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Among the ruling orders the manners and diversions of the colonial age, so closely affiliated with domestic institutions, were almost identical with those of the middle classes of the same type in Great Britain. Historians for the sake of convenience were wont to speak of Puritan New England, the Cavalier South, and the commercial Middle Colonies as representing distinct schemes of culture but the simplicity of the classification is responsible for many an error. If we look at the statute books, which pretend to universality, it appears that delights of the flesh and skepticism in religion, even the faintest, were condemned with equal severity in Virginia and Massachusetts. Puritan Boston gave to mankind one of the greatest freethinkers of the colonial era, Benjamin Franklin, who was in most matters, including his relations with women, unconventional enough for the gay gentlemen who toasted Prince Charlie; though he fled from Boston to Philadelphia to breathe a freer air, he was the product of Cotton Mather's province.
On the other hand, under genial Southern skies, were reared the families that brought forth in America the two outstanding pietists of the nineteenth century, Robert E. Lee, whose lips were never profaned by an oath, whiskey, or tobacco, and Stonewall Jackson, who opened every battle with a prayer. Rum as hot and wines as rich as any that graced the planter's table were found on the boards of the noblest divines and the strictest merchants of Boston.
Nevertheless, Puritanism threw a dark shadow over many of the amusements deemed harmless in Virginia. The strictness of Cromwell's generation—that excessive reaction to the lewdness and vulgarity of the Elizabethan age—was reproduced with its Biblical sanctions in New England's legal code. Sabbath was made a solemn day, meet only for preaching, praying, and Bible reading; all labor, not strictly vital, and all frivolity were forbidden by law. Theaters and Maypoles—the latter historic symbols of
