That the record made in this quotation may be complete, it must be supplemented by a few words devoted to another aspect of fashion among the early Puritans. This was in the matter of hair-dressing, that fashion which went to such enormous lengths in England during the eighteenth century. A curious fact is that the Puritan women seem generally to have worn "bangs"; and this fact is more of a certificate to their simplicity than to their taste. However, there was a large leaven of fashion in the towns of the Puritans; for in 1683 Increase Mather thus spoke of the mode of his day: "Will not the haughty daughters of Zion refrain their pride in apparell? Will they lay out their hair, and wear their false locks, their borders, and towers like comets about their heads?" These queries suggest decided lengths in head adornment, probably even to the adoption of the "heart-breakers" worn in 1670, which are described as "False locks set on wyers to make them stand at a distance from the head." One would think that such frank admission of falsity might plead its own excuse; but one Puritan minister describes the women of that time as "Apes of Fancy, friziling and curyling of their hayr."
Enough of dress and fashion! Yet some record thereof is pertinent here, for it shows us the gradual change which was being worked in the customs and ideas of New England. The colonies were becoming conventional; when modishness comes in at the door, individuality flies out at the window. The ideal of the home was being modified, not to say altered. There had always been among a certain element a love for the gauds and fripperies of the world, but it was not until the opening of the second colonial period that this element grew to the ascendency in New England. The old primitive simplicity as a national attribute was beginning to fail, and in its stead was being imported the conventional complexity of life in the mother country. New England was becoming more deserving of her name; she was growing to be a lesser England instead of a new civilization. She was fast falling into the errors that were undermining the true American spirit in the southern colonies.
We have seen the wardrobe of a New England woman, presumably one of fashion, yet not of notable rank. Here was a great change from the era when the majority of women wore homespun and furnished themselves with the material which they wore as well as fashioned the garments with their own hands. Of course there was still, and long continued to be, an element that preserved the household traditions of the earlier settlers, and thus the individuality of the life; but it had come to be in the minority. The New England woman, taken from the representative class, no longer whirled her spinning wheel and wove the garments for her wearing and that of her family; she looked to her goodman to import these things from England in the vessels which were now regularly arriving in the home ports.
Another sign of the changed conditions of the New England home was the matter of domestic service. In 1687, according to the writer of The Diary of a French Refugee in Boston, there was "absolute Need of Hired Help;" but it was less household servants than field hands to whom the author was referring. Later, however, we find Hugh Peters, of Salem, writing to an acquaintance in Boston, "Wee haue heard of a diuidence of women & children in the baye & would be glad of a share viz: a young woman or girle & a boy if you thinke goode." This points to domestic service, as does a later letter from the same source, in which he says, "My wife desires my daughter to send to Hanna that was her mayde now at Charlestowne to know if she would dwell with us, for truly wee are now so destutute (having now but an Indian) that wee know not what to do." Later yet, in the beginning of the eighteenth century, we find in the journals frequent advertisements of runaway servants, mostly Indians. There was also negro slavery in the northern colonies, though it was never entirely accepted as an institution,--not from any moral scruples, but because of inexpediency and poverty. In 1645, Emanuel Downing suggested the exchange of Indian captives for negroes, and said, "I doe not see how wee can thrive untill wee gett a stock of slaves sufficient to doe all our business;" but this probably referred to field hands, though he later wrote to England for "godly e skylful paynestakeing girles" as servants, and in default of these he at last fairly inaugurated the system of slavery which existed for a time in New England. There were white slaves as well as black in the northern colonies, and this infamous custom helped to solve the problem of domestic service.
That there was trouble with servants in those old days, even as in these present, is amply attested by the records; but it was possible to resort to more drastic measures than are now feasible. We read that at Hartford, "Susan Coles for her rebellious cariedge towards her mistris is to be sent to the house of correction and be kept to hard labour and course dyet, to be brought forth the next Lecture Day to be publiquely corrected and so to be corrected weekly until Order be given to the contrary." This was in the early times, and many matrons of later days, even as many now, must have longed for the return of the laws which enabled them to keep their servants in order. Mary Dudley has set forth her experience in this matter in a letter to her mother, Madame Winthrop, whom she had asked to send her "a goode girle, a strong lusty servant, used to all kind of work who would refuse none." Her letter of complaint is worth quoting at large, as showing the conditions of the New England housekeeper of that day in relation to her "help:"
"A great affliction I have met withal by my maide servant and now I am like through God his mercie to be freed from it; at her first coming to me she carried herselfe dutifully as became a servant; but since through mine and my husbands forbearance towards her for small faults, she hath got such a head and is growen so insolent that her carriage towards vs especialle myselfe is unsufferable. If I bid her doe a thinge she will bid me to doe it myselfe, and she sayes how she can give content as wel as any servant but shee will not, and sayes if I love not quietness I was never so fitted in my life for she would make mee have enough of it. If I should write to you of all the reviling speeches and filthie language she hath vsed towards me I should but grieve you."
There is more of it; but enough has been quoted to show the tone, which is strikingly prophetic of many things of the present day; even a piece of our reprehensible slang seems foreshadowed in that phrase, "she hath got such a head." In another letter, this time written by a man, John Winthrop, we hear that the "Irish creature" whom he and his wife have for servant is a very plague. She is "lying and unfaithfull; w'd doe things on purpose in contradiction and vexation to her mistress; lye out of the house anights and have contrivances w'th fellows that have been stealing from o'r estate and gett drink out of ye cellar for them; saucy and impudent.... She w'd frequently take her mistresses capps and stockins, hankerchers etc., to dress herselfe and away without leave among her companions." So that the servant question was just as difficult of solution among our great-great-grandmothers as for ourselves.
Yet from this very condition of servitude blossomed one of the purest flowers of romance that we find in the history of the early days of our country,--the story of Agnes Surriage. She was but a servant, a mere drudge, scrubbing the floor of the tavern at Marblehead, when her beauty attracted the attention of young Sir Harry Frankland, then collector of the port of Boston. Noting that she was barefooted, he gave her a crown to buy a pair of shoes; but on a subsequent visit he saw her again scrubbing and still shoeless. His question as to the disposition of his crown elicited the reply that she had bought the shoes but was keeping them "to wear to meeting;" and though there would seem to be no great wit herein, it is recorded that Frankland thought that "a reply had never been made with such charming grace." At all events, he incontinently fell heels over head in love; but his pride of family forbade marriage, and it would seem that at first his intentions toward the young girl were creditable enough, since he had her educated by the best masters in Boston, and especially instructed in religion by the Rev. Dr. Edward Holyoke, president of Harvard College. So matters went until Agnes was twenty-three; but then Frankland's passion would no longer be denied, though he had no intention of making the lowborn girl his wife. But she loved him with a love too great to balk at conventions; she felt herself his wife in heart, and she gave herself unreservedly to him. For a time they lived together in Boston; but scandal became too strong, and they went into the country, where they lived for about three years the ideal country life of that day,--a life much like that of the Virginia planter. Then they went on a visit to England; but the relatives of Frankland would have none of them, and they went to travel on the continent. After about a year of wandering they settled down at Lisbon, and were there during the terrible earthquake that visited that city on All Saints' Day, 1755. During that catastrophe Frankland was in mortal peril; and in his moments of pain and danger he vowed that, if he were saved, he would make Agnes his wife in fact as she had so long been in heart. Scarcely had the vow been recorded before Agnes was at his side, having searched for him and come in time to aid in his rescue. He did not forget his oath when the danger was passed, and the next day married her according to the rites of the Church of Rome, the ceremony being repeated according to English customs while they were on their homeward voyage. Agnes, now Lady Frankland, was on this occasion well received in England; but the hearts of the lovers--for such they still were--inclined to Boston, the scene of their first loves, and they soon crossed the ocean and took up their residence in the Clarke Mansion on Garden Street in Boston. Here they lived until 1757, when Frankland was appointed consul-general at Lisbon; but in 1763 they once more returned to the city of their early love and lived there until 1768, when they went to England, where Frankland died. Lady Frankland then returned once more to her now desolate home, though she did not live in the Clarke Mansion, but in Hopkinton, where she dwelt until the Revolution, when she once more suffered exile, this time as a Tory. She went to England, and there she harmed the romance of her life by her marriage to John Drew, a rich banker; but she died within a year, at the age of fifty-eight, and one can only regret that death did not anticipate that unfaithfulness to the memory of her first lover. Even with its luckless anticlimax, there are few stories so romantic as that of the beautiful scrubbing-girl of Marblehead, and she may well be remembered as one of the most prominent figures of colonial womanhood.
Let us now return to matters more immediately connected with the earlier part of the period which we are considering; and among them there is none of more interest, even though it be hardly enduring, than the story of the epidemic of witchcraft at Salem.
It must be remembered that the witchcraft outbreak at Salem, though it was there most exaggerated, was yet typical. It was the day of superstition; and that superstition was both received and fostered mostly by women. The outbreak at Salem was in a way salutary, for its very violence brought about the reaction which soon culminated in the establishment of a truer creed and a different influence for women; but at the time it was in the actual direction of primitive development in America.