Nott helped resolve them through his “very calm healing Temper.”86
Nott’s calmness, like Nicholson’s anger, was not simply a personal trait. Virginians understood Nott’s actions as part of an emerging cultural framework that helped provincial leaders rethink their political experiences, their self-presentation, and their views about anger. The moderation recommended to Nicholson (and revered in Nott) did more than condemn excessive anger. It formed part of an ethic of polite social and political interaction that struggled to keep disruptive emotional reactions within careful bounds. Careful control of aggression also restrained power and helped societies avoid the dangers of arbitrary and absolute rule.
Of course, neither Nicholson nor Nott caused or created this cultural shift, which spanned America as well as the Atlantic. The goals of politeness everywhere remained ideals rather than realities, aspirations rather than descriptions. But they were not divorced from everyday experience. Virginians’ responses to their two governors reveal the experiences and contentions that gave meaning to this emerging ideal of human relationships.
The central theme of the inscription that Byrd prepared for the monument to Nott in 1718 was the late governor’s respect for the boundaries of authority. Nott used his powers “to do good to the People,” Byrd noted, not “to insult and oppress.” With a “passion” only for “doing good” and a concern for “mildness, prudence, and justice,” Nott “was content with the limited Authority of his Commission, and stretch’t not the Royal Prerogative to make his Power absolute, and his Government arbitrary.”87
These descriptions were not simply polite commonplaces. Byrd’s arguments sharply critiqued both Nott’s predecessor and his successor. The legislative committee reviewing the draft removed a number of his more fervent claims, worried that they might be taken as criticisms of their current governor.
Nicholson of course had a different view of his failure to follow the letter of the law. He believed his sacred duty to keep order sometimes required extraordinary measures. You “speak so much of the Prerogative,” noted a concerned supporter in England, “& so little of the law.” Blair complained that Nicholson went even further, speaking “in the most contemptible terms of the English Laws & even use[d] that Expression Magna Charta, Magna F[art]a.”88
Contemporaries often referred to this broad view of official power in another term used by Byrd. “Arbitrary” had originally not been a negative term. It was closely connected with arbitration, allowing a mutually agreed-upon authority to determine an appropriate result without being shackled by technicalities. Since judges had the freedom to consider divine “wisdome & mercy” as well as “Justice,” the Puritan leader John Winthrop noted, they were “Gods upon earthe.”89 By the end of the century, however, the term “arbitrary” had largely lost its positive connotations. Robert Beverley II’s 1705 history praised Nicholson in his first term as governor for being a “strict Observer of the Acts of Assembly, making them the sole Rule of his Judgment.” This “Regularity,” however, broke down in council meetings. There Nicholson had been “Imperious” and “Arbitrary.”90
This issue of arbitrary government lay at the heart of John Locke’s influential critique of the authoritarian ideas that Nicholson continued to hold into the eighteenth century. Locke’s First Treatise on Government, first published in 1689, responded to the late Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, a book that defended monarchical power as an extension of the universally accepted authority of the father within the family. Since the king played the same paternal role within the community, he too ruled by “his own will.” As Filmer had argued elsewhere, such arbitrary or absolute government formed “the first and the safest government for the world.”
Locke rejected this approach. Without “settled standing Laws” constraining leaders, he warned, people were slaves, a status he held was only acceptable for prisoners taken in warfare. “Absolute Arbitrary Power” created a nightmarish situation when a leader could “force [the people] to obey at pleasure the exorbitant and unlimited Decrees of their sudden thoughts, or unrestrain’d, and till that moment unknown Wills without having any measures set down which may guide and justifie their actions.”91
The unpredictable Nicholson posed just such a danger. An English correspondent warned the governor in 1702 that his harsh words and actions were risky in the current political environment. In the past, he suggested, “a more violent treatment would not only have been endured even by Englishmen, but perhaps would have been well enough approved of.” But “the case is quite altered now,” especially since the Glorious Revolution. If you should be charged with “arbitrariness” in Parliament, he warned Nicholson, not even your merits or your friends “will be able to save you.”92
Nott by contrast seemed to embody the opposite ideals. He was known, a clergyman noted, for his “Exactness in doing Justice to all Persons” and his “great Moderation.”93 The last term had by then become central to discussions of governance. “Moderation” had previously referred to regulation and control. Massachusetts’s earliest law code provided that church elders “guided and moderated” church assemblies. By the middle of the century, moderation also came to mean something larger and more politically pressing, freedom from overt and harsh partisanship.94 Late seventeenth-century discussions of religion used the term to criticize a narrow orthodoxy that accepted only a limited range of Protestant beliefs, in particular noting the post-Restoration laws that pushed numerous Puritan-inclined ministers out of their Church of England pulpits. In calling for greater toleration, the Quaker leader William Penn in the 1680s wrote both “a plea for moderation” and “a perswasive to moderation.”95 Daniel Defoe twenty years later published “Moderation maintain’d.” The religious associations of the term may well have been part of the reason the enthusiastically high church Nicholson resented letters recommending moderation.96
As these letters also suggested, however, moderation referred to government as well as religion. A minister who had noted Nott’s death in Virginia also witnessed the aftermath of Governor Edward Tynte’s demise in South Carolina four years later. With partisans promoting competing elections to choose a temporary governor, “violent Proceedings” seemed a distinct possibility—until one of the contestants agreed to end the contest, earning the author’s commendation for “his Moderation.”97 Blair’s 1702 sermon on the death of King William similarly celebrated the same qualities in noting “the mildness and gentleness of the King’s reign.” As with Byrd’s use of the term “arbitrary,” this was not an apolitical argument. An angry Nicholson accused the clergyman of attacking William’s predecessors Charles II and James II—and suspected that Blair was also referring to him.98
The ideal of moderation included a distinct way of thinking about the boundaries of legitimate power. Earlier theories of authority tended to emphasize the broad powers and responsibilities of magistrates. In practice, however, common religious values, local connections, and personal ties often restrained the exercise of power. By the late seventeenth century, however, the balance between broad theory and limited practice became deeply problematic. English revolutions, American rebellions, and the expanding reach of the English state, all within an Atlantic world both drawn together and pulled apart by increasing trade and communication, made older conceptions of power difficult to defend except in extreme forms—although this did not stop people from trying to do so. Tory politicians and Anglican Church leaders endlessly preached the obligations of nonresistance and unlimited submission in the wake of the Civil War. Some political philosophers attempted to make the same case. Filmer, drawing on Jean Bodin’s argument about the indivisibility of sovereignty, rejected any restriction on monarchical authority. These proponents of absolutism found even Thomas Hobbes suspect. Although Hobbes (born the same year as Filmer) was gratifyingly clear on the obligation to obey government, he traced this duty to communal agreement rather than divine authority.99
Facing
