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:—
A gentleman carried his wife to London last week and died about eight o’clock at night, leaving her five hundred pounds a year in land. The next day before twelve she was married to the journeyman woolen-draper that came to sell mourning to her.
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:—
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 thats only adding fuel to the fire it makes me 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 eliviate my sorrows by burying that chast and troublesome passion in the grave of oblivion or eternal forgetfulness.
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:—
I purpose as soon as I recover my strength (from the pleurisy) to wait on Miss Bettie in hopes of a reconsideration of the former cruel sentence, and to see if I cannot obtain a decision in my favor. I enclose a letter to her.
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.