It was about the beginning of the period chosen for the subject of this chapter, the period reaching from the close of the War of 1812 to 1850, that American society, as represented in the upper classes of the womanhood of America, began to be conventional according to European standards. There were still, and continued to be, many individuals of note; but there was very little individuality in the mass. In dress, in manners, in customs, and even in thought, there was little to distinguish the American woman of the higher rank from her European sister. The birth of a national aristocracy had done its invariable work, and importation of foreign ideals and ideas had completed that work and given it direction. Certain traits, racial and national, were visible in most of the daughters of America and differentiated them from their European compeers; but they were traits which did not affect society in the mass and which were therefore individual and not social. Domesticity still held sway in the majority of American circles; the American woman was still preeminently the home goddess and the home ruler, and refused to abdicate her crown even at the call of fashion; but it must be acknowledged that she wore that crown less easily and comfortably than in earlier days. There was fast dawning the day of artificiality in the things of existence, the day when the shadow should seem greater than the substance, when the queen of the home should degenerate into the queen of the revel. There was needed some cataclysm to rescue American womanhood from the peril which she was approaching; and it was well for her that that cataclysm came at need, however terrible it may have been in the coming.
Yet even in those days the social world did not represent all that was best in American womanhood or even all that was most noteworthy. Therein alone, it is true, were to be found those whose individuality became famous; but in other fields there labored many American women who were unknown to all but those of their immediate environment, and yet whose work was of national importance. Steadily, even while the butterflies of society danced at rout and revel in the East, the western frontiers were being pushed further and further toward the great ocean that had crept round the feet of Balboa, first of white men to stand upon its shores. Kentucky was no longer "the West"; it had sent a president in Jackson, a great senator in Clay, and it was recognized as a sister state even by the proudest of its eastern fellows. But beyond the Mississippi still stretched a country which was practically a terra incognita, and which still awaited reclamation from the rule of the savage and the wild beast. Into this waiting region strode many a determined explorer with axe and rifle, bent on winning a home from the grasp of the wilderness; and with him went his wife to give grace to the home when it should be won and "make the wilderness blossom like a rose." They were survivals, these women, of the primitive type of American womanhood: strong, grave of countenance and bearing, caring little for pleasure or recreation, putting duty before all things in their lives as in their esteem, almost masculine in determination and courage. To their hands the rifle was more familiar than the distaff, for upon them often depended the safety of home and children when their husbands were afield or slain; yet they were feminine in many ways of the best and fitted to become the mothers of a sturdy race of warriors and tillers of the soil.
There is no record of any individual heroines among these women of the pioneers of western civilization, unless it be of purely local limit, nor do we even know much of the story of these women in the mass. We hear no little of the sufferings, privations, and perils of the men who beat back the Indian from his hunting grounds, chased the grizzly bear to his lair in the Rocky Mountains, and turned barren prairie into fruitful field; but of their wives and daughters, who bore the larger share of those privations and suffered more terror in those perils, we are given no record save in the most general terms. Perhaps the chroniclers who tell in terms of admiration of the endurance and courage of the pioneers and forget to mention those of their wives unconsciously pay the latter, and womanhood through them, the greatest of homage, in taking such qualities for granted in women and, hence, too natural to call for record. However this may be, we know, from acquaintance with the general facts, that with the ever-encroaching frontier of our country's western limit of habitation there always advanced the foot of woman, braving all perils in her love for her husband, her children, and her home.
It was the presence of this gallant band, as well as their courage and endurance, which assures us of one of the most predominant traits of the most distinctive American womanhood in those days. That trait is the love of home. It was to seek a home, a habitation and spot of ground that should be their very own, that the pioneer and his wife dared the perils of the wilderness; and in this search the wife was at least as instrumental as the husband. To have a home was the ambition of every American woman of those times; and, if she could not compass this by ordinary methods, she had recourse to extraordinary ones. If she could not find a home among the habitations of her fellows, if her good man could not give to her this one desire of her heart, then she urged her husband forth into the barren fields of the unknown West, where danger and death might await them, but where at least there was promise of the home,--the Mecca of her every wish.
Toward the end of the period included in this chapter there occurred another westward movement which happily is not entirely relative to the story of American womanhood, and yet must receive mention here. The credulous followers of John Smith, the Mormon, as they are conveniently though incorrectly styled in general terminology, driven from their abodes among the more civilized of their race, sought asylum on the shores of the Great Salt Lake and there built a city to be their abiding place for ever. Somewhat later the Mormon creed boldly avowed its adherence to the theory of polygamy, in practice only at first and then in precept as well, and thus revived, even though within narrow limits, one of the oldest and furthest removed conditions that had ever environed womanhood. That such a theory should prove attractive to any woman seems to most of us a thing in itself wonderful, that it did thus prove attractive to many is a matter of history. It is true that the majority of recruits to the harems--the word is as correct as convenient--of the Mormons came from the older countries of the eastern shores of the Atlantic: Sweden sent many women to Salt Lake City, and even England furnished her quota, while the Latin countries, probably because of the prevalence of the Catholic faith in their borders, the influence of that faith being in all ways antagonistic to Mormon theories and arguments, lost but few of their daughters to the Mormon Minotaur. With these accessions to the seraglios of the Utah settlement we are less concerned; but many an American woman, by birth and rearing a child of our own land, turned from her ancient traditions to become the "wife" of a Mormon elder. Those who look upon the Mormon practice of polygamy as immoral are narrow and prejudiced, for morality is always a thing of convention and agreement; but that it was a blot upon our civilization may be admitted without cavil. At one time it became even an actual threat to the best interests of our social structure; it promised to engulf in its Charybdis some of the elements of our society which we could ill spare and to make itself felt as an influence in places where it dared not openly raise its head. Legislation--whether justifiable by the spirit of our commonwealth, or otherwise, is legitimate matter of dispute--at length intervened to banish all fear of Mormon influence and to abolish the practices which were most reprobated, and now Mormonism is shorn of its most distinctive feature and that which lent itself most readily to the cause of proselytism.
However we may condemn the tenets and practices of Mormonism, it must be admitted that the most representative women of the Mormons, in the heyday of Mormon power, were thrifty, industrious, economical, and notable workers. Moreover, though it is generally thought that among the disciples of Joseph Smith--to whose door, however, the practice of polygamy cannot be laid, for that was an addendum to the faith made by Brigham Young--women were held in slight esteem, an idea generally correct as to the mass, there were many instances of Mormon women of influence and power in the councils of the men. The adoption of polygamy as part of the creed was largely the work, if not the inspiration, of a woman who was "sealed" to Brigham Young; and the practice would never have grown to any strength, as it had many opponents among the men, had it not received the approbation and welcome of the women. Its adoption caused more than one schism in the Church of the Latter-day Saints, as the Mormons pompously style themselves, but the schismatics never received the support of more than a few of the women of the "peculiar people," and it may be broadly stated that the revival of polygamy among a civilized people was at least as much the work of women as of men.
Mormonism is doomed as a faith; but its existence will always be felt in national results. Even so limited a movement as this, when it touches matters of descent, must ever leave its traces, and the very breaking-up of such a community will have its effect of disseminating impure sources among the fountains of our nation. In this instance, woman, who has done so much for America, has brought harm to her.
As the eighteenth century approached its middle age, society in America grew more and more distinguished and less and less distinctive. It had long since lost all traces of provincialism; it was a power in itself with its glamor of aristocracy, and it even had its traditions of rank, which were not unrecognized by foreign social powers. In the earliest days of the century, on Christmas Eve, 1803, Elizabeth Patterson, of Baltimore, had been married to Jerome Bonaparte; and, though the marriage was unrecognized by the all powerful Emperor Napoleon and was thus made practically invalid, it was perfectly legitimate and noteworthy. Though Napoleon, because of the exigencies of his peculiar position, forced Jerome to renounce his young bride and marry as became his station, he himself treated Miss Patterson with consideration and even generosity, his liberality to her in the matter of a pension enabling her to make the famous retort, when Jerôme offered to provide for her after his marriage, that she "preferred being sheltered under the wing of an eagle to being suspended from the bill of a goose." She never bore any rancor to Napoleon for his actions toward her, though she strove with all her might to win her rights.
Some fifteen years later the same city of Baltimore, or, more correctly, a place contiguous to that city, now known, from its once residents, as Catonsville, gave to society the four Caton sisters, celebrated at home and abroad by the name, conferred by English admirers, of the "American Graces." They were the granddaughters of Charles Carroll of Carrollton and daughters of Richard Caton, and three of them respectively married, in two cases after prior matrimonial alliances, the Marquis of Wellesley, eldest brother of the Duke of Wellington and himself a distinguished Governor-general of India and, later, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland; the Marquis of Carmarthen, eldest son and finally successor of the Duke of Leeds; and Baron Stafford. These were "great matches" for the daughters of a provincial town; and it is a little singular that Louisa Caton, who became the sister-in-law of Elizabeth Bonaparte by her first marriage to William Patterson, should afterward become allied to the family of the man, in the Duke of Wellington, who was most instrumental in overthrowing the fortunes of the family to which Miss Patterson had allied herself by her marriage, and Baltimore be thus connected in its traditions with the respective leaders in the most decisive battle the modern world has ever known.
Though America was spared the adoption of the notable extravagances of European fashions, yet everywhere, in every aspect, were to be seen European conditions of society. Even the type of American woman, preserved till now in certain peculiarities of mental attitude, began to fail. There remained many individual representatives of that type, and these among our most aristocratic society; but in the mass it was not observable. To do away with such type, to lose all distinctiveness of racial attitude, was fast becoming the aim of the American society woman. This was well enough when it had to do with graces of bearing and amenities of intercourse; but it lent itself to affectations and follies as well. The wife and the mother were no longer the representative American women; the homely and the home-giving chrysalis had been cast aside, and the lustrous but useless butterfly was spreading its wings for flight. Still a country of homes in its more widely spread conditions, this was not the aspect assumed by America when it was gazed upon by foreign eyes, for these saw first the most prominent rather than the deeper facts. The capital was fast becoming more of social than of political importance, and the wives and daughters of the senators and representatives in Congress assembled at least thought of themselves, even if they were not generally considered, as being of as much importance in the march of the nation as were their husbands and fathers. The vision of the mothers of the republic, as they looked forward upon the path which they hoped to see their daughters tread as following in their own footsteps, had not been brought to pass. Not that there was failure of the best among American womanhood; taking it in the mass, it was pure and high and true. But it was wrongly directed to bring forth its best potencies, at least in its most representative, though fortunately not most characteristic, expressions; it had taken the wrong turning.