"To tell you of this city, I would not do justice to the subject. The extravagance is in dressing, and running to parties; but I must say they regard the Sabbath, and attend preaching, for there are churches of every denomination and able ministers of the Gospel.... Oh, my dear friend, how shall I get through this bustle? There are not less than from fifty to one hundred persons calling in a day.... Don't be afraid of my giving way to those vain things. The Apostle says, I can do all things in Christ, who strengthened me. The play-actors sent me a letter requesting my countenance to them. No. A ticket to balls and parties. No, not one. Two dinings; several times to drink tea. Indeed, Mr. Jackson encourages me in my course."
It does not seem to have occurred to the simple piety of the writer that attendance at church may have been as much the result of fashion as of religion; but the more charitable view may be the correct one, as those were days of greater devoutness than the present, and even society maintained some of the rigid rules of old Puritan times, The little picture drawn by Mrs. Jackson is suggestive both of the social whirl of the capital and the simple ways of her who but for her untimely death might later have ruled as titular queen of the social circle. Mrs. Jackson was indeed one who might stand as a representative of much that is best in American womanhood of that day or any day. She was domestic and retiring, but by no means illiterate, as she was falsely said to be when the political fight raged high, and she was a woman, as her letters show, of the most exemplary piety and resolution in the right. Had she inhabited the White House as its mistress she might have injected anew into Washington society a tone which was beginning to be less and less dominant as time went on.
It was about the beginning of the period chosen for the subject of this chapter, the period reaching from the close of the War of 1812 to 1850, that American society, as represented in the upper classes of the womanhood of America, began to be conventional according to European standards. There were still, and continued to be, many individuals of note; but there was very little individuality in the mass. In dress, in manners, in customs, and even in thought, there was little to distinguish the American woman of the higher rank from her European sister. The birth of a national aristocracy had done its invariable work, and importation of foreign ideals and ideas had completed that work and given it direction. Certain traits, racial and national, were visible in most of the daughters of America and differentiated them from their European compeers; but they were traits which did not affect society in the mass and which were therefore individual and not social. Domesticity still held sway in the majority of American circles; the American woman was still preeminently the home goddess and the home ruler, and refused to abdicate her crown even at the call of fashion; but it must be acknowledged that she wore that crown less easily and comfortably than in earlier days. There was fast dawning the day of artificiality in the things of existence, the day when the shadow should seem greater than the substance, when the queen of the home should degenerate into the queen of the revel. There was needed some cataclysm to rescue American womanhood from the peril which she was approaching; and it was well for her that that cataclysm came at need, however terrible it may have been in the coming.