Part 1 (1/2)
The Colonial Cavalier.
by Maud Wilder Goodwin.
Preface
Two great forces have contributed to the making of the Anglo-American character. The types, broadly cla.s.sed in England as Puritan and Cavalier, repeated themselves in the New World. On the bleak Ma.s.sachusetts coast, the Puritan emigrants founded a race as rugged as their environment.
Driven by the force of compelling conscience from their homes, they came to the new land, at once pilgrims and pioneers, to rear altars and found homes in the primeval forest. It was not freedom of wors.h.i.+p alone they sought, but their own way. They found it and kept it. Such a race produced a strong and hardy type of manhood, admirable if not always lovable.
But there was another force at work, moulding the national character, a force as persistent, a type as intense as the Puritan's own, and its exact opposite. The men who settled the Southern Colonies, Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas, were Cavaliers; not necessarily in blood, or even in loyalty to the Stuart cause, but Cavalier in sympathies, in the general view of life, in virtues and vices. So far as the provinces could represent the mother country, Virginia and Maryland reflected the Cavaliers, as Ma.s.sachusetts and Connecticut reflected the Puritans.
Their settlers came, impelled by no religious motives, and driven by no persecution. They lacked, therefore, the bond of a common enthusiasm and the still stronger tie of a common antipathy. Above all, they lacked the town-meeting. Separated by the necessities of plantation life, they formed a series of tiny kingdoms rather than a democratic community. To the Puritan, the village life of Scrooby and its like was familiar and therefore dear; but to the Southern settlers, the ideal was the great estate of the English gentry whose descendants many of them were.
The term, ”Cavalier,” came into vogue in the struggle between Charles the First and his Parliament, but the type itself was already well-developed in the reign of James, and under the fostering influence of Buckingham. A great deal of energy has been wasted in the discussion as to how much of this Cavalier blood was found among the early settlers. It is enough that we know that, between the coming of the first adventurers and the Restoration, the number of ”gentlemen” was sufficient to direct the policy of the State, and color the life of its society.
When the earliest colonists left England, the Cavalier was at the height of his glory. Now he represents a lost cause, ”and none so poor to do him reverence.” The sceptre of royal authority is shattered; society has grown dull and decorous. Even in dress, the Puritan has prevailed. The people who speak of Cromwell's followers as ”Roundheads” and ”Cropped Ears,” go closer cropped than they, and the costume of a gentleman of to-day is uglier and gloomier than any the Puritan ever dreamed of introducing.
These concessions of the modern world make the Puritan a familiar figure, as he stands out in the page of Hawthorne, or on the canvas of Boughton.
But the Cavalier fades into the dim and shadowy background of the past. We cannot afford to have him slip away from us so, if we wish really to understand the history of our country; we must know both sides of its development.
Hitherto, the real comprehension of the Colonial Cavalier has been hindered by the florid enthusiasm of the South, and the critical coldness of the North. His admirers have painted him as a theatrical personage, always powdered and be-ruffled, fighting duels as frequently as he changed his dress, living in lordly state in a baronial mansion, or dancing in the brilliant halls of fas.h.i.+on in the season at the capital. All this is, of course, seen to be absurd, as one comes to study the conditions under which he lived. We find the ”capital” a straggling village, the ”estate” a half-cultivated farm, and the ”host of retainers” often but a mob of black slaves, clad in motley, or lying half-naked in the sun. Does it follow, then, that the lives of these men are not worth serious study? Surely not.
It is in the very primitiveness of environment that the chief interest of the study of that early life lies. Here were men who brought to the New World a keen appreciation of the luxuries and refined pleasures of life, who had not eschewed them for conscience's sake like the Puritan, yet who relinquished them all bravely and cheerfully, to face the hards.h.i.+ps and dangers of a pioneer life; and when their descendants, growing rich with the increasing prosperity of the country, had once more surrounded themselves with beautiful homes and wide acres, they too stood ready to sacrifice them all at the call of Liberty. If we would understand Was.h.i.+ngton, and Jefferson, and the Lees, George Mason, and John Randolph, we must study them as the ”Autocrat” tells us we should all be studied, for at least a century before birth.
The Colonial Cavalier must be painted, like a Rembrandt, with high lights and deep shadows. It is idle to ignore his weaknesses or his vices. They are of the kind that insist on notice. Yet, with all his faults, he will surely prove well worth our serious consideration, and however wide we open our eyes to his defects, however we seek to brush away the illusions with which tinsel hero-wors.h.i.+p has surrounded him, we shall still find him, judged as he has a right to be, at his best, closely approaching Lowell's definition of a gentleman: ”A man of culture, a man of intellectual resources, a man of public spirit, a man of refinement, with that good taste which is the conscience of the mind, and that conscience which is the good taste of the soul.”
This little volume makes no pretensions to the dignity of a history. It aims only, through local gossip and homely details of life and customs, to open a side-door, through which we may, perchance, gain a sense of fireside intimacy with _The Colonial Cavalier_.
His Home
[Ill.u.s.tration: The Colonial Cavalier
His Home]
I stood in the wide hall of the old brick mansion built, a century and a half ago, by ”King Carter,” on the sh.o.r.e of the James River.
It was Autumn. The doors at either end of the saloon were open, and their cas.e.m.e.nts framed the landscape like a picture. From the foot of the moss-grown steps at the rear, the drive stretched its length, under several closed gates, for half a mile, till it joined the little travelled high-road. From the porch in front, the ground fell away, in what had once been a series of terraces, to the brink of the river, across whose western hills the November sun was setting red. Not a ripple stirred the surface of the water--the dead leaves on the ground never rustled. All was still; solitary, yet not melancholy. The place seemed apart from the present--a part of the past.
Within doors, everything was mellowed by the softening touch of twilight and age. The hospitable fire which blazed in the great throat of the library chimney, cast odd shadows on the high wainscot, and the delicately wrought mouldings over the chimney-breast, and its reflections danced in the small panes of the heavily framed windows as though the witches were making tea outside.
The dark staircase wound upward in the centre of the hallway, its handrail hacked by the swords of soldiers in the Revolution. As I glanced at it, and then out along the long avenue, I seemed to see Tarleton's scarlet-clad dragoons das.h.i.+ng up to surround the house. Then, as I turned westward, imagination travelled still further into the past, and pictured the slow approach of a British packet, gliding peacefully up to the little wharf down yonder, to discharge its household freight of tea and spices, of India muslins and ”callamancoes” before it proceeded on its way to the town of Williamsburg, a few miles farther up the river.
At the period of which I was dreaming, Williamsburg was the capital of the province, with a wide street named in honor of the Duke of Gloucester, and a college named after their late majesties, William and Mary, with a jolly Raleigh tavern and a stately Governor's Palace; but all this had come about some fifty years before the building of _Carter's Grove_.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Hall in Carter's Grove James River Va.]
In the middle of the seventeenth century it was far more primitive,--indeed, it was not Williamsburg at all, but only ”The Middle Plantation,” with a few pioneer houses surrounded by primeval forests, from which savage red faces now and then peered out, to the terror of the settlers; while at nightfall the heavy wooden shutters had been closed, lest the firelight should prove a s.h.i.+ning mark for the Indian's arrow. If the traveller found Williamsburg in the eighteenth century ”a straggling village,” and its mansions ”houses of very moderate pretensions,” what would he have thought of those first modest homes, where the horse-trough was the family wash-basin; where stools and benches, hung against the wall, const.i.tuted the furniture; where the kitchen-table served for dining-table as well, and was handsomely set out with bowls, trenchers, and noggins of wood, with gourds and squashes daintily cut, to add color to the meal; while the family was counted well off that could muster a few spoons, and a plate or two of s.h.i.+ning pewter! But those pioneers and their wives felt pride in their little homes, for they realized how favorably they contrasted with the cabins built at ”James Cittie” by Wingfield and Smith and their fellow-adventurers. They had indeed more cause for honest pride than the stay-at-homes in England could ever realize, for such knew nothing of the infinite toil and the difficulty of founding a settlement in a new country, thousands of miles from civilization, with forests to be cleared and savages to be fought, turbulent followers to be ruled, and food, shelter, and clothing to be provided.
No sooner were the ”Ancient Planters,” as the chronicles call the first settlers, fairly ash.o.r.e on their island, than the Company at home opened its battery of advice upon them: ”Seeing order is at the same price with confusion,” the secretary wrote, setting down a very dubious proposition as an aphorism, ”it shall be advisably done to set your houses even and by a line, that your streets may have a good breadth, and be carried square about your market-place, and every street's end opening into it, that from thence, with a few field-pieces, you may command every street throughout; which market-place you may also fortify, _if you think it needful_.” It must have seemed grimly humorous to those pioneers, huddling their cabins together within the shelter of the wooden fence, dignified by the name of a palisade, and mounted with all the guns they could muster, to be thus advised from a distance of three thousand miles to construct at once a model English village, and fortify the market-place, _if they thought best_. An Italian proverb has it that ”it is easy to threaten a bull from a window,” and so the Virginia Company found no difficulty in regulating the affairs of the colonists and the Indians, from their window in London.