There were here and there dandies who imported their manners with their clothes; but as the girls then had the good sense to believe that these, so far from being superior to those of domestic growth, did not wear so long or well, and had a way of changing so often as to be worth less than the duty imposed to bring them in, such foreign importations gradually fell off.
Young ladies at home then sewed the tares, instead of the wicked old Sower. The “help” was only looked for, and always found in, the house; which was kept up for the sake of the family, and not for the servants. People worked all the hours in which they did not sleep, and thus kept their minds from being agitated by the operation of “eight-hour laws,” the tortures of party squeezes, and the bore of concerts and lectures. Children were put to bed before midnight, were satisfied with their simple toys, and remained children nature’s full term. Parents ruled, and not the baby, which crowed as much as it pleased, except over its begettors.
It must be said, however, that elderly people even then bewailed the decay of the times, and often, over their pipes or knitting, conjured up visions of more virtuous days, when they were young, amid the green fields of old England, the emerald meadows of Holland, or on the hardy plains of Sweden.
Secondly, Morals.—Ethics have no isothermal lines, fencing in the moral qualities, as nature girdles the earth with wavy zones for fruits, arctic, temperate, and tropical. And yet certain vices and virtues prevail, as trade-winds, more at one period, or over one tract at a given time than at or over another. It would almost seem as if certain moral or immoral ovarian eggs had been early and secretly laid in some wide districts, or among certain nations, where they were afterwards washed over by the impregnating milt of peculiar influences, and then broke into ready and abundant life.
There were jails in all the Colonies, and very early. The variety of the jail-bird never wanted specimens. The crimes against the person were more frequent at first than those against property, for the obvious reason that there were more of the former than the latter; as property multiplied, however, it was, as usual, viciously coveted.
The vices of an early age are more vigorous but rarer. Mean crimes; ambidextrous, cunning contrivances under the forms but against the spirit of law; ingenious larcenies by railway companies, by chartered corporations, by trust companies, by commercial partnerships, by seminaries and academies, where the pupils provide their own furniture, silver, and a great part of the instruction, and pay twice—ordinary and extraordinary—for everything they ought to get and do not; sharp, unscrupulous trade, slicing down realities so thin that they hardly serve to veneer our wants, and diluting truth so much that the millionth part of a grain will supply a whole store for twenty-four hours; the brokerage of office; the thousand deceits, infiltrated through the spongy textures of doubtful natures, and sprouting out, like rice, when the water of gain is poured upon it;—these all are the luxuries of a higher civilization. They have nothing to feed on in a simple state of society. They drift in upon an older one like barnacles and foul creepers on the copper fastenings of noble, well-freighted ships. Like blood in super-refined sugar, subtle vices look so white in the mixture that we almost fail to see their crimsoning hues. We speak of the crimes and misdemeanors of the Colonial times as indications of the prevailing morality, just as flies in open pans of cream tell its quality and richness.
Morality, we have said, is not bounded by isothermal lines; and yet climate and soil do seriously affect the prevailing moral tones and hues, just as earthly lakes take on the passing colors of the heavens above.
The Puritan sternness of New England convictions—as iron-like as the firs and larches on her own hills—swept in as gray gustiness across her early history as her northeasters over her wide fields. The latter pinched her children physically till they became of the same blue tint as their church regulations. The rigidity of even Huguenot faith could not stand the continual sun of South Carolina, which, at length, so relaxed its sharp lines that they ceased to cut at all across that compressed globe of iniquity, human slavery. The moral qualities of Virginia were like its own soil, at first stiff and deep, but gradually deteriorating until they got down into such a narcotic, stony poverty, that the plough of vigorous truth seldom turned up.
Forms of church worship, rites, and ceremonies usually flourish best in warm latitudes, where the passive swing on ecclesiastical ropes, suspended between time-crusted pillars, requires less exertion than climbing the tree, Zaccheus-like for one’s self. The vines which, all along down the well-sunned slopes, from the Chesapeake Bay southwards, lean lovingly upon the magnolia and cottonwood, shaping themselves often into verdant gothic arches, grasped with no tighter fingers the supports which safely steadied their trusting confidence, than did their sunny-hearted cultivators curl securely the tendrils of their religious faith around the Episcopal oaks, whose acorns, dropped from rook-nested boughs in England, and gathered and planted here, soon sprang up and spread their cool shades for an easy, luxurious faith.
The dominant morality of New York early borrowed its ingredients, as its capital, from whomsoever would lend it anything. Although all these contributions came to it through the Narrows, they soon broadened, on being landed. Thither came the sturdy, broad-breeched, meadow-bottomed Dutch, bringing the well-pounded creed of Dort, hardened and tempered, like blistered steel, upon the anvil of war, through the preceding century. The mace of iron-glaived Alva had again and again struck it; but the sturdy strokes had sent more fire into than they had ever brought from it. There, too, came Protestants from the Rhine, who had gone through the flames of St. Bartholomew’s day, and escaping first from France to Old Netherlands, and thence to New Netherlands, had carried with them, more carefully than their old delft, the sharp Articles of Calvinism. From Bohemia came the scholars of Huss; from Piedmont, the hunted Waldenses; from France, the men who turned their faces to centripetal Rome as their Mecca,—their religious creeds mixing and mingling in the wide-armed Bay of New York, which ever welcomed all religions that built houses on its shores or belted its waist with commercial girdles. The Baptists were early washed over to our coasts, and finding ample rivers for their aquatic rite, spread with every new wave of emigration. Congregational and Independent churches grew like young bullocks in almost every New England valley,—even putting their stiff necks through the Connecticut natural Ox-Bow at Hadley,—the only yoke they ever would submit to. We speak of churches and sects as propagators of morality, and as the yardsticks which measured the colonial morals; for as yet wicked men had not learned to use the church as covers, whence to spread nets for simpletons that lighted, like pigeons, on or near the adjacent grounds. In general, it may be said, that in spite of Puritan rites in New England showing the forbidding and cold side of the warm-hearted Gospel, in spite of the hedged Episcopal orchards of Virginia, where the blossoming odors were sought to be kept wholly inside the very high walls, in spite of the fermenting influences in New York, and the discouragements from various local causes in the other Colonies, Rhode Island and Maryland excepted, the colonists were healthily moral.