For Mr. Bacon, though he had the repute of a preux chevalier, yet sent one of the ladies to inform her husband and those of the other dames that he meant to place the ladies "in the forefront of his men" while the fortifications were in progress, thus securing his forces against attack by interposing the shield of sacred femininity between them and their enemies. When the "white-aproned" herald delivered her message, "the poor gentlewomen were mightily astonished, and neather were their husbands void of amazement at this subtill invention." No wonder; for though as a conception the words of General Bosquet, C'est magnifique! might have been applied, certainly they would needs be followed by the rest of the famous saying, mais ce n'est pas la guerre! The chronicler of the affair continues in a strain which is worthy of at least partial quotation for its sardonic humor. "If Mr. Fuller thought it strange that the Divell's black garde should be enrouled God's soldiers," he says, the husbands made it no less wonderful that their innocent and harmless wives should thus be entred a white garde to the Divell. And this action was a method in war that they were not well acquainted with that before they could come to pierce their enemy's sides they must be obliged to dart their weapons through their wives brest. "The Divell" of the foregoing is of course Bacon himself; and really, when we think of the poor ladies set in their "white aprons" on the breastworks, not sure whether they have most to fear from front or rear, from friend or foe, we are tempted to consider the title well bestowed. Yet Bacon was generally held to be a man of gallantry as well as a gallant man; but the incident is not to the point. At last "the guardian angells withdrew into a place of safety," the works being finished; and, strange to say, we hear no more concerning them, though they were left in the camp of the rebels when Berkeley's troops were repulsed, and what befel them during the subsequent triumph--a brief one--of the Baconian forces and the burning of Jamestown we are not told. It is to be hoped that they were restored to their homes with more courtesy than they were brought thence.
Bacon's antagonist, Sir William Berkeley, did not prove himself more gallant or considerate to women than the defeated rebel. After Bacon had been defeated and had wisely died, the wife of Major Cheeseman, one of the captured rebels, was present during the interrogation of her husband by Berkeley, and when the latter demanded Cheeseman's reasons for rebelling, the lady very courageously came forward and prevented his reply by telling the enraged Sir William that "It was her provocation that made her husband join in the cause that Bacon contended for; if he had not been influenced by her instigations he had never done that which he had done;" and then, kneeling to Berkeley, she continued, "Since what her husband had done was by her means, and so by consequence she most guilty, she prayed that she might be hanged and he pardoned." It was a womanly and wifely speech; and those who are unacquainted with the character of Berkeley will find it difficult to believe that he answered her by a proposition so gross and insulting that it proved him utterly wanting the true instincts, however he may have had the veneer, of a gentleman, as well as in understanding of a woman's heart. Cheeseman was not hanged, however; but he died in prison, and the circumstances were thought mysterious, so that Berkeley was not held guiltless of the death.
In the narrated incidents we can find a point of contrast between the female cultures of the North and the South. We can well imagine a Puritan wife addressing a dignitary as Mrs. Cheeseman addressed Governor Berkeley; but it is impossible to fancy Puritan women in the situation in which those "white gardes of the Divell" found themselves. The former would never have submitted to the degradation; they would not, for their lives, have so hampered the hands of their husbands. It was not the pioneer woman of a new continent who stood upon those ramparts and made their own breasts the shields of their enemies, but the delicately reared and nurtured woman of a pampered class. Yet that there was good courage among these fine ladies is shown, if showing were necessary, in the example of Mrs. Cheeseman; but it was not universal as among the women of the Puritans, though both its presence and absence formed but a general rule to which there were many and important exceptions.
With all their divergences and differences, however, there was between the North and South one point of contact which was typical, racial, and individual, and which in its persistence grew to be national. It was of course a continuation of Anglo-Saxon tradition, applied to new circumstances which made it but the more powerful in influence; but it was a tradition which was to be potent in the formation of the American spirit. This was the home. For the home, as we know it, is almost, if not entirely, uniquely American and English. There may be entered a saving clause concerning the Teutonic nations, but it would not impeach the full integrity of the statement. Only in the Anglo-Saxon races has the home possessed the peculiar sanctity which it holds in this day among those same peoples; and in America this has been distinctively the case. For a race of pioneers, which builds in the desert its own continuing cities, sees in its edifices, however humble at first, something which is not evident to the inhabiter of ancient cities. The dweller in the wilderness gazes with a peculiar affection upon the little tract which he has reclaimed; and the cottage or even hut, with its humble household gods and goods, takes in his eyes a strange and extrinsic value because of that which they represent to him, in achievement and of necessity.
Therefore, north and south, the first thought of the pioneer settler was to establish the home; and the first requisite of the home is its presiding deity, the wife. Thus the American woman had from the first a peculiar value in the eyes of her husband; she was more surely "flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone" than were other wives, for she shared of necessity all his perils and triumphs, while his work was patiently done for her as for himself. She represented to him his gage to fortune as well as his best-beloved and most-needed companion; and she was necessary to him. This attitude of the husband, unexpressed, perhaps uncomprehended, was none the less effective in forming the womanly ideal of the home. Because that home had been gained--in the aggregate at last, in the individual at first--by the sweat of her goodman's brow and was maintained and guarded by the labor of his hands and the courage of his heart, therefore the American wife was conscious of a peculiar duty toward the husband, a peculiar tenderness toward the home, which to her represented as much as to him.
In this way and for these reasons the sanctity of the American home became peculiarly marked, and there arose in that home an atmosphere of holiness and purity that was in contrast to the households of other nations at that day. There is no more appropriate place than this, on the border line of the two epochs of colonization, when the American type began to be defined and recognized, for a brief glance at the American home in its spiritual features. As with the homes in rural England, but differing in this respect, as in so many others, from the city life of the mother country, the purity of the home was its most noteworthy and carefully conserved feature. In many respects there was likeness between the home of America and that of Holland; certainly, though in many aspects the resemblance failed, there was a closer resemblance than between the former and the home in any other nation. Whether this came from the brief sojourn of the Pilgrims in Holland cannot be said with certainty, though it seems most improbable; the greater likelihood is that the conditions which prevailed in colonial America were those best adapted to the genius of the Dutch people in the matter of domesticity, as later shown in the somewhat similar conditions and results in South Africa. Certain it is that the American home, like that of Holland, was in all ways, materially and morally, preeminently clean. There are many faults to be attributed to our ancestors north and south; but they had great virtues as well, and this of cleanliness in the home was one, and a great one. Even at this early day there was plenty of roystering and even vice in the colonies, more especially in Virginia, where the gay young blades ruffled it in imitation of the sparks of the court of the Stuarts; but the home was still preserved free from contamination. Woman was from the first held as a sacred thing, as a being to be reverenced and even worshipped, not with the affected gallantry of the English cavaliers or the French exquisites, but in all honesty and honor. They knew her value, these men of the old colonies; and they felt that an affront to her purity and virtue was a blow at the very foundation of the country they were learning to love. So it was that in America, as nowhere else, woman was in the mid-colonial days held in honor and honest reverence, and so it was that the American home, founded amid the clamor of the war-whoop and standing as the true stronghold of civilization, grew to be the finest emblem of the spirit of the new land and the noblest monument to the character and influence of its women.
CHAPTER VI
THE LATER COLONIAL PERIOD
Though perhaps rather a ramification than an inherent part of the history of woman, the subject of dress among the female colonists, at least in New England, is one of too great interest to permit it to be passed over in silence in a book concerning the women of America. From the very first--retracing our steps somewhat in order to obtain a complete view of the matter--the question of female dress was one that in New England was constantly giving grave offence and even scandal to the more serious of the colonists. Sumptuary laws were passed again and again, their very repetition showing how helpless was legislation to cope with the conditions confronting it in the matter of feminine love for gauds. As early as 1634 there was enacted a law which forbade any person, either man or woman, from making or buying any apparel, either woollen or silk or linen, with any lace on it, silver, gold, or thread, under the penalty of forfeiture of said clothes. Gold and silver girdles, hatbands, belts, ruffs, and beaver hats were prohibited by the same law; but the planters were permitted to wear out such apparel as they were already provided with, "except the immoderate great sleeves, slashed apparel, immoderate great rails and long wings." Five years later there was a new piece of legislation which banished "immoderate great breeches, knots of ryban, broad shoulder bands and rayles, silk ruses, double ruffles and capes," and in 1651 the General Court, having found its legislation futile in many respects, descended to argument, and expressed its "utter detestation and dislike that men or women of meane condition, education, and callings shoulde take uppon them the garbe of gentlemen by the wearinge of gold or silver lace or buttons or poynts at their knees, to walke in great boots, or women of the same rank to weare silke or tiffany hoodes or scarfes." If those "of meane condition" did these things, it is evident that the people of higher class could not have been very sober in their garb--indeed we know that they were not. In 1676 the Court of Connecticut passed a law that is worthy of quotation in full, since it not only sets forth the Puritan opinion upon the matter, but shows the ingenuity of their efforts to cope with the growing evil, and also gives us a good idea of the fashions of that time: