The people commonly travel on horseback, and the ladies are capable of teaching their neighbours the art of horsemanship. There are few coaches in the colony, but many chaises and whiskeys. In winter the sleigh is used—a vehicle drawn by two horses, and carrying six persons in its box, which hangs on four posts standing on two steel slides or large skates.
Dancing, fishing, hunting, skating, and riding in sleighs on the ice, are all the amusements allowed in this colony.
Smuggling is rivetted in the constitution and practice of the inhabitants of Connecticut, as much as superstition and religion, and their province is a storehouse for the smugglers of the neighbouring colonies. They conscientiously study to cheat the King of those duties which, they say, God and Nature never intended should be paid. From the Governor down to the tithing-man, who are sworn to support the laws, they will aid smugglers, resist collectors, and mob informers. This being
a popular Government, all the officers are appointed by the freeholders. There are very severe laws against bribery. The candidates are not suffered to give a dinner, or a glass of cider, on the day of the election, to a voter. Indeed, bribery is the next greatest crime to a breach of the Sabbath; yet open bribery, as established by custom immemorial in Rhode-Island, is more praiseworthy than the practice of Connecticut. I will give the reader some idea of the mode in which an election is managed in Connecticut.
All the voters in a township convene in the town meeting-house. One of the ministers, after prayers, preaches from some such text as, “Jabez was more honourable than his brethren.” The people keep their seats, while the constables take their votes in a box; and if a voter has not his vote written, the constable gives him one. So Jabez is elected; and the meeting is concluded with a prayer of thanks to the Lord God of Israel for “turning the hearts of his people against the enemies of Zion, and for uniting them in Jabez, the man after his own heart.” The manner in which the preacher treats his text will more particularly appear from the animadversion of a certain Quaker on one of these occasions. “Friend,” said he to the pedagogue, “I do thee no wrong in telling thee that thou hast prayed and preached against bribery, but forgot to keep thy tongue from speaking evil against thy neighbour. Dost thou think the Lord will regard thy preaching so much as the voters whom thou dost call freemen? If thou believest it, thou hast bribed not only the people, but the Lord also, to reject Ebenezer and Benjamin.” The preacher called upon the constable to
take away this babbler and open the meeting; which was done, and Ebenezer and Benjamin were rejected by the voters.
The men in general throughout the province are tall, stout, and robust. The greatest care is taken of the limbs and bodies of infants, which are kept straight by means of a board—a practice learnt from the Indian women, who abhor all crooked people—so that deformity is here a rarity.
Another custom derived from the Indians is, to welcome a new-born infant into the world with urine and honey, the effects of which are wonderful; and hence it is that at groanings there are always a little hog and a rattle-snake’s skin, the latter of which prevents numbness and the cramp. The women are fair, handsome, genteel. They have, indeed, adopted various customs of the Indian women, but cannot learn, like them, how to support the pains of child-bearing without a groan. Naturalists and surgeons have not been able to assign the reason why a negro woman should have a hundred pains, a white woman ten, and an Indian none. Some have said that the fatigues and hardships which negroes endure are the cause; but the Indians undergo many more: others have said it was owing to the change of climate; but this is suppletory: while the enthusiastic divines attribute it to the sin of Eve, and to the curse laid on the Canaanites. The deists ask these divines if Eve was not the common mother of the white, black, and copper-coloured women, and how it appears that negroes are the descendants of Canaan? Their answer is, that all Nature is mystery.
The women of Connecticut are strictly virtuous, and
to be compared to the prude rather than the European polite lady. They are not permitted to read plays; cannot converse about whist, quadrille, or operas, but will freely talk upon the subject of history, geography, and mathematics. They are great casuists and polemical divines; and I have known not a few of them so well skilled in Greek and Latin as often to put to the blush learned gentlemen.