,” go closer cropped than they, and the costume of a gentleman of to-day is uglier and gloomier than any the Puritan ever dreamed of introducing.

These concessions of the modern world make the Puritan a familiar figure, as he stands out in the page of Hawthorne, or on the canvas of Boughton. But the Cavalier fades into the dim and shadowy background of the past. We cannot afford to have him slip away from us so, if we wish really to understand the history of our country; we must know both sides of its development.

Hitherto, the real comprehension of the Colonial Cavalier has been hindered by the florid enthusiasm of the South, and the critical coldness of the North. His admirers have painted him as a theatrical personage, always powdered and be-ruffled, fighting duels as frequently as he changed his dress, living in lordly state in a baronial mansion, or dancing in the brilliant halls of fashion in the season at the capital. All this is, of course, seen to be absurd, as one comes to study the conditions under which he lived. We find the “capital” a straggling village, the “estate” a half-cultivated farm, and the “host of retainers” often but a mob of black slaves, clad in motley, or lying half-naked in the sun. Does it follow, then, that the lives of these men are not worth serious study? Surely not. It is in the very primitiveness of environment that the chief interest of the study of that early life lies. Here were men who brought to the New World a keen appreciation of the luxuries and refined pleasures of life, who had not eschewed them for conscience’s sake like the Puritan, yet who relinquished them all bravely and cheerfully, to face the hardships and dangers of a pioneer life; and when their descendants, growing rich with the increasing prosperity of the country, had once more surrounded themselves with beautiful homes and wide acres, they too stood ready to sacrifice them all at the call of Liberty. If we would understand Washington, and Jefferson, and the Lees, George Mason, and John Randolph, we must study them as the “Autocrat” tells us we should all be studied, for at least a century before birth.

The Colonial Cavalier must be painted, like a Rembrandt, with high lights and deep shadows. It is idle to ignore his weaknesses or his vices. They are of the kind that insist on notice. Yet, with all his faults, he will surely prove well worth our serious consideration, and however wide we open our eyes to his defects, however we seek to brush away the illusions with which tinsel hero-worship has surrounded him, we shall still find him, judged as he has a right to be, at his best, closely approaching Lowell’s definition of a gentleman: “A man of culture, a man of intellectual resources, a man of public spirit, a man of refinement, with that good taste which is the conscience of the mind, and that conscience which is the good taste of the soul.”

This little volume makes no pretensions to the dignity of a history. It aims only, through local gossip and homely details of life and customs, to open a side-door, through which we may, perchance, gain a sense of fireside intimacy with The Colonial Cavalier.

His Home

I stood in the wide hall of the old brick mansion built, a century and a half ago, by “King Carter,” on the shore of the James River.

It was Autumn. The doors at either end of the saloon were open, and their casements framed the landscape like a picture. From the foot of the moss-grown steps at the rear, the drive stretched its length, under several closed gates, for half a mile, till it joined the little travelled high-road. From the porch in front, the ground fell away, in what had once been a series of terraces, to the brink of the river, across whose western hills the November sun was setting red. Not a ripple stirred the surface of the water—the dead leaves on the ground never rustled. All was still; solitary, yet not melancholy. The place seemed apart from the present—a part of the past.

Within doors, everything was mellowed by the softening touch of twilight and age. The hospitable fire which blazed in the great throat of the library chimney, cast odd shadows on the high wainscot, and the delicately wrought mouldings over the chimney-breast, and its reflections danced in the small panes of the heavily framed windows as though the witches were making tea outside.

The dark staircase wound upward in the centre of the hallway, its handrail hacked by the swords of soldiers in the Revolution. As I glanced at it, and then out along the long avenue, I seemed to see Tarleton’s scarlet-clad dragoons dashing up to surround the house. Then, as I turned westward, imagination travelled still further into the past, and pictured the slow approach of a British packet, gliding peacefully up to the little wharf down yonder, to discharge its household freight of tea and spices, of India muslins and “callamancoes” before it proceeded on its way to the town of Williamsburg, a few miles farther up the river.

At the period of which I was dreaming, Williamsburg was the capital of the province, with a wide street named in honor of the Duke of Gloucester, and a college named after their late majesties, William and Mary, with a jolly Raleigh tavern and a stately Governor’s Palace; but all this had come about some fifty years before the building of Carter’s Grove.

In the middle of the seventeenth century it was far more primitive,—indeed, it was not Williamsburg at all, but only “The Middle Plantation,” with a few pioneer houses surrounded by primeval forests, from which savage red faces now and then peered out, to the terror of the settlers; while at nightfall the heavy wooden shutters had been closed, lest the firelight should prove a shining mark for the Indian’s arrow. If the traveller found Williamsburg in the eighteenth century “a straggling village,” and its mansions “houses of very moderate pretensions,” what would he have thought of those first modest homes, where the horse-trough was the family wash-basin; where stools and benches, hung against the wall, constituted the furniture; where the kitchen-table served for dining-table as well, and was handsomely set out with bowls, trenchers, and noggins of wood, with gourds and squashes daintily cut, to add color to the meal; while the family was counted well off that could muster a few spoons, and a plate or two of shining pewter! But those pioneers and their wives felt pride in their little homes, for they realized how favorably they contrasted with the cabins built at “James Cittie” by Wingfield and Smith and their fellow-adventurers. They had indeed more cause for honest pride than the stay-at-homes in England could ever realize, for such knew nothing of the infinite toil and the difficulty of founding a settlement in a new country, thousands of miles from civilization, with forests to be cleared and savages to be fought, turbulent followers to be ruled, and food, shelter, and clothing to be provided.

No sooner were the “Ancient Planters,” as the chronicles call the first settlers, fairly ashore on their island, than the Company at home opened its battery of advice upon them: “Seeing order is at the same price with confusion,” the secretary wrote, setting down a very dubious proposition as an aphorism, “it shall be advisably done to set your houses even and by a line, that your streets may have a good breadth, and be carried square about your market-place, and every street’s end opening into it, that from thence, with a few field-pieces, you may command every street throughout; which market-place you may also fortify, if you think it needful.” It must have seemed grimly humorous to those pioneers, huddling their cabins together within the shelter of the wooden fence, dignified by the name of a palisade, and mounted with all the guns they could muster, to be thus advised from a distance of three thousand miles to construct at once a model English village, and fortify the market-place, if they thought best. An Italian proverb has it that “it is easy to threaten a bull from a window,” and so the Virginia Company found no difficulty in regulating the affairs of the colonists and the Indians, from their window in London. The settlers paid as little heed as possible to their interference, and struggled on through the sickness and the starving-time, as best they could, clearing away the brush, and felling trees, and putting up houses. But building went on so slowly that in 1619, “In James Cittie were only those houses that Sir Thomas Gates built in the tyme of his government (1610), with one wherein the governor allwayes dwelt, and a church built wholly at the charge of the inhabitants of the citye, of timber, being fifty foote in length and twenty in breadth.” The report from the town of Henrico was still less encouraging, for there were found only “three old houses, a poor ruinated church, with some few poore buildings on the islande.”

Yet, in spite of hindrances and drawbacks, the colony prospered. Lord De la Warre reported that all the enterprise needed was “a few honest laborers burdened with children”; and such alluring inducements were held out to immigrants, that I cannot understand how the London poor, swarming in their black alleys, could resist the invitation to come over to a land where pure air and plenty were to be had for nothing. Ralph Hamor wrote home: “The affairs of the colony being so well ordered and the hardest tasks already overpast, that whosoever, now or hereafter, shall happily arrive there, shall finde a handsome house of some four roomes or more, if he have a family, to repose himselfe in, rent-free, and twelve English acres of ground adjoining thereunto, very strongly impailed; which ground is only allotted unto him for roots, gardaine-herbs and corne; neither shall he need to provide himselfe victuals. He shall have for himselfe and family a competent twelvemonths’ provision delivered unto him.” In addition to all this, the colonist was to be furnished with tools of all sorts, and “for his better subsistence, he shall have poultry and swine, and if he prefer, a goate or two, and perhaps a cowe given him.” I am at a loss to understand why all England did not emigrate at once to the land where such a gift-enterprise was on foot. Perhaps the readers distrusted Hamor’s authority; perhaps they thought some extraordinary risks or dangers must lurk behind such fair promises, and when the Indian massacre came, they possibly nodded their wise heads and said, “I told you so.”

The agent of the Maryland Company worked on a very different system from this gilded Virginia offer. He published a pamphlet giving detailed directions to “intending settlers.” They were not to depend on the resources of the colony, even for the first year, but to bring with them laborers and watch-dogs, grains and seeds of all kinds, and meal enough to last while their houses were a-building.

I find that I gain the best idea of what these first houses in America were like, by asking myself how I should have built, in the conditions under which the settlers worked, dropped down in a little forest-clearing, the ocean before and the Indians behind, with few and imperfect tools, and with a pressure all the while of securing food for to-day, and sowing grain for to-morrow. I am sure I should have put up a shelter of the rudest kind that could be trusted to withstand the winds of Autumn, and the storms of Winter. I should not have planed my beams, nor matched my floorboards. Only my doors and shutters I should have made both strong and stout, to meet the gales from the sea, or a sudden dash from lurking savages in the bush. This I find, therefore, without surprise, was just what the settlers did. They divided the house into a kitchen and a bedroom, with a shed joined on for the goats and pigs, or, if the owner were so lucky, a cow. Their chimneys were chiefly constructed out of twigs plastered on both sides with clay, which dried in the sun, and served for some time, before it crumbled again to dust. As there were no mills, the corn-grinding had to be done at home; so the settlers, learning the trick from the Indians, improvised a mortar, by burning out the stump of a tree into a hollow, and hanging over it a log, suspended from the limb of a tree close at hand, for a pestle. This was hard work, and the grinding in the little hand-mills brought from England was scarcely easier. A dying man, leaving his children to their uncle’s care, expressly stipulated that they should not be put to the drudgery of pounding corn.

Within the house, stood the great and small wheels for wool and flax, the carding-comb and the moulds for making those candles, of green myrtleberry wax which, as Beverly writes, “are never greasie to the touch, nor melt with lying in the hottest weather. Neither does the snuff of these ever offend the smell, like that of a tallow-candle; but instead of being disagreeable, if an accident puts a candle out, it yields a pleasant fragrancy to all that are in the room, insomuch that nice people often put them out on purpose to have the incense of the expiring snuff.”

It was no pitiable life that those pioneers lived, even in those most primitive days. Their out-of-door existence was full of a wild charm, and their energy soon improved conditions indoors. Every ship from England brought over conveniences and luxuries. The cabin was exchanged for a substantial house. First pewter, and then silver plate began to shine on sideboards of polished oak. Four-post bedsteads decorated the sleeping rooms, and tapestry curtains kept out the cold.

A Maryland record of 1653 tells of a bargain between T. Wilford and Paul Sympson, by which, in consideration of twenty thousand pounds of tobacco received from Sympson, Wilford agrees to support him for the rest of his life “like a gentleman.” This gentleman-like provision consisted of a house fifteen feet square, with a Welsh chimney, and lined with riven boards; a handsome joined bedstead, bedding and curtains; one small table, six stools, and three wainscot chairs; a servant to wait on him; meat, apparel, and washing; and every year an anker (ten gallons) of drams, one tierce of sack, and a case of English spirits for his own use.

It is hard to imagine what more of luxury, an annuity could furnish to a gentleman of the nineteenth century, if indeed Heaven had blessed him with a stomach capable of consuming such an “intolerable deal of sack.”

The next fifty years still further increased the elegance of living; and style as well as comfort began to be considered. In an inventory of household goods belonging to a Virginian in 1698, I find included, “a feather-bed, one sett Kitterminster curtains, and Vallens bedstead, one pair white linen sheets with two do. pillow biers, 2 Rusha-leather chaires, 5 Rush-bottom chaires, a burning glass, a flesk fork, and 6 Alchemy spoones” (alchemy being a mixed metal, originally supposed to be gold made by magic). In addition to these articles, the list includes a brass skimer and 2 pairs of pot-hooks, and, as its crowning glory, “1 old silver Dram-cup.” No doubt the possessor had sat with his boon companions on many a cold night, by the great chimney, plunging the hot poker into the fire.—

“And nursed the loggerhead, whose hissing dip,
Timed by nice instinct, creamed the mug of flip.”

The house of a planter in Virginia at the end of the seventeenth century, was substantial and comfortable. The inventory of such a planter mentions, as belonging to the homestead, a “parlor chamber, chamber over sd. chamber, chamber over the parlor, nursery, old nursery, room over the Ladyes chamber, Ladyes chamber, entry, store, home house quarter, home house, quarter over the creek, Smiths shopp, Barne, kitchen, Dary, chamber over the old Dary, flemings quarter, Robinsons quarter, Whitakers quarter, Black Wallnut Quarter.”

By this time, the house of the rich in the towns boasted a parlor, but its furnishing was of the simplest. A white floor sprinkled with clean white sand, large tables, and heavy high-backed chairs of solid, dark oak decorated a parlor enough for anybody, says the chronicler of Baltimore. William Fitzhugh directs Mistress Sarah Bland in London (1682) to procure him a suit of tapestry hangings for a room twenty feet long, sixteen feet wide, and nine feet high; “and half a dozen chairs suitable.”

The kitchen had long ago been separated from the dining-room, and, in the better houses, set off in a separate building, that its odours might not fill the other rooms when warm weather made open doors and windows necessary. The dining-room, with its broad buffet, its well-filled cellarette, its silver plate, and its quaint old English furniture, was generally the pleasantest room in the house. Opening out of the dining-room, between it and the parlor, ran the wide hall, with doors at either end, with carved stairway and panelled walls, often hung with family portraits.

Early in the eighteenth century, Spotswood came over as Governor of Virginia, and a new era of more elaborate living was introduced. His “palace” at Williamsburg, according to the contemporary report of the Reverend Hugh Jones—not to be taken, however, without a grain of salt—was “a magnificent structure, built at the publick expense, furnished and beautified with gates, fine gardens, offices, walks, a fine canal, orchards, etc,” and most impressive of all, in those days, when Sir Christopher Wren set the architectural fashions, “a cupola or lanthorn” illuminated on the King’s birthnight, or other festival occasion. At Germanna, a little settlement of Germans clustered round the Spotswood iron-works, the Governor built him a house so fine that Colonel Byrd speaks of it as The Enchanted Castle, and has left an amusing account of a visit he made him there. “I arrived,” he says, “about three o’clock, and found only Mrs. Spotswood at home. I was carried into a room elegantly set off with pier glasses, the largest of which came soon after to an odd misfortune. Amongst other favorite animals that cheered this lady’s solitude, a brace of tame deer ran familiarly about the house, and one of them came to stare at me as a stranger. But unluckily, spying his own figure in the glass, he made a spring over the tea-table that stood under it and shattered the glass to pieces, and, falling back upon the tea-table, made a terrible fracas.”

What a change is here, from the hewn timbers and bare walls and wooden trenchers of the pioneer, to enchanted castles and mirrors, and china and tea-tables!

This Colonel Byrd, who writes so genially of his visit to Germanna, was a typical cavalier—not godly, but manly—with a keen enjoyment of a jest, as the pucker at the corners of the lips in his portrait clearly shows, with a hearty good-will toward his neighbor and especially his neighbor’s wife, with a fine, healthy appetite, and a zest for all good things to eat and drink. In his boundary-line trip to Carolina and his journey to the mines, he smacks his lips over the fat things that fall in his way. Now it is a prime rasher of bacon, fricasseed in rum; now a capacious bowl of bombo. In one and the same paragraph, he tells how he commended his family to the care of the Almighty, fortified himself with a beefsteak, and kissed his landlady for good luck, before setting out on his travels.

Roughing it in camp, he dreams of the fine breakfast he will make on a fat doe, and a two-year-old bear, killed over night. At a stopping-place he records, “Our landlady cherished us with roast-beef and chicken-pie.” Having eaten these with a relish, he pours down a basin of chocolate, wishes peace to that house, and takes up his line of march for home. There is something refreshing to our jaded generation in the hearty enjoyment that our ancestors took in their food.

I am struck in all these old gastronomic records with the immense amount of meat, in proportion to the vegetables used. No wonder gout was a common disease, and the overheated blood needed to be reduced by cupping and leeching. The out-of-door life, the riding and hunting of Maryland and Virginia, enabled the men to eat freely and drink deep, and the Southern table was always lavishly provided. A foreigner having remarked of Mrs. Madison that her table was like a Harvest-Home, she replied that, as the profusion which amused the visitor was the outgrowth of her country’s prosperity, she was quite willing to sacrifice European elegance to Virginia liberality. Good housekeeping in those days consisted chiefly in setting a bountiful table, and the Colonial dame, in spite of her troop of servants, was kept busy in planning the meals, the breakfasts of hot bread and griddle-cakes, the afternoon dinner, and “the bite before bedtime.” To her it fell, to carry the keys, to portion out the rations for the negro quarters, and to lay aside the materials from which the turbanned queen of the kitchen should compound the savory sausage, the fried chicken, the sauces, and dumplings, and cakes, which have made Southern cooking famous.

The domestic life of women on those old plantations must have been rather monotonous. The travellers who visited them, describe them as sharing little in the amusements of their husbands, and brothers, and sons. Chastellux says that, like the English, they are very fond of their infants, but care little for their children; but the annals and biographies do not bear out his statement. George Wythe learned his Greek at home, from a Testament, while his mother held an English copy in her hand and prompted him as he went on. John Mason, too, bore through life the impress of his mother’s influence. He was only seven years old when she died, yet through life, “mother’s room” was perfectly distinct to him, the old chest of drawers distinguished as gown drawer, shirt drawer, and jacket drawer, the closet known as mistress’ closet, containing his mother’s dresses, and another cupboard, known as the closet, in which hung a small green horsewhip with a silver head, carried by Mrs. Mason when she rode, and on other occasions used for purposes of correction, so that the children nicknamed it “the green doctor.” An old letter recalls another “mother’s room” in those eighteenth-century days: “On one side sits the chambermaid with her knitting; on the other a little colored pet, learning to sew. An old decent woman is there, with her table and shears, cutting out the negroes’ winter clothes, while the old lady directs them all, incessantly knitting.”

Home, rather than Church, was the sacred spot to the Colonial Cavalier, in spite of his theoretical reverence for Mother Church. It was at home that most of the baptisms and funerals occurred, and Hugh Jones complains that “in houses also they most commonly marry, without regard to the time of the day, or season of the year.” The central idea of the Puritan religion was fear of God; the centre of the Cavalier’s religion was love of man. From this root sprung a radiant cheerfulness, an open-handed liberality, and an unbounded hospitality. If it be true that the best ornaments of a house are its guests, never were houses more brilliantly decorated than those Southern mansions. The names of Brandon, and Berkeley, and Westover, and Mont Clare, and Doughoregan call up the procession of guests who have walked, and danced, and dined, and slept under their roofs. We see stately men, in lace and ruffles, pacing the minuet with powdered dames, in “teacup time of hood and hoop, and when the patch was worn.” We see lovers and maidens, brides and bridegrooms spending the honeymoon under the sheltering trees, and patriot Continentals arming in their halls for the struggle with the enemies of their country.

Not the lofty alone, but the lowly as well, could claim a welcome at those always open doors. Indians, half-breeds, and leather-clad huntsmen hung round the kitchen of Greenaway Court, while Washington and Lord Fairfax dined in the saloon. Not even acquaintance was considered necessary to ensure a cordial reception. “The inhabitants,” wrote Beverly, “are very courteous to travellers, who need no other recommendation than being human creatures. A stranger has no more to do but to inquire upon the road where any gentleman or good housekeeper lives, and there he may depend upon being received with hospitality. This good-nature is so general among their people, that the gentry, when they go abroad, order their principal servants to entertain all visitors with everything the plantation affords; and the poor planters who have but one bed, will often sit up, or lie upon a form, or couch, all night, to make room for a weary traveller to repose himself after his journey.”

In Winter, the fire blazed high on the hearth, and the toddy hissed in the noggin; in Summer, the basket of fruit stood in the breeze-swept hall, and lightly clad black boys tripped in, bearing cool tankards of punch and sangaree. The guest need only enter in, to be at home. No one was considered so contemptible, as he who consented to receive money for entertaining visitors. Keeping an inn or “ordinary” was looked upon askance, and the law dealt with the proprietor rigorously, as with one who probably would cheat if he got a chance. His charges were carefully regulated, and he was subject to fine, and even imprisonment, if he went beyond them. A Maryland statute provides that “noe Ordinary-Keeper within this Province shall at any Time charge anything to account for Boles of Punch, but shall only Sell the Severall Ingredients to the Said Mixture according to the Rates before in this Act Ascertained.” A traveller, in those good old days, might ride from Maryland to Georgia, and never put up at an Ordinary at all, sure, whenever he wished to stop by the way, of a cordial welcome at a private house. Some planters even kept negroes posted at their gate, to give warning of a rider’s approach, that he might be invited in, and that the household might be in readiness to receive him.

Such promiscuous hospitality could only exist in a community with a happy faculty for taking life easily, an ability to dispense with the slavery to method, and to be contented though things went wrong. The fastidious European found some of the manners and customs a little trying. “In private houses as well as inns,” writes a traveller, “several people are crowded together in the same room; and in the latter it very commonly happens that after you have been some time in bed, a stranger of any condition comes into the room, pulls off his clothes, and places himself without ceremony between your sheets.”

Another visitor says that the Virginia houses are spacious, but the apartments are not commodious, “and they make no ceremony of putting three or four persons into the same room, nor do these make any objections to being thus heaped together.”

The Colonial Cavalier was gregarious by nature. He was warmly social, and, being so much shut off by plantation life from intercourse with his fellows, he welcomed a guest as a special providence, to relieve the monotony of his life. The gentleman-planter in affluent circumstances had nothing to do, and he did it in a very leisurely way. His occupations were such as could be shared by a guest. An observant traveller has left us a vivid picture of the daily routine of such an individual: “He rises about nine o’clock. He may perhaps make an excursion to walk as far as his stable to see his horses, which is seldom more than fifty yards from his house. He returns to breakfast between nine and ten, which is generally tea or coffee, bread and butter, and very thin slices of venison, ham, or hung beef. He then lies down on a pallet on the floor in the coolest room in the house, in his shirt and trousers only, with a negro at his head, and another to fan him and keep off the flies. Between twelve and one, he takes a draught of toddy or bombo, a liquor composed of water, sugar, rum and nutmeg, which is made weak, and kept cool. He dines between two and three, and at every table, whatever else there may be, a ham and greens, or cabbage, is always a standing dish. At dinner he drinks cider, toddy, punch, port, claret, and Madeira, which is generally excellent here. Having drunk some few glasses of wine after dinner, he returns to his pallet, with his two blacks to fan him, and continues to drink toddy or sangaree all the afternoon. He does not always drink tea. Between nine and ten in the evening, he eats a light supper of milk and fruit or wine, sugar and fruit, etc., and almost immediately retires to bed for the night.”

All this sounds as if Smyth must have made his visit to Virginia in midsummer, and fancied that the habits were the same all the year round, as in that semi-tropical season. As a picture, it is truer of Carolina than of any section farther North. As we go South we find the character more indolent, the energies more relaxed, and even the houses changing their expression. The stately brick manor-houses, modelled on the English mansion, with their deep mullioned windows and heavy doors, give place to Italian villas, with white pillars and porches gleaming from their green points of land up and down the rivers. Under this shady porch the planter might lie at his ease, watching the boats on the streams as they come and go, and breathing the perfume from the garden at his feet. The garden of those days was laid out also on the Italian pattern, in shapes of horseshoes, or stars, or palm-leaves, with avenues leading down bordered by tulips trees, with box-hedged paths, wherein Corydon and Phyllis might wander, quite hidden from the lounger on the portico. In its centre stood often a summer-house, where successive generations plighted troth, and exchanged love-tokens. Everything about the garden, as about the house, suggested England. The lawn was sown with the seed of the silvery grass, so familiar in the great English parks. Even birds were imported from the mother country. When Spotswood came over, he brought with him a number of larks to delight his ears with their familiar strain, but either the climate was unpropitious, or the stronger native birds resented the coming of the foreigners, for the larks died out, and left only here and there a lonely descendant to startle the traveller as he rode along the solitary forest roads at sunrise, with a flow of melody that called up the leafy lanes of the old home.

Sweethearts and Wives

The first settlers in America had no homes, for the first requisite for a home is a wife. They soon learned that “a better half, alone, gives better quarters.” The Indian squaws were almost the only women known to the voyagers on the Susan Constant and her sister ships; and though the adventurers wrote home in glowing terms of their dusky charms, they looked askance upon the idea of marriage with the heathen natives. We cannot help, however, echoing the sentiments of Colonel Byrd of Westover, when he says: “Morals and all considered, I can’t think the Indians much greater heathens than the first adventurers,” who, he adds, “had they been good Christians, would have had the charity to take this only method of converting the natives to Christianity. For, after all that can be said, a sprightly lover is the most prevailing missionary that can be sent amongst these, or any other infidels. Besides,” he proceeds candidly, “the poor Indians would have had less reason to complain that the English took away their lands, if they had received them by way of portion with their daughters.”

It was, in truth, a great benefit both to the English and to the Indians, when “Bright-Stream-Between-two-Hills”—called in the native dialect “Pocahontas”—married John Rolfe, with the approbation of both races. To this union some of the proudest families in Virginia trace their descent. Poor little Princess! The first romance of America casts its pathetic charm around you. However apocryphal the legend of your saving Smith’s life, it is hard to resist the impression of your cherishing a sentimental attachment for the gallant captain, and a suspicion that you were tricked into a marriage with Rolfe.

Smith records a sad interview with Pocahontas when she was being lionized, under the name of Lady Rebecca, as a royal visitor in London. “Being about this time preparing to set sail for New England,” he writes, “I could not stay to do her that service I desired, and she well deserved; but, hearing she was at Bradford with divers of my friends, I went to see her. After a modest salutation without any bow, she turned about, obscured her face as not seeming well contented. But not long after, she began to talk, and remembered me well what courtesies she had done, saying: ‘You did promise Powhatan what was yours should be his, and he the like to you; you called him Father—being in his land a stranger—and by the same reason so must I doe you.’” Smith objects on the ground of her royal lineage, which had well-nigh brought Rolfe to grief, and she responds: “Were you not afraid to come into my father’s countrie and cause feare in him and all his people but mee, and feare you here I should call you Father? I tell you then I will; and you shall call me childe; and soe will I be forever and ever your countrieman. They did tell me always you were dead, and I knew no other till I came to Plymouth. Yet Powhatan did command Ottamatomakkin to seek you and know the truth, because your countriemen will lie much.” So ended the parting; and soon afterward the poor little Princess died a stranger in a strange land. “She came to Gravesend, to her end and grave.”

The first English wedding on American soil was solemnized between John Laydon, a laborer, and Anne Buras, maid to Mistress Forest. They were “marry’d together” in 1608. Eleven years later came a ship bearing “ye maides,” a company of ninety young women, “pure and uncorrupt,” sent over to Virginia, at the expense of the company in London, to be married to such settlers as were able and willing to support them, and to refund to the company the cost of passage. A little later, sixty more “maides” followed; and though the cost of a wife rose from a hundred and twenty, to a hundred and fifty pounds of tobacco, there was no slackening in the demand. In Maryland, as late as 1660, the market was equally brisk. “The first planters,” says the record, “were so far from expecting money with a woman, that ’twas a common thing for them to buy a deserving wife, that carried good testimonials of her character, at the price of a hundred pound, and make themselves believe they had a bargain.”

We read of an adventurous young lady of some social consequence, being a niece of Daniel Defoe, who, suffering from an unfortunate love-affair in England, ran away from home, and came to Maryland as a “redemptioner.” Her services were engaged by a farmer named Job, in Cecil County, and soon after, according to a frequent custom of the country, she married into the family of her employer. A Maryland record of November 2, 1638, runs thus: “This day came William Lewis, planter, and made oath that he is not recontracted to any other woman than Ursula Gifford; and that there is no impediment why he should not be married to the said Ursula Gifford—and, further, he acknowledged himself to owe unto the Lord Proprietary a thousand pounds of tobacco, in case there be any precontract or other lawful impediment whatsoever, as aforesaid, either on the part of William Lewis or Ursula Gifford.”

This arrangement of making the bridegroom responsible for the good faith of the lady as well as his own, is quite refreshing in these days of equal rights and responsibilities. The woman’s rights question, however, was at the front in Maryland, in the seventeenth century; and the strong-minded woman who introduced it, was Mistress Margaret Brent, cousin to Governor Calvert, who had such confidence in her business sagacity and ability, that he appointed her his executrix, with the brief instructions, “Take all: pay all.” She made application to the Maryland Assembly to grant her a vote in the House for herself, and another as his Lordship’s attorney. The request was peremptorily refused by Governor Greene; but, nothing daunted, “the sd. Mrs Brent protested against all proceedings in this present assembly unlesse shee may be present and have a vote as aforesaid.” Another woman of force in those days was Virlinda Stone. In the Maryland archives still exists a letter from her to Lord Baltimore, praying for an investigation of a fight in Anne Arundel County, during which her husband was wounded. At the end of the business-like document, she adds a fiery and altogether feminine postscript, in which she declares that “Hemans, the master of the Golden Lion, is a very knave: and that will be made plainly for to appeare to your Lordship, for he hath abused my husband most grossly.” Such women as these were not to be trifled with. No wonder Alsop says: “All complimental courtships drest up in critical Rarities are meer strangers to them. Plain wit comes nearest to their genius; so that he that intends to court a Maryland girle, must have something more than the tautologies of a long-winded speech to carry on his design, or else he may fall under the contempt of her frown and his own windy discourse.”

The Virginia women were as high-spirited as their Maryland sisters. They had no idea of being commanded into matrimony. When Governor Nicholson became infatuated with one of the fair daughters of Master Lewis Burwell and demanded her hand with royally autocratic manner, neither she nor her parents were disposed to comply. The suitor became furious, and persisted for years in his determination, which seems to have been as much a matter of pride, as of sentiment. He took pains to wreak his wrath on every one who opposed the match, going so far as to threaten the lives of the unwilling young woman’s father and brother. To Commissary Blair he declared that, if she married any one but himself, he would cut the throats of three men—the bridegroom, the minister, and the justice who issued the license. Strangely enough, the damsel was not attracted by this wild wooing; and, as a candid friend wrote to the furious lover, “It is not here, as in some barbarous countries, where the tender lady is dragged into the Sultan’s arms reeking with the blood of her relatives.” Though this affair created such a stir throughout the Colony of Virginia and lasted so long a time, no record has remained of the young heroine’s after fate, except the fact that she did not become Lady Nicholson; not even her Christian name has come down to posterity, to whom she remains a shadowy divinity.

A noticeable feature of Colonial life in Virginia, is the belleship of widows. The girls seem to have stood no chance against their fascinations. Washington, and Jefferson, and Madison each married one. In the preceding century, Sir William Berkeley, who had brought no lady with him across the water, was taken captive by a young widow of Warwick County, a certain Dame Frances Stevens, who, after thirty-two years of married life, being again left a widow by Berkeley’s death, wedded with her late husband’s secretary, Philip Ludwell—holding fast, however, to her title of Lady Berkeley. Lord Culpeper writes in a letter of 1680, “My Lady Berkeley is married to Mr. Ludwell; and thinks no more of our world.” It is to be hoped that the secretary whom the lady took for her third husband, proved a more amiable companion than the fiery old Governor, whose pride and bitter obstinacy wrought such havoc after Bacon’s rebellion, that the reports of his cruelties echoed to the shores of England. Edmund Cheesman, a follower of Bacon’s, being brought up for trial, Berkeley asked him: “Why did you engage in Bacon’s designs?” Before Cheesman could answer, his young wife, falling on her knees, exclaimed: “My provocation made my husband join in the cause for which Bacon contended. But for me he had never done what he has done. Let me bear the punishment, but let my husband be pardoned!” Where was the chivalry of that Cavalier blood on which Berkeley prided himself? We read that her prayer availed her husband nothing, and procured only insult to herself.

Our sympathy with Bacon, in his rebellion against Berkeley’s tyranny, makes us doubly regretful that he should have stained his career by a deed of cowardice and cruelty. It was one of those blunders worse than crimes, and gave him and his followers the contemptuous appellation of “White Aprons.” When Bacon made his sudden turn on Sir William Berkeley, he established his headquarters at Green Spring, Berkeley’s own mansion. There he threw up breastworks in front of his palisades, and then sent out detachments of horsemen, who scoured the country and brought back to camp the wives of prominent Berkeleyites. Among these dames were Madam Bray, Madam Page, Madam Ballard, and Madam Bacon—the last, the wife of the rebel’s kinsman. Bacon then sent one of the dames to the town under a flag of truce, to inform the husbands that he intended to place them in front of his men while he constructed his earthworks. “The poor gentlewomen were mightily astonished, and neather were their husbands void of amazement at this subtile invention. The husbands thought it indeed wonderful that their innocent and harmless wives should thus be entered a white garde to the Divell”—the Divell, of course, being General Bacon, who, thus protected by The White Aprons, finished his fortifications in security; gaining a reputation for “subtility,” but tarnishing his character for gallantry.

As society grew more stable, it grew also more complex. The buying of wives gave way to sentimental courtships, and men also began to learn the advantages of a single life. In Maryland so many took this view, that we find the old statutes imposing a tax on bachelors over twenty-five years of age, of five shillings, for estates under three hundred pounds sterling, or twenty shillings when over; a tax which seems to have been more successful as a means of raising money than of promoting matrimony; for we find the record of its payment by a surprising number of bachelors, St. Ann’s parish vestry-books alone showing thirty-four such derelicts. Perhaps, however, this celibacy did not indicate so much aversion to marriage, as inability to meet the growing demands for luxury. The obstinate bachelors may have felt with regard to matrimony as Alsop did with regard to liberty, that “without money it is like a man opprest with the gout—every step he takes forward puts him to pain.” The Abbé Robin at a later day says of Annapolis: “Female luxury here exceeds what is known in the provinces of France. A French hair-dresser is a man of importance; it is said a certain dame here, hires one of that craft at a thousand crowns a year salary.” The very rumors of such extravagance must have frightened frugal young men!

The Colonial maiden came into society and married, at an age which now seems surprisingly early. Chief-Justice Marshall met and fell in love with his wife when she was fourteen, and married her at sixteen. An unmarried woman of over twenty-five, was looked upon as a hopeless and confirmed old maid and spoken of, like Miss Wilkins, of Boston, as “a pitiable spectacle.” It may be that this extreme youth of the maids explains the attraction of the widows, who had more social experience. Burnaby writes in a very unhandsome manner of his impressions of the Virginia ladies whom he met in his American tour, and generalizes with true British freedom on slight acquaintance with the facts. He admits grudgingly that the women of Virginia are handsome, “though not to be compared with our fair countrywomen in England. They have but few advantages, and consequently are seldom accomplished. This makes them reserved and unequal to any interesting or refined conversation. They are immoderately fond of dancing, and, indeed, it is almost the only amusement they partake of; but even in this, they discover great want of taste and elegance, and seldom appear with that gracefulness and ease which these movements are so calculated to display. Toward the close of an evening, when the company are pretty well tired with contra-dances, it is usual to dance jigs—a practice originally borrowed, I am informed, from the negroes. The Virginia ladies, excepting these amusements, and now and then a party of pleasure into the woods to partake of a barbecue, cheerfully spend their time in sewing and taking care of their families.”

Another traveller makes a better report, and draws more favorable conclusions.

“Young women are affable with young men in America,” he writes, “and married women are reserved, and their husbands are not as familiar with the girls as they were, when bachelors. If a young man were to take it into his head that his betrothed should not be free and gay in her social intercourse, he would run the risk of being discarded, incur the reputation of jealousy, and would find it very difficult to get married. Yet if a single woman were to play the coquette, she would be regarded with contempt. As this innocent freedom between the sexes diminishes in proportion as society loses its purity and simplicity of manners, as is the case in cities, I desire sincerely that our good Virginia ladies may long retain their liberty entire.”

The Colonial age was the day of elaborate compliment. Gentlemen took time to turn their sentences and polish them neatly, and ladies heard them to the end without suggesting by a word or glance that the climax had been foreseen for the last five minutes, at least. An essay on Woman, by a certain Mr. Thomas, had a great vogue in the eighteenth century, and antedated Tupper’s Poems as a well of sentimental quotation. The Spectator and The Tattler gave the tone to society literature, and enabled the provincial dame to reflect accurately the Lady Betty Modish of London. The beaux, too, took many a leaf from The Spectator in the study of a compliment. When I read of the Colonial maiden poring over the tiny glaze-paper note accompanying a book entitled “The Art of Loving”—in which the writer declares it to be “most convenient, presenting the art of Loving to one who so fully possesses the art of Pleasing”—I am carried back to the days of Sir Charles Grandison.

There is a marked contrast in the social chronicles of the eighteenth century at home and abroad, between what the gentlemen said to the ladies and what they said about them. That wicked Colonel Byrd, for instance, after making himself agreeable to Governor Spotswood’s ladies the whole evening, writes in his journal that their conversation was “like whip sillabub—very pretty, but with nothing in it.” Again he describes himself patronizingly as “prattling with the ladies after a nine o’clock supper.” Yet, underneath all the superficial bowing and scraping of courtesy and compliment, and the jesting asides at the expense of the fair sex, it must be set down to the Cavalier’s credit that he treated womankind with a great tenderness and respect. Woman’s influence made itself felt in private and in public—in the Council, in the Virginia House of Burgesses, and in the Assemblies of Maryland and of Carolina.

The pride and folly of Governor Tryon of Carolina led him to make a demand on the Assembly for an extensive appropriation for the building of a palace at Newbern suitable for the residence of a royal Governor. To obtain this appropriation, Lady Tryon and her sister, the beautiful Esther Wake, used all their blandishments. Lady Tryon gave brilliant balls and dinners, and her sister’s bright eyes rained influence to such good purpose, that the first appropriation and as much more was granted, and the palace was pronounced the most magnificent structure in America. The palace is fallen—its marble mantels, its colonnades, its carved staircases are in ruins; but the name of beautiful Esther Wake is preserved in Wake County.

The chronicles of the Carolinas are full of romance. Here, at Cross Creek, dwelt Flora MacDonald, the heroic rescuer of the Pretender after the disasters of Culloden. It seems a strange chance that brought her from such exciting masquerades, from the companionship of kings and the rôle of heroine on the stage of the great world, to the pioneer’s cottage in the wild woods of the Western wilderness. The only drawback to her career in eighteenth century eyes was that she married and lived happy ever after. The romance of that day demanded a broken heart, and tragedy was always in high favor. Every locality had its story of blighted love and life. The Dismal Swamp, lying on the border between Virginia and Maryland, was a sort of Gretna Green, where many runaway marriages were celebrated. Tradition tells of a lover whose sweetheart died suddenly; and he, driven mad by grief, fancied that she had gone to the Dismal Swamp, where he perished in the search for her.

When Tom Moore was in this country he was impressed by the legend, and set it thus to the music—let us not dare to say the jingle—of his verse:

They made her a grave too cold and damp
For a soul so warm and true,
And she’s gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp,
Where all night long, by her fire-fly lamp
She paddles her white canoe.

And her fire-fly lamp I soon shall see,
Her paddle I soon shall hear.
Long and loving our life shall be,
And I’ll hide the maid in a cypress tree,
When the footsteps of Death draw near.

Real life had its tragedies, too. In the deep wainscoted hall of the Brandon Mansion hangs a portrait of lovely Evelyn Byrd. She sits on a green bank, with a handful of roses and a shepherd’s crook in her lap—her soft, dark eyes look out in pensive sadness as though they could, if they would, tell the story of a maiden’s heart and a life ended untimely by unhappy love. One story says she broke her heart for Parke Custis, who left her to wear the willow, and married afterward the Martha Dandridge, who in the whirligig of time became Lady Washington. Another rumor connects her name with that of the Earl of Peterborough, who loved her deeply, so the story runs; but his creed was not hers, and her father, Colonel Byrd, would not consent to the marriage. The maiden yielded to her father’s will, but pined away and died; and there, in the Westover burying-ground, she lies under a ponderous stone, which records this epitaph:

“Alas, Reader,
We can detain nothing, however valued,
From unrelenting death,
Beauty, Fortune, or exalted Honour—
See here a proof!”

I cannot help feeling that all these might have been detained on earth to a ripe age, had the maiden been left free to decide the most important question of her life to her liking; for, in a letter written by Colonel Byrd when Evelyn was a slip of a girl, I read concerning the maiden, “She has grown a great romp and enjoys robust health.” Yet a few years later, the robust romp has faded to a shadow, and is laid away in the family graveyard, and only her portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller, remains to appeal to the sentiment and sympathy of posterity.

The gentle Evelyn Byrd was not the only one whom the traditions of the Colonial Cavalier credit with carrying to the grave a heart scarred with the wounds of unhappy love. Lord Fairfax, who lived to be over sixty and kept open house at Belvoir, where Washington visited him and kept him company in riding to hounds over hill and dale; Lord Fairfax—with his gaunt, tall frame; his gray, near-sighted eyes, and prominent aquiline nose, little outward resemblance as he might bear to the original of the almond-eyed portrait at Brandon—resembled her at least in a wounded heart and a broken career. In his youth, this solitary Virginia recluse had been a brilliant man-about-town in the gay world of London. He had held a commission in “the Blues”; he had known the famous men of the day, he had dabbled in literature, and contributed a paper now and then to the Spectator. When his career of fashion was at its height, he paid his addresses to a young lady of rank and was accepted. The day for the wedding was fixed—the establishment furnished, even to equipage and servants—when the inconstant bride-elect, dazzled by a ducal coronet, broke her engagement. The blow wrought a complete change in the jilted lover. From that time he shrank from the society of all women, and finally came over to Virginia to hide his hurt in the Western forests.

Spite of such traditions of melancholy, the actual career of most of the people of those times forms a curious contrast to the ideals of their poetry and fiction. With scarcely an exception, they survived their unsuccessful love affairs, and lived in prosperous serenity with others than the first rulers of their hearts.

There is Jefferson, for instance. Almost the first letter in his published correspondence is devoted to a confession of his tender passion for a young lady dwelling in the town of Williamsburg. Yet her name is not the one that stands next his own on the marriage register. This first love of his was a Miss ’Becca Burwell. We chance upon the young collegian’s secret as we open his letter to John Page, written on Christmas day, 1762. He begins jocularly enough, yet only half in fun after all: “I am sure if there is such a thing as a Devil in this world, he must have been here last night, and have had some hand in contriving what happened to me. Do you think the cursed rats (at his instigation, I suppose) did not eat up my pocket-book, which was in my pocket, within a foot of my head? And not contented with plenty for the present, they carried away my jemmy-worked silk garters and half a dozen new minuets I had just got.” “Tell Miss Alice Corbin,” he adds, “that I verily believe the rats knew I was to win a pair of garters from her, or they never would have been so cruel as to carry mine away.”

Christmas day, indeed, found him in sorry case. These losses he could have borne, but worse remained to tell: “You know it rained last night, or if you do not know it, I am sure I do. When I went to bed I laid my watch in the usual place; and going to take her up after I arose this morning, I found her in the same place, ’tis true, but—quantum mutatus ab illo—all afloat in water, let in at a leak in the roof of the house, and as silent and still as the rats that had eat my pocket-book. Now, you know, if chance had had anything to do in this matter, there were a thousand other spots where it might have chanced to leak as well as this one, which was perpendicularly over my watch. But, I’ll tell you, it’s my opinion that the Devil came and bored the hole over it on purpose.” It was not the injury to his timepiece which drew forth these violent, half-real, half-jesting objurgations; no, there was a sentimental reason behind. The water had soaked a watch-paper and a picture, so that when he attempted to remove them, he says: “My cursed fingers gave them such a rent as I fear I shall never get over. I would have cried bitterly, but that I thought it beneath the dignity of a man!” The mystery of the original of the picture and the maker of the watch-paper is soon explained, for a page or two further on, he trusts that Miss ’Becca Burwell will give him another watch-paper of her own cutting, which he promises to esteem much more, though it were a plain round one, than the nicest in the world cut by other hands. “However,” he adds, “I am afraid she would think this presumption, after my suffering the other to get spoiled.”

A very real and tumultuous passion this of young Tom Jefferson’s! Every letter he writes to his friend teems with reference to her. Now she is R. B.; again Belinda; and again, with that deep secrecy of dog Latin so dear to the collegian, she figures as Campana in die (bell in day); or, still more mysteriously, as Adnileb, written in Greek that the vulgar world may not pry into the sacred secret. Oh, youth, youth, how like is the nineteenth century to the eighteenth, and that to its preceding, till we reach the courtship of Adam and Eve!

In October, ’63, he writes to his old confidant: “In the most melancholy fit that ever any poor soul was, I sit down to write you. Last night, as merry as agreeable company and dancing with Belinda in the Apollo could make me, I never could have thought the succeeding sun could have seen me so wretched as I now am!... I was prepared to say a great deal. I had dressed up in my own mind such thoughts as occurred to me in as moving a language as I knew how, and expected to have performed in a tolerably creditable manner. But, good God! when I had an opportunity of venting them, a few broken sentences, uttered in great disorder and interrupted with pauses of uncommon length, were the too visible marks of my strange confusion.” The framer of the Declaration of Independence, whose eloquence startled the world, found himself tongue-tied and stammering in a declaration of love to a provincial maiden.

At twenty-nine or thirty Jefferson had recovered enough to go a-courting again, to Mistress Martha Skelton, a young and childless widow, of such great beauty that many rivals contested with him the honor of winning her hand. The story goes that two of these rivals met one evening in Mrs. Skelton’s drawing-room. While waiting for her to enter, they heard her singing in an adjoining room, to the accompaniment of Jefferson’s violin. The love-song was so expressively executed that the admirers perceived that their doom was sealed, and, picking up their cocked hats, they stole out without waiting for the lady.

If Jefferson in his younger days was soft-hearted toward the gentler sex, his susceptibility was as nothing compared to Washington’s. The sentimental biography of that great man would be more entertaining than the story of his battles, or his triumphs of government. There are evidences in his own handwriting that, before he was fifteen years old, he had conceived a passion for a fair unknown beauty, so serious as to disturb his otherwise well-regulated mind, and make him seriously unhappy. His sentimental poems written at that age, are neither better nor worse than the productions of most boys of fifteen. One of them hints that bashfulness has prevented his divulging his passion:

“Ah, woe is me, that I should love and conceal!
Long have I wished and never dare reveal.”

At the mature age of sixteen, he writes to his “dear friend Robin”: “my residence is at present at his Lordship’s, where 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 that’s only adding fuel to the fire, it makes me the 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 alleviate my sorrows by burying that chaste and troublesome passion in the grave of oblivion.” This “chaste and troublesome passion” had subsided enough, when he went as a young officer to New York in all the gorgeousness of uniform and trappings, to enable him to fall in love with Miss Mary Phillipse, whom he met at the house of her sister, Mrs. Beverly Robinson. She was gay, she was rich, she was beautiful, and Washington might have made her the offer of his heart and hand; but suddenly an express from Winchester brought word to New York of a French and Indian raid, and young Washington hastened to rejoin his command, leaving the capture of the lady to Captain Morris. Three years later we find him married to the Widow Custis, with two children and a fortune of fifteen thousand pounds sterling. Shortly after, he writes of himself from Mount Vernon, temperately enough, as “fixed in this seat with an agreeable partner for life,” and we hear no more of amatory verses in honor of his Lowland Beauty, or flirtations with fashionable young dames in New York. But when the Marquis de Chastellux announced his marriage, Washington wrote him in a vein of humor rather foreign to him, and bespeaking a genial sympathy in his expectations of happiness. “I saw by the eulogium you often made on the happiness of domestic life in America,” he writes, “that you had swallowed the bait, and that you would as surely be taken one day or other, as that you were a philosopher and a soldier. So your day has at length come! I am glad of it with all my heart and soul. It is quite good enough for you. Now you are well served for coming to fight in favor of the American rebels all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, by catching that terrible contagion—domestic felicity—which, like the small-pox or plague, a man can have only once in his life.”

Of all the joyous festivals among the Southern Colonists, none was so mirthful as a wedding. The early records of the wreck of the Sea Venture and the tedious and dangerous delay on the Bermudas mention that in even that troublous time they held one “merry English wedding.” In any new land marriages and births are joyful events. All that is needed for prosperity is multiplication of settlers, and so it is quite natural that the setting up of a new household should be celebrated with rejoicing and merry-making.

In one respect the colonists broke with the home traditions. They insisted on holding their marriage ceremonies at home rather than in church, and no minister could move their determination. As civilization advanced, and habits grew more luxurious, the marriage festivities grew more elaborate and formal. The primitive customs gave way to pomp and display, till at length a wedding became an affair of serious expense. “The house of the parents,” says Scharf in his “Chronicles of Baltimore,” “would be filled with company to dine; the same company would stay to supper. For two days punch was dealt out in profusion. The gentlemen saw the groom on the first floor, and then ascended to the second floor, where they saw the bride; there every gentleman, even to one hundred a day, kissed her.”

A Virginia wedding in the olden time was a charming picture—the dancers making merry in the wide halls or on the lawn; the black servants dressed in fine raiment for the occasion and showing their white teeth in that enjoyment only possible to a negro; the jolly parson acting at once as priest and toast-master; the groom in ruffles and velvet, and the bride in brocade and jewels. Never again will our country have so picturesque a scene to offer. Let us recall it while we may!

His Dress

If you have any curiosity to know what clothes these first Colonial Cavaliers wore, you may learn very easily by reading over the “particular of Apparrell” upon which they agreed as necessary to the settler bound for Virginia.

The list includes: “1 dozen Points, a Monmouth cap, 1 waste-coat, 3 falling bands, 1 suit of canvase, 3 shirts, 1 suit of frieze, 1 suit of cloth, 4 paire shoes, 3 paire Irish stockings, and 1 paire garters.” Besides these he would need “1 Armor compleat, light, a long peece, a sword, a belt and a Bandelier,” which may be reckoned among his wearing apparel, for it would be long before the settler could be safe without them when he ventured outside the palisade.

Englishmen in those days were fond of elaborate dress. It was the period of conical hats, and rosetted shoes, of doublets and sashes and padded trunk-hose, which his Majesty, James the First, much affected because they filled out his ill-shaped legs. Suits of clothes were a frequent form of gift and bequest. Captain John Smith’s will declares, “I give unto Thomas Packer, my best suite of aparrell, of a tawney colour, viz., hose, doublet, jerkin and cloake.”

The peruke began its all-conquering career in England, under the Stuarts. Elizabeth, it is true, had owned eighty suits of hair, and Mary of Scotland had varied her hair to match her dresses. But a defect of the French Dauphin introduced the use of the wig for men as well as women, and false hair became the rage throughout the world of fashion. A London peruke-maker advertised: “Full-bottom wigs, full bobs, minister’s bobs, naturals, half-naturals, Grecian flyes, Curleyroys, airey levants, qu perukes and baggwiggs.” The customer must have been hard to please, who could find nothing to suit his style in such a stock.

The settlers in Colonial America did not allow themselves such luxuries of the toilet as a variety of wigs, though a well-planned peruke or “a bob” might have been a good device to trick the tomahawk of the savage into a bloodless scalping. With the poorer people, a single wig for Sunday wear sufficed, and was replaced on week days by a cap, generally of linen.

The Colonial dames, being too far from Court to copy the low-necked dresses, the stomachers and farthingales of the inner circle of fashion, wore instead, huge ruffs, full, short petticoats, and long, flowing sleeves, over tight undersleeves. Even in the wilderness, however, they retained a feminine fondness for gay attire.

John Pory, a clever scapegrace intimately acquainted with gaming-tables and sponging-houses in London, but figuring in Virginia as secretary to Governor Yeardley, wrote home to Sir Dudley Carleton, “That your Lordship may know that we are not the veriest beggars in the world, our cow-keeper here of James Cittie, on Sundays goes accoutred all in fresh flaming silk, and a wife of one that in England professed the black art, not of a scholar but of a collier of Croydon, wears her rough beaver hat with a fair pearl hat-band and a silken suit, thereto correspondent.”

Lively John was probably lying a little in the cause of immigration, but it is certain that the desire for fine clothes early called for a check, and at an early session of the Virginia House of Burgesses, a sumptuary law was passed “against excess in apparell,” directing “that every man be ceffed in the church for all publique contributions—if he be unmarried, according to his own apparrell; if he be married, according to his own and his wives, or either of their apparell.” Here, surely, is a suggestion from the past, for the fashionable church of the present.

A later law in the provinces enacts that “no silke stuffe in garments or in peeces, except for hoods or scarfes, nor silver or gold lace, nor bonelace of silke or thread, nor ribbands wrought with silver or gold in them, shall be brought into this country to sell, after the first of February.” A Maryland statute proposes that two sorts of “cloaths” only be worn, one for summer, the other for winter. But this was going too far, and the law was never enforced.

It was permitted to none but Members of the Council and Heads of Hundreds in Virginia to wear the coveted gold on their clothes, or to wear any silk not made by themselves. This last prohibition was intended not so much to discourage pomp and pride, as to stimulate the infant industry of silk production, which from the beginning had been a pet scheme of the colonists. They had imported silk-worms and planted mulberry trees; and as an inducement to go into the business, the Burgesses offered a premium of five thousand pounds of tobacco to any one making a hundred pounds of wound silk in any one year.

His Gracious Majesty, Charles the Second, sent to his loyal subjects in Virginia, a letter, still to be seen in the college library at Williamsburg. It is written by his Majesty’s private secretary and signed with the sacred “Charles R.” It is addressed to Governor Berkeley, and runs:

“Trusty & Wellbeloved, We Greet You Well. Wee have received w^th much content ye dutifull respects of Our Colony in y^e present lately made us by you & y^e councell there, of y^e first product of y^e new Manufacture of Silke, which as a mark of Our Princely acceptation of yo^r duteys & for y^r particular encouragement, etc.—Wee have commanded to be wrought up for y^e use of Our owne person.”

From this letter has sprung the legend, dear to loyalist hearts, that the robe worn by Charles at his coronation was woven of Virginia silk.

So much material was needed “for y^e use of our owne person,” that the offering of silk was no doubt very welcome. The King’s favorite, Buckingham, had twenty-seven suits, one of them of white uncut velvet, set all over with diamonds and worn with diamond hat-bands, cockades and ear-rings, and yoked with ropes and knots of pearls.

It was an era of wild extravagance. Not satisfied with the elegance of the time of Charles First, his son’s courtiers added plumes to the wide-brimmed hats, enlarged the bows on the shoes, donned great wigs, loaded their vests with embroidery, and over their coats hung short cloaks, worth a fortune.

The women dressed as befitted the court of a dissolute king. Their artificial curls were trained in “heart-breakers” and “love-locks.” The whiteness of their skin was enhanced by powder and set off by patches. Their shoulders rose above bodices of costly brocade hung with jewels which had sometimes ruined both buyer and wearer.

The Puritans, by their opposition to the Court, escaped the evil influences of these extravagances. But the Colonial Cavaliers, who bowed before the King lower than the courtiers at home, of course imitated his dress, so far as their fortunes allowed. Every frigate that came into port at Jamestown or St. Maries brought the latest London fashions. A little before Colonel Fitzhugh in Virginia was ordering his Riding Camblet cloak from London, Mr. Samuel Pepys was writing in his journal, “This morning came home my fine camlete cloak with gold buttons.” While this gentleman was attiring himself in his new shoulder-belt and tunique laced with silk, “and so very handsome to church,” Sir William Berkeley and Governor Calvert were opening their eyes of a Sunday morning three thousand miles away, and making ready to get into their rosetted shoes, and to lace their breeches and hose together with points as fanciful as his, and, like him, perhaps, having their heads “combed by y^e maide for powder and other troubles.” No doubt Lady Berkeley, in her fine lace bands, her coverchef and deep veil, was as fine as Madam Pepys in her paragon pettycoat and “just a corps.”

With the beginning of the eighteenth century, the hoop appeared, and carried all before it, in more senses than one. “The ladies’ petticoats,” I read in the notes of a contemporary of the fashion, “are now blown up into a most enormous concave.” Over this concave the ladies wore, on ceremonious occasions, such as a ball at Governor Spotswood’s or an assembly at Annapolis, trailing gowns of heavy brocade, many yards in length. Dragging these skirts behind, and bearing aloft on their heads a towering structure of feathers, ribbons and lace, it was no wonder these dames preferred slow and stately measures. At their side, or as near as the spreading hoop permitted, moved their favored cavaliers, their coat-skirts stiff with buckram, their swords dangling between their knees, their breeches of red plush or black satin, so tight that they fitted without a wrinkle.

Men of that day took their dress very seriously. Washington, who had doubtless gained many ideas of fashion from the modish young officers of Braddock’s army, ordered his costumes with as much particularity as he afterward conducted his campaigns. Shortly before he started with his little cavalcade of negro servants on his five-hundred-mile ride to Massachusetts, in 1756, he sent over to a correspondent in London an order for an extensive wardrobe. He wanted “2 complete livery suits for servants, with a spare cloak and all other necessary trimmings for two suits more.” He omits no detail. “I would have you,” he writes, “choose the livery by our arms; only as the field is white, I think the clothes had better not be quite so, but nearly like the inclosed. The trimmings and facings of scarlet, and a scarlet waistcoat. If livery lace is not quite disused, I should be glad to have the cloaks laced. I like that fashion best, and two silver-laced hats for the above servants.”

In addition to this, he wishes “1 set of horse-furniture with livery lace, with the Washington crest on the housings, etc. The cloak to be of the same piece and color of the clothes, 3 gold and scarlet sword-knots, 3 silver and blue ditto, 1 fashionable gold-laced hat.”

It is not strange that the gallant young officer made a sensation among the dames and damsels of Philadelphia and New York as he journeyed northward, nor that Mistress Mary Phillipse nearly lost her heart to the wearer of the gold and scarlet sword-knots and the fashionable gold-laced hat.

All society went in gorgeous array in those gay days, before color had been banished to suit the grim taste of the Puritan, and to meet the economical maxims of Poor Richard. Judges, on the bench, wore robes of scarlet, faced with black velvet, exchanged in summer for thinner ones of silk. Etiquette demanded equally formal costume for advocates at the bar. Patrick Henry, who began by indifference to dress, even rushing into court fresh from the chase, with mud and mire clinging to his leather breeches, at length yielded to social pressure, and donned a full suit of black velvet in which to address the court; and, on one occasion at least, a peach-colored coat effectively set off by a bag-wig, powdered, as pompous Mr. Wirt observes, “in the highest style of forensic fashion.”

A satirical description sets forth the dress of a dandy in the middle of the eighteenth century, as consisting of “a coat of light green, with sleeves too small for the arms, and buttons too big for the sleeves; a pair of Manchester fine stuff breeches, without money in the pockets; clouded silk stockings, but no legs; a club of hair behind, larger than the head that carries it; a hat of the size of a sixpence, on a block not worth a farthing.”

In October, 1763, the free-school at Annapolis was broken into by robbers, and the wardrobe of the master stolen. When I remember the scanty salaries paid to these schoolmasters, I look with surprise on the inventory, which the victim of the robbery publishes. Here we have a superfine blue broadcloth frock coat, a new superfine scarlet waistcoat bound with gold lace, a pair of green worsted breeches lined with dimity, besides a ruffled shirt, pumps, and doe-skin breeches. A very pretty wardrobe, I should say, for the teacher of a Colonial village-school!

It was a picturesque world in those days. The gentry rode gayly habited in bright-colored velvets and ruffles; the clergy swept along in dignified black; the judges wore their scarlet robes, and the mechanics and laborers were quite content to don a leather apron over their buckskin breeches and red-flannel jacket. The slaves in Carolina were forbidden to wear anything, except when in livery, finer than negro-cloth, duffils, kerseys, osnaburgs, blue linen, check-linen, coarse garlix or calicoes, checked cotton, or Scotch plaid. This prohibition was quite unnecessary, as the slave thought himself very lucky if he were clad in a new and whole garment of any sort.

Even paupers had their distinctive badges. A Virginia statute commands that every person who shall receive relief from the parish, and be sent to the poorhouse, shall, upon the shoulder of the right sleeve of his, or her, uppermost garment, in an open and visible manner, wear a badge with the name of the parish to which he, or she, belongs, cut either in blue, red, or green cloth, at the will of the vestry or churchwardens. If any unfortunate were afflicted with pride as well as poverty and refused to wear this badge of pauperism, he was subject, by the law, to a whipping, not to exceed five lashes.

The students of William and Mary College were required to wear academical dress as soon as they had passed “y^e grammar school,” and thus another costume was added to the moving tableaux on the street of Williamsburg.

In the college-books, I find it resolved by the Faculty in 1765 that Mrs. Foster be appointed stocking-mender in the college, and that she be paid annually the sum of £12, provided she furnishes herself with lodging, diet, fire, and candles. Considering the length of stockings in those days, and assuming that the nature of boys has not materially changed, I cannot help thinking the salary somewhat meagre for the duties involved. Stockings, however, were less troublesome than shirts. A Mrs. Campbell sends her nephews back to school accompanied by a note explaining that she returns all their clothes except eleven shirts, not yet washed.

If the clothes of boys were troublesome, those of girls were more so. Madam Mason, as guardian of her children, sends in an account, wherein the support of each child is reckoned at a thousand pounds of tobacco yearly. Her son, Thomson, is charged with linen and ruffled shirts, and her daughter, Mary, with wooden-heeled shoes, petticoats, one hoop-petticoat, and linen. We may be sure that the needling on those petticoats and ruffled skirts would be a reproach, in its dainty fineness, to the machine-made garments of our age.

Little Dolly Payne, who afterward became Mrs. Madison and mistress of the White House, trotted off to school in her childhood (so her biographer tells us), equipped with “a white linen mask to keep every ray of sunshine from the complexion, a sun-bonnet sewed on her head every morning by her careful mother, and long gloves covering the hands and arms.”

Gentlewomen, big and little, in y^e olden time, seem to have had an inordinate fear of the sunshine, as is evidenced by their long gloves, their veils, and those riding-masks of cloth or velvet, which must have been most uncomfortable to keep in place, even with the aid of the little silver mouthpieces held between the teeth. But vanity enables people to endure many ills. In a correspondence between Miss Anna Bland in Virginia, and her brother Theodorick in London, the young lady writes: “My Papa has sent for me a dress and a pair of stays. I should be glad if you will be peticular (sic) in the choice of them. Let the stays be very stiff bone, and much gored at the hips, and the dress any other color except yellow.”

No doubt, the consciousness of looking well, sustained the young martyr, as she gasped through the minuet, in her new dress and her stiff stays, drawn tight at home by the aid of the bed-post. The first directions to the attendant in a case of swooning, so common in our great-grandmothers’ lifetime, was to cut the stays, that the imprisoned lungs might get room to breathe once more.

Human nature is oddly inconsistent. These people, who found it incomprehensible that savages should tattoo their bodies, hang beads round their necks, and wear ornaments of snakes and rats hung by the tails through their ears and noses, decked themselves with jewelry, wore wigs and patches, and pierced their ears for barbaric rings of gold or precious stones. I protest I don’t know which would have looked queerer to the other, the Indian squaw or the Colonial belle of the eighteenth century; but, from the artistic standpoint, the advantage was all with the child of nature.

In a grave business letter, written to Washington on matters of state by George Mason, the correspondent adds: “P.S. I shall take it as a particular favor if you’ll be kind enough to get me two pairs of gold snaps made at Williamsburg, for my little girls. They are small rings with a joint in them, to wear in the ears, instead of ear-rings—also a pair of toupée tongs.”

It is a pleasant glimpse we thus gain of one great statesman writing to another, and turning away from public enterprises to remember the private longings of the two little maidens at home, whose hearts are to be gladdened, though the flesh suffers, by these bits of finery.

It was not little girls alone who were willing to endure discomfort in the cause of personal appearance. Washington’s false teeth still remain, a monument of his fortitude. They are a set of “uppers and unders” carved in ivory, inserted in a ponderous plate, with clamps in the roof that must have caused torture to the inexperienced mouth. The upper set is connected with the lower by a spiral spring, and the two are arranged to be held in place by the tongue. No one but the hero of Trenton and Valley Forge, could have borne such an affliction and preserved his equanimity.

Tooth-brushes are a modern luxury. In the old times, the most genteel were content to rub the teeth with a rag covered with chalk or snuff, and there was more than a suspicion of effeminacy in a man’s cleaning his teeth at all. It is not strange that there was such a demand for the implanted teeth which Dr. Le Mayeur introduced toward the end of the century.

I think it may be fairly claimed that the nineteenth century has marked a great advance in personal cleanliness. To this, as much as anything, except perhaps the use of rubber clothing, we owe its increase of longevity. It is impossible to overestimate the importance to modern hygiene of water-proof substances, keeping the feet and body dry. Pattens and clogs were of service in their day and generation, but they were a clumsy contrivance as compared with the light overshoes of India-rubber. It was not till 1772 that the first efforts were made in Baltimore to introduce the use of umbrellas. “These, like tooth-brushes,” writes Scharf, “were at first ridiculed as effeminate, and were only introduced by the vigorous efforts of the doctors, who recommended them chiefly as shields from the sun and a defence against vertigo and prostration from heat. The first umbrellas came from India. They were made of coarse oiled linen, stretched over sticks of rattan, and were heavy and clumsy, but they marked a wonderful step in the direction of hygienic dress. Before their introduction, ministers and doctors, who, more than any one else in the community, were called to face the winter rains, wore a cape of oiled linen, called a roquelaire.”

If the dress of the period before the Revolution was not hygienic, it was handsome, and eminently picturesque, as the old portraits of the last century show. The universally becoming ruffles of lace were in vogue, and women still young wore dainty caps, whose delicate lace, falling over the hair, lent softness and youth to the features. Old ladies were not unknown as now, but, at an age when the nineteenth century woman of fashion is still frisking about in the costume of a girl of twenty, the Colonial dame adopted the dress and manners which she conceived suited to her age and dignity. Here, for instance, is the evidence of a portrait, marked on the stretcher, “Amy Newton, aged 45, 1770, John Durand, pinxit.” The lady wears an ermine-trimmed cloak draped about her shoulders, over a bodice, lace-trimmed and cut square in the neck. The lace-bordered cap falls as usual over the matron’s hair. There is, to me, something rather fine and dignified in the assumption of a matronly dress as a matter of pride and choice. In one respect the Colonial dames, old and young, were gayly attired. Their feet were clad in rainbow hues of brilliant reds and greens and their dresses were generally cut to show to advantage the high-heeled slipper and clocked stocking of bright color.

Washington’s order-book forms an excellent guide to the prevailing modes of the day. The orders call for rich coats and waistcoats and cocked hats for himself; and for Mrs. Washington, a salmon tabby velvet, fine flowered lawn aprons, white callimancos hoes, perfumed powder, puckered petticoats, and black velvet riding masks. Master Custis is fitted out with two hair bags and a whole piece of ribbon, while the servants are provided with fifty ells of osnabergs (a coarse cloth made of flax and tow manufactured at Osnaberg, in Germany, and much in vogue for servants’ wear).

The goods of the time, for high and low, were made to outlast more than one generation. Charles Carroll, of Carrollton, was betrothed in his youth to a beautiful young lady. The wedding-dress was ordered from London, but before its arrival the bride elect had died, and the dress was laid aside. A century later, it appeared at a fancy dress ball, its fabric untarnished, and untouched by time. It was worth while to pay high prices for such stuffs. In many a household to-day is cherished some bit of the brocades, sarcenets, shalloons, and tammies worn by our great-grandmothers and their mothers.

In the Maryland Gazette, somewhere in the middle of the last century, Catherine Rathel, milliner, from London, advertises a tempting assortment of white satin, India and other chintzes, calico, gingham, cloaks, cardinal’s hats, flowered gauze aprons, bonnets, caps, égrettes, fillets, breast-flowers, fashionable ribbands, buttons and loops, silk hose, superfine white India stockings, box and ivory combs.

The firm of Rivington & Brown present an equally attractive display for gentlemen: “An importation of hats, gold and silver-laced, and cocked by his Majesty’s Hatter. London-made pumps and boot-garters, silk or buff sword-belts and gorgets, newest style paste shoe-buckles, gold seals, snuff-boxes of tortoise-shell, leather, or papier-maché.”

Whatever luxuries or elegances of the toilet a man of fashion might possess, his snuff-box was his chief pride. This was the weapon with which he fought the bloodless battles of the drawing-room and, armed with it, he felt himself a Cavalier indeed. The nice study of the times and seasons when it should be tapped, when played with, when offered or accepted, and when haughtily thrust into the pocket, marked the gentleman of the old school. But one use of the snuff-box, I am certain, was never devised by either Steele or Lilie, but was left for the brain or nerves of a Colonial dame to invent. A widow, left alone and unprotected, occupied that ground-floor room generally designated in the Colonial house as the parlor-chamber. Fearing firearms more than robbers, she armed herself with a large snuff-box, which, in case of any suspicious noise in the night, she was wont to click loudly, in imitation of the cocking of a gun. The effect on the hypothetical robbers was instantaneous, and they never disturbed her twice in the same night.

Colonial dress, as we advance toward the time of the Revolution, grows simpler. Wigs fall by their own weight, and men begin to wear their own hair, drawn back and fastened in dignified fashion with a bow of broad ribbon, generally black. Except for ruffled shirts and deep cuffs, the costume of society approaches the sobriety of to-day, and the lack of money and threat of war subdue the dress even of the women. The military alone still keep up the pomp and circumstance of costume worn by all men in the Stuart era. In 1774, the Fairfax Independent Company of Volunteers meet in Virginia, and resolve to gather at stated seasons for practice of military exercise and discipline. It is further resolved that their dress shall be a uniform of blue turned up with buff, with plain yellow metal buttons, buff waistcoat, and breeches, and white stockings; and furnished with good flint-lock and bayonet, sling cartouch box and tomahawk.

Washington’s orders from Fort Cumberland, dated the seventeenth of September, 1775, prescribe the uniform to be worn by the Virginia Regiment in the opening struggle: “Every officer of the Virginia Regiment to provide himself, as soon as he can conveniently, with suit of Regimentals of good blue Cloath; the Coat to be faced and cuffed with scarlet, and trimmed with Silver; a scarlet waistcoat, with silver Lace; blue Breeches, and a silver-laced hat, if to be had, for Camp or Garrison duty. Besides this, each officer to provide himself with a common soldier’s Dress for Detachments and Duty in the Woods.”

In looking back to the beginning of the Revolutionary War, when that great wrench was made which separated America from the parent country, we have a feeling that men’s minds were wholly occupied with the tremendous issues at stake; yet, as we study the old records, we find the same buying and selling, the planting and reaping, the same pondering and planning of dress and the trifles of daily life going on much in the old fashion. In Jefferson’s private note-book, under date of July 4th, 1776, the day of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, I find, entered in his own hand, the item: “For seven pairs of women’s gloves, twenty shillings.”

Even so do great things and small jostle one another in this strange world of ours, and a woman’s glove lies close to the document which changed the fate of nations.

News, Trade and Travel

In the early days, the highways of the Cavalier Colonies were the broad waters of bay and sound; their by-ways, the innumerable rivers and creeks; and their toll-gates, the ports of entry. Road-making was tedious and costly, and the settlers saw no reason for wasting time and energy in the undertaking, when nature had spread her pathways at their feet, and they needed only to step into a canoe, or a skiff manned by black oarsmen, to glide from one plantation to another; or to hoist sail in a pinnace for distant settlements. Many animals travel, but man is the only one who packs a trunk, and, except a few like the nautilus and the squirrel, the only one who sails a boat. There is a sentiment connected with a ship, which no other conveyance can ever have. The very names of those old colonial vessels are redolent of “amber-greece,” “pearle,” and treasure, of East India spices and seaweed

“From Bermuda’s reefs, and edges
Of sunken ledges
In some far-off bright Azore.”

The history of the colonies might be written in the story of their ships. There were The Good Speed, The Discovery, and The Susan Constant, which preceded the world-famous Half Moon and Mayflower to the new world. There were The Ark and The Dove that brought over Lord Baltimore and his colonists; The Sea-Venture which went to wreck on the Somer Isles; and The Patience, and The Deliverance which brought her crew safe to Virginia. These were the pioneers, followed by a long line of staunch craft, large and small, from the Golden Lyon to The Peggy Stewart, which discharged her cargo of taxed tea into Chesapeake Bay.

Many ships in those days were named, as we name chrysanthemums, in honor of some prominent man or fair dame. These good folk must have followed the coming and going of their namesakes with curious interest. The sight of a sail on the horizon never lost its excitement, for every ship brought some wild tale of adventure. The story of shipwreck “on the still vexed Bermoothes,” and the wonderful escape of Gates and Somers, with their crew, has been made famous forever by the tradition that it suggested to Shakespeare the plot of The Tempest; but every “frygat” that touched at Jamestown or Annapolis brought accounts almost as thrilling, of storm and stress, of fighting tempests with a crew reduced by scurvy to three or four active seamen, of running for days from a Spanish caravel or a French pickaroune.

The Margaret and John set sail for America early in the seventeenth century, carrying eighty passengers, besides sailors, and armed with “eight Iron peeces and a Falcon.” When she reached the “Ile of Domenica,” the captain entered a harbor, that the men might stretch their limbs on dry land, “having been eleven weeks pestered in this vnwholesome ship.” Here, to their misfortune, they found two large ships flying Hollander colors, but proving to be Spaniards. These enemies sent a volley of shot which split the oars and made holes in the boats, yet failed to strike a man on the Margaret and John.

“Perceiving what they were,” writes one of the English crew, “we fitted ourselves the best we could to prevent a mischief: seeing them warp themselves to windward, we thought it not good to be boarded on both sides at an anchor; we intended to set saile, but the Vice-Admiral battered so hard at our starboard side, that we fell to our businesse, and answered their vnkindnesse with such faire shot from a demiculvering, that shot her betweene wind and water, whereby she was glad to leave us and her Admirall together.” The Admiral then bespoke them, and demanded a surrender; to which the sturdy English replied that they had no quarrel with the King of Spain, and asked only to go their way unmolested, but as they would do no wrong, assuredly they would take none. The Spaniards answered these bold words with another volley of shot, returned with energy by the English guns.

“The fight continued halfe an houre, as if we had been invironed with fire and smoke, untill they discovered the waste of our ship naked, where they bravely boorded us, loofe for loofe, hasting with pikes and swords to enter; but it pleased God so to direct our Captaine and encourage our men with valour, that our pikes being formerly placed under our halfe deck, and certaine shot lying close for that purpose under the port holes, encountered them so rudely, that their fury was not onely rebated, but their hastinesse intercepted, and their whole company beaten backe; many of our men were hurt, but I am sure they had two for one.” Thus, all day and all night, the unequal battle continued, till at length the doughty little British vessel fairly fought off her two enemies, and they fell sullenly back and ran near shore to mend their leaks, while the Margaret and John stood on her course.

It is hard, in these days, when the high seas are as safe as city streets, to realize the condition of terror to which merchantmen were reduced, two hundred years ago, by the rumor of a black flag seen in the offing, or of some “pyrat” lying in wait outside the harbor. In Governor Spotswood’s time, Williamsburg was thrown into a state of great excitement by the report that the dreaded buccaneer John Theach, known by the name of Blackbeard, had been seen cruising along the coasts of Virginia and Carolina. The Governor rose to the occasion, however. He sent out Lieutenant Maynard with two ships, to look for Blackbeard. Maynard found him and boarded his vessel in Pamlico Sound. The pirate was no coward. He ordered one of his men to stand beside the powder-magazine with a lighted match, ready, at a signal from him, to blow up friends and foes together. The signal never came, for a lucky shot killed Blackbeard on the spot and his crew surrendered. They might as well have died with their leader, for thirteen of them were hanged at Williamsburg. Blackbeard’s skull was rimmed with silver and made into a ghastly drinking-cup, and we hear no more of pirates in those waters.

The protection of vessels was not the only reason for policing the waterways. Smuggling was much more common than piracy, and the laws against it were the harder to enforce, because the entire community was secretly in sympathy with the offenders. In the earliest Maryland records is Lord Baltimore’s commission, giving his lieutenant authority to “appoint fit places for public ports for lading, shipping, unlading and discharging all goods and merchandizes to be imported or exported into or out of our said province, and to prohibit the shipping or discharging of any goods or merchandizes whatsoever in all other places.” Any one violating the shipping law was subject to heavy fines and imprisonment.

In Virginia the statutes compelled ships to stop at Jamestown, or other designated ports, before breaking bulk at the private landings along the river. Who can picture the excitement in those lonely plantations when the frigate tied up at the wharf, and began to unload from its hold, its cargo of tools for the farm, furniture for the house, and, best of all, the square white letters with big round seals, containing news of the friends distant a three months’ journey! Sometimes the new comer would prove no ocean voyager, but a nearer neighbor, some stout, round-sterned packet, from New Netherland or New England, laden with grain and rum, or hides and rum, to be exchanged for the tobacco of the Old Dominion.

To journey from one colony to another thus, the trader must first secure a license and take oath that he would not sell or give arms or ammunition to the Indians. On these terms Lord Baltimore, in 1637, granted to a merchant mariner, liberty “to trade and commerce for corn, beaver or any other commodities with the Dutchmen on Hudson’s river, or with any Indians or other people whatsoever being or inhabiting to the northward, without the capes commonly called Cape Henry and Cape Charles.”

Long after the waters of Chesapeake Bay were dotted with sails, and the creeks of Maryland and Virginia gay with skiffs, the land communication was still in an exceedingly primitive condition. The roads were little more than bridle-paths. The surveyors deemed their duty done if the logs and fallen trees were cleared away, and all Virginia could not boast of a single engineer. Bridges there were none; and the traveller, arriving at a river bank, must find a ford, or swim his horse across, counting himself fortunate if he kept his pouch of tobacco dry. Planters at a distance from the rivers hewed out rolling-roads, on which they brought down their tobacco in casks, attached to the horses that drew them by hoop-pole shafts. Roads, winding along the streams, were slowly laid out, and answered well enough in fair weather, but in storms they were impassable, and at night so bewildering that belated travellers were forced to come to a halt, make a fire, and bivouac till morning. In 1704, the roads in Maryland were so poor that we find the Assembly passing an act declaring that “the roads leading to any county court-house shall have two notches on the trees on both sides of the roads, and another notch a distance above the other two; and any road that leads to any church shall be marked, into the entrance of the same, and at the leaving any other road, with a slip cut down the face of the tree near the ground.” Guide-posts were still unknown.

The travel was as primitive as the roads. Public coaches did not exist. Horseback riding was the usual way of getting over the ground, though the rough roads made the jolting a torment. “Travelling in this country,” wrote a stranger, as late as the Revolution, “is extremely dangerous, especially if it is the least windy, from the number of rotten pines continually blowing down.” It was no uncommon thing for a driver to be obliged to turn into the woods half a dozen times in a single mile to avoid the fallen logs. A certain Madame de Reidefel, who was driving in a post-chaise with her children, had a narrow escape from death. A rotten tree fell directly across her path, but fortunately struck between the chaise and the horses, so that the occupants of the carriage escaped, though the front wheels were crushed, and one of the horses lamed.

Between pirates on sea and pine-trees on land, so many perils beset the traveller that starting on a journey became a momentous undertaking. “It was no uncommon thing,” writes the historian, “for one who went on business or pleasure from Charleston to Boston or New York, if he were a prudent and cautious man, to consult the almanac before setting out, to make his will, to give a dinner or a supper to his friends at the tavern, and there to bid them a formal goodbye.”

A journey being so great an affair, the traveller was of course a marked man, and his arrival at an ordinary was the signal for the gathering of all who could crowd in to hear of his adventures, and also to hear the public and private news of which he might be the bearer. “I have heard Dr. Franklin relate with great pleasantry,” said one of his friends, “that in travelling when he was young, the first step he took for his tranquillity and to obtain immediate attention at the inns, was to anticipate inquiry, by saying: ‘My name is Benjamin Franklin. I was born at Boston, am a printer by profession, am travelling to Philadelphia, shall have to return at such a time, and have no news. Now what can you give me for dinner?’”

This curiosity was rather peculiar to New England. The Southerner, while perhaps as anxious to hear the news, was more restrained in asking questions. That good breeding and tact which were a Cavalier inheritance, taught him to wait decorously for his news as for his food. A foreigner in the last century, in travelling through the South, came upon a party of Virginians smoking and drinking together on a veranda. He reports that on his ascending the steps to the piazza, every countenance seemed to say, ‘This man has a double claim to our attention, for he is a stranger in the place!’ In a moment, there was room made for him to sit down; a new bowl was called for, and every one who addressed him did it with a smile of conciliation; but no man asked him whence he had come or whither he was going.

All foreigners bear the same testimony to this universal courtesy, which smoothed rough roads and made travelling enjoyable, in spite of its difficulties and dangers. When I realize what those difficulties were, I am surprised at the willingness with which journeys were undertaken. I read of Washington setting out on a mission to Major-General Shirley in Boston, and riding the whole distance of five hundred miles on horseback in the depth of winter, escorted only by a few servants; yet little is made of his experiences. Women, too, were quite accustomed to riding on long expeditions. An octogenarian described to Irving the horseback journeys of his mother in her scarlet cloth riding-habit. “Young ladies from the country,” he said, “used to come to the balls at Annapolis, riding, with their hoops arranged fore and aft like lateen sails; and after dancing all night, would ride home again in the morning.”

Annapolis, before the Revolution, was a centre of gayety. Its rich families came up to town for the season each Fall, and in the Spring moved back to their country-houses with their various belongings. The family coach which was used to transport these possessions was a curious affair to modern eyes. It was colored generally a light yellow, with smart facings. The body was of mahogany, with Venetian windows on each side, projecting lamps, and a high seat upon which coachman and footman climbed at starting.

As this old coach lumbered up and down the streets of Annapolis, its occupants no doubt fancied that they had reached the final limit of speed and comfort in travel, and they looked back with scorn and pity on the primitive conveyances of their ancestors, just as posterity will doubtless look back from their balloons and electric motors on our steam engines. In one of Jefferson’s early letters we chance upon a curious prophecy. Being about to make a visit, he asks to be met by his friend’s “periagua,” as a canoe was called, and suggests that some day a boat may be made, which shall row itself.

After all, I question whether there was not more pleasure in travel in those days, before boats rowed themselves, and when horses were made of flesh and blood instead of iron and steam; when the rider ambled along, noting each tree and shrub, pausing to exchange greetings with every wayfarer, and stopping by night beneath some hospitable roof to make merry over the cup of sack or the glass of “quince drink” prepared for his refreshment. If the traveller was of a surly and unsocial nature, he was indeed to be pitied; since, for him who would not accept his neighbor’s hospitality, there remained only the roadside tavern or “ordinary,” and woe to him who was compelled to test its welcome! The universal practice of keeping open-house made the inns poorer in quality, and the contempt of the community for one who would receive money for the entertainment of guests, kept men of repute out of the business.

A Maryland statute, in 1674, resolves “that noe Person in that Province shall have a Licence to keep Ordinary for the future but th^t he shall give Bond to his Excellency with good Sureties that he shall keep foure good ffeather beds for the Entertainment of Customers.” In any place where the county court is held, he is directed to keep “eight ffeather or fflock beds at the least, and ffurniture suitable.” The charges of the ordinary-keeper are fixed by law. He is allowed to charge ten pounds of tobacco per meal “for dyet,” ten pounds “for small beare,” and four “for lodging in a bed with sheets.”

While the traveller was loitering on the road, enjoying hospitality or enduring ordinaries, those he left at home were in ignorance of his whereabouts; and it was only after days or weeks of anxious waiting, that they could hope to hear of his safe arrival at his destination. Meanwhile rumor, which always thrives in proportion to ignorance, might make their lives miserable by reports of a riderless horse seen galloping into some village, of storms and gales, or of trees crashing across the lonely roads. In the absence of the post and the telegraph, this spreading of false news became so troublesome that an act was passed in Maryland declaring that, “Whereas many Idle and Bussie-headed people doe forge and divulge falce Rumors and Reports,” it is enacted that they be either fined or “receive such corporall punishment, not extending to life or member, as to the Iustices of that court shall seeme meete.”

It was long before the idea of a postal service under government control dawned upon the Colonies. Throughout almost the whole of the seventeenth century letters were sent by the hand of the chance traveller. Maryland directed that in the case of public state-papers the sheriff of one county should carry them to the sheriff of the next, and so on to their goal; but private letters had no such official care.

An old Virginia statute commanded that “all letters superscribed for the publique service, should be immediately conveyed from plantation to plantation to the place and person directed, under the penalty of one hogshead of tobacco for each default.”

Another law, bearing date 1661, orders that “when there is any person in the family where the letters come, as can write, such person is required to endorse the day and houre he received them, that the neglect or contempt of any person stopping them may be the better knowne and punished accordingly.”

A letter in those days merited the attention it received, for it represented a vast deal of labor and expense. Paper was a costly luxury, as we may infer from those old yellow pages crossed and re-crossed with writing, and the tiny cramped hand in which the old sermons are written. In 1680, I find Colonel William Fitzhugh ordering from London “two large Paper-Books, one to contain about fourteen or fifteen quires of paper, the other about ten quires, and one other small one.”

The paper was left blank on one side, and so folded that it formed its own envelope. It was fastened with a seal whose taste and elegance was a matter of pride with the writer. The style was formal, as became the dignity of a person who knew how to write. In those times people did not write letters; they indited epistles. A communication sent across the ocean, in 1614, is addressed “To y^e Truly Honorable & Right Worthy Knight, S^r Thomas Smith,” and is signed: “At Y^r Command To Be Disposed of.”

Love-letters shared the formality of the time, and were written with a stateliness and elaboration of compliment which suggest a minuet on paper. Family letters are often in the form of a journal, and cover a period of months. They cost both labor and money but they were worth their price. Cheap postage has made cheap writing. We no longer compose; we only scribble.

In 1693, Thomas Neale was appointed by royal patent, “postmaster-general of Virginia and all other parts of North America.” The House of Burgesses passed an Act declaring that if post-offices were established in every county, Neale should receive threepence for every letter not exceeding one sheet, or to or from any place not exceeding four score English miles distance.

In 1706, letters were forwarded eight times a year from Philadelphia to the Potomac, and afterward as far as Williamsburg, with the proviso that the post-rider should not start for Philadelphia till he had received enough letters to pay the expenses of the trip.

The average day’s journey for a postman covered a distance of some forty miles in Summer, and over good roads; but, when the heavy Autumn rains washed out great gullies in his path or the Winter storms beat him back, he was lucky if he accomplished half that distance. His letters were subject to so many accidents, that it is a wonder they ever reached the persons to whom they were addressed. It was not till the post-office passed into Franklin’s energetic and methodical hands that it was made regular and trustworthy.

The estimate of the common post in early days is curiously illustrated by an episode which occurred in Virginia. The hero was one Mr. Daniel Park, “who,” says the chronicle, “to all the other accomplishments that make a complete sparkish gentleman, has added one upon which he infinitely values himself; that is, a quick resentment of every, the least thing, that looks like an affront or injury.”

One September morning, when the Governor of Maryland was breakfasting with Mr. Commissary Blair at Middle Plantation, Colonel Park marched in upon them, having a sword about him, much longer than what he commonly travelled with, and which he had caused to be ground sharp in the point that morning. Addressing himself to the Governor of Maryland, he burst out: “Captain Nicholson, did you receive a letter that I sent you from New York?”

“Yes,” answered Nicholson, “I received it.”

“And was it done like a gentleman,” fumed the fiery colonel, “to send that letter by the hand of a common post, to be read by everybody in Virginia? I look upon it as an affront, and expect satisfaction!”

Fancy the number of affairs of honor that this “complete young sparkish gentleman” would have on hand if he lived in the present year of grace and resented every letter sent him by the common post!

There is something which strikes us as infinitely diverting in his suggestion that everybody in Virginia would be interested in his letter. But perhaps he was nearer the truth than we realize, for in his day all news came through such sources, and a letter was regarded as a good thing, which it would be gross selfishness not to share with one’s neighbors. As for a letter from Europe it was an affair of the greatest magnitude, exciting the interest of the whole community.

Those giant folios which entertain us every morning with their gossip from all quarters of the globe had no existence then. Early in the last century, the Colonial Cavalier gleaned all his knowledge of the world and its affairs, from some three-month-old copy of the London papers and magazines, brought over by a British packet. Even this communication, it seems, was uncertain, for complaint is made that the masters of vessels keep the packages till an accidental conveyance offers, and for want of better opportunities frequently commit them to boatmen, who care very little for their goods, so they get their freight.

The colonists had struggled to establish a local journal, and a printing press had been started in Virginia in the seventeenth century, but it had been strangled in its infancy by Berkeley, who declared it the parent of treason and infidelity; and so it came about that the Southern Provinces had no public utterance for their news or their views, till the silence was broken by the voice of Maryland, speaking through her Gazette, in 1727, when in all America there were only six rival sheets. Franklin says that his brother’s friends tried to dissuade him from publishing The New England Courant, on the ground that there was already one newspaper in America. His memory lapsed a little, as The Courant had in fact three predecessors, but the incident shows how little notion there was at that time, of the public demand for news.

In 1736, was first issued The Virginia Gazette, a dingy little sheet about twelve by six inches in size, and costing to subscribers, fifteen shillings a year. The newspaper of the day had no editorial page. Its comments on public affairs were in the form of letters, after the fashion of The Tatler and The Spectator. It had a poet’s corner, where many a young versemaker tried the wings of his Pegasus, and it printed also poetical tributes under the notices of deaths and marriages. In this section, after the record of the wedding of Mr. William Derricoat and Miss Suckie Tomkies, appear these lines:

“Hers the mild lustre of the blooming morn
And his the radiance of the rising day—
Long may they live and mutually possess
A steady love and genuine happiness!”

When Edmund Randolph married Betsey Nicholas, the poet found himself unable to express his emotions in less than two stanzas:

“Exalted theme, too high for common lays!
Could my weak muse with beauty be inspired,
In numbers smooth I’d chant my Betsy’s praise,
And tell how much her Randolph is admired.
“To light the hymeneal torch, since they’re resolved,
Kind Heaven, I trust, will make them truly blest;
And when the Gordian knot shall be dissolved,
Translate them to eternal peace and rest.”

It is safe to say that this figure, comparing matrimony with a Gordian knot, was original with the poet. Had the bridegroom been as fiery and “sparkish” as Colonel Park, he might have called out the writer, but he seems to have taken it in good part.

The prospectus of the Maryland Gazette for 1745 announces that its price will be twelve shillings a year, or fourteen shillings sealed and delivered. It promises the freshest advices, foreign and domestic, but adds, with much simplicity and candor: “In a dearth of news, which in this remote part of the world may sometimes reasonably be expected, we shall study to supply the deficit by presenting our readers with the best material we can possibly collect, having always due regard to the promotion of virtue and learning, the suppression of vice and immorality, and the instruction as well as entertainment of our readers.” What more could the most exacting subscriber demand?

Advertisements, then, as now, served the double purpose of filling space, and supporting the paper. They were charged for, at the rate of five shillings for the first week, and one shilling for each week following, provided they were of moderate length—a vague provision, one would say. These old advertisements are of great value to the student of the life of the past. They give a better picture of the condition of society, than a ream of “notes.” Here we read of the shipping of a crew on a packet bound for England. Half-way down the column a lost hog is advertised, and here, Edward Morris, breeches-maker, announces a sale of buckskin breeches, and gloves with high tops, and assures his customers that “they may depend on kind usage at reasonable rates.” Surely the resources of modern advertising have never devised anything more alluring than this promise of “kind usage at reasonable rates.”

Since the art of reading was unknown to a considerable proportion of the community, it was natural that pictorial devices should be largely used. Not only were the shops along the highways distinguished by such signs as “the Blue Glove,” and “the Golden Keys,” with appropriate illustrations; but in the advertising columns of the papers, the print was re-enforced by pictures of ships and horses, and runaway slaves.

The purchase and sale of negroes formed a standing advertisement, beneath the caption of an auction-block.

In the Virginia Gazette of August, 1767, we find the following under the curious headline:

“Sale of a Musical Slave.”

“A valuable young handsome Negro fellow, about 18 or 20 years of age; has every qualification of a genteel and sensible servant, and has been in many different parts of the world. He shaves, dresses hair, and plays on the French horn. He lately came from London, and has with him two suits of new clothes, which the purchaser may have with him. Inquire at the printing office.”

It is hard to understand why the owner should wish to part with a prodigy possessed of so many accomplishments. Perhaps his playing on the French horn is the explanation.

Runaway servants, both black and white, form the subject of many advertisements in those old newspapers. In the Maryland Gazette (1769) appears a description in rhyme of the disappearance of an indented servant:

“Last Wednesday morn at break of day,
From Philadelphia ran away
An Irishman, named John McKeogn.
To fraud and imposition prone,
About five feet five inches high;
Can curse and swear, as well as lie.
How old he is I can’t engage,
But forty-five is near his age.
“He oft in conversation chatters
Of Scripture and religious matters,
And fain would to the world impart
That virtue lodges in his heart.
But, take the rogue from stem to stern,
The hypocrite you’ll soon discern
“And find, though his deportment’s civil,
A saint without, within a devil.
Whoe’er secures said John McKeogn,
(Provided I should get my own),
Shall have from me in cash paid down
Five dollar bills, and half-a-crown.”

Mary Nelson is the owner and poet, or, in the fashion of the day, I should say poetess, and perhaps owneress, as I find it recorded of Mary Goddard that she was postmistress of Baltimore and Printress and Editress of the Baltimore Journal.

The world moves. The auction-block, and the runaway slave, with his bundle on his back, have disappeared from among the pictures in the advertising column; the packet has given way to the ocean steamer; the horse to the bicycle; the stage coach to the railroad; the little provincial gazettes, with their coarse gray paper and blurred type, to the great dailies, as large as the Bible and as doubtful as the Apocrypha. I wonder if another century will have such astounding tales to tell of progress in news, trade and travel!

His Friends and Foes

The early adventurers had never seen anything of savage life till they touched the shores of Virginia. Everything connected with the strange beings there was full of interest. They set down faithfully whatever they saw, and a good deal more besides.

The Susquehannocks impressed them most of all the Indian tribes. Their enormous height and fine proportions made them look like giants, and their attire was as impressive as their persons. One who saw them, writes home in those first pioneer days: “Their attire is the skinnes of Beares and Woolves. Some have Cassacks made of Beares heads and skinnes that a mans head goes through the skinnes neck, and the eares of the Beare fastened to his shoulders, the nose and teeth hanging downe his breast, another Beares face split behind him, and at the end of the nose hung a Pawe. The half sleeves comming to the elbowes were the neckes of Beares and the armes through the mouth with pawes hanging at their noses. One had the head of a Wolfe hanging in a chaine for a Iewell.”

One of their chiefs specially impressed the English. He was a giant among giants. The calf of his leg was three-quarters of a yard round, and “the rest of his limbs answerable to that proportion.” His arrows were five quarters long, and he wore a wolf’s skin at his back for a quiver. The picture of this Indian Hercules accompanied the maps which Captain Smith sent home to enlighten the Company in England.

The stories of the different adventurers were gathered together and printed as “The General History of Virginia.” The volume was adorned (I cannot say illustrated) by a series of woodcuts, which make us laugh aloud by their inaccuracy. The Indians are simply gigantic Englishmen naked and beardless, with the hair standing in a stiff ridge on top of the head, like a cock’s comb. The wigwams look like haystacks, and the canoes like bathtubs. What a collection of pictures we might have had, if a kodak had been among the possessions of Captain Smith and his company! We should see King Pamaunche with “the chaine of pearles round his necke thrice double, the third parte of them as bygg as pease,” and catch a view of his “pallace” with its hundred-acre garden set with beans, pease, tobacco, gourdes, pompions, “and other thinges unknowne to us in our tongue.” We should have the interiors of the smoky wigwams which Spelman and Archer visited, the forms of the squaws dimly outlined against the grimy mat, as they pounded corn, or dropped the bread into the kettle to boil.

Thanks to John Smith’s graphic pen, we have a picture of Powhatan, that fierce old ancestor of so many first families of Virginia, almost as vivid as a photograph. Smith went to visit him, and found him proudly tying upon a bedstead a foot high, upon ten or twelve mats. “At head sat a woman, at his feet another. On each side, sitting upon a mat upon the ground, were ranged his chief men, on each side the fire, five or ten in rank, and behind them as many young women, each a great chaine of white beads over their shoulders, their heads painted in red, and with such a grave and majestical countenance as drove us into admiration to see such state in a naked savage.”

We might suppose these last words applied to the women, instead of to Powhatan, did we not know how little state and majesty were allowed these copper-colored Griseldas. The Indian squaws were little more than slaves. When the braves moved, it was the squaws who carried the wigwams and set them up in the new camp. When the men sat at meals, they spread the mats, waited upon their masters, and finally contented their appetites with the remnants of the feast. In the field, too, they bore the brunt of the toil: “Let squaws and hedgehogs scratch the ground,” said an old warrior; “man was made for war and the chase.”

Yet, wretched and abused as these women were, they seemed content with their lot, and when their husbands died, they not only mourned for them, but seemed quite ready to enter the same servitude with a new master. “I once saw a young widow,” said Jefferson, “whose husband, a warrior, had died about eight days before, hastening to finish her grief, and who, by tearing her hair, beating her breast, and drinking spirits, made the tears flow in great abundance in order that she might grieve much in a short space of time, and be married that evening to another young warrior.”

Spelman, a Virginia adventurer who, in the course of one of his exploring trips, witnessed an Indian wedding, has left us an account of the ceremony. “Ye man,” he says, “goes not unto any place to be married, but ye woman is brought to him where he dwelleth. At her coming, her father or cheefe frend ioynes the hands togither, and then ye father, or cheefe frend of the man, bringeth a longe string of beades and, measuringe his armes leangth thereof, doth breake it over ye handes of those that ar to be married while their handes be ioyned together and gives it unto ye woman’s father or him that brings hir. And so, with much mirth and feastinge they go togither.”

This “longe string of beades” of which Spelman spoke, was probably made of the peak and roanoke, which made the riches of the Indian, and served him at once for money and ornament. Both were made from shell—one dark, the other white. The darker was the more valuable, and was distinguished as wampum peak. The English traders accepted it as coinage, and reckoned its value at eighteen pence a yard, while the white peak sold for ninepence. In the proceedings of the Maryland Council we find Thomas Cornwaleys licensed to trade with the Indians for corn, roanoke, and peak.

When the red men wished to make bargains with the English, before interpreters had been trained to speak both languages, the counting was done by dropping beans, one by one, amid total silence. Woe to the offender who interrupted an Indian during this critical operation, or indeed at any time! An interruption was looked upon as an unpardonable affront. Once, in the time of Bacon’s Rebellion, an Indian chief, accompanied by several of his tribe, came to negotiate a treaty of peace with the English. In the course of the Werrowance’s address, one of his attendants ventured to put in a word. Instantly, the chief snatched a tomahawk from his girdle, split the poor fellow’s skull, motioned to his companions to carry him out, and continued his speech as calmly as though nothing had happened.

The lack of ceremony in the white men’s address, and the frequency with which they interrupted, struck the Indian as amazing and unpardonable. There is a tradition that one of the early preachers strove to teach an old Indian brave the doctrine of the Trinity. The Indian heard him calmly to the end, and then began in his turn to tell of the Great Spirit who spoke in the thunder, and whose smile was the sunshine. In the midst of his discourse, the clergyman broke in, “But all this is not true.” The Indian, turning to the circle around, remarked: “What sort of man is this? He has been talking for an hour of his three Gods, and now he will not let me tell of my one.”

The character of the Indian was a strange mixture of apparent contradictions. He would hunt and fish for a season, and then feast and make merry night and day while his supplies lasted. When they were exhausted, he would gird up his loins, and fast for a period long enough to end the life of a white man. He had an inordinate love of finery, upon which the English traded from the first. He would barter away a whole Winter’s provisions of corn for a scarlet blanket or a bunch of gay-colored beads. Yet he was not without a natural shrewdness which enlightened him when he was being cheated. The story runs that some of the early missionaries taught the savages that their salvation depended on catching for them shad, which they sold to the settlers. In the course of time the Indians discovered the trick, and drove out the deceivers. Years afterward, another mission was established, and the first priest took as his text, “Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters!” The Indians gathered round the preacher when the sermon was ended, and one of the tribe said: “White man, you speak in fine words of the waters of life; but before we decide on what we have heard, we would like to know whether any shad swim in those waters!”

It must be confessed that the Indians appear to better advantage than the English, in the early transactions. When Hamor went to visit King Powhatan, he was received with royal courtesy. The chief sent one of his attendants to bring what food he could find, though he explained that, as they were not expecting visitors, they had not kept anything ready. “Presently,” Hamor recounts, “the bread was brought in two great wodden bowls, the quantity of a bushel sod bread, made up round, of the bygnesse of a tenise-ball, whereof we eat some few.” After this repast, Hamor and his comrades were regaled with “a great glasse of sacke,” and then were ushered into the wigwam appropriated to them for the night. English and Indian ideas of comfort did not correspond, however, for Hamor complains: “We had not bin halfe an hour in the house, before the fleas began so to torment us that we could not rest there, but went forth and under a broade oake, upon a mat, reposed ourselves that night.”

Hamor took with him on this visit, as an offering to the Indian chief, five strings of blue and white beads, two pieces of copper, five wooden combs, ten fishhooks, and a pair of knives. In return for these costly presents, this pious English gentleman asked Powhatan, who had already given Pocahontas to the whites, to send them another daughter, really as a hostage, but nominally as a wife to Sir Thomas Dale, the worthy governor of Virginia, regardless of the slight objection that there was already a Lady Dale in England. Pocahontas had good reason for saying to Smith when she met him in London, “Your countrymen will lie much.”

To the early settlers the savage seemed a strange being, not more than half human, who happened to be in possession of the land they coveted. They thought they did God service when they flung to the Indian a Bible and a handful of beads, in exchange for the land which had been his birthright for centuries. They cheated and cajoled him when he was angry, as they might have wheedled an angry tiger; yet, strange to say, they were quite off their guard when, at length, the tiger made his spring, and glutted the vengeance he had been nursing so long.

When the news of the Indian massacre reached England, it roused a frenzy of revenge equal in fury to that of the savages. The Virginia Company quite forgot that they had set forth in their charter that the conversion of the Indians was one of the main objects of the new adventure, or if they remembered it at all, it was only to apologize lamely for a complete change of base. “We condemn their bodies,” they wrote to the colonists, “the saving of whose souls we have so zealously affected. Root them out from being any longer a people.... War perpetually without peace or truce: yet spare the young for servants” (the Englishman even in a rage has an eye to the main chance). “Starve them by destroying their corn, or reaping it for your own use! Pluck up their weirs! Obstruct their hunting! Employ foreign enemies against them at so much a head! Keep a band of your own men continually upon them, to be paid by the colony, which is to have half of their captives and plunder!”

These short, nervous sentences fell like hammer-strokes on the ears of the Englishmen in America, and they found an echo in their hearts. It is easy for us to characterize their revengeful spirit as inconsistent and unchristian. It is easy to tolerate a bear in a menagerie, or an Indian on a reservation. It is quite another thing to exercise toleration toward either in the life-and-death grip of a frontier struggle.

These men had seen their homes go up in flames. They had heard the blood-curdling war-whoop. They had counted the bloody scalps hanging at the Indian’s belt, and marked on them the hair of those they loved. It was idle to preach toleration to them. Henceforward for many years it was war to the knife.

Yet, both as friend and foe, the Indian had given the colonists many lessons. He had taught them the culture of maize and tobacco, he had taught them to stalk the deer, to trap the bear, and to blaze the forest path. Many a lesson in woodcraft the settlers learned from him. Washington’s shrewdness in borrowing native methods of warfare, would, had his advice been taken, have saved Braddock’s army from utter rout in the Western forests. The very enmity of the Indian was a help to the Colonial Cavalier, whose ease-loving temperament might easily have sunk into sloth had it not felt the spur of danger and the necessity for being on the alert. The docility of the negro was a perpetual temptation to the white man to the abuse of arbitrary power, but the resistance of the Indian was a constant reminder that here was a force unsubdued and unsubduable.

Of the influence of the white men on the Indian, the less said the better. They eradicated none of his vices, and they lent him many of their own. They found him abstinent, and they made him a guzzler of firewater. They found him hospitable, and they made him suspicious and vindictive. They found him in freedom, the owner of a great country; they robbed him of the one, and crowded him out of the other.

An old sachem in the eighteenth century, meeting a surveyor, said to him: “The French claim all the land on one side of the Ohio, the English claim all the land on the other side. Now, where does the Indian’s land lie?”

The savages exchanged their corn and tobacco for the rum-cask and the firearms of civilization, and a strange jumble of a new religion, whose ceremonies they grafted onto their own, with grotesque results. It is hard to say whether they fared worst as the white man’s friends or foes. When the English made a treaty with the Chickahomanies, “a lustie and a daring people,” these were the terms offered them by the whites:

“First: They should for ever bee called Englishmen and bee true subjects to King James and his Deputies.

“Secondly: Neither to kill nor detaine any of our men, nor cattell, but bring them home.

“Thirdly: To bee alwaies ready to furnish us with three hundred men, against the Spaniards or any.

“Fourthly: They shall not enter our townes, but send word they are new Englishmen.

“Fifthly: That every fighting man, at the beginning of harvest shall bring to our store two bushels of corne for tribute, for which they shall receive so many hatchets.

“Lastly: The eight chiefe men should see all this performed or receive the punishment themselves; for their diligence they should have a red coat, a copper chaine, and King James his picture, and be accounted his noblemen.”

This shameful bargain is recorded by the English with evident self-satisfaction, and apparently without a suspicion that they need blush for the transaction. Yet when the Indian met treachery with treachery, and fraud with guile, the civilized settlers were ablaze with indignation for no better reason than that the savages had learned of them, and bettered their instructions.

His Amusements

Of all the amusements of the Colonial Cavalier, none was so popular as gambling. The law strove in vain to break it up. This statute in the Colonial Record, tells its own story: “Against gaming at dice and cardes, be it ordained by this present assembly that the winners and loosers shall forfaicte ten shillings a man, one ten shillings thereof to go to the discoverer, and the rest to pious uses.” I fear very little was ever collected for pious uses. The difficulty lay in the fact that, as every one played, there was no one to act the spy.

This passion for gaming in the colonies was only a reflection of the craze in England. For more than a century after the return of Charles the Second, the rattle of the dice-box, and the shuffling of cards were the most familiar sounds in every London chocolate-house. Young sinners and old spent their fortunes, and misspent their lives, playing for money at Brooke’s or Boodle’s. When a man fell dead at the door of White’s, he was dragged into the hall amid bets as to whether he were dead or alive, and the surgeon’s aid was violently opposed, on the ground of unfairness to those betting on the side of death. The Duke of St. Albans, at eighty, too blind to see the cards, went regularly to a gambling-house with an attendant. Lady Castlemaine lost twenty-five thousand pounds in one night’s play. General Braddock’s sister, having gamed away her fortune at Bath, finished the comedy by hanging herself. When her affectionate brother heard the news, he remarked jocularly, “Poor Fanny, I always thought she would play till she was forced to tuck herself up.”

I offer all this testimony to show that our Colonial Cavalier was only the child of his age, when he too shook the dice, and shuffled the cards. Being short of cash, his bets were generally made in tobacco, or, failing that, in flesh and blood. Many a slave found a new master in the morning, because his old master had been unlucky at play the night before.

In a community so absorbed in the excitement of hazard, the lottery of course took deep hold. The first plantation in America was aided by a grand “standing lottery,” with along list of “welcomes, prises and rewards,” amounting to more than ten thousand crowns. The declaration sets forth that “all prises, welcomes and rewards drawne wherever they dwell, shall of the treasurer have present pay, and whosoever under one name or poesie payeth three pound in ready money, shall receive six shillings and eight pence, or a silver spoone of that value at his choice.”

“The money for the Adventurers is to be paid to Sir Thomas Smith, Knight, and Treasurer for Virginia, or such officers as he shall appoint in City or Country, under the common seale of the company for the receit thereof.”

The example thus set, was followed whenever the colonies felt a pressure for money. In Virginia a lottery was established to meet the expenses of the French and Indian War—the drawing directed to be “in the Burgesses’ Room of the Capital at Williamsburgh at ten in the morning. Prizes current money from £5 to £2000. The lucky numbers to be published in the Gazette.”

In Maryland, in the eighteenth century, a “Scheme of Lottery is humbly proposed to the Public for Raising the sum of 510 pounds, current money, to be applied towards completeing the Market-House in Baltimore-Town in Baltimore Co., buying two Fire-Engines and a parcel of Leather-Buckets for the use of the said Town, enlarging the present Public Wharf and Building a new one.”

If gambling was a favorite pastime and the lottery a popular excitement, the Cavalier was not a stranger to manlier sports. Of a brave and ardent temper, and a fine physique, he found at once his work and play in the hardy amusements of the chase. He had learned from the Indian to stalk the deer, walking stealthily behind his horse till a good chance offered to shoot close at hand, and lay the unsuspecting deer at his feet. Sometimes, in the bright October weather, the air would be blue with the smoke of the fires built to start the game. Now, in his heavy leather boots, he would start afoot after wild hare, or by the light of the moon, with a band of servants and dogs, he would hunt the ’possum and the coon. This habit of hunting was so universal that the Colonial Cavalier well merited the sarcasm of The Spectator, which described the English country gentleman as lying under the curse pronounced in the words of Goliath, “I will give thee to the fowls of the air and to the beasts of the field.” Hunting as a sport may not be spiritualizing, but it certainly is not brutalizing, and as much cannot be said for all the sports of that day, in the Southern colonies of America.

The cock-fight and the gouging-match never lacked as eager a throng of spectators, as gathers to-day at a football game; yet both were brutal and disgusting. They roused the amazement of every foreigner, that such things should be tolerated in a civilized country. The gouging-match was simply a fight of the lowest order. Not only were fists freely used, but the test of success was the ability of the stronger bully to gouge out the eye of his adversary. The under man could only save his sight by humiliating himself to cry out, “Kings Cruse!” or “Enough!”

Anbury, who witnessed several of these matches, says: “I have seen a fellow, reckoned a great adept in gouging, who constantly kept the nails of both his thumb and second finger long and pointed; nay, to prevent their breaking or splitting, he hardened them every evening in a candle.”

So familiar was this brutal practice that it supplied a Southern orator in after years with a rhetorical climax when, inciting his countrymen to make war on the mercantile interests of Great Britain, he exclaimed: “Commerce is the apple of England’s eye. There let us gouge her!”

The cock-fight was scarcely less degrading than the gouging-match. When a fight was announced, the news spread like lightning, and from all over the country people came thronging, some bringing cocks to be entered in the match, but all with money or tobacco to bet on the result. The scene was one of wild excitement. Men and boys cheered on their favorites, and watched with delight, while the furious cocks thrust at each other with their long spurs of cruel steel.

It is pleasant to turn away from such scenes and sports as these, to read of the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe riding up into the wild fastnesses of the Blue Ridge Mountains with Governor Spotswood. It was a right knightly expedition, and one of the most picturesque in American history. They wound through the forest, and forded the rivers, and climbed rocky mountains, and took possession of peak after peak in the name of “His Majesty George the Third.” Their horses were shod with iron, which was not usual in those days, and on their return, Governor Spotswood presented each of the Cavaliers as a memento of the journey, with a tiny gold horse-shoe, set with jewels, and bearing the legend, “Sic juvat transcendere montes.” The thrifty old king disapproved of this extravagance, and left the Governor to pay for the mementoes out of his own pocket.

Riding on horseback was the chief recreation, as well as the chief mode of getting about, at the South. As the planters grew richer, they delighted to own fine horses and outfits. Washington’s letter-book contains an order sent to London for elaborate equipments: “1 man’s riding saddle, hogskin seat, large plated stirrups, double-reined bridle and Pelham bit plated. A very neat and fashionable Newmarket saddle-cloth. A large and best portmanteau, saddle, bridle and pillion, cloak-bag, and surcingle. A riding-frock of a handsome drab-coloured broadcloth with plain double gilt buttons. A riding waistcoat of superfine scarlet cloth and gold lace, with buttons like those of the coat. A blue surtout coat. A neat switch whip, silver cap. Black velvet cap for servant.”

Washington, as methodical in private affairs as in public, kept in his household books, a register of the names and ages of his horses and his dogs. Here we may read the entire family history of Ajax and Blueskin, Valiant and Magnolia, or of the foxhounds Vulcan, Singer, Ringwood, Music, and True Love.

There was a peculiar intimacy between the foxhounds and their master, for they were associated with some of the happiest hours of his life, and when they came in from a field-day, torn by the briars through which they had struggled or limping from thorns in the foot, they were tenderly cared for, bandaged, and looked after. No amusement so delighted Washington as riding across country with Lord Fairfax in one of the hunts which that gentleman and sportsman was so fond of organizing at Greenaway Court. On a brisk yet soft autumn morning, through the blue Virginia haze, the gentry for miles around came to the “meet.” The huntsmen might be heard urging on the dogs with cries of “Yoicks! Yoicks! Have at him! Push him up!” till the fox, which had doubled on its tracks, round and round the thick covert, at length broke away, and the cry was raised of “Tally-ho! Gone away!” The huntsman blew his horn, the whipper-in cracked his whip, the hounds were in full cry, and the entire field of scarlet-coated riders broke in, in a mad gallop, through brush and briar. A strong fox will “live” before hounds on an average of an hour, but sometimes the hunt lasted all day, and covered thirty miles or more. The lessons of endurance, of woodcraft, and of hardy strength, which the Virginia gentlemen learned in these hunts, stood them in good stead in the life-and-death struggle on sterner fields.

A great lover of animals was Charles Lee, who was always surrounded by a troop of dogs, and who made himself somewhat unwelcome as a visitor, by insisting on bringing them into the house with him wherever he went. “I must have some object to embrace,” he once wrote to a friend. “When I can be convinced that men are as worthy objects as dogs, I shall transfer my benevolence, and become as staunch a philanthropist as the canting Addison affected to be.”

Apparently he never changed his mind, but died still devoted to his dogs and his horses. Men who loved horses, of course loved horse-racing as well. The Carolina Jockey Club was a famous institution. Its annual races drew crowds from the neighboring country, and the population gave itself up to several days’ festivity, ending in a ball. In Virginia, the sport was no less popular. The Gazette of October, 1737, announces that “On St. Andrew’s Day, there are to be horse-races and several other Diversions for the entertainment of the Gentlemen and Ladies at the Old Field.” The programme of this entertainment recalls the days of Merrie England. Besides the race of twenty horses for a prize of five pounds, the advertisement gives notice: