r brother about
1743, Eliza Pinckney says of the people of Carolina:

"The people in genl are hospitable and honest, and the better
sort add to these a polite gentile behaviour. The poorer sort are
the most indolent people in the world or they could never be
wretched in so plentiful a country as this. The winters here are
very fine and pleasant, but 4 months in the year is extreamly
disagreeable, excessive hott, much thunder and lightening and
muskatoes and sand flies in abundance."

"Crs Town, the Metropolis, is a neat, pretty place. The
inhabitants polite and live in a very gentile manner. The streets
and houses regularly built--the ladies and gentlemen gay in their
dress; upon the whole you will find as many agreeable people of
both sexes for the size of the place as almost any
where...."[158]

Companies great enough to give the modern housewife nervous prostration
were often entertained at dinners, while many of the planters kept such
open house that no account was kept of the number of guests who came and
went daily and who commonly made themselves so much at home that the
host or hostess often scarcely disturbed them throughout their entire
stay. Several years after the Revolution George Washington recorded in
his diary the surprising fact that for the first time since he and
Martha Washington had returned to Mount Vernon, they had dined alone. As
Wharton says in her _Martha Washington_, "Warm hearted, open-handed
hospitality was constantly exercised at Mount Vernon, and if the master
humbly recorded that, although he owned a hundred cows, he had sometimes
to buy butter for his family, the entry seems to have been made in no
spirit of fault finding." Of this same Washingtonian hospitality one
French traveller, Brissot de Warville, wrote: "Every thing has an air of
simplicity in his [Washington's] house; his table is good, but not
ostentatious; and no deviation is seen from regularity and domestic
economy. Mrs. Washington superintends the whole, and joins to the
qualities of an excellent housewife that simple dignity which ought to
characterize a woman whose husband has acted the greatest part on the
theater of human affairs; while she possesses that amenity and manifests
that attention to strangers which renders hospitality so charming."[159]

With such hospitality there seemed to go a certain elevation in the
social life of Virginia and South Ca