Through the letters of the day many hints have come down to us of what colonial men and women deemed important in matters of love and marriage. Thus, we find Washington writing Nelly Custis, warning her to beware of how she played with the human heart—especially her own. Women wrote many similar warnings for the benefit of their friends or even for the benefit of themselves. Jane Turrell early in the eighteenth century went so far as to write down a set of rules governing her own conduct in such affairs, and some of these have come down to us through her husband's Memoir of her:
"I would admit the addresses of no person who is not descended of pious and credible parents."
"Who has not the character of a strict moralist, sober, temperate, just and honest."
"Diligent in his business, and prudent in matters. Of a sweet and agreeable temper; for if he be owner of all the former good qualifications, and fails here, my life will be still uncomfortable."
Whether the first of these rules would have amounted to anything if she had suddenly been attracted by a man of whose ancestry she knew nothing, is doubtful; but the catalog of regulations shows at least that the girls of colonial days did some thinking for themselves on the subject of matrimony, and did not leave the matter to their elders to settle.
XIII. Matrimonial Irregularities
There is one rather unpleasant phase of the marriage question of colonial days that we may not in justice omit, and that is the irregular marriage or union and the punishment for it and for the violation of the marriage vow. No small amount of testimony from diaries and records has come down to us to prove that such irregularities existed throughout all the colonies. Indeed, the evidence indicates that this form of crime was a constant source of irritation to both magistrates and clergy.
The penalty for adultery in early Massachusetts was whipping at the cart's tail, branding, banishment, or even death. It is a common impression that the larger number of colonists were God-fearing people who led upright, blameless lives, and this impression is correct; few nations have ever had so high a percentage of men of lofty ideals. It is natural, therefore, that such people should be most severe in dealing with those who dared to lower the high morality of the new commonwealths dedicated to righteousness. But even the Puritans and Cavaliers were merely human, and crime would enter in spite of all efforts to the contrary. Bold adventurers, disreputable spirits, men and women with little respect for the laws of man or of God, crept into their midst; many of the immigrants to the Middle and Southern Colonies were refugees from the streets and prisons of London; some of the indented servants had but crude notions of morality; sometimes, indeed, the Old Adam, suppressed for generations, broke out in even the most respectable of godly families.
Both Sewall and Winthrop have left records of grave offences and transgressions against social decency. About 1632 a law was passed in Massachusetts punishing adultery with death, and Winthrop notes that at the "court of assistants such an act was adopted though it could not at first be enforced."[278] In 1643 he records:
"At this court of assistants one James Britton ... and Mary Latham, a proper young woman about 18 years of age ... were condemned to die for adultery, upon a law formerly made and published in print...."[279]