Colonial dames and good wives

by Alice Morse Earle

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:—

The men in the colony begin through habit to use corn as an article of food, but the women, who are mostly Parisians, have for this kind of food a dogged aversion which has not been subdued. Hence they inveigh bitterly against his Grace the Bishop of Quebec who they say has enticed them away from home under pretext of sending them to enjoy the milk and honey of the land of promise.

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:—

Five dayes and a halfe in the summer is the allotted time that they worke, and for two months, when the Sun is predominate 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.

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.”