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 in