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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 admir