"Glad to turn itinerant
to stroll and teach from town to town"
and from plantation to plantation. From these the young ladies had their music and dancing lessons. Their letters are very stilted and polite,—poor dears,—but "intellectual attainments" do not appear in many of them. They usually end with laying upon a bad pen all the blame for all shortcomings. "Excuse bad spelling and writing, for I have ane ill pen," said Jeanie Deans. The colonial ladies made no apology for their phonetic spelling. Was not that all right? If "hir" did not spell "her," pray, what did it spell? "Bin" was surely more reasonable than "been"; "tha" than "they." There were "Dixonaries" in the closets along with the Latin books, but they were troublesome, and not always to be trusted. Dr. Johnson—if we can imagine him as such—was in their day a sweet babe in long clothes!
When the slow-sailing ships arrived from England one might have the fashions of six months ago.
English cousins sometimes came over, and very nervous were the Virginia girls lest the Western ménage should be found to be behind the times. Among old letters a certain Miss Ambler appears to have been dreadfully aggrieved by the criticisms of some English cousins. "Everything we eat, drink or wear seems to be wrong—the rooms are too cold or too hot; the wood is not laid straight on the Andirons:—and even poor Aunt Dilsey does not escape censure,—dear Aunt Dilsey whom we all so love! Actually, Aunt Dilsey came to me in tears, and said she had been ordered to pull down her bandanna so that none of her wool would show in the back of her poor neck, and to draw cotton gloves over her hands for they were 'so black and nasty'!"
James Monroe.
Many of the Virginians, at that early day, were advocates of negro emancipation. James Monroe, who lived in Fredericksburg, was the great friend of emancipation. Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, was named in his honor. It was a citizen of Fredericksburg, in 1782, who introduced into the body, which had replaced the House of Burgesses, the first resolution for the emancipation of negroes and for the prohibition of the slave trade ever offered in America. General John Minor, of "Hazel Hill," was the author and advocate of this measure. In 1792 the first-published utterance against slavery in this country appeared in a tract entitled, "Slavery Inconsistent with Justice and Good Policy," by the Rev. David Rice. When estates were settled large numbers of negroes were manumitted by common consent and sent to Liberia.
We have reason to believe that house servants were treated with the affectionate consideration they deserved. Mr. Custis distinctly declares that this was true of Mary Washington,—that she was always kind to her servants, and considerate of their comfort. The man or woman who treated servants with severity was outlawed from the friendship and respect of his neighbors, many of whom at a later day freed their slaves and left them land to live upon.