Marriage Quote by Augustus Baldwin Longstreet

A lawyer-narrator’s eyebrow lift is doing most of the work here. Longstreet opens with the mock-solemn “there were women in the world,” a faux-biblical throat-clearing that signals satire: this isn’t reverence for domestic life so much as a setup for how reputation circulates in a small, status-hungry community. The men are introduced as “heroes” and defined by “prowess,” language that smells like epic poetry but lands in the parlor. That mismatch is the joke.

The pivot is sharper: the wives “were no strangers” to their husbands’ exploits, and “strange as it may seem” they “presumed a little upon it.” Longstreet feigns surprise at something his audience is meant to recognize immediately: social credit is transferable. A man’s public masculinity becomes a kind of household currency, spendable by the “good ladies” in gossip, entitlement, and neighborhood hierarchy. “Presumed” is a tidy legal word with a moral edge; it implies both assumption and overreach, as if the wives are committing a small procedural sin by claiming standing in court they haven’t earned.

Context matters: Longstreet’s humor grows out of an early-19th-century Southern print culture that loved tall tales, swagger, and the soft humiliation of pretension. As a lawyer, he knows how bravado is performed, witnessed, and admitted into evidence. The line flatters male “prowess” just long enough to show how ridiculous it looks once domesticated and monetized. The subtext isn’t really about women behaving badly; it’s about a society that treats masculine violence and public feats as a communal asset - and then acts shocked when someone cashes the check.