Colonial dames and good wives

CONSORTS AND RELICTS.

In the early days of the colony of Massachusetts Bay, careful lists were sent back to old England by the magistrates, telling what “to provide to send to New England” in order to ensure the successful planting and tender nourishing of the new settlement. The earliest list includes such homely items as “benes and pese,” tame turkeys, copper kettles, all kinds of useful apparel and wholesome food; but the list is headed with a most significant, a typically Puritan item, Ministers. The list sent to the Emigration Society by the Virginian colonists might equally well have been headed, to show their most crying need, with the word Wives.

The settlement of Virginia bore an entirely different aspect from that of New England. It was a community of men who planted Jamestown. There were few women among the early Virginians. In 1608 one Mistress Forrest came over with a maid, Anne Burraws, who speedily married John Laydon, the first marriage of English folk in the new world. But wives were few, save squaw-wives, therefore the colony did not thrive. Sir Edwin Sandys, at a meeting of the Emigration Society in London, in November, 1619, said that “though the colonists are seated there in their persons some four years, they are not settled in their minds to make it their place of rest and continuance.” They all longed to gather gold and to return to England as speedily as possible, to leave that state of “solitary uncouthness,” as one planter called it. Sandys and that delightful gentleman, the friend and patron of Shakespeare, the Earl of Southampton, planned, as an anchor in the new land, to send out a cargo of wives for these planters, that the plantation might “grow in generations and not be pieced out from without.” In 1620 the Jonathan and the London Merchant brought ninety maids to Virginia on a venture, and a most successful venture it proved.

There are some scenes in colonial life which stand out of the past with much clearness of outline, which seem, though no details survive, to present to us a vivid picture. One is this landing of ninety possible wives--ninety homesick, seasick but timidly inquisitive English girls--on Jamestown beach, where pressed forward, eagerly and amorously waiting, about four hundred lonely emigrant bachelors--bronzed, sturdy men, in leather doublets and breeches and cavalier hats, with glittering swords and bandoleers and fowling-pieces, without doubt in their finest holiday array, to choose and secure one of these fair maids as a wife. Oh, what a glorious and all-abounding courting, a mating-time, was straightway begun on the Virginian shore on that happy day in May. A man needed a quick eye, a ready tongue, a manly presence, if he were to succeed against such odds in supply and demand, and obtain a fair one, or indeed any one, from this bridal array. But whosoever he won was indeed a prize, for all were asserted to be “young, handsome, honestly educated maids, of honest life and carriage”--what more could any man desire? Gladly did the husband pay to the Emigration Company the one hundred and twenty pounds of leaf tobacco, which formed, in one sense, the purchase money for the wife. This was then valued at about eighty dollars: certainly a man in that matrimonial market got his money’s worth; and the complaining colonial chronicler who asserted that ministers and milk were the only cheap things in New England, might have added--and wives the only cheap things in Virginia.

It was said by old writers that some of these maids were seized by fraud, were trapanned in England, that unprincipled spirits “took up rich yeomans’ daughters to serve his Majesty as breeders in Virginia unless they paid money for their release.” This trapanning was one of the crying abuses of the day, but in this case it seems scarcely present. For the girls appear to have been given a perfectly fair showing in all this barter. They were allowed to marry no irresponsible men, to go nowhere as servants, and, indeed, were not pressed to marry at all if against their wills. They were to be “housed lodged and provided for of diet” until they decided to accept a husband. Naturally nearly all did marry, and from the unions with these young, handsome and godly-carriaged maids sprang many of our respected Virginian families.

No coquetry was allowed in this mating. A girl could not promise to marry two men, under pain of fine or punishment; and at least one presumptuous and grasping man was whipped for promising marriage to two girls at the same time--as he deserved to be when wives were so scarce.

Other ship-loads of maids followed, and with the establishment of these Virginian families was dealt, as is everywhere else that the family exists, a fatal blow at a community of property and interests, but the colony flourished, and the civilization of the new world was begun. For the unit of society may be the individual, but the molecule of civilization is the family. When men had wives and homes and children they “sett down satysfied” and no longer sighed for England. Others followed quickly and eagerly; in three years thirty-five hundred emigrants had gone from England to Virginia, a marked contrast to the previous years of uncertainty and dissatisfaction.

Virginia was not the only colony to import wives for its colonists. In 1706 His Majesty Louis XIV. sent a company of twenty young girls to the Governor of Louisiana, Sieur de Bienville, in order to consolidate his colony. They were to be given good homes, and to be well married, and it was thought they would soon teach the Indian squaws many useful domestic employments. These young girls were of unspotted reputation, and upright lives, but they did not love their new homes; a dispatch of the Governor says:--

The men in the colony begin through habit to use corn as an article of food, but the women, who are mostly Parisians, have for this kind of food a dogged aversion which has not been subdued. Hence they inveigh bitterly against his Grace the Bishop of Quebec who they say has enticed them away from home under pretext of sending them to enjoy the milk and honey of the land of promise.

I don’t know how this venture succeeded, but I cannot fancy anything more like the personification of incompatibility, of inevitable failure, than to place these young Parisian women (who had certainly known of the manner of living of the court of Louis XIV.) in a wild frontier settlement, and to expect them to teach Western squaws any domestic or civilized employment, and then to make them eat Indian corn, which they loathed as do the Irish peasants. Indeed, they were to be pitied. They rebelled and threatened to run away--whither I cannot guess, nor what they would eat save Indian corn if they did run away--and they stirred up such a dissatisfaction that the imbroglio was known as the Petticoat Rebellion, and the governor was much jeered at for his unsuccessful wardship and his attempted matrimonial agency.

In 1721 eighty young girls were landed in Louisiana as wives, but these were not godly-carriaged young maids; they had been taken from Houses of Correction, especially from Paris. In 1728 came another company known as filles à la cassette, or casket girls, for each was given by the French government a casket of clothing to carry to the new home; and in later years it became a matter of much pride to Louisianians that their descent was from the casket-girls, rather than from the correction-girls.

Another wife-market for the poorer class of wifeless colonists was afforded through the white bond-servants who came in such numbers to the colonies. They were of three classes; convicts, free-willers or redemptioners, and “kids” who had been stolen and sent to the new world, and sold often for a ten years’ term of service.

Maryland, under the Baltimores, was the sole colony that not only admitted convicts, but welcomed them. The labor of the branded hand of the malefactor, the education and accomplishments of the social outcast, the acquirements and skill of the intemperate or over-competed tradesman, all were welcome to the Maryland tobacco-planters; and the possibilities of rehabilitation of fortune, health, reputation, or reëstablishment of rectitude, made the custom not unwelcome to the convict or to the redemptioner. Were the undoubted servant no rogue, but an honest tradesman, crimped in English coast-towns and haled off to Chesapeake tobacco fields, he did not travel or sojourn, perforce, in low company. He might find himself in as choice companionship, with ladies and gentlemen of as high quality, albeit of the same character, as graced those other English harbors of ne’er-do-weels, Newgate or the Fleet Prison. Convicts came to other colonies, but not so openly nor with so much welcome as to Maryland.

All the convicts who came to the colonies were not rogues, though they might be condemned persons. The first record in Talbot County, Maryland, of the sale of a convict, was in September, 1716, “in the third Yeare of the Reign of our Sovereign Lord King George.” And it was for rebellion and treason against his Majesty that this convict, Alexander MacQueen, was taken in Lancashire and transported to America, and sold to Mr. Daniel Sherwood for seven years of service. With him were transported two shiploads of fellow-culprits, Jacobites, on the Friendship and Goodspeed. The London Public Record Office (on American and West India matters, No. 27) records this transportation and says the men were “Scotts Rebells.” Earlier still, many of the rebels of Monmouth’s rebellion had been sold for transportation, and the ladies of the court of James had eagerly snatched at the profits of the sale. Even William Penn begged for twenty of these rebels for the Philadelphia market. Perhaps he was shrewd enough to see in them good stock for successful citizens. Were the convict a condemned criminal, it did not necessarily follow that he or she was thoroughly vicious. One English husband is found petitioning on behalf of his wife, sentenced to death for stealing but three shillings and sixpence, that her sentence be changed to transportation to Virginia.

The redemptioners were willing immigrants, who contracted to serve for a period of time to pay the cost of their passage, which usually had been prepaid to the master of the ship on which they came across-seas. At first the state of these free-willers was not unbearable. Alsop, who was a redemptioner, has left on record that the work required was not excessive:--

Five dayes and a halfe in the summer is the allotted time that they worke, and for two months, when the Sun is predominate in the highest pitch of his heat, they claim an antient and customary Priviledge to repose themselves three hours in the day within the house. In Winter they do little but hunt and build fires.

and he adds, “the four years I served there were not to me so slavish as a two-year’s servitude of a handicraft apprenticeship in London.”

Many examples can be given where these redemptioners rose to respected social positions. In 1654, in the Virginia Assembly were two members and one Burgess who had been bond-servants. Many women-servants married into the family of their employers. Alsop said it was the rule for them to marry well. The niece of Daniel Defoe ran away to escape a marriage entanglement in England, sold herself on board ship as a redemptioner when but eighteen years old, was bought by a Mr. Job of Cecil County, Maryland, and soon married her employer’s son. Defoe himself said that so many good maid-servants were sold to America that there was a lack for domestic service in England.