Assuming without question the direction of affairs, this new aristocracy, after the fashion of the old leaders who were gone, addressed itself to the task of social, political, and religious control. 1 Manifestly the situation was big with possibilities with respect to the effect to be produced upon the thought and habits of the people. There they dwelt in their spacious houses, 2 these modern aristocrats and autocrats of fashion and custom, by no means rolling in luxury and idleness, yet claiming and enjoying a degree of relaxation and social pleasure vastly more lavish than that accorded to their plebeian neighbors, occupying themselves with their parties, their weddings and dances, 3 their refinements of dress 4 and behavior, but with little or no disposition to abandon themselves to scandalous conduct.
- 1 Winsor, The Memorial History of Boston, vol. iii, pp. 191, 203; Morse, The Federalist Party in Massachusetts, pp. 37, 38; Harvard Theological Review, January, 1916, p. 104.
- 2 Weeden, Early Life in Rhode Island, pp. 357 et seq., calls attention to the spacious and elegant houses which were built at Providence about 1790, and to the new group of merchants which the expansion of trans-oceanic commerce called into existence there. Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, pp. 821 et seq., deals with the situation in a larger way.
- 3 Parker, History of the Second Church of Christ in Hartford, p. 172. The passage contains a vivid picture of the state of polite society in an important Connecticut center. Love, The Colonial History of Hartford, pp. 244 et seq., deals with the transformation of social life with particular reference to the disintegration of Puritanism.
- 4 An outcry against the excesses of fashion began to make itself heard. "An Old Farmer," writing to the Massachusetts Spy, March 27, 1799, complains on account of the consequent drain upon the purses of husbands and fathers: " I am a plain farmer, and therefore beg leave to trouble you with a little plain language. By the dint of industry, and application to agricultural concerns, I have, till lately, made out to keep square with the world. But the late scarcity of money, together with the extravagance of fashions have nearly ruined me. ... I am by no means tenacious of the old way, or of old fashions. I know that my family must dress different from what I used to when I was young; yet as I have the interest of husbands and fathers at heart, I wish there might be some reformation in the present mode of female dress. ... In better times, six or seven yards of Calico would serve to make a gown; but now fourteen yards are scarcely sufficient. I do not perceive that women grow any larger now than formerly. ... A few years since, my daughters were not too proud to wear good calfskin shoes; two pair of which would last them a year: But now none will suitt them but morroco, and these must be of the slenderest kind. . . . Young ladies used to be contented with wearing nothing on their heads but what Nature gave them. . . . But now they dare not appear in company, unless they have half a bushel of gauze, and other stuff, stuck on their heads". The letter closes with a humorous account of the writer's embarrassing experience with the trains of the ladies' dresses on the occasion of a recent visit to church.
