Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/253

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Part Taken by Women in American History


persuasive tongue, all these were legacies from the County Wexford ancestors. The "Cousin Dolly" for whom Dolly Payne was named was the lovely Dorothea Spotswood Dandridge, granddaughter of the famous Sir Alexander Spotswood, of Virgina. Curiously enough, this "Cousin Dolly" married two of Dolly Payne's mother's cousins — first, Patrick Henry, and, after his death, when her little namesake was nine years old, Judge Edmund Winston—making a bewildering maze of cousins, as they used to do, and still do, down in Virginia. Dolly Payne's father was a Quaker, and so little Mistress Dolly wore her ashen gown down to her toes and the queer little Quaker bonnets and plain kerchiefs and long cuffs covering her dimpled arms, as prescribed for those of her sex by the decree of the "Friends." But this sober dress was not to her mind, it seems, for we read that she wore a gold chain about her neck, under the folds of her kerchief, a sin which she confessed to the old black "Mammy Rosy," and who, no doubt, after scolding her for such an impropriety, consoled her with an extra allowance of some particularly longed-for dainty.

It was on account of John Payne's religious belief that he set free his negro slaves, sold his plantation, and moved his family to Philadelphia, where he hoped to find more sympathy than was to be had from the Virginia cavaliers. But John Payne found his financial position much embarrassed with the sale of the Virginia plantation, and was, no doubt, glad when a desirable suitor, in the person of young John Todd, a Quaker lad and rising young lawyer, asked for the hand of Mistress Dolly. Mistress Dolly herself was not enthusiastic in the matter, but she finally yielded to her father's desire, and was married to Lawyer Todd on the seventh day of January, 1790, in the Friends' Meeting House on Pine Street. There were no minister, no bridal veil, no wedding music, no dancing, and no drinking the bride's health, nor any of the merrymaking her