Maud Wilder Goodwin

“ It is a mighty transformation to have been brought about in a century and a half. The Southern Colonies did not give up their allegiance without a bitter struggle of reason against sentiment, a struggle which New England never knew; but at length the loyalty which had bowed down to fallen royalty at Breda and yielded Charles II. so early a recognition that he quartered the arms of Virginia with those of England, France, and Scotland, and spoke of it as the Old Dominion—at last, this generous, faithful, confiding loyalty had been outraged past endurance. But still the old traditions lingered. ”

“ Bacon’s death remains one of the mysteries of history. Some said he died of miasma in the Virginia swamps; some hinted that his foes poisoned his food, so sudden and mysterious was his ending; and lest Berkeley’s revenge should extend to insulting the very corpse of his foe, Bacon’s followers buried him with the greatest secrecy, and no man knoweth the resting place of this first colonial champion of popular rights. But the spirit of popular liberty did not die with Bacon, nor vice-royal tyranny with Berkeley. ”

“ If these traits excite in the breast of humanity that common tribute to the memory of the departed—a sigh—then traveller as thou passest this wreck, let thine be borne upon the breeze which bends the grassy covering of the grave of Old Job Pray.”
This stone, like many another we find in these old brick-walled Southern burying-grounds, brings a smile which borders close upon a tear. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ When Sir William Berkeley, as despotic at heart as his Stuart master, undertook to play the tyrant in Virginia, the country blazed out into a rebellion, which died only with the death of Nathaniel Bacon, its leader. Bacon was a rebel, but a rebel of the type of Washington and Patrick Henry—one who believed in the motto which Jefferson engraved on his seal, “Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God.” ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 ”

“ John Randolph had a bunk for his slave side by side with the bed of his pet horse. Patrick Henry wrote with admirable candor: “Believe me, I shall honor the Quakers for their noble efforts to abolish slavery; they are equally calculated to promote moral and political good. Would any one believe that I am master of slaves of my own purchase? I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living without them. I will not—I can not—justify it.” The great Southern statesman said that he trembled for his country when he remembered that God was just. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 85] 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. ”

“ So the Colonial Cavaliers found trouble in their households with servants of any race or color, and the gentle nature of the blacks proving specially adaptable to servitude, and purchase money seeming so much less than wage-money, they gradually did away with other service. Every plantation had its negro-quarters, where crowds of pickaninnies swarmed in the sunshine outside the little cabins with scarcely more clothing on than their parents had worn in their African jungle. The bread of Indian corn was baked on the hoe over a smoky fire, or in the ashes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.... ”

“ The Cavalier had been trained in the school of politics, in the responsibilities of power, and in the traditions of greatness.
The very absence of the reading habit tended to develop action, and the power of thinking out problems afresh, unhampered by the trammels of other men’s thoughts. The haughtiness begotten [Pg 225] by slave-holding made it doubly hard for the master to bow the knee even to a sovereign. The habit of command and responsibility of power, which shone on the battlefield and in the council-chamber, were learned on the lonely estates, where each planter was a king. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus our study of the lawmaking and law-breaking records has brought us all the way from that House of Burgesses sitting at James Cittie in 1619—their hearts full of loyalty to his Majesty King James the First, and full of gratitude for [Pg 265] the slender liberties he has seen fit to loan rather than grant them—to the brink of the Revolution, to parties of the Crown and of the people, to the hall in the Virginia Capitol where the Assembly is boiling with wrath and defiance against George the Third and his ministers, who have dared to insult the rights and liberties of a free people. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If we hold that tact and courtesy and gracious hospitality are results of education, we must admit that the Puritans of New England might have learned much from their neighbors in Maryland and Virginia. The education of politics, of power, of high traditions in virtue and in manners the Colonial Cavalier possessed. The education of books he lacked. Here and there, however, we find traces of some omnivorous reader even in the earliest times. Books were highly valued and treasured by generation after generation. ”

“ Well had it been for the Cavalier colonies had they adhered to this system of apprenticeship and indented service. Their children and their children’s children might then have sung of “the nobility of labor, the long pedigree of toil.” But with the widespread introduction of negro slavery, came the degradation of labor. The negro represented a despised caste. He labored; therefore labor was contemptible. Henceforth there was established an aristocracy of ease and wealth, resting on a foundation of unpaid labor. ”

“ The statute-books of Maryland and Virginia are records of the barbarity into which injustice may drive a kindly, liberty-loving people who are forced into cruelty by the logic of events. Having taken the wrong road, like Bunyan’s Pilgrim, the Cavaliers found the rocks ready to fall on them if they went forward, and the gulf yawning behind them if they tried to turn back. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is to be feared that these colonial maidens sometimes allow their thoughts to wander in sermon-time, from their quaint little prayer-books, with their uneven type and crooked f’s, and that they are thinking of dinners while they confess themselves sinners. But their levity is not treated severely by the priest, for he is as eager for his Madeira as his young parishioners are eager for their minuet.
They were jolly dogs, those colonial clergymen of the Church of England in the eighteenth century, and no more to be taken seriously than Friar Tuck, whose apostolic successors they were. ”