Sweethearts and Wives
The first settlers in America had no homes, for the first requisite for a home is a wife. They soon learned that “a better half, alone, gives better quarters.” The Indian squaws were almost the only women known to the voyagers on the Susan Constant and her sister ships; and though the adventurers wrote home in glowing terms of their dusky charms, they looked askance upon the idea of marriage with the heathen natives. We cannot help, however, echoing the sentiments of Colonel Byrd of Westover, when he says: “Morals and all considered, I can’t think the Indians much greater heathens than the first adventurers,” who, he adds, “had they been good Christians, would have had the charity to take this only method of converting the natives to Christianity. For, after all that can be said, a sprightly lover is the most prevailing missionary that can be sent amongst these, or any other infidels. Besides,” he proceeds candidly, “the poor Indians would have had less reason to complain that the English took away their lands, if they had received them by way of portion with their daughters.”
It was, in truth, a great benefit both to the English and to the Indians, when “Bright-Stream-Between-two-Hills”—called in the native dialect “Pocahontas”—married John Rolfe, with the approbation of both races. To this union some of the proudest families in Virginia trace their descent. Poor little Princess! The first romance of America casts its pathetic charm around you. However apocryphal the legend of your saving Smith’s life, it is hard to resist the impression of your cherishing a sentimental attachment for the gallant captain, and a suspicion that you were tricked into a marriage with Rolfe.
Smith records a sad interview with Pocahontas when she was being lionized, under the name of Lady Rebecca, as a royal visitor in London. “Being about this time preparing to set sail for New England,” he writes, “I could not stay to do her that service I desired, and she well deserved; but, hearing she was at Bradford with divers of my friends, I went to see her. After a modest salutation without any bow, she turned about, obscured her face as not seeming well contented. But not long after, she began to talk, and remembered me well what courtesies she had done, saying: ‘You did promise Powhatan what was yours should be his, and he the like to you; you called him Father—being in his land a stranger—and by the same reason so must I doe you.’” Smith objects on the ground of her royal lineage, which had well-nigh brought Rolfe to grief, and she responds: “Were you not afraid to come into my father’s countrie and cause feare in him and all his people but mee, and feare you here I should call you Father? I tell you then I will; and you shall call me childe; and soe will I be forever and ever your countrieman. They did tell me always you were dead, and I knew no other till I came to Plymouth. Yet Powhatan did command Ottamatomakkin to seek you and know the truth, because your countriemen will lie much.” So ended the parting; and soon afterward the poor little Princess died a stranger in a strange land. “She came to Gravesend, to her end and grave.”
The first English wedding on American soil was solemnized between John Laydon, a laborer, and Anne Buras, maid to Mistress Forest. They were “marry’d together” in 1608. Eleven years later came a ship bearing “ye maides,” a company of ninety young women, “pure and uncorrupt,” sent over to Virginia, at the expense of the company in London, to be married to such settlers as were able and willing to support them, and to refund to the company the cost of passage. A little later, sixty more “maides” followed; and though the cost of a wife rose from a hundred and twenty, to a hundred and fifty pounds of tobacco, there was no slackening in the demand. In Maryland, as late as 1660, the market was equally brisk. “The first planters,” says the record, “were so far from expecting money with a woman, that ’twas a common thing for them to buy a deserving wife, that carried good testimonials of her character, at the price of a hundred pound, and make themselves believe they had a bargain.”
We read of an adventurous young lady of some social consequence, being a niece of Daniel Defoe, who, suffering from an unfortunate love-affair in England, ran away from home, and came to Maryland as a “redemptioner.” Her services were engaged by a farmer named Job, in Cecil County, and soon after, according to a frequent custom of the country, she married into the family of her employer. A Maryland record of November 2, 1638, runs thus: “This day came William Lewis, planter, and made oath that he is not recontracted to any other woman than Ursula Gifford; and that there is no impediment why he should not be married to the said Ursula Gifford—and, further, he acknowledged himself to owe unto the Lord Proprietary a thousand pounds of tobacco, in case there be any precontract or other lawful impediment whatsoever, as aforesaid, either on the part of William Lewis or Ursula Gifford.”
This arrangement of making the bridegroom responsible for the good faith of the lady as well as his own, is quite refreshing in these days of equal rights and responsibilities. The woman’s rights question, however, was at the front in Maryland, in the seventeenth century; and the strong-minded woman who introduced it, was Mistress Margaret Brent, cousin to Governor Calvert, who had such confidence in her business sagacity and ability, that he appointed her his executrix, with the brief instructions, “Take all: pay all.” She made application to the Maryland Assembly to grant her a vote in the House for herself, and another as his Lordship’s attorney. The request was peremptorily refused by Governor Greene; but, nothing daunted, “the sd. Mrs Brent protested against all proceedings in this present assembly unlesse shee may be present and have a vote as aforesaid.” Another woman of force in those days was Virlinda Stone. In the Maryland archives still exists a letter from her to Lord Baltimore, praying for an investigation of a fight in Anne Arundel County, during which her husband was wounded. At the end of the business-like document, she adds a fiery and altogether feminine postscript, in which she declares that “Hemans, the master of the Golden Lion, is a very knave: and that will be made plainly for to appeare to your Lordship, for he hath abused my husband most grossly.” Such women as these were not to be trifled with. No wonder Alsop says: “All complimental courtships drest up in critical Rarities are meer strangers to them. Plain wit comes nearest to their genius; so that he that intends to court a Maryland girle, must have something more than the tautologies of a long-winded speech to carry on his design, or else he may fall under the contempt of her frown and his own windy discourse.”
The Virginia women were as high-spirited as their Maryland sisters. They had no idea of being commanded into matrimony. When Governor Nicholson became infatuated with one of the fair daughters of Master Lewis Burwell and demanded her hand with royally autocratic manner, neither she nor her parents were disposed to comply. The suitor became furious, and persisted for years in his determination, which seems to have been as much a matter of pride, as of sentiment. He took pains to wreak his wrath on every one who opposed the match, going so far as to threaten the lives of the unwilling young woman’s father and brother. To Commissary Blair he declared that, if she married any one but himself, he would cut the throats of three men—the bridegroom, the minister, and the justice who issued the license. Strangely enough, the damsel was not attracted by this wild wooing; and, as a candid friend wrote to the furious lover, “It is not here, as in some barbarous countries, where the tender lady is dragged into the Sultan’s arms reeking with the blood of her relatives.” Though this affair created such a stir throughout the Colony of Virginia and lasted so long a time, no record has remained of the young heroine’s after fate, except the fact that she did not become Lady Nicholson; not even her Christian name has come down to posterity, to whom she remains a shadowy divinity.
A noticeable feature of Colonial life in Virginia, is the belleship of widows. The girls seem to have stood no chance against their fascinations. Washington, and Jefferson, and Madison each married one. In the preceding century, Sir William Berkeley, who had brought no lady with him across the water, was taken captive by a young widow of Warwick County, a certain Dame Frances Stevens, who, after thirty-two years of married life, being again left a widow by Berkeley’s death, wedded with her late husband’s secretary, Philip Ludwell—holding fast, however, to her title of Lady Berkeley. Lord Culpeper writes in a letter of 1680, “My Lady Berkeley is married to Mr. Ludwell; and thinks no more of our world.” It is to be hoped that the secretary whom the lady took for her third husband, proved a more amiable companion than the fiery old Governor, whose pride and bitter obstinacy wrought such havoc after Bacon’s rebellion, that the reports of his cruelties echoed to the shores of England. Edmund Cheesman, a follower of Bacon’s, being brought up for trial, Berkeley asked him: “Why did you engage in Bacon’s designs?” Before Cheesman could answer, his young wife, falling on her knees, exclaimed: “My provocation made my husband join in the cause for which Bacon contended. But for me he had never done what he has done. Let me bear the punishment, but let my husband be pardoned!” Where was the chivalry of that Cavalier blood on which Berkeley prided himself? We read that her prayer availed her husband nothing, and procured only insult to herself.
Our sympathy with Bacon, in his rebellion against Berkeley’s tyranny, makes us doubly regretful that he should have stained his career by a deed of cowardice and cruelty. It was one of those blunders worse than crimes, and gave him and his followers the contemptuous appellation of “White Aprons.” When Bacon made his sudden turn on Sir William Berkeley, he established his headquarters at Green Spring, Berkeley’s own mansion. There he threw up breastworks in front of his palisades, and then sent out detachments of horsemen, who scoured the country and brought back to camp the wives of prominent Berkeleyites. Among these dames were Madam Bray, Madam Page, Madam Ballard, and Madam Bacon—the last, the wife of the rebel’s kinsman. Bacon then sent one of the dames to the town under a flag of truce, to inform the husbands that he intended to place them in front of his men while he constructed his earthworks. “The poor gentlewomen were mightily astonished, and neather were their husbands void of amazement at this subtile invention. The husbands thought it indeed wonderful that their innocent and harmless wives should thus be entered a white garde to the Divell”—the Divell, of course, being General Bacon, who, thus protected by The White Aprons, finished his fortifications in security; gaining a reputation for “subtility,” but tarnishing his character for gallantry.
As society grew more stable, it grew also more complex. The buying of wives gave way to sentimental courtships, and men also began to learn the advantages of a single life. In Maryland so many took this view, that we find the old statutes imposing a tax on bachelors over twenty-five years of age, of five shillings, for estates under three hundred pounds sterling, or twenty shillings when over; a tax which seems to have been more successful as a means of raising money than of promoting matrimony; for we find the record of its payment by a surprising number of bachelors, St. Ann’s parish vestry-books alone showing thirty-four such derelicts. Perhaps, however, this celibacy did not indicate so much aversion to marriage, as inability to meet the growing demands for luxury. The obstinate bachelors may have felt with regard to matrimony as Alsop did with regard to liberty, that “without money it is like a man opprest with the gout—every step he takes forward puts him to pain.” The Abbé Robin at a later day says of Annapolis: “Female luxury here exceeds what is known in the provinces of France. A French hair-dresser is a man of importance; it is said a certain dame here, hires one of that craft at a thousand crowns a year salary.” The very rumors of such extravagance must have frightened frugal young men!
The Colonial maiden came into society and married, at an age which now seems surprisingly early. Chief-Justice Marshall met and fell in love with his wife when she was fourteen, and married her at sixteen. An unmarried woman of over twenty-five, was looked upon as a hopeless and confirmed old maid and spoken of, like Miss Wilkins, of Boston, as “a pitiable spectacle.” It may be that this extreme youth of the maids explains the attraction of the widows, who had more social experience. Burnaby writes in a very unhandsome manner of his impressions of the Virginia ladies whom he met in his American tour, and generalizes with true British freedom on slight acquaintance with the facts. He admits grudgingly that the women of Virginia are handsome, “though not to be compared with our fair countrywomen in England. They have but few advantages, and consequently are seldom accomplished. This makes them reserved and unequal to any interesting or refined conversation. They are immoderately fond of dancing, and, indeed, it is almost the only amusement they partake of; but even in this, they discover great want of taste and elegance, and seldom appear with that gracefulness and ease which these movements are so calculated to display. Toward the close of an evening, when the company are pretty well tired with contra-dances, it is usual to dance jigs—a practice originally borrowed, I am informed, from the negroes. The Virginia ladies, excepting these amusements, and now and then a party of pleasure into the woods to partake of a barbecue, cheerfully spend their time in sewing and taking care of their families.”
Another traveller makes a better report, and draws more favorable conclusions.
“Young women are affable with young men in America,” he writes, “and married women are reserved, and their husbands are not as familiar with the girls as they were, when bachelors. If a young man were to take it into his head that his betrothed should not be free and gay in her social intercourse, he would run the risk of being discarded, incur the reputation of jealousy, and would find it very difficult to get married. Yet if a single woman were to play the coquette, she would be regarded with contempt. As this innocent freedom between the sexes diminishes in proportion as society loses its purity and simplicity of manners, as is the case in cities, I desire sincerely that our good Virginia ladies may long retain their liberty entire.”
The Colonial age was the day of elaborate compliment. Gentlemen took time to turn their sentences and polish them neatly, and ladies heard them to the end without suggesting by a word or glance that the climax had been foreseen for the last five minutes, at least. An essay on Woman, by a certain Mr. Thomas, had a great vogue in the eighteenth century, and antedated Tupper’s Poems as a well of sentimental quotation. The Spectator and The Tattler gave the tone to society literature, and enabled the provincial dame to reflect accurately the Lady Betty Modish of London. The beaux, too, took many a leaf from The Spectator in the study of a compliment. When I read of the Colonial maiden poring over the tiny glaze-paper note accompanying a book entitled “The Art of Loving”—in which the writer declares it to be “most convenient, presenting the art of Loving to one who so fully possesses the art of Pleasing”—I am carried back to the days of Sir Charles Grandison.
There is a marked contrast in the social chronicles of the eighteenth century at home and abroad, between what the gentlemen said to the ladies and what they said about them. That wicked Colonel Byrd, for instance, after making himself agreeable to Governor Spotswood’s ladies the whole evening, writes in his journal that their conversation was “like whip sillabub—very pretty, but with nothing in it.” Again he describes himself patronizingly as “prattling with the ladies after a nine o’clock supper.” Yet, underneath all the superficial bowing and scraping of courtesy and compliment, and the jesting asides at the expense of the fair sex, it must be set down to the Cavalier’s credit that he treated womankind with a great tenderness and respect. Woman’s influence made itself felt in private and in public—in the Council, in the Virginia House of Burgesses, and in the Assemblies of Maryland and of Carolina.
The pride and folly of Governor Tryon of Carolina led him to make a demand on the Assembly for an extensive appropriation for the building of a palace at Newbern suitable for the residence of a royal Governor. To obtain this appropriation, Lady Tryon and her sister, the beautiful Esther Wake, used all their blandishments. Lady Tryon gave brilliant balls and dinners, and her sister’s bright eyes rained influence to such good purpose, that the first appropriation and as much more was granted, and the palace was pronounced the most magnificent structure in America. The palace is fallen—its marble mantels, its colonnades, its carved staircases are in ruins; but the name of beautiful Esther Wake is preserved in Wake County.
The chronicles of the Carolinas are full of romance. Here, at Cross Creek, dwelt Flora MacDonald, the heroic rescuer of the Pretender after the disasters of Culloden. It seems a strange chance that brought her from such exciting masquerades, from the companionship of kings and the rôle of heroine on the stage of the great world, to the pioneer’s cottage in the wild woods of the Western wilderness. The only drawback to her career in eighteenth century eyes was that she married and lived happy ever after. The romance of that day demanded a broken heart, and tragedy was always in high favor. Every locality had its story of blighted love and life. The Dismal Swamp, lying on the border between Virginia and Maryland, was a sort of Gretna Green, where many runaway marriages were celebrated. Tradition tells of a lover whose sweetheart died suddenly; and he, driven mad by grief, fancied that she had gone to the Dismal Swamp, where he perished in the search for her.
When Tom Moore was in this country he was impressed by the legend, and set it thus to the music—let us not dare to say the jingle—of his verse:
They made her a grave too cold and damp
For a soul so warm and true,
And she’s gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp,
Where all night long, by her fire-fly lamp
She paddles her white canoe.
And her fire-fly lamp I soon shall see,
Her paddle I soon shall hear.
Long and loving our life shall be,
And I’ll hide the maid in a cypress tree,
When the footsteps of Death draw near.
Real life had its tragedies, too. In the deep wainscoted hall of the Brandon Mansion hangs a portrait of lovely Evelyn Byrd. She sits on a green bank, with a handful of roses and a shepherd’s crook in her lap—her soft, dark eyes look out in pensive sadness as though they could, if they would, tell the story of a maiden’s heart and a life ended untimely by unhappy love. One story says she broke her heart for Parke Custis, who left her to wear the willow, and married afterward the Martha Dandridge, who in the whirligig of time became Lady Washington. Another rumor connects her name with that of the Earl of Peterborough, who loved her deeply, so the story runs; but his creed was not hers, and her father, Colonel Byrd, would not consent to the marriage. The maiden yielded to her father’s will, but pined away and died; and there, in the Westover burying-ground, she lies under a ponderous stone, which records this epitaph:
“Alas, Reader,
We can detain nothing, however valued,
From unrelenting death,
Beauty, Fortune, or exalted Honour—
See here a proof!”
I cannot help feeling that all these might have been detained on earth to a ripe age, had the maiden been left free to decide the most important question of her life to her liking; for, in a letter written by Colonel Byrd when Evelyn was a slip of a girl, I read concerning the maiden, “She has grown a great romp and enjoys robust health.” Yet a few years later, the robust romp has faded to a shadow, and is laid away in the family graveyard, and only her portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller, remains to appeal to the sentiment and sympathy of posterity.
The gentle Evelyn Byrd was not the only one whom the traditions of the Colonial Cavalier credit with carrying to the grave a heart scarred with the wounds of unhappy love. Lord Fairfax, who lived to be over sixty and kept open house at Belvoir, where Washington visited him and kept him company in riding to hounds over hill and dale; Lord Fairfax—with his gaunt, tall frame; his gray, near-sighted eyes, and prominent aquiline nose, little outward resemblance as he might bear to the original of the almond-eyed portrait at Brandon—resembled her at least in a wounded heart and a broken career. In his youth, this solitary Virginia recluse had been a brilliant man-about-town in the gay world of London. He had held a commission in “the Blues”; he had known the famous men of the day, he had dabbled in literature, and contributed a paper now and then to the Spectator. When his career of fashion was at its height, he paid his addresses to a young lady of rank and was accepted. The day for the wedding was fixed—the establishment furnished, even to equipage and servants—when the inconstant bride-elect, dazzled by a ducal coronet, broke her engagement. The blow wrought a complete change in the jilted lover. From that time he shrank from the society of all women, and finally came over to Virginia to hide his hurt in the Western forests.
Spite of such traditions of melancholy, the actual career of most of the people of those times forms a curious contrast to the ideals of their poetry and fiction. With scarcely an exception, they survived their unsuccessful love affairs, and lived in prosperous serenity with others than the first rulers of their hearts.
There is Jefferson, for instance. Almost the first letter in his published correspondence is devoted to a confession of his tender passion for a young lady dwelling in the town of Williamsburg. Yet her name is not the one that stands next his own on the marriage register. This first love of his was a Miss ’Becca Burwell. We chance upon the young collegian’s secret as we open his letter to John Page, written on Christmas day, 1762. He begins jocularly enough, yet only half in fun after all: “I am sure if there is such a thing as a Devil in this world, he must have been here last night, and have had some hand in contriving what happened to me. Do you think the cursed rats (at his instigation, I suppose) did not eat up my pocket-book, which was in my pocket, within a foot of my head? And not contented with plenty for the present, they carried away my jemmy-worked silk garters and half a dozen new minuets I had just got.” “Tell Miss Alice Corbin,” he adds, “that I verily believe the rats knew I was to win a pair of garters from her, or they never would have been so cruel as to carry mine away.”
Christmas day, indeed, found him in sorry case. These losses he could have borne, but worse remained to tell: “You know it rained last night, or if you do not know it, I am sure I do. When I went to bed I laid my watch in the usual place; and going to take her up after I arose this morning, I found her in the same place, ’tis true, but—quantum mutatus ab illo—all afloat in water, let in at a leak in the roof of the house, and as silent and still as the rats that had eat my pocket-book. Now, you know, if chance had had anything to do in this matter, there were a thousand other spots where it might have chanced to leak as well as this one, which was perpendicularly over my watch. But, I’ll tell you, it’s my opinion that the Devil came and bored the hole over it on purpose.” It was not the injury to his timepiece which drew forth these violent, half-real, half-jesting objurgations; no, there was a sentimental reason behind. The water had soaked a watch-paper and a picture, so that when he attempted to remove them, he says: “My cursed fingers gave them such a rent as I fear I shall never get over. I would have cried bitterly, but that I thought it beneath the dignity of a man!” The mystery of the original of the picture and the maker of the watch-paper is soon explained, for a page or two further on, he trusts that Miss ’Becca Burwell will give him another watch-paper of her own cutting, which he promises to esteem much more, though it were a plain round one, than the nicest in the world cut by other hands. “However,” he adds, “I am afraid she would think this presumption, after my suffering the other to get spoiled.”
A very real and tumultuous passion this of young Tom Jefferson’s! Every letter he writes to his friend teems with reference to her. Now she is R. B.; again Belinda; and again, with that deep secrecy of dog Latin so dear to the collegian, she figures as Campana in die (bell in day); or, still more mysteriously, as Adnileb, written in Greek that the vulgar world may not pry into the sacred secret. Oh, youth, youth, how like is the nineteenth century to the eighteenth, and that to its preceding, till we reach the courtship of Adam and Eve!
In October, ’63, he writes to his old confidant: “In the most melancholy fit that ever any poor soul was, I sit down to write you. Last night, as merry as agreeable company and dancing with Belinda in the Apollo could make me, I never could have thought the succeeding sun could have seen me so wretched as I now am!... I was prepared to say a great deal. I had dressed up in my own mind such thoughts as occurred to me in as moving a language as I knew how, and expected to have performed in a tolerably creditable manner. But, good God! when I had an opportunity of venting them, a few broken sentences, uttered in great disorder and interrupted with pauses of uncommon length, were the too visible marks of my strange confusion.” The framer of the Declaration of Independence, whose eloquence startled the world, found himself tongue-tied and stammering in a declaration of love to a provincial maiden.
At twenty-nine or thirty Jefferson had recovered enough to go a-courting again, to Mistress Martha Skelton, a young and childless widow, of such great beauty that many rivals contested with him the honor of winning her hand. The story goes that two of these rivals met one evening in Mrs. Skelton’s drawing-room. While waiting for her to enter, they heard her singing in an adjoining room, to the accompaniment of Jefferson’s violin. The love-song was so expressively executed that the admirers perceived that their doom was sealed, and, picking up their cocked hats, they stole out without waiting for the lady.
If Jefferson in his younger days was soft-hearted toward the gentler sex, his susceptibility was as nothing compared to Washington’s. The sentimental biography of that great man would be more entertaining than the story of his battles, or his triumphs of government. There are evidences in his own handwriting that, before he was fifteen years old, he had conceived a passion for a fair unknown beauty, so serious as to disturb his otherwise well-regulated mind, and make him seriously unhappy. His sentimental poems written at that age, are neither better nor worse than the productions of most boys of fifteen. One of them hints that bashfulness has prevented his divulging his passion:
“Ah, woe is me, that I should love and conceal!
Long have I wished and never dare reveal.”
At the mature age of sixteen, he writes to his “dear friend Robin”: “my residence is at present at his Lordship’s, where I might, was my heart disengaged, pass my time very pleasantly, as there’s a very agreeable young lady lives in the same house; but as that’s only adding fuel to the fire, it makes me the more uneasy; for by often and unavoidably (!) being in company with her, revives my former passion for your Lowland Beauty; whereas, was I to live more retired from young women, I might in some measure alleviate my sorrows by burying that chaste and troublesome passion in the grave of oblivion.” This “chaste and troublesome passion” had subsided enough, when he went as a young officer to New York in all the gorgeousness of uniform and trappings, to enable him to fall in love with Miss Mary Phillipse, whom he met at the house of her sister, Mrs. Beverly Robinson. She was gay, she was rich, she was beautiful, and Washington might have made her the offer of his heart and hand; but suddenly an express from Winchester brought word to New York of a French and Indian raid, and young Washington hastened to rejoin his command, leaving the capture of the lady to Captain Morris. Three years later we find him married to the Widow Custis, with two children and a fortune of fifteen thousand pounds sterling. Shortly after, he writes of himself from Mount Vernon, temperately enough, as “fixed in this seat with an agreeable partner for life,” and we hear no more of amatory verses in honor of his Lowland Beauty, or flirtations with fashionable young dames in New York. But when the Marquis de Chastellux announced his marriage, Washington wrote him in a vein of humor rather foreign to him, and bespeaking a genial sympathy in his expectations of happiness. “I saw by the eulogium you often made on the happiness of domestic life in America,” he writes, “that you had swallowed the bait, and that you would as surely be taken one day or other, as that you were a philosopher and a soldier. So your day has at length come! I am glad of it with all my heart and soul. It is quite good enough for you. Now you are well served for coming to fight in favor of the American rebels all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, by catching that terrible contagion—domestic felicity—which, like the small-pox or plague, a man can have only once in his life.”
Of all the joyous festivals among the Southern Colonists, none was so mirthful as a wedding. The early records of the wreck of the Sea Venture and the tedious and dangerous delay on the Bermudas mention that in even that troublous time they held one “merry English wedding.” In any new land marriages and births are joyful events. All that is needed for prosperity is multiplication of settlers, and so it is quite natural that the setting up of a new household should be celebrated with rejoicing and merry-making.
In one respect the colonists broke with the home traditions. They insisted on holding their marriage ceremonies at home rather than in church, and no minister could move their determination. As civilization advanced, and habits grew more luxurious, the marriage festivities grew more elaborate and formal. The primitive customs gave way to pomp and display, till at length a wedding became an affair of serious expense. “The house of the parents,” says Scharf in his “Chronicles of Baltimore,” “would be filled with company to dine; the same company would stay to supper. For two days punch was dealt out in profusion. The gentlemen saw the groom on the first floor, and then ascended to the second floor, where they saw the bride; there every gentleman, even to one hundred a day, kissed her.”
A Virginia wedding in the olden time was a charming picture—the dancers making merry in the wide halls or on the lawn; the black servants dressed in fine raiment for the occasion and showing their white teeth in that enjoyment only possible to a negro; the jolly parson acting at once as priest and toast-master; the groom in ruffles and velvet, and the bride in brocade and jewels. Never again will our country have so picturesque a scene to offer. Let us recall it while we may!