The Colonial Cavalier Part 7

In the year 1752 a new delight was opened to the provincials. Hallam's company of comedians came over in _The Charming Sally_ to act for them. A playbill of that year announces that "at the new theatre in Annapolis by the company of comedians, on Monday next, being the sixth of this instant July, will be performed _The Busy Body_, likewise a farce called _The Lying Valet_. To begin precisely at 7 o'clock. Tickets to be had at the printing-office. No persons to be admitted behind the scenes. Box seats 10s., pit 7s. 6d, gallery 5s." A later bill announces that "children in laps will not be admitted."

The favorite plays given by Hallam's Company seem to have been--

"The Suspicious Husband," "Oth.e.l.lo," "The Mock Doctor," "Romeo and Juliet," "The Devil To Pay," "A Bold Stroke for a Wife," and "Miss In Her Teens; or, A Medley of Lovers."

Our squeamish age would find much to shock, and perhaps little to amuse, in many of those old plays. Congreve's shameless muse set the pace, and the Nell Gwynns of the stage kept it. If we wonder that our ancestors could listen and look, will not our descendants wonder equally at us?

Before Hallam and his company came over to set up a professional standard, amateur theatricals were the rage. The Virginia _Gazette_ in 1736 announces a performance of "_The Beaux' Stratagem_ by the gentlemen and ladies of this county," and also that the students of the college are to give _The Tragedy of Cato_ at the theatre. Somehow, Addison's tragedies seem further removed from our sympathies than Congreve's comedies, and we turn with relief to a form of amus.e.m.e.nt always in fashion and forever modern, the time-honored entertainment of feasting.

In 1744, a grand dinner was given by Governor Gooch to visiting statesmen at Annapolis. William Black, who was present, records in his journal that "Punch was served before dinner, which was sumptuous, with wines in great abundance, followed by strawberries and ice-cream, a great rarity." These public banquets were momentous affairs, demanding a sound digestion and a steady head in those guests who wished to live to dine another day.

Chastellux gives a vivid account of their customs. "The dinner," he writes, "is served in the American or, if you will, in the English fashion, consisting of two courses, one comprehending the entrees, the roast meat and the warm side-dishes; the other, the sweet pastry and confectionery. When this is removed, the cloth is taken off, and apples, nuts, and chestnuts are served. It is then that healths are drunk." This custom of drinking healths, he finds pleasant enough, inasmuch as it serves to stimulate and prolong conversation. But he says, "I find it an absurd and truly barbarous practice, the first time you drink, and at the beginning of the dinner, to call out successively to each individual, to let him know you drink his health. The actor in this ridiculous comedy is sometimes ready to die with thirst, whilst he is obliged to inquire the names, or catch the eyes, of twenty-five or thirty persons."

The woes of the diner and winer do not, it seems, end with this general call, for he is constantly called, and having his sleeve pulled, to attract his attention, now this way, now that. "These general and partial attacks end in downright duels. They call to you from one end of the table to the other: 'Sir, will you permit me to drink a gla.s.s of wine with you?'"

Allowing for some exaggeration on the part of the lively Frenchman, it is easy to see what quant.i.ties of Madeira and "Phyall" must have been drunk in those tournaments of courtesy, and I do not wonder to read in the journal of a young woman of the eighteenth century: "The gentlemen are returned from dinner. Both tipsy!"

"The Tuesday Club," of Maryland, had many a jovial supper together. Their toasts always began with "The Ladies," followed by "The King's Majesty,"

and after that "The Deluge." I find a suggestive regulation made by this club, that each member should bring his own sand-box, "to save the carpet."

Parson Bacon sanctified these convivial meetings by his presence and was, by all accounts, the ringleader of the boisterous revels. Jonathan Boucher, another clergyman, but of a very different type, was a great clubman too. He was one of the leading spirits of "The Hommony Club,"

whose avowed object was "to promote innocent mirth and ingenious humor."

The days of women's clubs were still in the far future, and the chief excitement of the ladies was an occasional ball. The Maryland a.s.semblies began at six o'clock in the evening, and were supposed to end at ten, though the young folks often coaxed and cajoled the authorities into later hours. Card parties were part of the entertainment, and whist was enlivened by playing for money. The supper was often furnished from the ladies' kitchens and the gentlemen's gamebags, and was a tempting one. The costumes were rich and imposing. A witness of one of these Maryland b.a.l.l.s writes: "The gentlemen, dressed in short breeches, wore handsome knee-buckles, silk stockings, buckled pumps, etc. The ladies wore--G.o.d knows what; I don't!"

Dancing and music were the chief branches of the eighteenth-century maiden's education. I can fancy, as I read that "Patsy Custis and Milly Posey are gone to Colonel Mason's to the dancing-school," how they held up their full petticoats, and pointed out the toes of their red-heeled shoes, and dreamed of future conquests, although for one of them the tomb was already preparing its chill embrace.

For women, life in town was pleasant enough with its tea-drinkings, its afternoon visits, and its evening a.s.semblies, but on the plantations far from neighbors time must often have hung heavy on their hands. Yet even there, pleasures could be found, or made. When evening shut down over the lonely manor-houses along the Chesapeake, the myrtleberry candles were lighted, the slender-legged mahogany tables drawn out, and the Colonial dames seated themselves to an evening of cards. Small stakes were played for to heighten the interest of "Triumph, Ruff and Honors," "Gleke," or "Quadrille;" and when these lost their charm, there was the spinet to turn to.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Spinet.]

In those primitive days people still loved melody. "A little music" was called for with enthusiasm, and given without hesitation. There was no scientific criticism to be feared when the young men and maidens "raised a tune." Their list of songs was not long; but familiarity lent a deeper charm than novelty. "Gaze not on Swans" was a favorite in the seventeenth century. "Push about the Brisk Bowl," while well enough at the hunt supper table, was banished from the drawing-room in favor of "Beauty, Retire!" a song beginning--

"Beauty, retire! thou dost my pitty move; Believe my pitty and then trust my love."

The writer does not make it quite clear why he wishes Beauty to retire, nor why she moves his pity. In fact, the case seems quite reversed in the last stanza:

"With niew and painfulle arts Of studied warr I breake the hearts Of half the world; and shee breakes mine; And shee, and shee, and _shee_ breakes mine!"

Through the lapse of more than one century, we hear the echo of those young voices, rising and falling in the air and counter of the quaint old melodies.

Oh, those shadowy corners of candle-lighted rooms, those spinets, those duos and trios, those ruffled squires and brocaded dames!--where are they now?

His Man-Servants and His Maid-Servants

[Ill.u.s.tration: His Man-Servants _and_ his Maid Servants.

"JOVE _fixed it certain That whatever day Makes a man slave, Takes half his worth away_"]

A New England farmhouse and a Southern plantation:--What a contrast the two presented in colonial days! In the homes of Ma.s.sachusetts and Connecticut, the notable housewife was up before light, breaking the ice over the water, of a winter morning, preparing with her own hands the savory sausages and buckwheat cakes for the men's breakfast, and setting the house in order. To her it fell to take charge of the wool from the back of the sheep till it reached the back of her boy; carding, spinning, weaving, dyeing the wool, cutting the cloth, and sewing the seams, scouring floors and washing dishes; all these duties fell to the share of the Puritan Priscillas. Yet, when evening fell, when the dishes were shelved on the dresser, these busy housewives, in their sanded kitchens, with the firelight reflected from their shining tins, were not to be pitied, even in comparison with their more luxuriously attended sisters in Maryland or Virginia.

Life at the South was at once grander and shabbier, than in New England.

The Southerner's ease-loving nature had the power to ignore detail; and it is attention to detail which brings well-being to the household and wrinkles to the housekeeper. A thousand slaves could not take the place of one woman of "faculty." In fact, the more shiftless, lazy negroes there were, the less order and tidiness prevailed. But order and tidiness were not indispensable to happiness there and then, and the sum of human enjoyment was large on those old plantations, in spite of shiftlessness and slavery. Of that restless ambition which corrodes modern life, men had little, women had none, and servants less than none. The negro was a true child of the tropics, and with food and sunshine enough, was merry as the day is long.

A healthy negro, on a prosperous estate, under the charge of a gentleman, not under the bane of an overseer, came perhaps as near to animal cheerfulness as mortal often does. The master enjoyed that serenity and leisure which freedom from manual labor gives; his children grew up, each with a personal retainer attached to himself with the old feudal loyalty; the lady of the house was again the old Saxon _hlaefdige_, who gave out the bread to the tribe of servants day by day. Yet with all the brightness which can be thrown into the picture, slavery was a curse alike to slave and slave-owner, on account both of what it brought and what it took away.

It is strange to note how silently and unperceived the black cloud of slavery stole over the Colonial Cavalier. A casual entry in John Rolfe's journal records: "About the last of August came in a dutch man of warre that sold vs twenty Negars." Before the arrival of this fatal vessel life-servitude was unknown. The system of apprenticeship, and what would now be called contract labor, prevailed. These indented white servants were either transported convicts, sold for a season to the planters, or, like the Maryland _redemptioners_, poor immigrants, who contracted to serve for a period of time equivalent to the cost of their pa.s.sage, which was prepaid to the master of the ship on which they came.

The work of these indented servants was not excessive. "Five dayes and a halfe in the summer," said one who knew the situation from experience, "is the allotted time that they worke and, for two months, when the sun predominates in the highest pitch of his heat, they claim an antient and customary Priviledge, to repose themselves three hours in the day, within the house. In Winter they do little but hunt and build fires."

The Sot-Weed Factor gives a much less rose-colored account of the life of a redemptioner. A woman-servant in the poem, looking back on her life in England, exclaims:

"Not then a slave for twice two year, My cloathes were fashionably new, Nor were my shifts of linnen blue.

But things are changed: Now at the Hoe I daily work and Barefoot go, In weeding corn, or feeding Swine I spend my melancholy time."

A "melancholy time" many of the redemptioners must have had in their enforced service; but if the master proved too severe, the indented servant had the privilege of selecting another, and the original employer was indemnified for his loss. Susan Frizell, who had run away from her master, was recaptured and brought before the court for punishment; but her accounts of ill-usage so moved the authorities, that they remitted the extra term of service to which running away had made her liable, and only demanded that she should earn under a new master the five hundred pounds of tobacco to be paid to her old employer. The bystanders were so touched by poor Susan's pitiful situation that they collected six hundred pounds on the spot, and sent Susan on her way rejoicing, with a capital of one hundred pounds of tobacco to give her a new start in the world.

The law provided that the servant, when his time of service expired, should receive a portion of goods sufficient to make him an independent freeman, who might rise to be a councillor or an a.s.semblyman. A Colonial statute directs that "at the end of said terme of service, the master or mistress of such servant shall give unto such man or maid-servant, 3 barrels, a hilling hoe and a felling axe; and to a man-servant, one new cloth suite, one new shirte, 1 new paire shoes, and a new Monmouth capp; and to a maid-servant, 1 new pettycoat and waistcoat, 1 new smock, 1 pair new shoes, 1 pair new stockings and the cloaths formerly belonging to the servant."

The advantage of this system of indented service lay in its gradual absorption of the immigrant population, who thus had time to understand the laws and inst.i.tutions of their new country before they became in their turn citizens and lawmakers. The disadvantage lay in the encouragement it gave to kidnapping. Many children and young people in the seaboard towns of England were beguiled, or carried by force, on shipboard, to be sold as servants in the colonies. The kidnappers, or "spirits," as they were commonly called, served as bugaboos in many an English nursery to frighten naughty children into obedience under threat of being spirited away to America.

Howells' "State-Trials" contains a pitiful account of the experiences of a young n.o.bleman sold as a white servant in Virginia through the plot of his covetous uncle, who wanted his property. The nephew is a mere child when he begins his apprenticeship in the provinces, but, by a series of attempts to escape, he prolongs his term of service till, when he finally succeeds in getting back to England to claim his own from the treacherous uncle, he is a man grown, and as difficult of recognition as the Tichborne claimant. The great majority of the first indented servants sent over, however, were convicts ripe for the jail or the gallows, and only respited to be transported to the colonies, which long suffered from the introduction of such a cla.s.s of citizens.

The records of Middles.e.x County, England, tell their own story:

_3 April, 15 James I._

Stephen Rogers, for killing George Watkins against the form of Statute of the first year of King James, convicted of manslaughter, was sentenced to be hung, but at the instance of Sir Thomas Smith, Kn't, was reprieved in the interest of Virginia, because he was a carpenter.

_6 August, 16 James I._

On his conviction of incorrigible vagabondage Ralph Rookes was reprieved at Sheriff Johnson's order so that he should be sent to Virginia.

_28 April, 18 James I._

On her conviction by a Jury of stealing divers goods of Mary Payne, Elizabeth Handsley was reprieved for Virginia.

_31 st May, 18 James I._