It was a very beautiful and enjoyable
life that the Virginians led in that ancient
time, for it certainly seems ages ago, before
the war came to turn ideas upside
down and convert the picturesque commonwealth
into a commonplace, modern
state. It was a soft, dreamy, deliciously
quiet life, a life of repose, an old life,
with all its sharp corners and rough surfaces
long ago worn round and smooth.
Everything fitted everything else, and
every point in it was so well settled as to
leave no work of improvement for anybody
to do. The Virginians were satisfied
with things as they were, and if there
were reformers born among them, they
went elsewhere to work changes. Society
in the Old Dominion was like a well rolled
and closely packed gravel walk, in which
each pebble has found precisely the place
it fits best. There was no giving way
under one's feet, no uncomfortable grinding
of loose materials as one walked about
over the firm and long-used ways of the
Virginian social life.
Let me hasten to say that I do not altogether
approve of that life by any means.
That would be flat blasphemy against the
god Progress, and I have no stomach for
martyrdom, even of our modern, fireless
sort. I frankly admit in the outset,
therefore, that the Virginians of that old
time, between which and the present
there is so great a gulf fixed, were idle
people. I am aware that they were,
when I lived among them, extravagant
for the most part, and in debt altogether.
It were useless to deny that they habitually
violated all the wise precepts laid
down in the published writings of Poor
Richard, and set at naught the whole
gospel of thrift. But their way of living
was nevertheless a very agreeable one to
share or to contemplate, the more because
there was nothing else like it anywhere
in the land.
A whole community, with as nearly as
possible nothing to do, is apt to develop
a considerable genius for enjoyment, and
the Virginians, during somewhat more
than two centuries of earnest and united
effort in that direction, had partly discovered
and partly created both a science
and an art of pleasant living. Add to
idleness and freedom from business cares
a climate so perfect that existence itself is
a luxury within their borders, and we
shall find no room for wonder that these
people learned how to enjoy themselves.
What they learned, in this regard, they
remembered too. Habits and customs
once found good were retained, I will not
say carefully,—for that would imply
effort, and the Virginians avoided effort
always,—but tenaciously. The Virginians
were born conservatives, constitutionally
opposed to change. They loved the old
because it was old, and disliked the new,
if for no better reason, because it was
new; for newness and rawness were well-nigh
the same in their eyes.
This constitutional conservatism, without
which their mode of life could never
have been what it was, was nourished by
both habit and circumstance. The Virginians
were not much given to travelling
beyond their own borders, and when they
did go into the outer world it was only to
find a manifestation of barbarism in every
departure from their own prescriptive
standards and models. Not that they
were more bigoted than other people, for
in truth I think they were not, but their
bigotry took a different direction. They
thought well of the old and the moss-grown,
just as some people admire all
that is new and garish and fashionable.
But chief among the causes of that conservatism
which gave tone and color to
the life we are considering was the fact
that ancient estates were carefully kept in
ancient families, generation after generation.
If a Virginian lived in a particular
mansion, it was strong presumptive proof
that his father, his grandfather, and his
great-grandfather had lived there before
him. There was no law of primogeniture
to be sure by which this was brought
about, but there were well-established customs
which amounted to the same thing.
Family pride was a ruling passion, and
not many Virginians of the better class
hesitated to secure the maintenance of
their family place in the ranks of the untitled
peerage by the sacrifice of their own
personal prosperity, if that were necessary,
as it sometimes was. To the first-born
son went the estate usually, by the
will of the father and with the hearty concurrence
of the younger sons, when there
happened to be any such. The eldest
brother succeeded the father as the head
of the house, and took upon himself the
father's duties and the father's burdens.
Upon him fell the management of the
estate; the maintenance of the mansion,
which, under the laws of hospitality obtaining
there, was no light task; the
education of the younger sons and daughters;
and last, though commonly not by
any means least, the management of the
hereditary debt. The younger children
always had a home in the old mansion,
secured to them by the will of their father
sometimes, but secure enough in any case
by a custom more binding than any law;
and there were various other ways of providing
for them. If the testator were
rich, he divided among them his bonds,
stocks, and other personal property not
necessary to the prosperity of the estate,
or charged the head of the house with the
payment of certain legacies to each. The
mother's property, if she had brought a
dower with her, was usually portioned
out among them, and the law, medicine,
army, navy, and church offered them genteel
employment if they chose to set up
for themselves. But these arrangements
were subsidiary to the main purpose of
keeping the estate in the family, and
maintaining the mansion-house as a seat
of elegant hospitality. So great was the
importance attached to this last point,
and so strictly was its observance enjoined
upon the new lord of the soil, that he was
frequently the least to be envied of all.
I remember a case in which a neighbor of
my own, a very wealthy gentleman, whose
house was always open and always full of
guests, dying, left each of his children a
plantation. To the eldest son, however,
he gave the home estate, worth three or
four times as much as any of the other
plantations, and with it he gave the young
man also a large sum of money. But he
charged him with the duty of keeping
open house there, at all times, and directed
that the household affairs should be conducted
always precisely as they had been
during his own lifetime. The charge
well-nigh outweighed the inheritance.
The new master of the place lived in Richmond,
where he was engaged in manufacturing,
and after the death of the father
the old house stood tenantless, but open
as before. Its troops of softly shod servants
swept and dusted and polished as
of old. Breakfast, dinner, and supper
were laid out every day at the accustomed
hours, under the old butler's supervision,
and as the viands grew cold his silent
subordinates waited, trays in hand, at the
back of the empty chairs during the full
time appointed for each meal. I have
stopped there for dinner, tea, or to spend
the night many a time, in company with
one of the younger sons who lived elsewhere,
or with some relative of the family,
or alone, as the case might be, and I have
sometimes met others there. But our
coming or not was a matter of indifference.
Guests knew themselves always
welcome, but whether guests came or not
the household affairs suffered no change.
The destruction of the house by fire
finally lifted this burden from its master's
shoulders, as the will did not require him
to rebuild. But while it stood, its master's
large inheritance was of very small worth
to him. And in many other cases the
preference given to the eldest son in the
distribution of property was in reality
only a selection of his shoulders to bear
the family's burdens.
In these and other ways, old estates of
greater or less extent were kept together,
and old families remained lords of the
soil. It is not easy to overestimate the
effect of this upon the people. A man
to whom a great estate, with an historic
house upon it and an old family name
attached to it, has descended through
several generations, could hardly be other
than a conservative in feeling and influence.
These people were the inheritors
of the old and the established. Upon
them had devolved the sacred duty of
maintaining the reputation of a family
name. They were no longer mere individuals,
whose acts affected only themselves,
but were chiefs and representatives
of honorable houses, and as such bound
to maintain a reputation of vastly more
worth than their own. Their fathers before
them were their exemplars, and in a
close adherence to family customs and
traditions lay their safety from unseemly
lapses. The old furniture, the old wainscot
on the walls, the old pictures, the
old house itself, perpetually warned them
against change as in itself unbecoming
and dangerous to the dignity of their race.
And so changes were unknown in their
social system. As their fathers lived, so
lived they, and there was no feature of
their life pleasanter than its fixity. One
always knew what to expect and what to
do; there were no perplexing uncertainties
to breed awkwardness and vexation.
There was no room for shams and no
temptation to vulgar display, and so
shams and display had no chance to become
fashionable.
Aside from the fact that the old and the
substantial were the respectable, the social
status of every person was so fixed
and so well known that display was unnecessary
on the part of the good families,
and useless on the part of others. The
old ladies constituted a college of heralds
and could give you at a moment's notice
any pedigree you might choose to ask for.
The "goodness" of a good family was a
fixed fact and needed no demonstration,
and no parvenu could work his way into
the charmed circle by vulgar ostentation
or by any other means whatever. As one
of the old dames used to phrase it, ostentatious
people were thought to be "rich
before they were ready."
As the good families gave law to the
society of the land, so their chiefs ruled
the State in a more positive and direct
sense. The plantation owners, as a matter
of course, constituted only a minority
of the voting population, at least after
the constitution of 1850 swept away the
rule making the ownership of real estate
a necessary qualification for suffrage; but
they governed the State nevertheless as
completely as if they had been in the
majority. Families naturally followed
the lead of their chiefs, voting together
as a matter of clan pride, when no principle
was involved, and so the plantation
owners controlled directly a large part of
the population. But a more important
point was that the ballot was wholly unknown
in Virginia until after the war, and
as the large landowners were deservedly
men of influence in the community, they
had little difficulty, under a system of
viva-voce voting, in carrying things their
own way on all matters on which they
were at all agreed among themselves. It
often happened that a Whig would continue
year after year to represent a
Democratic district, or vice versa, in the
Legislature or in Congress, merely by
force of his large family connection and
influence.
All this was an evil, if we choose to
think it so. It was undemocratic certainly,
but it worked wonderfully well, and the
system was good in this at least, that it
laid the foundations of politics among the
wisest and best men the State had; for as
a rule the planters were the educated men
of the community, the reading men, the
scholars, the thinkers, and well-nigh every
one of them was familiar with the whole
history of parties and of statesmanship.
Politics was deemed a necessary part of
every gentleman's education, and the
youth of eighteen who could not recapitulate
the doctrines set forth in the resolutions
of 1798, or tell you the history of
the Missouri Compromise or the Wilmot
Proviso, was thought lamentably deficient
in the very rudiments of culture. They
had little to do, and they thought it the
bounden duty of every free American
citizen to prepare himself for the intelligent
performance of his functions in the
body politic. As a result, if Virginia did
not always send wise men to the councils
of the State and nation, she sent no politically
ignorant ones at any rate.
It was a point of honor among Virginians
never to shrink from any of the duties
of a citizen. To serve as road-overseer
or juryman was often disagreeable to men
who loved ease and comfort as they did,
but every Virginian felt himself in honor
bound to serve whenever called upon, and
that without pay, too, as it was deemed
in the last degree disreputable to accept
remuneration for doing the plain duty of
a citizen.
It was the same with regard to the
magistracy. Magistrates were appointed
until 1850, and after that chosen by election,
but under neither system was any
man free to seek or to decline the office.
Appointed or elected, one must serve, if
he would not be thought to shirk his duties
as a good man and citizen; and though the
duties of the office were sometimes very
onerous, there was practically no return
of any sort made. Magistrates received
no salary, and it was not customary for
them to accept the small perquisites
allowed them by law. Under the old
constitution, the senior justice of each
county was ex-officio high sheriff, and the
farming of the shrievalty—for the high
sheriff always farmed the office—yielded
some pecuniary profit; but any one magistrate's
chance of becoming the senior
was too small to be reckoned in the account;
and under the new constitution of
1850 even this was taken away, and the
sheriffs were elected by the people. But
to be a magistrate was deemed an honor,
and very properly so, considering the nature
of a Virginian magistrate's functions.
The magistrates were something more
than justices of the peace. A bench of
three or more of them constituted the
County Court, a body having a wide civil
and criminal jurisdiction of its own, and
concurrent jurisdiction with the Circuit
Court over a still larger field. This County
Court sat monthly, and in addition to its
judicial functions was charged with considerable
legislative duties for the county,
under a system which gave large recognition
to the principle of local self-government.
Four times a year it held
grand-jury terms—an anomaly in magistrate's
courts, I believe, but an excellent
one as experience proved. In a large
class of criminal cases a bench of five
justices, sitting in regular term, was a
court of oyer and terminer.
The concurrent jurisdiction of this
County Court, as I have said, was very
large, and as its sessions were monthly,
while those of the circuit judges were
held but twice a year, very many important
civil suits involving considerable interests
were brought there rather than
before the higher tribunal. And here we
encounter a very singular fact. The
magistrates were usually planters, never
lawyers, and yet, as the records show,
the proportion of County-Court decisions
reversed on appeal for error was always
smaller than that of decisions made by
the higher tribunals, in which regular
judges sat. At the first glance this seems
almost incredible, and yet it is a fact, and
its cause is not far to seek. The magistrates,
being unpaid functionaries, were
chosen for their fitness only. Their election
was a sort of choosing of arbitrators,
and the men elected were precisely the
kind of men commonly selected by honest
disputants as umpires—men of integrity,
probity, and intelligence. They came
into court conscious of their own ignorance
of legal technicalities, and disposed
to decide questions upon principles of
"right between man and man" rather
than upon the letter of the law; and as
the law is, in the main, founded upon
precisely these principles of abstract justice,
their decision usually proved sound
in law as well as right in fact.
But the magistrates were not wholly
without instruction even in technical matters
of law. They learned a good deal by
long service,—their experience often running
over a period of thirty or forty years
on the bench,—and, in addition to the
skill which intelligent men must have
gained in this way, they had still another
resource. When the bench thought it
necessary to inform itself on a legal point,
the presiding magistrate asked in open
court for the advice of counsel, and in
such an event every lawyer not engaged
in the case at bar, or in another involving
a like principle, was under obligation to
give a candid expression of his opinion.
The system was a very peculiar and interesting
one, and in Virginia it was about
the best also that could have been hit
upon, though it is more than doubtful
whether it would work equally well anywhere
else. All the conditions surrounding
it were necessary to its success, and
those conditions were of a kind that cannot
be produced at will; they must grow.
In the first place, the intelligence and
culture of a community must not be concentrated
in certain centres, as is usually
the case, especially in commercial and
manufacturing States, but must be distributed
pretty evenly over the country,
else the material out of which such a
magistracy can be created will not be
where it is needed; and in the very nature
of the case it cannot be imported for the
purpose. There must also be a public
sentiment to compel the best men to serve
when chosen, and the best men must be
men of wealth and leisure, else they cannot
afford to serve, for such a magistracy
must of necessity be unpaid. In short,
the system can work well only under the
conditions which gave it birth in Virginia,
and those conditions will probably never
again exist in any of these States. It is
a matter of small moment to the citizen
of Massachusetts or New York that Virginia
once had a very peculiar judiciary;
but it is not a matter of light importance
that our scheme of government leaves
every State free to devise for itself a system
of local institutions adapted to its
needs and the character and situation of
its people; that it is not uniformity we
have sought and secured in our attempt
to establish a government by the people,
but a wise diversity rather; that experience
and not theory is our guide; that
our institutions are cut to fit our needs,
and not to match a fixed pattern; and
that the necessities of one part of the
country do not prescribe a rule for another
part.
But this is not a philosophical treatise.
Return we therefore to the region of small
facts. It is a little curious that with their
reputed fondness for honorary titles of all
kinds, the Virginians never addressed a
magistrate as "judge," even in that old
time when the functions of the justice
fairly entitled him to the name. And it
is stranger still, perhaps, that in Virginia
the members of the Legislature were
never called "honorable," that distinction
being held strictly in reserve for members
of Congress and of the national cabinet.
This fact seems all the more singular
when we remember that in the view of
Virginians the States were nations, while
the general government was little more
than their accredited agent, charged with
the performance of certain duties and
holding certain delegated powers which
were subject to recall at any time.
I have said that every educated Virginian
was acquainted with politics, but this
is only half the truth. They knew the
details quite as well as the general facts,
and there were very many of them not
politicians and never candidates for office
of any kind who could give from memory
an array of dates and other figures of
which the Tribune Almanac would have
no occasion to be ashamed. Not to
know the details of the vote in Connecticut
in any given year was to lay oneself
open to a suspicion of incompetence; to
confess forgetfulness of the "ayes and
noes" on any important division in
Congress was to rule oneself out of the
debate as an ignoramus. I say debate
advisedly, for there was always a debate
on political matters when two Virginia
gentlemen met anywhere except in church
during sermon time. They argued earnestly,
excitedly, sometimes even violently,
but ordinarily without personal ill-feeling.
In private houses they could not quarrel,
being gentlemen and guests of a common
host, or standing in the relation of guest
and host to each other; in more public
places—for they discussed politics in all
places and at all times—they refrained
from quarrelling because to quarrel would
not have been proper. But they never
lost an opportunity to make political
speeches to each other; alternately,
sometimes, but quite as often both, or
all, at once.
It would sometimes happen, of course,
that two or more gentlemen meeting
would find themselves agreed in their
views, but the pleasure of indulging in a
heated political discussion was never foregone
for any such paltry reason as that.
Finding no point on which they could
disagree, they would straightway join
forces and do valiant battle against the
common enemy. That the enemy was
not present to answer made no difference.
They knew all his positions and all the
arguments by which his views could be
sustained quite as well as he did, and
they combated these. It was funny, of
course, but the participants in these one-sided
debates never seemed to see the
ludicrous points of the picture.
A story is told of one of the fiercest of
these social political debaters—a story
too well vouched for among his friends to
be doubted—which will serve, perhaps,
to show how unnecessary the presence of
an antagonist was to the successful conduct
of a debate. It was "at a dining-day,"
to speak in the native idiom, and
it so happened that all the guests were
Whigs, except Mr. E——, who was the
staunchest of Jeffersonian Democrats.
The discussion began, of course, as soon
as the women left the table, and it speedily
waxed hot. Mr. E——, getting the
ear of the company at the outset, laid on
right and left with his customary vigor,
rasping the Whigs on their sorest points,
arguing, asserting, denouncing, demonstrating—to
his own entire satisfaction—for
perhaps half an hour; silencing
every attempt at interruption by saying:
"Now wait, please, till I get through;
I'm one against seven, and you must let
me make my points. Then you can
reply."
He finished at last, leaving every Whig
nerve quivering, every Whig face burning
with suppressed indignation, and every
Whig breast full, almost to bursting, with
a speech in reply. The strongest debater
of them all managed to begin first, but
just as he pronounced the opening words,
Mr. E—— interrupted him.
"Pardon me," he said, "I know all
your little arguments, so I'll go and
talk with the girls for half an hour
while you run them over; when you get
through send for me, and I'll come and
SWEEP YOU CLEAR OUT OF THE
ARENA."
And with that the exasperating man
bowed himself out of the dining-room.
But with all its ludicrousness, this universal
habit of "talking politics" had its
uses. In the first place, politics with
these men was a matter of principle, and
not at all a question of shrewd management.
They knew what they had and
what they wanted. Better still they
knew every officeholder's record, and held
each to a strict account of his stewardship.
Under the influence of this habit in
social life, every man was constantly on
his metal, of course, and every young
man was bound to fortify himself for
contests to come by a diligent study of
history and politics. He must know as a
necessary preparation for ordinary social
converse all those things that are commonly
left to the professional politicians.
As well might he go into society in ignorance
of yesterday's weather or last week's
news, as without full knowledge of Benton's
Thirty Years' View, and a familiar
acquaintance with the papers in the
Federalist. In short, this odd habit compelled
thorough political education, and
enforced upon every man old enough to
vote an active, earnest participation in
politics. Perhaps a country in which
universal suffrage exists would be the
better if both were more general than
they are.
But politics did not furnish the only
subjects of debate among these people.
They talked politics, it is true, whenever
they met at all, but when they had mutually
annihilated each other, when each
had said all there was to say on the subject,
they frequently turned to other
themes. Of these, the ones most commonly
and most vigorously discussed were
points of doctrinal theology. The great
battle-ground was baptism. Half the
people were, perhaps, Baptists, and when
Baptist and pedo-Baptist met they sniffed
the battle at once,—that is to say, as
soon as they had finished the inevitable
discussion of politics.
On this question of Baptism each had
been over the ground many hundreds of
times, and each must have known when
he put forth an argument what the answer
would be. But this made no manner of
difference. They were always ready to
go over the matter again. I amused myself
once by preparing a "part" debate on
the subject. I arranged the remarks of
each disputant in outline, providing each
speech with its proper "cue," after the
manner of stage copies of a play, and,
taking a friend into my confidence, I
used sometimes to follow the discussion,
with my copy of it in hand, and, except
in the case of a very poorly informed or
wholly unpractised debater, my "cues"
and speeches were found to be amusingly
accurate.
The Virginians were a very religious as
well as a very polemical people, however,
and I do not remember that I ever knew
them, even in the heat of their fiercest
discussions upon doctrine, to forget the
brotherly kindness which lay as a broad
foundation under their card-houses of
creed. They believed with all their souls
in the doctrines set down by their several
denominations, and maintained them
stoutly on all occasions; but they loved
each other, attended each other's services,
and joined hands right heartily in every
good work.
There was one other peculiarity in
their church relations worthy of notice.
The Episcopal Church was once an establishment
in Virginia, as every reader
knows, but every reader does not know,
perhaps, that even up to the outbreak of
the war it remained in some sense an
establishment in some parts of the State.
There were little old churches in many
neighborhoods which had stood for a century
or two, and the ancestors of the
present generation had all belonged to
them in their time. One of these churches
I remember lovingly for its old traditions,
for its picturesqueness, and for the
warmth of the greeting its congregation
gave me—not as a congregation but as
individuals—when I, a lad half grown,
returned to the land of my fathers.
Every man and woman in that congregation
had known my father and loved him,
and nearly every one was my cousin, at
least in the Virginian acceptation of that
word. The church was Episcopal, of
course, while the great majority, perhaps
seven eighths of the people who attended
it and supported it were members of other
denominations—Baptists, Presbyterians,
and Methodists. But they all felt themselves
at home here. This was the old
family church where their forefathers had
worshiped, and under the shadow of
which they were buried. They all belonged
here no matter what other church
might claim them as members. They
paid the old clergyman's salary, served in
the vestry, attended the services, kept
church, organ, and churchyard in repair,
and in all respects regarded themselves,
and were held by others, as members
here of right and by inheritance. It was
church and family, instead of Church and
State, and the sternest Baptist or Presbyterian
among them would have thought
himself wronged if left out of the count
of this little church's membership. This
was their heritage, their home, and the
fact that they had also united themselves
with churches of other denominations
made no difference whatever in their feeling
toward the old mother church, there
in the woods, guarding and cherishing
the dust of their dead.
All the people, young and old, went to
church; it was both pleasant and proper
to do so, though not all of them went for
the sake of the sermon or the service.
The churches were usually built in the
midst of a grove of century oaks, and
their surroundings were nearly always
pleasantly picturesque. The gentlemen
came on horseback, the ladies in their
great lumbering, old-fashioned carriages,
with an ebony driver in front and a more
or less ebony footman or two behind.
Beside the driver sat ordinarily the old
"mammy" of the family, or some other
equally respectable and respected African
woman, whose crimson or scarlet turban
and orange neckerchief gave a dash of
color to the picture, a trifle barbaric, perhaps,
in combination, but none the less
pleasant in its effect for that. The young
men came first, mounted on their superb
riding horses, wearing great buckskin
gauntlets and clad in full evening dress—that
being en règle always in Virginia,—with
the skirts of the coat drawn forward,
over the thighs, and pinned in front, as a
precaution against possible contact with
the reeking sides of the hard-ridden
steeds.
The young men came first to church,
as I have said, and they did so for a purpose.
The carriages were elegant and
costly, many of them, but nearly all were
extremely old-fashioned; perched high in
air, they were not easy of entrance or exit
by young women in full dress without
assistance, and it was accounted the prescriptive
privilege of the young men to
render the needed service at the church
door. When this preliminary duty was
fully done, some of the youths took seats
inside the church, but if the weather were
fine many preferred to stroll through the
woods, or to sit in little groups under the
trees, awaiting the exit of the womankind,
who must, of course, be chatted with and
helped into their carriages again.
Invitations to dinner or to a more extended
visit were in order the moment the
service was over. Every gentleman went
to dine with a friend, or took a number
of friends to dine with him. But the
arrangements depended largely upon the
young women, who had a very pretty
habit of visiting each other and staying a
week or more, and these visits nearly always
originated at church. Each young
woman invited all the rest to go home with
her, and after a deal of confused consultation,
out of whose chaos only the feminine
mind could possibly have extracted
anything like a conclusion, two or three
would win all the others to themselves,
each taking half a dozen or more with
her, and promising to send early the next
morning for their trunks. With so many
of the fairest damsels secured for a visit of
a week or a fortnight, the young hostess
was sure of cavaliers in plenty to do her
guests honor. And upon my word it was
all very pleasant! I have idled away
many a week in these old country houses,
and for my life I cannot manage to regret
the fact, or to remember it with a single
pang of remorse for the wasted hours.
Perhaps after all they were not wholly
wasted. Who shall say? Other things
than gold are golden.
As a guest in those houses one was not
welcome only, but free. There was a
servant to take your horse, a servant to
brush your clothes, a servant to attend
you whenever you had a want to supply
or a wish to gratify. But you were never
oppressed with attentions, or under any
kind of restraint. If you liked to sit in
the parlor, the women there would entertain
you very agreeably, or set you to
entertaining them by reading aloud, or
by anything else which might suggest
itself. If you preferred the piazza, there
were sure to be others like-minded with
yourself. If you smoked, there were always
pipes and tobacco on the sideboard,
and a man-servant to bring them to you
if you were not inclined to go after them.
In short, each guest might do precisely
as he pleased, sure that in doing so he
should best please his host and hostess.
My own favorite amusement—I am the
father of a family now, and may freely
confess the fancies and foibles of a departed
youth—was to accompany the
young mistress of the mansion on her
rounds of domestic duty, carrying her
key-basket for her, and assisting her in
various ways, unlocking doors and—really
I cannot remember that I was of any very
great use to her after all; but willingness
counts for a good deal in this world, and
I was always very willing at any rate.
As a rule, the young daughter of the
mansion was housekeeper, and this may
perhaps account for the fact that the
habit of carrying housekeeper's key-baskets
for them was very general among
the young gentlemen in houses where
they were upon terms of intimate friendship.
Life in Virginia was the pursuit of happiness
and its attainment. Money was a
means only, and was usually spent very
lavishly whenever its expenditure could
add in any way to comfort, but as there
was never any occasion to spend it for
mere display, most of the planters were
abundantly able to use it freely for better
purposes. That is to say, most of them
were able to owe their debts and to renew
their notes when necessary. Their houses
were built for comfort, and most of them
had grown gray with age long before the
present generation was born. A great
passage-way ran through the middle, commonly,
and here stood furniture which
would have delighted the heart of the
mediævalist: great, heavy oaken chairs,
black with age and polished with long
usage—chairs whose joints were naked
and not ashamed; sofas of ponderous
build, made by carpenters who were
skeptical as to the strength of woods, and
thought it necessary to employ solid
pieces of oak, four inches in diameter,
for legs, and to shoe each with a solid
brass lion's paw as a precaution against
abrasion. A great porch in front was
shut out at night by the ponderous
double doors of the hallway, but during
the day the way was wide open through
the house.
The floors were of white ash, and in
summer no carpets or rugs were anywhere
to be seen. Every morning the
floors were polished by diligent scouring
with dry pine needles, and the furniture
similarly brightened by rubbing with wax
and cork. In the parlors the furniture
was usually very rich as to woods and
very antique in workmanship. The curtains
were of crimson damask with lace
underneath, and the contrast between
these and the bare, white, polished floor
was singularly pleasing.
The first white person astir in the house
every morning was the woman who carried
the keys, mother or daughter, as the
case might be. Her morning work was
no light affair, and its accomplishment
consumed several hours daily. To begin
with she must knead the light bread with
her own hands and send it to the kitchen
to be baked and served hot at breakfast.
She must prepare a skillet full of light
rolls for the same meal, and "give out"
the materials for the rest of the breakfast.
Then she must see to the sweeping
and garnishing of the lower rooms, passages,
and porches, lest the maids engaged
in that task should entertain less extreme
views than her own on the subject of that
purity and cleanliness which constituted
the house's charm and the housekeeper's
crown of honor. She must write two or
three notes, to be dispatched by the
hands of a small negro to her acquaintances
in the neighborhood,—a kind of
correspondence much affected in that society.
In the midst of all these duties,
the young housekeeper—for somehow it
is only the youthful ones whom I remember
vividly—must meet and talk with
such of the guests as might happen to be
early risers, and must not forget to send
a messenger to the kitchen once every ten
minutes to "hurry up breakfast!" not
that breakfast could be hurried under any
conceivable circumstances, but merely
because it was the custom to send such
messages, and the young woman was a
duty-loving maid who did her part in the
world without inquiring why. She knew
very well that breakfast would be ready
at the traditional hour, the hour at which
it always had been served in that house,
and that there was no power on the plantation
great enough to hasten it by a
single minute. But she sent out to
"hurry" it nevertheless.
When breakfast is ready the guests are
ready for it. It is a merit of fixed habits
that one can conform to them easily, and
when one knows that breakfast has been
ready in the house in which he is staying
precisely at nine o'clock every morning
for one or two centuries past, and that
the immovable conservatism of an old
Virginian cook stands guard over the sanctity
of that custom, he has no difficulty in
determining when to begin dressing.
The breakfast is sure to be a good one,
consisting of everything obtainable at the
season. If it be in summer, the host will
have a dish of broiled roe herrings before
him, a plate of hot rolls at his right hand,
and a cylindrical loaf of hot white bread—which
it is his duty to cut and serve—on
his left. On the flanks will be one or
two plates of beaten biscuit and a loaf of
batter bread, i. e., corn-bread made rich
with milk and eggs. A dish of plain corn
"pones" sits on the dresser, and the servants
bring griddle-cakes or waffles hot
from the kitchen; so much for breads.
A knuckle of cold, boiled ham is always
present, on either the table or the dresser,
as convenience may dictate. A dish of
sliced tomatoes and another of broiled
ditto are the invariable vegetables, supplemented
on occasion with lettuce, radishes,
and other like things. These are the
staples of breakfast, and additions are
made as the season serves.
Breakfast over, the young housekeeper
scalds and dries the dishes and glassware
with her own hands. Then she goes to
the garden, smoke-house, and store-room,
to "give out" for dinner. Morning rides,
backgammon, music, reading, etc., furnish
amusement until one o'clock, or a
little later. The gentlemen go shooting
or fishing, if they choose, or join the host
in his rides over the plantation, inspecting
his corn, tobacco, wheat, and live stock.
About one the house grows quiet. The
women retire to their chambers, the gentlemen
make themselves comfortable in
various ways. About two it is the duty
of the master of the mansion to offer
toddy or juleps to his guests, and to ask
one of the dining-room servants if "dinner
is 'most ready." Half an hour later
he must send the cook word to "hurry it
up." It is to be served at four, of course,
but as the representative of an ancient
house, it is his bounden duty to ask the
two-o'clock question and send the half-past-two
message.
Supper is served at eight, and the
women usually retire for the night at ten
or eleven.
If hospitality was deemed the chief of
virtues among the Virginians, the duty
of accepting hospitality was quite as
strongly insisted upon. One must visit
his friends, whatever the circumstances,
if he would not be thought churlish. Especially
were young men required to show
a proper respect and affection for elderly
female relatives by dining with them as
frequently as at any other house. I shall
not soon forget some experiences of my
own in this regard. The most stately and
elegant country-house I have ever seen
stood in our neighborhood. Its master
had lived in great state there, and after
his death his two maiden sisters, left
alone in the great mansion, scrupulously
maintained every custom he had established
or inherited. They were my
cousins in the Virginian sense of the
word, and I had not been long a resident
of the State when my guardian reminded
me of my duty toward them. I must
ride over and dine there without a special
invitation, and I must do this six or eight
times a year at the least. As a mere boy,
half-grown, I made ready for my visit
with a good deal of awe and trepidation.
I had already met the two stately dames
and was disposed to distrust my manners
in their presence. I went, however, and
was received with warm, though rather
stiff and formal, cordiality. My horse
was taken to the stable. I was shown to
my room by a thoroughly drilled servant,
whose tongue had been trained to as persistent
a silence as if his functions had
been those of a mute at a funeral. His
name I discovered was Henry, but beyond
this I could make no progress in his
acquaintance. He prided himself upon
knowing his place, and the profound respect
with which he treated me made it
impossible that I should ask him for the
information on which my happiness, perhaps
my reputation, just then depended.
I wanted to know for what purpose I had
been shown to my room, what I was expected
to do there, and at what hour I
ought to descend to the parlor or library.
It was manifestly out of the question
to seek such information at the hands of
so well-regulated a being as Henry. He
had ushered me into my room and now
stood bolt upright, gazing fixedly at
nothing and waiting for my orders in profound
and immovable silence. He had
done his part well, and it was not for him
to assume that I was unprepared to do
mine. His attitude indicated, or perhaps
I should say aggressively asserted, the
necessity he was under of assuming my
entire familiarity with the usages of good
society and the ancient customs of this
ancient house. The worst of it was I
fancied that the solemn rogue guessed my
ignorance and delighted in exposing my
fraudulent pretensions to good breeding.
But in this I did him an injustice, as
future knowledge of him taught me. He
was well drilled, and delighted in doing
his duty, that was all. No gaucherie on
my part would have moved him to smile.
He knew his place and his business too
well for that. Whatever I might have
done he would have held to be perfectly
proper. It was for him to stand there
like a statue, until I should bid him do
otherwise, and if I had kept him there for
a week I think he would have given no
sign of weariness or impatience. As it
was, his presence appalled and oppressed
me, and in despair of discovering the
proper thing to do, I determined to put
a bold face upon the matter.
"I am tired and warm," I said, "and
will rest awhile upon the bed. I will join
the ladies in half an hour. You may go
now."
At dinner, Henry stood at the sideboard
and silently directed the servants.
When the cloth was removed, he brought
a wine tub with perhaps a dozen bottles
of antique Madeira in it and silently
awaited my signal before decanting one
of them. When I had drunk a glass with
the ladies, they rose and retired according
to the custom, leaving me alone with the
wine and the cigars,—and Henry, whose
erect solemnity converted the great silent
dining-room into something very like a
funeral chamber. He stood there like a
guardsman on duty, immovable, speechless,
patient, while I sat at the board, a
decanter of wine before me and the tub
of unopened bottles on the floor by my
side—enough for a regiment.
I did not want any wine or anything
else except a sound of some sort to break
the horrible stillness. I tried to think of
some device by which to make Henry go
out of the room or move one of his hands
or turn his eyes a little or even wink; but
I failed utterly. There was nothing
whatever to be done. There was no order
to give him. Every want was supplied
and everything was at my hand. The
cigars were under my nose, the ash pan
by them, and a lighted wax candle stood
within reach. I toyed with the decanter
in the hope of breaking the stillness, but
its stand was too well cushioned above
and below to make a sound. I ventured
at last to move one of my feet, but a
strip of velvet carpet lay between it and
the floor.
I could stand it no longer. Filling a
glass of wine I drank it off, lighted a fresh
cigar, and boldly strode out of the house
to walk on the lawn in front.
On the occasion of subsequent visits I
got on well enough, knowing precisely
what to expect and what to do, and in
time I came to regard this as one of the
very pleasantest houses in which I visited
at all, if on no other account than because
I found myself perfectly free there to do
as I pleased; but until I learned that I
was expected to consult only my own
comfort while a guest in the house the
atmosphere of the place oppressed me.
Not in every house were the servants
so well trained as Henry, but what they
lacked in skill they fully made up in numbers,
and in hardly anything else was the
extravagance of the Virginians so manifest
as in their wastefulness of labor. On
nearly every plantation there were ten or
twelve able-bodied men and women employed
about the house, doing the work
which two or three ought to have done,
and might have done; and in addition to
this there were usually a dozen or a score
of others with merely nominal duties or
no duties at all. But it was useless to
urge their master to send any of them to
the field, and idle to show him that the
addition which might thus be made to the
force of productive laborers would so increase
his revenue as to acquit him of debt
within a few years. He did not much
care to be free of debt for one thing, and
he liked to have plenty of servants always
within call. As his dinner table bore
every day food enough for a battalion,
so his nature demanded the presence of
half a dozen servitors whenever one was
wanted. Indeed, these people usually
summoned servants in squads, calling
three or four to take one guest's horse to
the stable or to bring one pitcher of ice-water.
And yet I should do the Virginians
great injustice were I to leave the impression
that they were lazy. With abundant
possessions, superabundant household
help and slave labor, they had a good
deal of leisure, but they were nevertheless
very industrious people in their way. It
was no light undertaking to manage a
great plantation and at the same time
fulfil the large measure of duties to
friends and neighbors which custom imposed.
One must visit and receive visitors,
and must go to court every month,
and to all planters' meetings. Besides
this there was a certain amount of fox
hunting and squirrel and bird and turkey
shooting and fishing to be done, from
which it was really very difficult to escape
with any credit to oneself. On the whole,
the time of the planters was pretty fully
occupied. The women had household
duties, and these included the cutting
and making of clothes for all the negroes
on the plantation, a heavy task which
might as well have been done by the
negro seamstresses, except that such was
not the custom. Fair women who kept
dressmakers for themselves worked day
after day on coarse cloths, manufacturing
coats and trousers for the field hands.
They did a great deal of embroidery and
worsted work too, and personally instructed
negro girls in the use of the
needle and scissors. All this, with their
necessary visiting and entertaining, and
their daily attendance upon the sick
negroes, whom they always visited and
cared for in person, served to make the
Virginian women about the busiest women
I have ever known. Even Sunday
brought them little rest, for, in addition
to other duties on that day, each of them
spent some hours at the "quarters" holding
a Sunday-school.
Nevertheless the Virginians had a good
deal of leisure on their hands, and their
command of time was a very important
agent, I should say, in the formation of
their characters as individuals, and as a
people. It bred habits of outdoor exercise,
which gave the young men stalwart
frames and robust constitutions. It gave
form to their social life. Above all, it
made reading men and students of many,
though their reading and their study were
of a somewhat peculiar kind. They were
all Latinists, inasmuch as Latin formed
the staple of their ordinary school course.
It was begun early and continued to the
end, and even in after life very many
planters were in the habit of reading their
Virgil and their Horace and their Ovid as
an amusement, so that it came to be assumed,
quite as a matter of course, that
every gentleman with any pretension to
culture could read Latin easily, and quote
Horace and Juvenal from memory.
But they read English literature still
more largely, and in no part of the country,
except in distinctly literary centres
like Cambridge or Concord, are really rich
household libraries so common a possession,
I think, as they were among the
best classes of Virginian planters. Let
us open the old glass doors and see what
books the Virginians read. The libraries
in the old houses were the growth of
many generations, begun perhaps by the
English cadet who founded the family on
this side of the water in the middle of the
seventeenth century, and added to little
by little from that day to this. They
were especially rich in the English classics,
in early editions with long s's and looped
ct's, but sadly deficient in the literature
of the present. In one of them, I remember,
I found nearly everything from
Chaucer to Byron, and comparatively
little that was later. From Pope to
Southey it furnished a pretty complete
geologic section of English literature, and
from internal evidence I conclude that
when the founder of the family and the
library first took up his residence in the
Old Dominion, Swift was still a contributor
to the Gentleman's Magazine,
and Pope was a poet not many years
dead.
There was a copy of "Tom Jones," and
another of "Joseph Andrews," printed
in Fielding's own time. The "Spectator"
was there, not in the shape of a
reprint, but the original papers, rudely
bound, a treasure brought from England,
doubtless, by the immigrant. Richardson,
Smollett, Swift, and the rest were present
in contemporary editions; the poets and
essayists, pretty much all of them, in
quaint old volumes; Johnson's "Lives of
the Poets;" Sheridan's plays, stitched;
Burke's works; Scott's novels in force,
just as they came, one after another,
from the press of the Edinburgh publishers;
Miss Edgeworth's moralities elbowing
Mrs. Aphra Behn's strongly tainted
romances; Miss Burney's "Evelina,"
which was so "proper" that all the young
ladies used to read it, but so dull that
nobody ever opens it nowadays; and
scores of other old "new books," which
I have no room to catalogue here, even
if I could remember them all.
Byron appeared, not as a whole, but in
separate volumes, bought as each was
published. Even the poor little "Hours
of Idleness" was there, ordered from
across the sea, doubtless, in consequence
of the savage treatment it received at the
hands of the Edinburgh Review, bound
volumes of which were on the shelves
below. There was no copy of "English
Bards and Scotch Reviewers," but as
nearly all the rest of Byron's poems were
there in original editions, it seems probable
that the satire also had once held a
place in the library. It had been read to
pieces, perhaps, or borrowed and never
returned.
There were histories of all kinds, and
collected editions of standard works in
plenty, covering a wide field of law, politics,
theology, and what not.
Of strictly modern books the assortment
was comparatively meagre. Macaulay's
"Miscellanies," Motley's "Dutch
Republic," Prescott's "Mexico," "Peru,"
etc.; stray volumes of Dickens, Thackeray,
Bulwer, and Lever; Kennedy's
"Swallow Barn," Cooke's "Virginia
Comedians," half a dozen volumes of
Irving, and a few others made up the list.
Of modern poetry there was not a line,
and in this, as in other respects, the old
library—burned during the war—fairly
represented the literary tastes and reading
habits of the Virginians in general. They
read little or no recent poetry and not
much recent prose. I think this was not
so much the result of prejudice as of
education. The schools in Virginia were
excellent ones of their kind, but their
system was that of a century ago. They
gave attention chiefly to "the humanities"
and logic, and the education of a
Virginian gentleman resembled that of an
Englishman of the last century far more
closely than that of any modern American.
The writers of the present naturally address
themselves to men of to-day, and
this is precisely what the Virginians were
not, wherefore modern literature was not
at all a thing to their taste.
To all this there were of course exceptions.
I have known some Virginians
who appreciated Tennyson, enjoyed
Longfellow and Lowell, and understood
Browning; just as I have known a few
who affected a modern pronunciation of
the letter "a" in such words as "master,"
"basket," "glass," and "grass."
A REBEL'S RECOLLECTIONS