Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College.
These themes, often discussed under the heading of conversation, continued to be significant after 1730. The pioneering English novelist Henry Fielding published a similarly conventional essay on the topic in the early 1740s, a little before the sixteen-year-old Virginian George Washington laboriously copied out rules prescribing proper behavior “in company and conversation.” In 1759 (when he was twenty-four), John Adams began a correspondence with a fellow Massachusetts lawyer by praising conversation for “promot[ing] Benevolence in general.” Just as Belcher thought travel cured “Sowerness,” Adams suggested that conversation “evaporates the Spleen” caused by solitary work.12
As these discussions of politeness note, polish was not mere adherence to rules or proper fashion. Locke had warned parents that providing properly tailored clothing or even instruction in posture by a dancing master was not enough. The issue was how actions were viewed, how other people responded to them—in Locke’s terms, whether they gave “Satisfaction, or Disgust.” As the “Polite Philosopher” (a work much reprinted in America) suggested, “Affection and Esteem” could only be gained by “the right Timing, and discreet Management” of the “Thousand little Civilities, Complacencies, and Endeavours to give others Pleasure” needed “to keep up the Relish of Life.” Close attention to other people, the piece continued, made up “the Essence of, what we call, Politeness.” As Franklin explained in a later newspaper piece, “The polite Man aims at pleasing others.”13
Of course, as contemporary observers and later scholars pointed out, not all eighteenth-century leaders were accomplished at what Franklin and others called “the art of pleasing”—or necessarily sought to practice it.14 But, although always imperfect and irregular, polite ideals were applied widely in settings that went far beyond the purely personal. Franklin’s Autobiography makes it clear that he suppressed his “Disputacious Turn” to increase his public influence. By eschewing “the Air of Positiveness,” he was better able to “persuade Men into [the] Measures” he “engag’d in promoting.” As he observed more generally, “disputing, contradicting and confuting People” might bring “Victory” but never “Good Will, which would be of more use.” He later applied the lesson during his successful diplomatic mission to France during the American Revolution, to the disappointment of his colleague John Adams, who favored direct appeals to morality and self-interest.15
Politeness was not simply passivity, as Adams sometimes suggested about the urbane Franklin. It also, as the latter recognized, helped build and exercise leadership, a means for the Philadelphian to encourage townspeople to hire street sweepers when he was a young man and to convince parliamentarians to repeal the Stamp Act when he was older. In both situations, he acted calmly and respectfully, refusing the role of the heroic figure who single-mindedly pursued vengeance and defied public concerns. Such harsh conquerors continued to have admirers—at least, many turn of the century American governors acted as if they did. Politeness by contrast emphasized “soft power,” attempting to win obedience rather than compel it. Recent studies of leadership often suggest similar lessons in opposing what a prominent figure in the field calls the “myth” of the “triumphant individual.” The key instead is cultivating “willing followers.”16 As the Scottish philosopher Frances Hutcheson suggested in the 1720s, although the “injudicious World” might believe that only people clothed in “external Splendor” deserved public honors, societies should also celebrate “the Promoter of Love and good Understanding among Acquaintances.”17
The Virginian William Byrd II (the subject of Chapter 3) used the same lesson to justify his own leadership after a problematic 1728 surveying expedition. According to the narrative he wrote soon after, his primary opponent had been disagreeable and domineering, demanding respect from his subordinates and cursing them when they failed to meet his standards. Byrd had acted differently. He treated the expedition members with sympathy and respect, encouraging them to work willingly even through the seemingly impassable Great Dismal Swamp. Rather than being (in the pseudonyms he gave his opponent and himself) a “Firebrand,” he was the emotionally intelligent “Steddy.”18
Byrd’s example suggests the usefulness of these ideals and practices in the eighteenth-century empire. His early account of the journey highlighted its polite and impolite interactions in order to convince his Virginian peers that he had acted honorably. Byrd revisited the expedition a few years later, crafting a different narrative that sought the attention of a transatlantic audience—people who might help him win economic and political advancement. Despite the differences from his earlier account, Byrd once again portrayed himself not as a heroic conqueror but as a sympathetic and encouraging leader.
Although Byrd never received the high office he sought, his desire to influence the central government was not unrealistic. Early modern nations had long been, as scholars suggest, “composite,” made up of disparate entities held together more often by continuing negotiations than by brute force. Lacking strong administrative structures fully staffed by paid officials, the eighteenth-century British empire was especially dependent on the aid of people on the peripheries. The ideals of politeness helped provincial elites present themselves as credible partners in this enterprise, socially and culturally as well as politically. At the same time, by developing a language to oppose harsh and arbitrary authority, politeness helped limit British control over its colonies.
Eighteenth-century elites in America as well as in England used politeness in a variety of settings, applying it to both personal and political relations, to the most local and individual circumstances as well as the most metropolitan and cosmopolitan. This breadth appears in a British response to the actions of an important colonial official around the turn of the century. Although Francis Nicholson (the subject of Chapter 1) spent forty years in America, his time as governor of Virginia from 1698 to 1705 was perhaps the most difficult. His towering temper hindered his attempts to court a sixteen-year-old woman from a prominent Virginian family (it presumably did not help that he was already in his mid-forties). The episode ended with her spurning the suit and him threatening to kill everyone involved if she married anyone else, including the minister who performed the ceremony. Hearing of such behavior, an English official advised the governor in 1702 to tread carefully—particularly in dealings with the woman who had spurned him. Nicholson should treat her and her family with “humanity, affability & courtesy.” English women, the letter noted, are “the freest in the world & will not be won by constraint but hate them who use them or theirs roughly.” The author did not limit this lesson solely to personal life. His description of English people in general used almost precisely the same terms—“the most freeborn people & the most impatient of servitude in the world”—making it clear that he was also counseling a broader approach to governing. Nicholson, he suggested, needed to steer clear, not just of his beloved and her family, but of “arbitrary & violent treatment of subjects” in general.
As Nicholson’s correspondent suggested, politeness taught the importance of limiting and softening the face of power (and the powerful), of making it (and them) less harsh, less frightening, less overwhelming. This lesson was more than theoretical. It offered a guide to practice that could help people become more like Franklin himself, who learned to forgo direct confrontation, than his “arbitrary” and “tyrannical” brother James.
Contexts
The goal of making power more acceptable became particularly important after 1670 when the already shaky structures of American authority came almost entirely unglued. Colonial leaders faced massive political disorder, both fighting among rulers and challenges from the ruled. At the same time the imperial government demanded new and unprecedented control. Almost every colonial regime experienced at least one major uprising. The insurgents of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 drove Virginia’s governor from the capital
