Learning to Own
Historian Sarah Hand Meacham describes the pet of choice in the 18th Century Chesapeake – the squirrel – and how owning pets prepared white children for adult roles, as absolute masters in the South’s slave society.
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This is a transcript from an earlier broadcast of this episode, entitled “Pet Friendly: A History of Domestic Animals.”
ED: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory with the American Backstory hosts.
BRIAN: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh, and I’m here with Ed Ayers.
ED: Hi, Brian.
BRIAN: And Peter Onuf’s with us.
PETER: Hey, Brian. We’re going to start the show today with a little bit of poetry.
SARAH HAND MEACHAM: From December 15, 1768.
PETER: This is Sarah Hand Meacham, an historian at Virginia Commonwealth University. And she found this poem published in the Virginia Gazette.
SARAH HAND MEACHAM: And I’ve pulled a section here for you.
PETER: This poem was allegedly written by a woman in memoriam of her pet, named Phil.
SARAH HAND MEACHAM: “Then did I stroke him, scratch his head, and in my bosom made his bed. For my affection was and still is all engrossed by charming Phil. But he is gone, ne’er to return. And unless ’tis to sigh and mourn, I’ll therefore seek another pet. A husband I may surely get.”
PETER: Whoa.
ED: Lucky guy.
PETER: You might be wondering, what kind of pet was Phil?
SARAH HAND MEACHAM: So she’s lamenting the death of her squirrel.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Squirrels were the fashionable courtship token. Powhatan Robertson left us a very nice diary from 1816 when he was a student at the College of William and Mary, and he writes in his diary about sending [? Miss N ?], a young woman he was interested in, a pet squirrel, and being very pleased when her family allowed her to accept it.
BRIAN: There were advice pamphlets on how to care for squirrels. Young boys would catch squirrels and tame them to sit in their shirt pockets. People would stand for portraits and be painted, yes, with squirrels. And so the obvious question for Meacham, why squirrels? I mean, why not rabbits or ducks?
SARAH HAND MEACHAM: Well, I think 18th century people read animals in ways that we just don’t anymore. So a squirrel, in particular, because of the patience required to get the meat out of the nut was an emblem of diligence and patience. And so these were sort of aspirational virtues that people had for their children. So they’d like to give children these squirrels so that they would, too, become patient and diligent.
BRIAN: I wanted to ask you a bit about the training part of the squirrels. Was there anything more than training up a trinket to give to the girl you were interested in?
SARAH HAND MEACHAM: I think so. I think much like today how parents give children pets, hoping it will train him to some sort of responsibility, that that was part of why pets were popular in the 18th century, particularly among elite or white colonists, that it was a way that parents were training children to take on their adults roles.
And some of these adult roles are very distasteful to us now, and correctly so. So some of these Virginia children would grow up and become masters and mistresses of enslaved men and women. By capturing a wild animal and domesticating it and taming it, the boy got some practice in the way he would be restraining humans later on. And girls, when they had to accept these animal gifts and keep the animal alive, showed that they would make good mothers and good mistresses. So it has a dark side.