described by a young Fredericksburg woman who visited the Washingtons one Christmas week:  “I must tell you what a charming day I spent at Mount Vernon with mama and Sally.  The Gen’l and Madame came home on Christmas Eve, and such a racket the Servants made, for they were glad of their coming!  Three handsome young officers came with them.  All Christmas afternoon people came to pay their respects and duty.  Among them were stately dames and gay young women.  The Gen’l seemed very happy, and Mistress Washington was from Daybreake making everything as agreeable as possible for everybody."[83]

Alexander Hamilton found life in his domestic circle so pleasant that he declared he resigned his seat in Washington’s cabinet to enjoy more freely such happiness.  Brooks in her Dames and Daughters of Colonial Days,[84] gives us a pleasing picture of Mrs. Hamilton, “seated at the table cutting slices of bread and spreading them with butter for the younger boys, who, standing by her side, read in turn a chapter in the Bible or a portion of Goldsmith’s Rome.  When the lessons were finished the father and the elder children were called to breakfast, after which the boys were packed off to school.”  “You cannot imagine how domestic I am becoming,” Hamilton writes.  “I sigh for nothing but the society of my wife and baby.”

III.  Domestic Toil and Strain

Despite the charm of colonial home life, however, the strain of that life upon womankind was far greater than is the strain of modern domestic duties.  In New England this was probably more true than in the South; for servants were far less plentiful in the North than in Virginia and the Carolinas.  But, on the other hand, the very number of the domestics in the slave colonies added to the duties and anxieties of the Southern woman; for genuine executive ability was required in maintaining order and in feeding, clothing, and caring for the childish, shiftless, unthinking negroes of the plantation.  In the South the slaves relieved the women of the middle and upper classes of almost manual labor, and in spite of the constant watchfulness and tact required of the Southern colonial dame, she possibly found domestic life somewhat easier than did her sister to the North.  The dreary drudgery, the intense physical labor required of the colonial housewife was of such a nature that the woman of to-day can scarcely comprehend it.  Aside from the astonishing number of child-births and child-deaths, aside too from the natural privations, dangers, ravages of war, accidents and diseases, incident to the settlement of a new country, there was the constant drain upon the woman’s physical strength through lack of those household conveniences which every home maker now considers mere necessities.  It was a day of polished and sanded floors, and the proverbial neatness of the colonial woman demanded that these be kept as bright as a mirror.  Many a hundred miles over those floors did the colonial dame travel—­on