The foregoing priggish and stilted epistle begins the next chapter of my life-story.
After Miss Wilson’s departure, and divers unsuccessful attempts to obtain a successor to his liking, my father determined upon a bold departure from the beaten path of traditional and conventional usage in the matter of girls’ education.
The widow of Reverend Doctor Rice lived in the immediate neighborhood of Union Theological Seminary, founded by her husband, and of which he was the first president. The cluster of dwellings that had grown up around the two institutions of learning—Hampden-Sidney College and the School of Divinity—made, with the venerable “College Church,” an educational centre for a community noted for generations past for intelligence and refinement. Prince Edward, Charlotte, and Halifax were closely adjacent counties peopled by what nobody then ridiculed as some of the “first families” of the state. Venables, Carringtons, Reades, Bouldins, Watkinses, Randolphs, Cabells, Mortons, Lacys—had borne a conspicuous part in state, church, and social history. The region was aristocratic—and Presbyterian. There was much wealth, for tobacco was the most profitable crop of Central and Southern Virginia, and the plantations bordering the Appomattox River were a mine of riches to the owners. Stately mansions—most of them antedating the Revolutionary War—crowned gently rolling hills rising beyond the river, each, with its little village of domestic offices, great stables, tobacco-barns, and “quarters,” making up an establishment that was feudal in character and in power.
Every planter was college-bred and a politician.
The local atmosphere of “College Hill” was not unlike that of an Old World university town. The professors of the sister institutions of learning occupied houses in the vicinity of seminary and college, and the quaint church, the bricks mellowed to red-brown by time stood equidistant from both.
One feature of the church impressed my youthful imagination. “Cousin Ben,” of Montrose—afterward the senior professor in the seminary, and as Rev. B. M. Smith, D.D., known throughout the Southern and Northern Presbyterian Church as a leader in learning and in doctrine—had, when a student of Hampden-Sidney, brought from Western Virginia a sprig of Scotch broom in his pocket. “The Valley”—now a part of West Virginia—was mainly settled by Scotch-Irish emigrants, and the broom was imported with their household stuff. The boy set the withered slip in the earth just inside of the gate of the church-yard. In twenty years it encompassed the walls with a setting of greenery, overran the enclosure, escaped under the fence, and raced rampant down the hill, growing tall and lush wherever it could get a foothold. In blossom-time the mantle of gold was visible a mile away. The smell of broom always brings back to me a vision of that ugly (but dear) red-brown church and the goodly throng, pouring from doors and gate at the conclusion of the morning service, filling yard and road—well-dressed, well-born county folk, prosperous and hospitable, and so happily content with their lot and residence as to believe that no other people was so blessed of the Lord they served diligently and with godly fear. Without the church-yard were drawn up cumbrous family coaches, which conveyed dignified dames and dainty daughters to and from the sanctuary. Beyond these was a long line of saddle-horses waiting for their masters—blooded hunters for the young men, substantial cobs for their seniors. None except invalided men deigned to accept seats in carriages.
As may be gathered from the formally familiar and irresistibly funny epistle, indited when I had been four months an insignificant actor in the scene I have sketched, “religious privileges” was no idle term then and there. Our social outings were what I have indicated. There were no concerts save the “Monthly Concert of Prayer for Foreign Missions” (held simultaneously in every church in the state and Union); not a theatre in Virginia, excepting one in Richmond, banned for the religious public by the awful memories of the burning of the playhouse in 1811. “Dining-days,” which their descendants name “dinner-parties,” were numerous, and there was much junketing from one plantation to another, a ceaseless drifting back and forth of young people, overflowing, now this house, now that, always certain of a glad welcome, and contriving, without the adventitious aid of cards or dancing, to lead joyous, full lives.
Once a week the community turned out, en masse, for church-going. They were a devout folk—those F. F. V.’s, at which we mock now—and considered it a public duty not to forsake the assembling of themselves together for worship, prayers, and sermons. These latter were intellectual, no less than spiritual pabulum. Oratory had not gone out of fashion in these United States, and in Virginia it was indigenous to the soil. Pulpit eloquence was in its glory, and speech-making at barbecues, anniversaries, and political gatherings, in court-rooms and upon “stumps,” was an art learned by boys in roundabouts and practised as long as veterans could stand upon their shrunken calves.
People flocked to church to attend reverently upon divine service, and, when the benediction was pronounced, greeted friends and neighbors, cheerily chatting in the aisles and exchanging greetings between the benches they had occupied during the services—men and women sitting apart, as in the Quaker meeting-house—as freely as we now salute and stroll with acquaintances in the foyer of the opera-house.
Such were some of the advantages and enjoyments included in the elastic phrase “religious privileges,” vaunted by the epistolary twelve-year-old.