Another traveller makes a better report, and draws more favorable conclusions.
“Young women are affable with young men in America,” he writes, “and married women are reserved, and their husbands are not as familiar with the girls as they were, when bachelors. If a young man were to take it into his head that his betrothed should not be free and gay in her social intercourse, he would run the risk of being discarded, incur the reputation of jealousy, and would find it very difficult to get married. Yet if a single woman were to play the coquette, she would be regarded with contempt. As this innocent freedom between the sexes diminishes in proportion as society loses its purity and simplicity of manners, as is the case in cities, I desire sincerely that our good Virginia ladies may long retain their liberty entire.”
The Colonial age was the day of elaborate compliment. Gentlemen took time to turn their sentences and polish them neatly, and ladies heard them to the end without suggesting by a word or glance that the climax had been foreseen for the last five minutes, at least. An essay on Woman, by a certain Mr. Thomas, had a great vogue in the eighteenth century, and antedated Tupper’s Poems as a well of sentimental quotation. The Spectator and The Tattler gave the tone to society literature, and enabled the provincial dame to reflect accurately the Lady Betty Modish of London. The beaux, too, took many a leaf from The Spectator in the study of a compliment. When I read of the Colonial maiden poring over the tiny glaze-paper note accompanying a book entitled “The Art of Loving”—in which the writer declares it to be “most convenient, presenting the art of Loving to one who so fully possesses the art of Pleasing”—I am carried back to the days of Sir Charles Grandison.
There is a marked contrast in the social chronicles of the eighteenth century at home and abroad, between what the gentlemen said to the ladies and what they said about them. That wicked Colonel Byrd, for instance, after making himself agreeable to Governor Spotswood’s ladies the whole evening, writes in his journal that their conversation was “like whip sillabub—very pretty, but with nothing in it.” Again he describes himself patronizingly as “prattling with the ladies after a nine o’clock supper.” Yet, underneath all the superficial bowing and scraping of courtesy and compliment, and the jesting asides at the expense of the fair sex, it must be set down to the Cavalier’s credit that he treated womankind with a great tenderness and respect. Woman’s influence made itself felt in private and in public—in the Council, in the Virginia House of Burgesses, and in the Assemblies of Maryland and of Carolina.
The pride and folly of Governor Tryon of Carolina led him to make a demand on the Assembly for an extensive appropriation for the building of a palace at Newbern suitable for the residence of a royal Governor. To obtain this appropriation, Lady Tryon and her sister, the beautiful Esther Wake, used all their blandishments. Lady Tryon gave brilliant balls and dinners, and her sister’s bright eyes rained influence to such good purpose, that the first appropriation and as much more was granted, and the palace was pronounced the most magnificent structure in America. The palace is fallen—its marble mantels, its colonnades, its carved staircases are in ruins; but the name of beautiful Esther Wake is preserved in Wake County.
The chronicles of the Carolinas are full of romance. Here, at Cross Creek, dwelt Flora MacDonald, the heroic rescuer of the Pretender after the disasters of Culloden. It seems a strange chance that brought her from such exciting masquerades, from the companionship of kings and the rôle of heroine on the stage of the great world, to the pioneer’s cottage in the wild woods of the Western wilderness. The only drawback to her career in eighteenth century eyes was that she married and lived happy ever after. The romance of that day demanded a broken heart, and tragedy was always in high favor. Every locality had its story of blighted love and life. The Dismal Swamp, lying on the border between Virginia and Maryland, was a sort of Gretna Green, where many runaway marriages were celebrated. Tradition tells of a lover whose sweetheart died suddenly; and he, driven mad by grief, fancied that she had gone to the Dismal Swamp, where he perished in the search for her.
When Tom Moore was in this country he was impressed by the legend, and set it thus to the music—let us not dare to say the jingle—of his verse:
They made her a grave too cold and damp
For a soul so warm and true,
And she’s gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp,
Where all night long, by her fire-fly lamp
She paddles her white canoe.
And her fire-fly lamp I soon shall see,
Her paddle I soon shall hear.
Long and loving our life shall be,
And I’ll hide the maid in a cypress tree,
When the footsteps of Death draw near.
Real life had its tragedies, too. In the deep wainscoted hall of the Brandon Mansion hangs a portrait of lovely Evelyn Byrd. She sits on a green bank, with a handful of roses and a shepherd’s crook in her lap—her soft, dark eyes look out in pensive sadness as though they could, if they would, tell the story of a maiden’s heart and a life ended untimely by unhappy love. One story says she broke her heart for Parke Custis, who left her to wear the willow, and married afterward the Martha Dandridge, who in the whirligig of time became Lady Washington. Another rumor connects her name with that of the Earl of Peterborough, who loved her deeply, so the story runs; but his creed was not hers, and her father, Colonel Byrd, would not consent to the marriage. The maiden yielded to her father’s will, but pined away and died; and there, in the Westover burying-ground, she lies under a ponderous stone, which records this epitaph:
“Alas, Reader,
We can detain nothing, however valued,
From unrelenting death,
Beauty, Fortune, or exalted Honour—
See here a proof!”