Colonial dames and good wives

								

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