The comic history of the United States, from a period prior to the discovery of America to times long subsequent to the present

by John D. Sherwood

Cotton Mather exorcising a Witch.
(p. 176)

CHAPTER X.
OF THE MANNERS, MORALS, HABITS, AND LAWS OF THE COLONISTS IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

First-class Telescope to see the Manners of a Past Age.—Difficulties of Near-sighted and Long-sighted People.—Near Objects more embarrassing to the Observer than Distant.—Why?—The Ghosts of the past.—The Manners and Dress of Stuyvesant, Eliot, Calvert, Rolfe, etc. described.—Manners of the Mass detailed; in their Work, Play, Diet, Courtship, Fashions, Treatment of Young Ladies and Gentlemen, Children, Servants, etc.—Superior Advantages of Paterfamilias then in making Acquaintance with his Wife and Children.—Fast Girls and Calicoes.—The Isothermal Lines of Ethics.—Certain Vices, like Eggs, laid secretly and hatched afterwards.—The Fashions of Crime at various Epochs compared.—Jails and Jail-Birds.—The ingenious Crimes of Trade, Corporations, Schools, and Seminaries noted.—How Sects are frozen or thawed by Temperature.—Northern and Southern Sectarianisms.—Why Episcopacy flourished in Warm Latitudes.—The Early Commercial Morality of New York.—Baptists, Congregationalists, and Independents.—The Habits of the Century; their Material, Color, Durability, and Wear.—The Laws mainly imported.—What a Business the Colonists carried on, notwithstanding, in the Domestic Article.—Kindness of the Proprietors in furnishing Ready-made Office-holders not appreciated.—American Itch for Law-making.—Laws against Criminals.—Their Crimson Color.—How the Rains of Mercy fell on hard Enactments, and the Thaw which followed.—Coroners’ Inquests sat upon.—Verdicts under various Lights.—Justices of the Peace, and the Law they peddled.—Administrations of Law then and now contrasted.—How Colors, although imponderable, turned the Judicial Scales.

Firstly, Manners.—Historians, especially in modern times, are accustomed to entertain their readers with varied and variegated descriptions of the manners of the people, period, or century under their telescopes; and as we have a first-rate historical Dollond, adjusted for day and night observations, and can bring down a past age so near as to enable our readers to see not only the cut of their great-great-great-grandfather’s coats, the quality of their metal buttons on the outside, and of the metal within their pockets, but can note and enjoy even the shape of their mouths, the character of the good things going in, and the better things coming out of them; nay, can catch and fix the evanescent and subtle flavor of their humor and wit, as they exhale in rosy nimbi, we shall not withhold some of the latest and most valuable discoveries we have been thus enabled to make. Some near-sighted people find a difficulty, as they look about upon their contemporaries, in arriving at results which they can crystallize around class nodules. They see only individual specimens, and wonder how the photographic historian can bring out by his machine picturesque groups, clothed in appropriate costume, artistically arranged. But this difficulty arises from the unhappy fact that the objects observed lie directly under their eye. The others lie without. Besides such obtuse-eyed watchers of their own times, who experience an embarrassment in getting fitting words to express their ideas of an average man, age, habits, or morals,—a process much like that of producing our current Sherry wines by boiling down and simmering off a variety of ingredients,—lose sight of the precipitating, coagulating, forming mass, in their anxiety to note the frisky bubbles that come up to the agitated surface. Besides, long-sighted chroniclers can see and describe the habits and manners of the distant past with more clearness, and certainly with more telling effect, than the troublesome present, with its distressing individualities and exceptions, lying, amid the disturbing cross-lights of actual, hard, well-known facts. If, in bringing up the ghost of a period long buried, we get the wrong dress on it, or chance to summon back a spectre, invested with habits that fitted another epoch as well or better, we are not teased or contradicted by any foolish survivor, pushed by children-like questions, or worried into redness of face by puzzling inquiries or an awkward silence.

And so reasoning, we feel sure that, if our inspection of the accoutrements, manœuvres, and drill of the companies that march before us in the seventeenth century, is not absolutely accurate, the fault will not lie in the distance, nor in the atmosphere, nor yet in the instrument, but in one of these two causes, either that they have sent up the wrong squads or else that the originals had not, after all, much manners to be inspected.

It is generally believed that Lord Chesterfield invented manners: but as he was not born until 1694, just as the seventeenth century was getting staggeringly infirm and indifferent to its externals, and as he did not procure the publication of his Letters until the characters on the blue slate-stones over the bones of the deceased age had become blurred and weather-dimmed, the question of the comparison of their manners with his patent methods and rules did not, we may well believe, much vex those earnest old toilers of the sea and on the land.

Single figures stand out in sharp and pleasing picturesqueness against the distant horizon of those Colonial days; in Virginia, John Rolfe; in New York, Petrus Stuyvesant; in Massachusetts, John Eliot; George Calvert, in Maryland; Theophilus Eaton, in Connecticut; Sir John Yeomans, in North Carolina; Roger Williams, in Rhode Island; and many others, who seem in their granite integrity to be poised, like calm sculpture, in ruff and wrist-frill, broad-lapelled coats, short-clothes, silk stockings, and real, unplated silver knee and sleeve buckles.—These figures, tall and stately, with high-bred, courtly manners, bland faces lit up by purposes and convictions, with large, generous waistcoats, made capacious for the pendulations of their big, loving hearts beneath, still arrest our admiring eyes. The great mass of the Colonists, however, were resolute workers, living on a spare diet, sleeping on hard beds, with shake-downs for their friendly, and shake-ups for their unfriendly, guests. Their tastes were simple and confined to a few objects. Those modern houses in which we dwell, more appropriately called museums, the best parts kept for show, and having not one, but several mermaids, a What-is-it, and an assortment of woolly animals with tails for heads, and heads omitted, would have paralyzed and shocked the most advanced Colonists. Their manners were taking, but they were mainly exhibited in taking grain from the fields, fish from the sea, and scant returns from their store sales. The graces were shown mainly by husbands in lifting their spouses on and off pillions, to and from church, and by young men in those sweetly rough compliments that love contrives in all times, and among all classes, to shape out from a scanty, lingual stock in exchange for sheep’s-eyes and assenting blushes.

As it took vessels at that period several months to come from France, the settlers were somewhat late in their knowledge of the foreign modes; but as the styles were the latest known, it was all the same in New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Boston. That rotatory machine which now turns out fashions semiannually, now clipping a yard or so from the top of a dress and adding it to the bottom, here expanding a bonnet to the size of a parasol, then contracting it to dimensions less than the milliner’s bill for it; at one time running a flat iron down in front, and at another tacking a donkey’s load on behind, had not yet been invented. Paterfamilias recognized his own children, day after day, and even year after year, in the same modes and garments; the serviceable gray or serge, during week-days, and the decent, plain, unarresting, and unstunning habiliments, reverently donned for Sunday. The girls were not fast, although the colors of their calicoes were. Their bright carnations they wore all the time, only a little more so on Sunday evenings when the sparks lit them up, especially if a match was near.

In general a homespun candor quaintly marked family and neighborhood intercourse, and homespun honesty, integrity, and good sense, public and private actions. Of course all ages have common types of roguery. Each, too, has its own special representatives who commit crimes according to a prevailing mode, and who might easily be put into the fashion-plates of the Old Bailey or Sing-Sing. In these respects the times whereof we speak kept company, to some extent, with their predecessors. But among the sparse settlements, the appropriators and spoilers of others’ property and rights had such a hard time to do a thriving business, and found that honest work laid up so much more at the year’s end, that after a little while they learned to prefer the ways of the virtuous, not from principle, but from interest, and left off courses that led to the poor-house, if they missed the jail.