Colonial dames and good wives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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