governor for ten months before sending him to England for trial. Jacob Leisler seized control of New York that same year—and then was executed two years later. These conflicts, the historian Jack P. Greene and others have argued, convinced elites of the need to rebuild a sense of unity and common purpose among themselves and to reestablish their authority over others.19
The task was especially difficult because England itself was so troubled. By 1690 it was only part way through a century of distress that lasted into the early eighteenth century. These difficulties began with a 1640s civil war that overthrew the country’s two major institutions, executing both king and archbishop on the way to ending the monarchy and stripping the Church of England of its power. The two institutions returned in the Restoration of 1660, not surprisingly with stronger official teaching about obedience to authority and with harsh laws against its opponents, particularly Protestants outside the church, the “Dissenters” who had held substantial power during the Civil War era. Both groups, however, were equally frightened of a Roman Catholic monarch, a situation that seemed increasingly possible in the 1670s as the likely heir, the king’s brother James, duke of York, became an increasingly vocal convert. Attempts to head off this result in the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–1681 failed, setting off bitter partisan fighting over how to respond. After James was crowned in 1685, however, his overreaching led to the Glorious Revolution three years later. The uprising overthrew James II and placed his nephew and daughter, ruling together as William and Mary, on the throne. In turn the change allowed colonists in Maryland, New York, and Massachusetts to remove their own unpopular regimes.20
Even as its American colonies grew more stable after 1690, England itself continued to be troubled. Disputes over James’s possible accession had created two political parties that would contend throughout the new century (and even into the nineteenth). At least at the start, the Whigs, associated most closely with commercial groups and Dissenters, were especially concerned about the rise of government power. The Tories, drawing upon the great landed families and the Anglican church, emphasized respect for traditional authorities. The character and strength of the two parties underwent a number of shifts over time, but the level of partisanship continued strong in these years, fed by the major wars that William and Mary began against France, conflicts that lasted, with only a brief interruption, for nearly a quarter century from 1689 to 1713. Although Queen Anne (the daughter of the deposed James and the sister of Queen Mary) took the throne in 1702 without difficulty, the lack of a clear heir proved similarly destabilizing. The succession was settled only by turning to a more distant German relative to avoid James II’s Catholic son.
Facing a series of crises spanning the Atlantic, American leaders struggled to gain the confidence of both English officials and other colonists. These efforts drew upon British Whig ideas to reconsider the nature of power. Earlier thinking about government characteristically centered on religious foundations, a relationship with ultimate authority that legitimized (or challenged) rulers’ demands for obedience. Late seventeenth-century theorists such as John Locke and Algernon Sidney helped shift the focus of attention. Rather than the link between God and government, they probed the relationship between the rulers and ruled. Discussions of government increasingly praised restraint in the exercise of power, self-control on the part of magistrates, and sympathetic attention to the concerns of inferiors.
As eighteenth-century leaders rethought (and renegotiated) power, they also remade their culture. Colonial elites, again drawing upon transatlantic values and practices, increasingly prized a polished, genteel self-presentation that rejected aggression and undue anger. To achieve this goal, they distanced themselves from common people both physically (in club rooms and great houses) and culturally (by rejecting popular manners, ideas, and language).
As with ideas about government, the most significant formulations of this cultural transformation originated in England, with a series of influential figures who built upon each other’s writings in the years surrounding the turn of the eighteenth century. The third Earl of Shaftesbury, a student of John Locke (and grandson of a central early Whig leader), drew upon his tutor’s work to argue that being moral also involved being sociable, generous, and concerned with the common good. Such a view of humanity fit well with the emphasis on divine affection and benevolence espoused by Archbishop John Tillotson, the head of the English church in the early 1690s. The most influential expression of polite ideals, however, came two decades later in the Spectator. Presented in elegant informal prose, the daily essays sought, as Addison noted, “to enliven morality with wit” and to encourage “Virtue and Discretion.”21
This wide-ranging remaking of ideas about power and culture also involved establishing new emotional standards. Eighteenth-century views of power and politeness entailed strikingly similar emotional economies. Both renounced vengeance and cruelty and rejected aggressive self-aggrandizement. The new visions of power and self-presentation also recommended sympathetic concern for other people. Rather than the harshness one contemporary called “huffing and hectoring,” the polite leader’s personal demeanor put people at ease.22
The ties between gentility and governing—between politeness and the polis—have been examined most extensively for Britain, with scholars following two major lines of discussion. German theorist Jürgen Habermas identifies a major transformation in the relationship between people and government around the turn of the eighteenth century. Elite Britons outside as well as inside government were increasingly able to discuss public affairs and influence policy. Though these political deliberations were not the sociable conversations recommended by Franklin and others, this “bourgeois public sphere” identified by Habermas relied heavily on similar values and institutions, including relative equality within conversations and the need for respectful responses.23
Historian Lawrence E. Klein, writing from the perspective of the history of political thought, sees an even more specific connection between gentility and government. The most important early theorists of what he calls a British “culture of politeness,” the third Earl of Shaftsbury and the Spectator authors Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, were not simply encouraging cultivated social interaction for its own sake. They also, Klein argues, made the case for the Whig party in its battle against Tory opponents, imagining and justifying a society controlled by gentlemen rather than by the powerful institutions of the Court and the Church.24
Students of the American experience tend to focus on other aspects of politeness, attending more to practice than to theory under the heading of “gentility.” Although the term can be difficult to distinguish from “politeness” in eighteenth-century English usage, gentility usually retained its original connections with high social status, and more often encompassed the elegant refinement in material goods, self-presentation, and language that eighteenth-century elites, in America as well as Europe, attempted to embody.
The most compelling works on America examine the ways this gentility created new sorts of connections among peers. The historian Richard Bushman offers the fullest account of these developments, showing how eighteenth-century elites remade their houses, their cities, and even their persons to facilitate refined social interaction. Literary scholar David Shields notes how these interchanges shaped early American literary culture in a range of settings from tea tables to taverns and literary circles. Bushman’s interest in fine manners and fine possessions and Shields’s stress on “private society,” however, offer little aid in thinking about the relationship between politeness and political authority.25
Scholars of American gentility have also examined two other sets of relationships. The first notes colonists’ connections with Britain. Like some contemporaries, these scholars sometimes speak of American elites “aping” metropolitan examples. Whereas earlier studies often focus on whether such imitation was desirable, some recent works refine the analysis by replacing the idea of imitation with “emulation” (Bushman’s attempt to emphasize adherence to a set of common values) or “legitimation” (seeking approval from British audiences skeptical of provincials).26
A final set
