Upon this picture Bishop Meade thus comments:
"If the wife of General Washington, having her own and his wealth at command, should thus choose to live, how much more the wives and mothers of Virginia with moderate fortunes and numerous children! How often have I seen, added to the above-mentioned scenes of the chamber, the instructions of several sons and daughters going on, the churn, the reel, and other domestic operations all in progress at the same time, and the mistress, too, lying on a sick-bed!"
All this is republican simplicity in its ideal form; but at another time, when Mrs. Washington is with her husband, the chief magistrate of the nation, at the seat of government, Mrs. Warren writes to her:
"Your observation may be true, that many younger and gayer ladies consider your situation as enviable; yet I know not one who by general consent would be more likely to obtain the suffrages of the sex, even were they to canvass at elections for the elevated station, than the lady who now holds the first rank in the United States."
Mrs. Warren is optimistic as to the probable result of such an election as she suggests; but the keynote of the quotation is sounded, though unintentionally, in the words "holds the first rank in the United States." With her advanced age to give it abetment, Mrs. Washington's admirable simplicity was doubtless preserved intact even in spirit through her occupation of the high position in which, by the grace of her husband's merits, she found herself; but the use of the word "rank" in such connection is ominous, especially in days of such enthusiasm for strait republicanism in all things. The recognition, though not the acknowledgment, of social rank arising from centralization and the spirit of a court was already present in democratic America.
While society was becoming formed and shaped into new moulds in the East, in the West the primitive conditions of settlement existed. Kentucky, the "dark and bloody ground," was the scene of true border warfare with the Indians before, during, and for a time after the War of Independence. While their sisters of the East were living in ease and affluence, the wives and daughters of the hardy pioneers were braving the terrors and perils of a wilderness as threatening as that which met the first white invaders of America. The first white women who stood upon the banks of the Kentucky River were the wife and daughters of Daniel Boone; but of them no legend of heroism is extant. Among their sister pioneers, however, deeds of daring were many. Famous for long were such women as Mrs. Duree, who alone held her house, after her husband had been killed, against the attacks of a band of Indians; Mrs. Whitley, whose leadership rescued a fellow pioneer who had been seized by the savages; Mrs. Merrill, who with her own hand killed with an axe four of a band of Indians that attacked her home and single-handed beat off the whole force; Elizabeth Zane, who at the siege of Fort Henry, when powder was wanted to repel the attack of the Indians and no man dared go for it beyond the gate, ran the gauntlet to and from her home, some sixty yards from the gate of the fort, and returned in safety with the prize, to be remembered in history as one of the foremost heroines of border warfare; and those noble women of Bryant's Station, who, in the hope that they would not draw the fire of the concealed Indians where a body of men would certainly be slain, walked calmly to the distant spring, filled their buckets as nonchalantly as if no danger existed, and returned unscathed, their coolness causing the Indians to believe that their ambush had not been detected and that it would therefore be a false move to betray its existence.
Such was the spirit of the women who shared in the development of the West. Their part, too, was to hearten and help their husbands in their incessant fight with the wilderness, savage beasts, and savage men; but this was too much a matter of course to call for note. The long rifle of the pioneer has been celebrated in song and story; but not surer, more needed, or more faithful was it than the wife who accompanied him in his explorations and shared his perils and toils. The women of Kentucky in those days, and all who helped the men to push further and further back the boundaries of savagery and extend those of civilization, deserve to be held in lasting remembrance by all who honor American womanhood, even though their qualities were not of those most admired in their sex. They had their place in our national story as well as their softer-reared sisters of the Atlantic coast, and they did their work as well and nobly.
Before returning to the social centre from our excursus into the wilds, it is proper to pause for an instant in the temple of letters and note a tablet on the walls. It is an old saying that "there is nothing new under the sun"; and it may surprise some readers to learn that the feminine preponderance in the fiction of the present, and even the growing tendency to laud precocity in authorship, are not without warrant in the earlier history of our nation's literature. Long ago Hannah Hill, the author of that cheerful tract called A Legacy for Children: Last Expressions and Dying Words, wrote and published a book when at the immature age of eleven; and even the present day cannot as yet surpass that piece of absurdity. More significant, however, is the fact that the first American novel was the work of a woman. Susanna Haswell was not of American birth, but she came to this country as a mere child and may fairly be claimed as a product of our soil, at least as far as her literary genius is concerned. In 1786 she published a work called Victoria, and, two years later, The Inquisitor. She then went to England with her lately married spouse, William Rowson, for a three years' residence; and it was during her absence from the country that she published the most famous of her works, Charlotte Temple, a Tale of Truth. It is this latter work that, with our national cheerful disregard for facts, is generally termed the "First American Novel," the existence of its predecessors and the fact of its foreign birth being entirely disregarded. However, the book was in its day a great success, having what was then an enormous sale--twenty-five hundred copies within a few years. While the style is of the most theatrical kind, the characters posing alternately in the front of the stage as they become the speakers, and the language is turgid to excess, the book is not without some merits. It is all impossible enough; but that forms little detriment to popularity even now, and the fact that no man or woman ever talked as talk Mrs. Rowson's characters does not make the work peculiar among its kind. It was published in 1892 in cheap form, but met with little welcome; yet it remains as a monument in our literature because of its titular position therein, though Victoria was the first American novel in point of time. Mrs. Rowson returned to this country immediately after the publication of Charlotte Temple, and continued to write--pouring forth a full stream of plays, songs, stories, and even school books--until her death in Boston in 1824.
Let us now return to the whirlpool of society proper, as in those days known. The first presidential mansion, as is well known, was on Market Street, Philadelphia, and thither repaired the diplomats of foreign nations as well as our own statesmen and politicians,--the latter class already threatening to grow to unseemly proportions. Moreover, thither repaired most of the social leaders of their time, and the president's receptions, at which punch and cake were the staple refreshments, soon became at least as distinctly social as political in their aspects and influences. "The coteries of the Lady Presidentess" was the name bestowed by certain disgruntled persons on the frequenters of these functions, and there were murmurs as to lack of republican simplicity. Yet there was in the manner of these receptions little to call forth animadversion from the most uncompromising democrat; and the like functions of Mrs. Adams, less official but more social in character, were almost equally lacking in ornateness.
Still there was much gaiety in the Quaker City while it held its place as the seat of government. "I have not," writes Miss Mary Binney, a belle of this time, "one minute to spare from French, music, balls, and plays. Oh, dear, this dissipation will kill me! for you must know our social tea drinkings of one or two friends is an assembly of two or three hundred souls."