Colonial dames and good wives

by Alice Morse Earle

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:—

Mrs. Wilson being thus perswaded over into the difficulties of an American desart, her kinsman Old Mr. Dod, for her consolation under those difficulties did send her a present with an advice which had in it something of curiosity. He sent her a brass counter, a silver crown, and a gold jacobus, all severally wrapped up; with this instruction unto the gentleman who carried it; that he should first of all deliver only the counter, and if she received it with any shew of discontent, he should then take no notice of her; but if she gratefully resented that small thing for the sake of the hand it came from, he should then go on to deliver the silver and so the gold, but withal assure her that such would be the dispensations to her and the good people of New England. If they would be content and thankful with such little things as God at first bestowed upon them, they should, in time, have silver and gold enough. Mrs. Wilson accordingly by her cheerful entertainment of the least remembrance from good old Mr. Dod, gave the gentleman occasion to go through with his whole present and the annexed advice.

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:—

My Wife & family was posted at your Honʳˢ a considerable while, it being thought to be ye most convenient place for ye feminine Rendezvous. Mr James who Commands in Chiefe among them, upon ye coast alarum given, faceth to ye Mill, gathers like a Snow ball as he goes, makes a Generall Muster at yor Honʳˢ, and so posts away with ye greatest speed, to take advantage of ye neighboring rocky hills, craggy, inaccessible mountains; so that Wᵗᵉᵛᵉʳ els is lost Mr James and yᵉ Women are safe.

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.”