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  The Colonial Cavalier

  Or

  Southern Life Before
  the Revolution


  By Maud Wilder Goodwin


  Illustrated by
  Harry Edwards


  New York
  Lovell, Coryell & Company
  1894




  COPYRIGHT, 1894,
  BY
  UNITED STATES BOOK COMPANY.

  _All Rights Reserved._




Contents


                                              PAGE

  Preface,                                       7

  His Home,                                     13

  Sweethearts and Wives,                        43

  His Dress,                                    73

  News, Trade and Travel,                       97

  His Friends and Foes,                        125

  His Amusements,                              141

  His Man-Servants and His Maid-Servants,      165

  His Church,                                  189

  His Education,                               221

  Laws, Punishments and Politics,              243

  Sickness and Death,                          273




The Colonial Cavalier




Preface


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




His Home




[Illustration: The Colonial Cavalier

His Home]


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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: Hall in Carter's Grove James River Va.]

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

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

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

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

[Illustration]

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

[Illustration]

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

It was no pitiable life that those pioneers lived, even in those most
primitive days. Their out-of-door existence was full of a wild charm, and
their energy soon improved conditions indoors. Every