[149] Wharton: Through Colonial Doorways, p. 219.
[150] Wharton: Through Colonial Doorways, p. 79.
[151] Wharton: Martha Washington, p. 230.
[152] Crawford: Romantic Days in the Early Republic, p. 53.
CHAPTER V
COLONIAL WOMAN AND SOCIAL LIFE
I. Southern Isolation and Hospitality
In the earlier part of the seventeenth century the social life of the colonists, at least in New England, was what would now be considered monotonous and dull. Aside from marriages, funerals, and church-going there was little to attract the Puritans from their steady routine of farming and trading. In New York the Dutch were apparently contented with their daily eating, drinking, smoking, and walking along the Battery or out the country road, the Bowery. In Virginia life, as far as social activities were concerned, was at first dull enough, although even in the early days of Jamestown there was some display at the Governor's mansion, while the sessions of court and assemblies brought planters and their families to town for some brief period of balls, banquets, and dancing.
As the seventeenth century progressed, however, visiting, dinner parties, dances, and hunts in the South became more and more gay, and the balls in the plantation mansions became events of no little splendor. Wealth, gained through tobacco, increased rapidly in this section, and the best that England and France could offer was not too expensive for the luxurious homes of not only Virginia but Maryland and South Carolina. The higher Dutch families of New York also began to show considerable vigor socially; Philadelphia forgot the staid dignity of its founder; and even New England, especially Boston, began to use accumulated wealth in ways of levity that would have shocked the Puritan fathers.