afraid to bring up college business with Governor Andros because he had always responded angrily, the council disagreed. “His Excell’ys answers to Mr. Blair when spoke to,” they judged (perhaps not convincingly), “were w’th great moderation and Calmness.”116
When Lord Lovelace, the governor of New York and New Jersey, died in 1709 (three years after Nott), his political ally Lewis Morris celebrated his “sweet and happy temper.” The governor, in Morris’s view, had been “so meek, so free from Arbitrary Principles, so just, so temperate; so fine a Man that my own and Countrey’s loss is inexpressible.” Like Nott, Lovelace had followed a difficult and unpopular governor. Lord Cornbury, Morris noted, had generally chosen harshness instead of “soft indearing measures.” “My Lord Lovelace,” Morris suggested, “wou’d (had he lived) have convinc’t this end of the World, mankind cou’d be govern’d without pride and ill nature or any thing of that superb and haughty demeanor which the Governors of Plantations are but too much Masters of.”117
The meek and temperate leadership celebrated in Nott and Lovelace did not become universal after them. Morris, despite his celebration of these values, was himself a prickly man even after he became governor of New Jersey in the late 1730s. But both Morris and Blair recommended the same cultural values—the rejection of ill nature, arbitrary rule, and haughty leadership, and the celebration of moderation. In the years after the turn of the century, these ideas became central to the ways colonial elites thought about their governments, their societies, and themselves, a cultural language that operated alongside the more familiar legal language of government powers and public liberty—and a rich set of ideas that could be used not just to critique other people but to shape one’s self.118
These ideals were particularly valuable for American leaders because they provided a means of dealing with their major relationships. The rages of governor Nicholson brought Virginia leaders literally face to face with the difficulties of imperial domination. Especially in a time when Britain more often sent Nicholsons than Notts, colonial elites bore the brunt of making this new relationship with England work, of finding a modus vivendi between their own aspirations and those of the empire. Polite values provided a set of values that made colonial elites recognizable to imperial leaders as gentlemen rather than backward provincials.
Polite interactions were also useful within the colonies. The ideals of moderation and meekness helped focus attention on the need to be aware of their impact on other people, to consider the needs and concerns of both their peers and common people.119 “Rash threatening speeches filled with scornfull reflections, and reproaches, spoken publickly behind a mans back, and anger and brow beatings to ones face, are not I believe likt by any man,” a New York official who experienced the rages of Lord Cornbury observed: “such treatment begetts a Contempt in the People.”120 Blair made a similar point the following year, noting that the short experience Virginia had with Nott (and he might have added, its longer and less successful experience with Nicholson) proved that “A Calm and moderate temper suits best with this Country.”121
CHAPTER 2
The Treasons of Thomas Nairne
On June 24, 1708, South Carolina’s governor Nathaniel Johnson accused Captain Thomas Nairne of high treason. Nairne, the colony’s Indian agent, had just returned from a hazardous overland trip almost to the Mississippi River, seeking to head off French designs against the colony. The governor had begged him to undertake the journey, writing with the speaker of the legislature seven months before that they had “that Good Opinion of You to Prefer You to any other.” But the words (and certainly the sentiment) must have come from the speaker, for the relationship between Johnson and Nairne had long since broken down. Within weeks of the agent’s return, the governor decided Nairne was in league with the French. The arrest warrant charged him with endeavoring “to disinherit and Dethrone our Rightfull and Lawfull Sovereigne Lady Queen Ann, and to place in her Room the pretended Prince of Wales.”1
Held without formal charges during the sweltering Charles Town summer (and freed from chains only by paying off his jailor), Nairne was released four months later only because he had won election to the colony’s legislature. Even then, however, the governor warned the Commons House about the accusation. Legislators first refused to seat Nairne and then took him into custody. After posting bail, Nairne fled to England. When he appeared before the Lords Proprietors, Carolina’s governing body, the members promoted rather than prosecuted him and encouraged him to write a tract extolling the colony. With his accuser Governor Johnson no longer in office and charges never formally filed, Nairne returned home in 1711 to resume his place as a legislator and (soon afterward) as the colony’s Indian agent.2
Nairne blamed the baseless treason accusation on the governor’s “hatred.” “This Countrey,” the Indian agent explained to a British official, has been “divided into two parties” since Johnson’s “reign” began three years before. Nairne himself belonged to the group opposed to the governor. As a legislator, Nairne had played a lead role in passing an Indian trading act over Johnson’s objections—before taking up the demanding post of agent it had created. Carolina’s ministers usually took Johnson’s side. But they shared Nairne’s frustration with the “unhappy divisions” of the colony’s public life. Carolinians, one clergyman wrote, were “miserably divided among themselves.”3
Carolina’s difficulties went beyond the disruptions caused by Governor Johnson. Six years after his removal in 1709, the Yamasee War threatened the colony’s very survival. Nairne, not surprisingly, participated in the conflict. Having gone to a village to hear Indian grievances in April 1715, he was taken in a surprise attack the next morning in the war’s first battle. He died after three days of excruciating torture.
Although Nairne never achieved, and perhaps never aspired to, the high positions held by Francis Nicholson, the Indian agent’s career may have been as extraordinary as the Virginia governor’s. Nairne worked with Native peoples almost his entire adult life, living (as contemporaries noted) “among the Indians” of southern Carolina, and traveling with them not only westward but south into the Everglades. As agent, he stood up to Carolinians who sought to exploit Natives. Nairne also participated in provincial politics, angering the governor because he both worked with Johnson’s enemies and broke with his fellow Anglicans to support their religious opponents. Nairne’s world, however, went even beyond Carolina and the southeastern part of the continent. He also saw himself as an active leader within the empire, seeking to extend British control over Florida and Louisiana, the centers of Spanish and French power in that part of the world. Undertaken in the middle of a major European war, his 1708 inland trip sought to build a Native coalition that could remove the French from their new settlement at Mobile.4
Each of these settings was deeply problematic. Connecting them—and an accused traitor—to the politics of politeness appears almost as challenging as navigating them in the first place. A man lying in a prison like “a dog in a hot hole,” or tied to a tree with lighted wooden splinters inserted in his body hardly seems a model of refinement.5 But Nairne himself applied a common set of concerns to each of these three seemingly distinct settings, an approach shaped by the emerging politics of politeness. His letters from Indian country in 1708 noted limited government and shocking levels of equality in each nation he visited. Two years later he celebrated the same characteristics in a pamphlet about Carolina itself. But Nairne did more than pay tribute to theories. He also worked to put them into practice by opposing not only the arbitrary French, but oppressive Carolinians as well. His fight against traders in Indian villages and the governor in Charles Town over their exploitation of Indians and religious minorities led directly to his time in prison.
