Chapter X

OF THE MANNERS, MORALS, HABITS, AND LAWS OF THE COLONISTS IN THE
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

First-class Telescope to see the MANNERS of a Past Age.—Difficulties
of Near-sighted and Long-sighted People.—Near Objects more
embarrassing to the Observer than Distant.—Why?—The Ghosts of the
past.—The Manners and Dress of Stuyvesant, Eliot, Calvert, Rolfe,
etc. described.—Manners of the Mass detailed; in their Work, Play,
Diet, Courtship, Fashions, Treatment of Young Ladies and Gentlemen,
Children, Servants, etc.—Superior Advantages of Paterfamilias then
in making Acquaintance with his Wife and Children.—Fast Girls and
Calicoes.—The Isothermal Lines of ETHICS.—Certain Vices, like Eggs,
laid secretly and hatched afterwards.—The Fashions of Crime at
various Epochs compared.—Jails and Jail-Birds.—The ingenious Crimes
of Trade, Corporations, Schools, and Seminaries noted.—How Sects are
frozen or thawed by Temperature.—Northern and Southern
Sectarianisms.—Why Episcopacy flourished in Warm Latitudes.—The
Early Commercial Morality of New York.—Baptists, Congregationalists,
and Independents.—The HABITS of the Century; their Material, Color,
Durability, and Wear.—The LAWS mainly imported.—What a Business the
Colonists carried on, notwithstanding, in the Domestic
Article.—Kindness of the Proprietors in furnishing Ready-made
Office-holders not appreciated.—American Itch for Law-making.—Laws
against Criminals.—Their Crimson Color.—How the Rains of Mercy fell
on hard Enactments, and the Thaw which followed.—Coroners’ Inquests
sat upon.—Verdicts under various Lights.—Justices of the Peace, and
the Law they peddled.—Administrations of Law then and now
contrasted.—How Colors, although imponderable, turned the Judicial
Scales.

Firstly, MANNERS.—Historians, especially in modern times, are accustomed to entertain their readers with varied and variegated descriptions of the manners of the people, period, or century under their telescopes; and as we have a first-rate historical Dollond, adjusted for day and night observations, and can bring down a past age so near as to enable our readers to see not only the cut of their great-great-great-grandfather’s coats, the quality of their metal buttons on the outside, and of the metal within their pockets, but can note and enjoy even the shape of their mouths, the character of the good things going in, and the better things coming out of them; nay, can catch and fix the evanescent and subtle flavor of their humor and wit, as they exhale in rosy _nimbi_, we shall not withhold some of the latest and most valuable discoveries we have been thus enabled to make. Some near-sighted people find a difficulty, as they look about upon their contemporaries, in arriving at results which they can crystallize around class nodules. They see only individual specimens, and wonder how the photographic historian can bring out by his machine picturesque groups, clothed in appropriate costume, artistically arranged. But this difficulty arises from the unhappy fact that the objects observed lie directly under their eye. The others lie without. Besides such obtuse-eyed watchers of their own times, who experience an embarrassment in getting fitting words to express their ideas of an average man, age, habits, or morals,—a process much like that of producing our current Sherry wines by boiling down and simmering off a variety of ingredients,—lose sight of the precipitating, coagulating, forming mass, in their anxiety to note the frisky bubbles that come up to the agitated surface. Besides, long-sighted chroniclers can see and describe the habits and manners of the distant past with more clearness, and certainly with more telling effect, than the troublesome present, with its distressing individualities and exceptions, lying, amid the disturbing cross-lights of actual, hard, well-known facts. If, in bringing up the ghost of a period long buried, we get the wrong dress on it, or chance to summon back a spectre, invested with habits that fitted another epoch as well or better, we are not teased or contradicted by any foolish survivor, pushed by children-like questions, or worried into redness of face by puzzling inquiries or an awkward silence.

And so reasoning, we feel sure that, if our inspection of the accoutrements, manœuvres, and drill of the companies that march before us in the seventeenth century, is not absolutely accurate, the fault will not lie in the distance, nor in the atmosphere, nor yet in the instrument, but in one of these two causes, either that they have sent up the wrong squads or else that the originals had not, after all, much manners to be inspected.

It is generally believed that Lord Chesterfield invented manners: but as he was not born until 1694, just as the seventeenth century was getting staggeringly infirm and indifferent to its externals, and as he did not procure the publication of his Letters until the characters on the blue slate-stones over the bones of the deceased age had become blurred and weather-dimmed, the question of the comparison of their manners with his patent methods and rules did not, we may well believe, much vex those earnest old toilers of the sea and on the land.

Single figures stand out in sharp and pleasing picturesqueness against the distant horizon of those Colonial days; in Virginia, John Rolfe; in New York, Petrus Stuyvesant; in Massachusetts, John Eliot; George Calvert, in Maryland; Theophilus Eaton, in Connecticut; Sir John Yeomans, in North Carolina; Roger Williams, in Rhode Island; and many others, who seem in their granite integrity to be poised, like calm sculpture, in ruff and wrist-frill, broad-lapelled coats, short-clothes, silk stockings, and real, unplated silver knee and sleeve buckles.—These figures, tall and stately, with high-bred, courtly manners, bland faces lit up by purposes and convictions, with large, generous waistcoats, made capacious for the pendulations of their big, loving hearts beneath, still arrest our admiring eyes. The great mass of the Colonists, however, were resolute workers, living on a spare diet, sleeping on hard beds, with shake-downs for their friendly, and shake-ups for their unfriendly, guests. Their tastes were simple and confined to a few objects. Those modern houses in which we dwell, more appropriately called museums, the best parts kept for show, and having not one, but several mermaids, a What-is-it, and an assortment of woolly animals with tails for heads, and heads omitted, would have paralyzed and shocked the most advanced Colonists. Their manners were taking, but they were mainly exhibited in taking grain from the fields, fish from the sea, and scant returns from their store sales. The graces were shown mainly by husbands in lifting their spouses on and off pillions, to and from church, and by young men in those sweetly rough compliments that love contrives in all times, and among all classes, to shape out from a scanty, lingual stock in exchange for sheep’s-eyes and assenting blushes.

As it took vessels at that period several months to come from France, the settlers were somewhat late in their knowledge of the foreign modes; but as the styles were the latest known, it was all the same in New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Boston. That rotatory machine which now turns out fashions semiannually, now clipping a yard or so from the top of a dress and adding it to the bottom, here expanding a bonnet to the size of a parasol, then contracting it to dimensions less than the milliner’s bill for it; at one time running a flat iron down in front, and at another tacking a donkey’s load on behind, had not yet been invented. Paterfamilias recognized his own children, day after day, and even year after year, in the same modes and garments; the serviceable gray or serge, during week-days, and the decent, plain, unarresting, and unstunning habiliments, reverently donned for Sunday. The girls were not fast, although the colors of their calicoes were. Their bright carnations they wore all the time, only a little more so on Sunday evenings when the sparks lit them up, especially if a match was near.

In general a homespun candor quaintly marked family and neighborhood intercourse, and homespun honesty, integrity, and good sense, public and private actions. Of course all ages have common types of roguery. Each, too, has its own special representatives who commit crimes according to a prevailing mode, and who might easily be put into the fashion-plates of the Old Bailey or Sing-Sing. In these respects the times whereof we speak kept company, to some extent, with their predecessors. But among the sparse settlements, the appropriators and spoilers of others’ property and rights had such a hard time to do a thriving business, and found that honest work laid up so much more at the year’s end, that after a little while they learned to prefer the ways of the virtuous, not from principle, but from interest, and left off courses that led to the poor-house, if they missed the jail.

There were here and there dandies who imported their manners with their clothes; but as the girls then had the good sense to believe that these, so far from being superior to those of domestic growth, did not wear so long or well, and had a way of changing so often as to be worth less than the duty imposed to bring them in, such foreign importations gradually fell off.

Young ladies at home then sewed the tares, instead of the wicked old Sower. The “help” was only looked for, and always found in, the house; which was kept up for the sake of the family, and not for the servants. People worked all the hours in which they did not sleep, and thus kept their minds from being agitated by the operation of “eight-hour laws,” the tortures of party squeezes, and the bore of concerts and lectures. Children were put to bed before midnight, were satisfied with their simple toys, and remained children nature’s full term. Parents ruled, and not the baby, which crowed as much as it pleased, except over its begettors.

It must be said, however, that elderly people even then bewailed the decay of the times, and often, over their pipes or knitting, conjured up visions of more virtuous days, when they were young, amid the green fields of old England, the emerald meadows of Holland, or on the hardy plains of Sweden.

_Secondly_, MORALS.—Ethics have no isothermal lines, fencing in the moral qualities, as nature girdles the earth with wavy zones for fruits, arctic, temperate, and tropical. And yet certain vices and virtues prevail, as trade-winds, more at one period, or over one tract at a given time than at or over another. It would almost seem as if certain moral or immoral ovarian eggs had been early and secretly laid in some wide districts, or among certain nations, where they were afterwards washed over by the impregnating milt of peculiar influences, and then broke into ready and abundant life.

There were jails in all the Colonies, and very early. The variety of the jail-bird never wanted specimens. The crimes against the person were more frequent at first than those against property, for the obvious reason that there were more of the former than the latter; as property multiplied, however, it was, as usual, viciously coveted.

The vices of an early age are more vigorous but rarer. Mean crimes; ambidextrous, cunning contrivances under the forms but against the spirit of law; ingenious larcenies by railway companies, by chartered corporations, by trust companies, by commercial partnerships, by seminaries and academies, where the pupils provide their own furniture, silver, and a great part of the instruction, and pay twice—ordinary and extraordinary—for everything they ought to get and do not; sharp, unscrupulous trade, slicing down realities so thin that they hardly serve to veneer our wants, and diluting truth so much that the millionth part of a grain will supply a whole store for twenty-four hours; the brokerage of office; the thousand deceits, infiltrated through the spongy textures of doubtful natures, and sprouting out, like rice, when the water of gain is poured upon it;—these all are the luxuries of a higher civilization. They have nothing to feed on in a simple state of society. They drift in upon an older one like barnacles and foul creepers on the copper fastenings of noble, well-freighted ships. Like blood in super-refined sugar, subtle vices look so white in the mixture that we almost fail to see their crimsoning hues. We speak of the crimes and misdemeanors of the Colonial times as indications of the prevailing morality, just as flies in open pans of cream tell its quality and richness.

Morality, we have said, is not bounded by isothermal lines; and yet climate and soil do seriously affect the prevailing moral tones and hues, just as earthly lakes take on the passing colors of the heavens above.

The Puritan sternness of New England convictions—as iron-like as the firs and larches on her own hills—swept in as gray gustiness across her early history as her northeasters over her wide fields. The latter pinched her children physically till they became of the same blue tint as their church regulations. The rigidity of even Huguenot faith could not stand the continual sun of South Carolina, which, at length, so relaxed its sharp lines that they ceased to cut at all across that compressed globe of iniquity, human slavery. The moral qualities of Virginia were like its own soil, at first stiff and deep, but gradually deteriorating until they got down into such a narcotic, stony poverty, that the plough of vigorous truth seldom turned up.

Forms of church worship, rites, and ceremonies usually flourish best in warm latitudes, where the passive swing on ecclesiastical ropes, suspended between time-crusted pillars, requires less exertion than climbing the tree, Zaccheus-like for one’s self. The vines which, all along down the well-sunned slopes, from the Chesapeake Bay southwards, lean lovingly upon the magnolia and cottonwood, shaping themselves often into verdant gothic arches, grasped with no tighter fingers the supports which safely steadied their trusting confidence, than did their sunny-hearted cultivators curl securely the tendrils of their religious faith around the Episcopal oaks, whose acorns, dropped from rook-nested boughs in England, and gathered and planted here, soon sprang up and spread their cool shades for an easy, luxurious faith.

The dominant morality of New York early borrowed its ingredients, as its capital, from whomsoever would lend it anything. Although all these contributions came to it through the Narrows, they soon broadened, on being landed. Thither came the sturdy, broad-breeched, meadow-bottomed Dutch, bringing the well-pounded creed of Dort, hardened and tempered, like blistered steel, upon the anvil of war, through the preceding century. The mace of iron-glaived Alva had again and again struck it; but the sturdy strokes had sent more fire into than they had ever brought from it. There, too, came Protestants from the Rhine, who had gone through the flames of St. Bartholomew’s day, and escaping first from France to Old Netherlands, and thence to New Netherlands, had carried with them, more carefully than their old delft, the sharp Articles of Calvinism. From Bohemia came the scholars of Huss; from Piedmont, the hunted Waldenses; from France, the men who turned their faces to centripetal Rome as their Mecca,—their religious creeds mixing and mingling in the wide-armed Bay of New York, which ever welcomed all religions that built houses on its shores or belted its waist with commercial girdles. The Baptists were early washed over to our coasts, and finding ample rivers for their aquatic rite, spread with every new wave of emigration. Congregational and Independent churches grew like young bullocks in almost every New England valley,—even putting their stiff necks through the Connecticut natural Ox-Bow at Hadley,—the only yoke they ever would submit to. We speak of churches and sects as propagators of morality, and as the yardsticks which measured the colonial morals; for as yet wicked men had not learned to use the church as covers, whence to spread nets for simpletons that lighted, like pigeons, on or near the adjacent grounds. In general, it may be said, that in spite of Puritan rites in New England showing the forbidding and cold side of the warm-hearted Gospel, in spite of the hedged Episcopal orchards of Virginia, where the blossoming odors were sought to be kept wholly inside the very high walls, in spite of the fermenting influences in New York, and the discouragements from various local causes in the other Colonies, Rhode Island and Maryland excepted, the colonists were healthily moral.

The schoolmaster got early abroad; and, generally boarding around in the school district, and making himself miscellaneously useful, wedged some educating notions into the heads of all,—in the younger by day, and in the older during the evenings. And thus the church, the school-house, industry, which pushed back idleness and its brood of vices, simple agricultural ways, the absence of city sores, and the rugged, conscientious pursuit of wholesome livelihoods in largely ventilated spaces, all concurred to hand up the Colonies along the unplanked roads of the age, to the outstretched hand of the eighteenth century.

_Thirdly_, THE HABITS of the period were few and simple; generally made of conscientious, native materials, coarse but strong; and were exceedingly well preserved.

They were of a mixed color, but on the whole good.

_Fourthly_, THE LAWS were at first and usually imported. Most of them were designed and upholstered in those second-class shops in London, the proprietors’ manufactories, which were owned by certain royal joint-stock subscribers, whose object was to make as much money as possible out of their articles. With this supreme object in view, their enactments were mainly framed to secure to themselves as much as could be of the proceeds of colonial labor, and leave the colonial purchasers to pay their own expenses and run the risks from the weather, poor crops, and Indian interruptions. To accomplish this, the proprietors sought to have the colonists devote as much of their time as possible to work. They endeavored to relieve them from the necessity of wasting precious moments in disposing of their products or in supplying themselves with materials, or in gossiping in assemblies about foolish rights, or in squandering their days in electing officers, or gadding about the townships in electioneering for themselves or others.

Did the Colonies want materials, wheat to sow the first year, crockery, furniture, store goods?

The companies could so easily send over a ship with them.

Did the prosperous colonist wish to dispose of his surplus crop?

The companies would take it for him, and sell it in England.

Was a governor, a judge, an office-holder of any kind, such as collector, portwarden, etc., needed?

Why, the companies kept them already made at their manufactory in London, and would express one through by their fast-sailing line in ample time, even if it took three months, and would deliver them wherever desired, at Plymouth, Hartford, Charleston, or Jamestown.

EXPRESSING A COLONIAL GOVERNOR FROM LONDON.
(p. 189)
]

The colonists very early felt the inconvenience of this little arrangement; and, being a sharp set, soon perceived the loss in thus buying and selling exclusively in a foreign market, stuff which they could suit themselves better with at home, even if the articles did not have the companies’ trade-mark or shine with their patented varnish. Gradually they tried their hands at law-making and officer-making, and, finding how easy it was, took a great liking to the business; and at length, dropping the foreign-made articles one after another, came to carry on a considerable manufacture of their own. The Yankee colonists were particularly handy at making church regulations, and so multiplied them that we doubt whether any churches then existing had such a large and full collection. In fact, in some parts of New England, church-members had a difficulty often in knowing what to do, not having sufficient time to read the long codes, and yet conscientiously fearing lest they might offend against some of their minute provisions prescribing or proscribing action. It may be remarked, in passing, that this _cacœthes faciendi leges_ is an itch highly American, no ointment having yet been found strong enough to cure it. The colonists early insisted on acquiring their lands in fee, not liking any leases but releases. The old fable of Anteus was again vivified. The man who stands on the soil gets the strength of the earth; and forthwith wrestles down his opponents, want or idleness, be they never so herculean. And so the simple land-owners of the Colonies, touching constantly their own acres, sucked up law-making power from their pores, and even imbibed a certain resisting faculty to cannons bored by any one but themselves.

They had an aversion to roads not made with their own hands; to laws of entail or inheritance, disposing of their lands which they had chopped out of the raw side of a continent; and, in fine, became so resolutely resistant to all resolutions moved on the far Atlantic side, unless seconded on this by themselves through their own representatives, that we are compelled by authentic documents to believe, if the ten commandments had been enacted by the royal law-makers without Colonial ratification, the sturdy settlers would have practically expunged all the “nots” from the suspected decalogue.

In those early times nothing was more criminal than the laws against criminals. Like the medical practitioners, the legal doctors believed in blood-letting for all ailments. Misdemeanors, now disposed of at quarter sessions and by police magistrates with small fines or petty imprisonment, then dangled at the hideous cross-bars.

The soft, April-like rains of clemency, now and then, however, began to fall upon these hard enactments. Quakers mildly doubted whether these scarecrows really frightened other offenders off the fields of crime. Silent tears, shed in secret household places over brothers and sons hung up on high hills for stealing or trespass, began to gather, like the waters of fountains hidden away in the depths of valleys, and to create that large American river, Public Sentiment,—larger than the Hudson, the Ohio, or the Mississippi,—which, rising and rising, has swept so many abuses and errors into the gulfs of time.

That solemn Saxon joke, a coroner’s inquest, as gloomy in its dissections, and as funny in its illogical conclusions, as in the land of the heptarchy, was not denied to those deodand colonists whose hearts suddenly stopped beating, and whose mortal wrecks, thrown up on that very weary shore “Crow’ners Law” were always prizes for small bunglers. For live men, _habeas corpus_, that great opener of illegally locked doors, began at the close of the century to be provided.

If colonial judges sometimes wrote to England to know how to decide cases politically edged, for fear they might cut a royal prerogative or sharpen popular rights; or if justices of the peace—those small pedlers of very common law, and uncommon specimens of judicial wares—dribbled out decisions for plaintiff or defendant, not knowing which was which, the puzzled magistrate giving opinions about the off ox, without knowing which was the “off” or which the “near” ox; or if sometimes in extreme cases the obfuscated and doubting arbiter of law consulted his wife and retailed her caudle lecture to the astonished suitor, as his well-considered judgment in the case,—in the main it may be averred that justice was as well tolled from the mills, as in these latter days when the judicial miller takes from the bag before the grist goes in, and sees to it that his private gutter taps the hopper before it shakes itself into the customer’s heap. Color is supposed to lurk just under the outer skin, and, if placed on the scales, to be imponderable; but it was always found that positive colors, when put on the judicial Fair banks, were very light; the white, which is no color at all, invariably weighing down that side of the balance, when a cinnamon-colored Indian or a black-berried African was found in the other. The black man always lost at the checker-board, even when the moves were claimed to be on the square. In fact, until a few years past, when the military game called “drafts” began, luck never favored that color at the little game of law, at which two can play and one pay, or in fact at any of the larger games of life in America. The bleaching-powders that whiten even the ermine were slow in coming into use. The seventeenth century, like so many of its ancestors, while working its double team, one white and the other black, to draw its loads, took better care at baiting-places and at the taverns over night of the white horse than of the other.