On Valentine’s Day in
1850, a U.S.
Army fort was established on the south bank of the Caloosahatchee
River in southwest Florida. The War Department had ordered Major
General David
E. Twiggs to establish the fort in response to escalating
hostilities between settlers and Seminoles in the area. As a Valentine’s Day
gift for his daughter, General Twiggs named the fort after her
fiancé, Colonel Abraham
C. Myers, chief quartermaster for the Department of Florida.
Valentine’s Day and war seem a curious combination, and yet, the oldest known
valentine still in existence today was written by a prisoner of war. The year
was 1416. In 1415, the Duke of Orléans was captured by the English at the
battle of Agincourt and held a prisoner in England for 25 years. In the first
year of his imprisonment in the Tower of London, young Charles penned the
following Valentine (translated from medieval French) presumably to his wife.
A Farewell to Love
I am already sick of love,
My very gentle Valentine,
Since for me you were born too late,
And I for you was born too soon.
God forgives him who has estranged
Me from you for the whole year.
I am already sick of love,
My very gentle Valentine.
“…FROM YOUR VALENTINUS”
According to popular
legend, the first Valentine in history was also penned in prison. During the
third century A.D., Roman Emperor Claudius forbade Roman soldiers to marry,
but, so the legend goes, a Roman named Valentinus, who was a Christian priest,
went about secretly and illegally marrying soldiers to their sweethearts,
anyway. One may say the priest died for love, because he was caught and
condemned to death. The night before his execution, he wrote a loving note to
the little daughter of his sympathetic jailer and signed it “from your
Valentinus.” The Christian Church canonized Valentinus, but it wasn’t until
around 498 A.D. that Pope Gelasius declared Feb. 14 to be “Saint Valentine’s
Day.” The creation of a saint’s day on that date was an unsuccessful attempt to
squelch the pagan fertility festival that the Romans had long enjoyed annually
on Feb. 15. During this popular festival the pagan priests sacrificed a goat
(for fertility) and a dog (for purification) and then, to encourage fertility,
they ran around gently slapping women and crops with the bloody strips of the
sacrificed goat’s hide.
SAINTS AND LOVERS
Over the past 1500
years, we’ve sort of toed St. Valentine’s Day away from being the observance of
a saint’s day and back in the direction of an occasion for, well, you know.
First, we quietly dropped the “Saint” from the name of the holiday. By the
1700s, exchanging valentine gifts and notes was becoming popular and if we know
anything about those perfumed ladies and gentlemen with powdered wigs and
rouged cheeks, we can be fairly certain that they weren’t using the occasion
for religious observances.
THE MOTHER OF THE AMERICAN VALENTINE
New England-born Esther
Howland was 20 in 1848 when she began to design Valentine’s Day cards. She
asked her father, who owned the largest book and stationary store in Worcester,
Massachusetts, to order paper laces and flowers from England for her project,
and she created a dozen sample cards for her brother, a salesman, to show to
his clients. He came home with $5,000 worth of orders. Esther promptly
organized the New England Valentine Company, which would eventually gross
annually over $100,000 in sales. Now, elaborate, ready-made Valentines,
previously available only from Europe and at considerable expense, were
available to young men and women of modest means.
However, the practice
of buying and sending Valentine cards was considered by some to be “cheap and
indecent.” On Valentine’s Day, 1856, the New York Times published the following
editorial: "Our beaux and belles are satisfied with a few miserable lines,
neatly written upon fine paper, or else they purchase a printed Valentine with
verses ready-made, some of which are costly, and many of which are cheap and
indecent. In any case, whether decent or indecent, they only please the silly
and give the vicious an opportunity to develop their propensities, and place
them, anonymously, before the comparatively virtuous. The custom with us has no
useful feature, and the sooner it is abolished the better."
FOOLISH LOVERS
Valentine greetings
were not abolished. In 1862, New Yorkers, alone, mailed 21,260 Valentines; in
1866, 86,000. Perhaps the bloodiest war in U.S. history, the Civil War,
inspired a growing need for expressions of love and a longing for love.
However, then as now, it was not always the thing itself, but how much it cost.
In the 1860s, a few Valentines were sold for as much as $500 each, the
equivalent today of over $8,000.
The New York Times described these exorbitantly
priced Valentines as follows:
"Valentines of
this class are not simply combinations of paper gorgeously gilded, carefully
embossed and elaborately laced. To be sure they show paper lovers seated in
paper grottoes, under paper roses, ambushed by paper cupids, and indulging in
the luxury of paper kisses; but they also show something more attractive than
these paper delights to the overjoyed receiver. Receptacles cunningly prepared
may hide watches or other jewelry, and, of course, there is no limit to the
lengths to which wealthy and foolish lovers may go."
Apparently, there is no
limit to the lengths to which a father might go for his little daughter on
Valentine’s Day, either. Can you imagine a Major General naming a U.S. Army
fort after his daughter’s fiancé? Such foolishness!
