In the narrated incidents we can find a point of contrast between the female cultures of the North and the South. We can well imagine a Puritan wife addressing a dignitary as Mrs. Cheeseman addressed Governor Berkeley; but it is impossible to fancy Puritan women in the situation in which those "white gardes of the Divell" found themselves. The former would never have submitted to the degradation; they would not, for their lives, have so hampered the hands of their husbands. It was not the pioneer woman of a new continent who stood upon those ramparts and made their own breasts the shields of their enemies, but the delicately reared and nurtured woman of a pampered class. Yet that there was good courage among these fine ladies is shown, if showing were necessary, in the example of Mrs. Cheeseman; but it was not universal as among the women of the Puritans, though both its presence and absence formed but a general rule to which there were many and important exceptions.
With all their divergences and differences, however, there was between the North and South one point of contact which was typical, racial, and individual, and which in its persistence grew to be national. It was of course a continuation of Anglo-Saxon tradition, applied to new circumstances which made it but the more powerful in influence; but it was a tradition which was to be potent in the formation of the American spirit. This was the home. For the home, as we know it, is almost, if not entirely, uniquely American and English. There may be entered a saving clause concerning the Teutonic nations, but it would not impeach the full integrity of the statement. Only in the Anglo-Saxon races has the home possessed the peculiar sanctity which it holds in this day among those same peoples; and in America this has been distinctively the case. For a race of pioneers, which builds in the desert its own continuing cities, sees in its edifices, however humble at first, something which is not evident to the inhabiter of ancient cities. The dweller in the wilderness gazes with a peculiar affection upon the little tract which he has reclaimed; and the cottage or even hut, with its humble household gods and goods, takes in his eyes a strange and extrinsic value because of that which they represent to him, in achievement and of necessity.