with subordinates rather than their provincial peers or transatlantic superiors. These scholars often see gentility as a means of (even a “tool” for) dividing society. In this view, elites used distinctive material culture and behavior to reinforce social boundaries through “explicit status markers” that “built a theater of class dominance.” Cary Carson speaks of provincial elites practicing “modern class warfare.”27 Such arguments show a sharp awareness of the central issues of power and authority, especially in application to poorer and less powerful people who receive little attention elsewhere. But these works too often rely on crude views of how power operated, and fail to distinguish eighteenth-century domination from earlier (and later) experiences.
Although they often give little attention to political meanings, these American studies together point to the broad reach of politeness, a formation that could be used in interactions with peers as well as with the less powerful people that elites sought to lead and the more powerful who attempted to lead them. Politeness could be used in a variety of ways as well as in a range of relationships. It provided a means of describing social interactions in broad terms as well as assessing and advising on specific courses of action. Politeness could also refer to a series of practices that attempted to put these ideals into practice. With this breadth of meanings, politeness proved a powerful resource that eighteenth-century American elites drew on in a wide range of situations, including (as this work reveals) some of the most problematic moments in their lives.
Although Jonathan Belcher spoke of the “polite world,” “polite company,” and “polite judges of manners,”28 its ideals were never fully incarnated in either Britain or America. They always operated as both theory and practice, as Platonic ideal and social fact, always both partaking of and reacting against other ideas and practices. In America politeness developed alongside two contemporary transformations in the British empire, the expansion of imperial government and of slavery. Both helped make politeness possible, while also competing with it to shape the character of power in America.
England had engaged only fitfully with its Atlantic colonies in the first half of the seventeenth century. Beginning in the 1670s, however, the crown sought to extend its power into America, setting off a range of protests culminating in the uprisings against the Dominion of New England. This goal of greater royal influence was not limited to America. Charles II and James II weakened legislatures and revoked local charters on both sides of the Atlantic. Although both England and America repudiated these innovations in the 1688 Glorious Revolution, however, their defeat did not halt the expansion of the British state or of imperial oversight, especially as a new series of wars with France spread to all parts of the empire. This growth of imperial authority played a significant role in spreading polite ideals and practices, not only by supporting centrally appointed officials in capital cities, but also encouraging provincial elites to participate more fully in transatlantic activities, if only to retain some measure of influence over British decisions. Yet, even at its most circumscribed, imperial rule still relied heavily on prerogative powers—authority beyond written laws that left open the possibility of arbitrary government.29
Even more than the growth of imperial power, the rise of African chattel slavery in America expanded the reach of authoritarian ideas and practices. The development of permanent, hereditary bondage as a central labor system in part responded to the broader crisis of authority in the late seventeenth-century English world. Seeking firmer control over laborers who were increasingly difficult to command, colonial elites established a legal regime that denied to the lowest level of society the ideals of restraint and respect that seemed increasingly necessary for free Americans. At the same time, however, the profits gained from slavery also made it possible for American elites to participate in a larger British culture that increasingly celebrated the ideals of politeness. These lessons, not surprisingly, sometimes came into conflict. Although American slaveholders such as William Byrd II and Eliza Lucas Pinckney (the subjects of Chapters 3 and 6 respectively) attempted to extend the ideals of sympathy to slaves, they never fully challenged the institution itself.30
Politeness played a similarly ambiguous role in the later development of democracy. At the same time colonial elites imposed a harsh authoritarian regime over the least powerful members of society, they were forced to give up their pretensions to full control over the rest of society. They increasingly turned to a set of ideals and practices that emphasized limitations on power. This politeness clearly helped reinforce the power of colonial leaders who faced not only powerful people above them but also other Americans who had resented and often risen up against previous leaders. The politics of politeness did not necessarily require that the people being led participate fully in policy decisions or choose freely the people who developed them. Politeness instead encouraged what contemporaries called “condescension,” a term that did not mean (as today) disdain, but gracious willingness to put aside the privileges of position in order to treat people generously. Such condescension did not, however, require giving up the prerogatives of power. By seeking to build affection and loyalty through sensitivity and concern, politeness often helped leaders respond to discontent without making structural changes.
These polite attitudes seemed particularly compelling to the American colonies. In Britain the new standards of politeness and gentility made their way within long-standing centers of power: an aristocracy, an established church, and a range of local institutions that could resist or remain indifferent to the new ideals. By contrast, the American culture of politeness developed among rising native-born elites just taking control of governmental structures that were similarly new. These precarious situations made the political applications of politeness—with its focus on attention to other people—all the more important.
Eighteenth-century leaders saw the development of politeness as a significant achievement, a recognition of values that had been ignored in less refined times. But from a later perspective these ideals were also part of a transition between the ideals of patriarchalism and democracy. If politeness did not require increased popular involvement, the ideals of restrained, respectful, and responsive leadership helped encourage the movement toward identifying the people rather than the powerful as the source of public decisions. That America, which had been particularly influenced by politeness, would afterward be similarly shaped by democratic ideals seems more than coincidental.
Characters and Conclusions
This work examines six individuals whose experiences illuminate the difficulties of establishing public authority and personal standing in early America: Virginia governor Francis Nicholson, whose towering rages became well known even across the Atlantic; South Carolina Indian agent Thomas Nairne, who moved across Indian country, provincial politics, and the Atlantic in a career that included imprisonment for treason in 1708 and death by torture at the hands of Native Americans seven years later; William Byrd, II, who led a group of gentlemen and others into the wilderness to determine the boundary between Virginia and North Carolina and then spent a decade trying to write about the experience; Jonathan Belcher, who gained the Massachusetts governorship in 1729 yet could not establish his son, Jonathan, Jr., as a London lawyer; Tom Bell, a former Harvard student whose crimes made him America’s first widely known confidence man; and Eliza Lucas Pinckney, a South Carolina woman whose family met with the dowager princess of Wales in 1753, a meeting at which the princess, the heir presumptive to the British throne, got down on one knee to comfort Pinckney’s child.
Even these brief descriptions make it clear that these subjects were not typical. Rather than studying representative samples, classic texts, or characteristic examples, this work deliberately pursues the unusual and the unexpected: royalty kneeling before a child; a confidence man posing as a minister to plunder the pious; an official jailed for treason on the testimony of a man he had previously convicted of bestiality. The goal is not simply to arouse curiosity or highlight oddities, but to use specific experiences to address broader concerns, to examine the relationships between how people acted and how they both thought and felt about their
