“That the Silver Streams of my Dearest Affections and faithfull Love will be willingly received into the Mill Pond of your tender Virgin Heart; by your halling up the flood gate of your virtuous Love and Affections; which will completely turn the Wheeles of your Gracious will and Understanding to receive the golden graines or Effects of my Steadfast Love and unerring Affection which will be in Loyall respective and Obliging Service so Long as Life Shall Last and such a thrice Happy Conjunction; may induce Many to bring bags of Golden graines of Rejoycing to our Mill and River of joy and contentment and we ourselves will sing ye Epithalmy; this is the Earnest (yet Languishing) Desire of his Soul who hath sent his heart with his Letter:”[33]
The foregoing epistle is connected with a curious chapter in the religious life of the Lower Counties of Pennsylvania.[34] The writer, a son of the celebrated controversialist and Baptist divine of London, Benjamin Keach, made himself notorious in the early days of the Colony by passing himself off as a minister of the Baptist Church. “A very wild spark,” one historian calls him, while even in Baptist annals Elias Keach is spoken of as “an ungodly young man, who, to make himself appear to be a clergyman, wore black clothing and bands.” He carried his imposture so far as to undertake to conduct a service, in the midst of which he broke down, and when the congregation gathered about him, thinking that he was attacked by some sudden indisposition, Mr. Keach confessed, “with tears and much trembling,” that he was no minister, nor a Christian. Whether this shady episode, which occurred in 1686, the same year that the love-letter was written to Miss Helm, prevented the mistress of his “Amorous and Virtuous Affections” from favoring his suit, contemporaneous history does not reveal. It does, however, establish the fact that Miss More, daughter of Chief Justice Nicholas More, of Pennsylvania, and not Miss Helm, became the wife of the polite letter-writer. It would be interesting to know with what sort of a declaratory effusion this second love was favored. On this point history is again silent. It states, however, what it is only just to repeat with regard to the subsequent career of Elias Keach,—namely, that he repented of his sins before he created further scandal in clerical circles. Having confessed, and having received absolution and ordination from one Elder Dungan, of Rhode Island, Mr. Keach began his life-work in earnest, which evidently bore good fruit, as he now enjoys the reputation of having established the first Baptist church in Philadelphia County, that of Pennepack, from which sprang a large sisterhood of Baptist churches in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
Among later Colonial love-letters are those of Abigail Smith, afterwards Mrs. John Adams, which are marked by the ready wit and playful fancy that characterized all her writings. These qualities she seems to have inherited from no stranger, as her father, the Rev. William Smith of Weymouth, was one of the most facetious of divines. It is said that when his eldest daughter, Mary, married Richard Cranch, he preached from Luke x. 42: “And Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.” Abigail also had her turn. Some of the aristocratic parishioners of Weymouth objected to John Adams because he was the son of a small farmer and himself a lawyer, these two facts rendering him, they thought, ineligible to marry the minister’s daughter, in whose veins flowed the bluest of New England blue blood. Mr. Smith accordingly favored his congregation with a discourse on the text, “For John came neither eating bread nor drinking wine; and ye say, He hath a devil,” the latter clause having reference to the groom’s profession, the law, which was not then held in much repute in New England.
In a letter written by Miss Smith, from her village home, to John Adams, who was undergoing the process of inoculation for small-pox in Boston, she says,—
“By the time you receive this I hope from experience that you will be able to say that the distemper is but a trifle. Think you I would not endure a trifle for the pleasure of seeing you? Yes, were it ten times that trifle, I would. But my own inclinations must not be followed. I hope you smoke your letters well before you deliver them. Mamma is so fearful lest I catch the distemper, that she hardly ever thinks the letters are sufficiently purified. Did you never rob a bird’s nest? Do you remember how the poor birds would fly round and round, fearful to come nigh, yet not know how to leave the place? Just so they say I hover round Tom whilst he is smoking my letters.”
It is to be regretted that John Adams’s answers to these letters are not preserved: they were probably burned up by the anxious mamma.
All Abigail’s letters are love-letters in their tone of earnest devotion, whether written before or after marriage. With the details of the stir and excitement of military doings in and around Boston, the arrival of General Washington, the scantiness of provisions, and the cry for pins, which seem to have been as scarce as diamonds, there abound such passages as this:
“I wish I could come and see you. I never suffer myself to think you are about returning soon. Can it, will it be? May I ask—may I wish for it? When once I expect you——But hush! Do you know it is eleven o’clock at night?... Pray don’t let Bass forget my pins. We shall soon have no coffee, nor sugar, nor pepper here; but whortleberries and milk we are not obliged to commerce for. I saw a letter of yours to Colonel Palmer by General Washington. I hope I have one too. Good-night. With thoughts of thee I close my eyes. Angels guard and protect thee; and may a safe return ere long bless thy Portia.”
It was always Diana or Portia, after the romantic fashion of those days; and who would not rather have been Portia than plain Abigail to her lover?
A curious literary and historical fact, not generally known, is that General Benedict Arnold, who was notorious for his extravagance in public and private life, was extremely parsimonious in the matter of love-letters. By the infallible proof of an old letter, recently discovered, it appears that he made the same amatory composition do double duty, having used it in addressing at least two ladies of his choice. The letter was first employed in a proposal to Miss A., whom he did not marry, and with a few changes was used in offering himself to the beautiful Miss Peggy Shippen, of Philadelphia, whom he married in 1779. The letter, as addressed to Miss Shippen, is to be found in Arnold’s “Life of Benedict Arnold,” and is undoubtedly a fine sample of a love-letter of a rather florid and bombastic style. If Miss Shippen had realized that her suitor had written to an earlier love that her “charms had lighted up a flame in his bosom which could never be extinguished, that her heavenly image was too dear to be ever effaced, and that Heaven’s blessing should be implored for the idol and only wish of his soul,” she might with some reason have hesitated to bestow her hand upon so trite a lover, who could find no fresh adjectives to match her charms.