The Colonial Cavalier, or Southern Life before the Revolution

Two great forces have contributed to the making of the Anglo-American character. The types, broadly classed in England as Puritan and Cavalier, repeated themselves in the New World. On the bleak Massachusetts 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 worship 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 Massachusetts and Connecticut reflected the Puritans.