turn to promoting the rebellions that Nicholson believed resulted from such opposition. Calling instead for moderation in exercising power and responding to diversity, the emerging ideals of politeness provided a means of opposing authoritarianism that proved widely popular. “It were to be wished indeed that we could all be of one opinion,” admitted South Carolina governor Charles Craven in the early 1710s, “but that is morally impossible.” Instead, he continued, people should “agree, to live amicably together,” by “consult[ing] the common good, [and] the tranquillity of our province.”101 The Boston minister Benjamin Colman provided a fuller description of such leadership in 1737. “The spirit of Constancy & Resolution, Authority & Government,” he told Harvard’s governing board in discussing the qualities of a college president, needed to be combined with “the Man of Prudence & Temper, Moderation, & Gentleness, Modesty humility & Humanity.”102
As Colman suggested, such attitudes also had implications beyond politics. Rather than (like Nicholson) seeking to emphasize authority and precedence at every turn, the ideals of politeness rejected the harshness of naked power. Instead, as a later author stated, politeness sought to “make persons easy in their behaviour, conciliating in their affections, and promoting every one’s benefit.” A student club at Harvard in 1722 called for meetings to “be Managed with Temper & Moderation.” Rather than “Contempt,” they commended “a Deference Paid to Each other.” Having experienced the “Feuds and Heart-burnings” that Beverley attributed to Nicholson’s administration, Blair similarly called on his parishioners to adopt “an … affable, courteous, kind, and friendly Behaviour to Men.” A properly controlled person, he suggested, would have “no Fierceness or Haughtiness in his Countenance, no Rudeness or Haughtiness in his Speech, [and] nothing that is insolent or affronting in his Action.”103
Soon after Nott arrived in August 1705, James Blair called a meeting of the colony’s clergy. He faced a difficult situation. His archenemy Nicholson remained in Virginia, waiting for a suitable ship to England, and continuing to meet with Virginia’s ministers. Their friendly relationship with the ex-governor contrasted sharply with their antagonism toward Blair. The commissary chose the text of his sermon with an eye toward reconciliation. The significance of Jesus’ call to “take my yoke upon you, and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart” would have been readily apparent to contemporaries. As Blair noted elsewhere, meekness was “a right Government of the Passion of Anger.”104
Despite his good intentions, Blair’s sermon did not go well. In praising the new governor “as studious of union & quiet,” Blair could not resist an invidious comparison with Nicholson who had instead sought “Party & faction.” A hostile clergyman present at the meeting later complained that, although Blair had criticized Nicholson, the commissary himself had used “overawing methods” in his “Sermon of meekness.”105
Polite ways of thinking about political and social relationships also recommended an emotional demeanor that best served these ideals. Even more than his ideas and perhaps even his actions, Nicholson’s unbounded anger had seemed to embody the harshness of arbitrary rule. Treating people generously through more carefully controlled expression, Blair and other people argued, worked better than seeking to frighten them into submission. Contemporary discussions of these issues by Blair and Boston’s Mather family reveal the relevance of Nicholson’s behavior to some of the central issues of personal and political relationships.
Blair addressed the issue of meekness more extensively (and less troublingly) in another sermon on meekness, a discussion of the beatitude “Blessed are the meek” that formed part of the lengthy series of addresses on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount he published in 1722. Like Increase and Cotton Mather, Blair rejects the idea that anger is bad in itself, comparing it to sheep-herding dogs that can be dangerous but very useful if trained properly. The ministers differed, however, on the proper uses of anger. The Mathers both focused on what Cotton calls “holy Anger,” passionate hatred for sin. Blair instead presents it as a tool of government that should only be unleashed on “such [things] as Reason has before taught it are Enemies.” In particular, subordinates (perhaps thinking of the students and slaves he himself commanded) could sometimes need “a Bark of Reproof” or even “a gentle Pinch of Punishment.” “If in the whole Management of Anger we keep a good Command,” he commented, it can be “of excellent Use in the Government both of larger and lesser Societies.”106
All three ministers also agreed that what Cotton Mather called “ungoverned anger” was dangerous, requiring some counterforce to control it.107 Not surprisingly, the Mathers stressed the need for God’s grace. Blair, by contrast, highlighted the role of reason. He traced the origins of meekness to “an inward Calmness and Tranquillity of Mind.” But despite this less supernatural view, he did not consider internal moderation an end in itself. Rather it led to “affable, courteous, kind, and friendly Behaviour to Men.” The meek man is “not censorious or captious, hasty or precipitate; he has the Civility and Patience to give Men a fair Hearing, and to hear them to an End.”108
Contemporaries distinguished such outward calm under provocation from other established views. As the seventeenth-century English religious writer Richard Allestree lamented, proponents of aristocratic honor seemed to feel that a self-respecting gentleman “passes for a Phlegmatick foole” if his “blood boyles not at the first glimpse of an Affront.”109 A number of leading Virginians besides Nicholson held this ideal in practice if not in theory. According to an account that the governor preserved among his material on his enemies, the nickname given to Robert Carter referred to more than his great wealth. Carter could be generous to flatterers, the description noted, but he used other people “with all the haughtiness & insolence possible, in contempt of him he is sometimes called King Carter … even to his face.”110
Blair similarly noted Daniel Parke, another council member, as a model of such aristocratic touchiness, portraying him as a man who prided himself on his “quick resentment of every the least thing that looks like an affront or Injury.” Parke, he complained, “carried everything with an high hand in his violent blustering manner.”111 Before leaving for England in 1697, he had manhandled Blair’s wife in church and even horsewhipped Nicholson, then governor of Maryland, at a college board meeting. Blair’s later warnings about the dangers of neglecting meekness may even have referred at least indirectly to Parke’s fate. Appointed governor of the Leeward Islands in 1706, his stormy four-year tenure ended when his subjects, weary of his heavy-handed rule and his numerous sexual liaisons, shot and killed him in the street, making him the only English governor in America ever to meet such a fate.112
In the traditional classification of the humors, the opposite of such choleric temperament was a phlegmatic disposition insensible to provocations. But such a person did not fit the ideals of moderation either. Politeness instead celebrated a well-honed sensitivity to moral and sociable sentiments, a sympathetic response to other people’s actions. William Byrd wittily described the problems of this position in his third-person description of himself as someone whose moderation may have been too moderate: “His soul is so tun’d to those things that are right, that he is too ready to be moved at those that are wrong. This makes him passionate, and sorely sensible of Injurys, but he punishes himself more by the resentment than he do[e]s the Party by revenge.”113
Such meekness, Blair argued, formed the foundation not just of genteel character but also of social existence itself. Government existed primarily for the protection of the meek. Proper rule forced “Oppressors … to keep in their Horns, and let their meek and peaceable Neighbours enjoy their own in Quiet.”114 Meekness went beyond leaving people alone, however. It was “always joined,” he suggested, with “all other social and good-natur’d Virtues.” Balance, moderation, and willingness to live within limits of law all depended on the restraint of anger. “There is no Passion,” he argued, “more inconsistent with Society and good Government.”115 Not surprisingly,
