on acting rather than analyzing—looking at how ideas operated in particular circumstances. Each of the main characters moved across geographical, social, and cultural boundaries in ways that forced them to challenge conventions—and to wrestle with the shifting nature of power in revealing ways.
Although these close examinations do not allow a comprehensive narrative, the work portrays three pairs of characters that together trace key stages in the evolution of politeness and power in the years between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the American Revolution almost a century later. Part I, “Attacking Authoritarianism,” begins the story in the chaotic years surrounding 1700, when standards and expectations about both government and social relationships were still in flux. The politics of politeness in these years offered a critique of overbearing governors and religious leaders who sought to supplant local leaders and local standards. Part II, “Learning to Lead,” considers the 1720s and 1730s, when gentility had become an important means of building both local support and broader standing. Politeness in these years offered a powerful language linking leaders with the people around them as well as with powerful Britons. Part III, “Challenging Conventions,” notes that the ideals and practices of politeness, having spread broadly by the 1740s, could be used by people who did not hold official authority. This expansion helped politeness develop a new set of meanings that took it farther away from its close ties with public power, whether raising issues of sincerity or helping to establish new emotional and literary standards. By the revolutionary age, politeness was at once more powerful and less cohesive than ever.
Published at the beginning of 1776, as many Americans hesitated on the brink of revolution, Tom Paine’s Common Sense made a compelling case for American independence, in part because of its unexpected starting point. Rather than beginning by condemning British tyranny, Paine criticizes common thinking about society and government. Many writers, he complains, see “little or no distinction” between the two. In reality, however, “they are not only different, but have different origins.” By highlighting this separation, Paine sought to reassure anxious Americans that rejecting “the Royal Brute of Britain” would not destroy their society.31
Like so much that Paine wrote, the argument he presented as “common sense” actually represented a radical reorientation of older beliefs. For centuries, authorities declared government natural, a God-given means of restraining the forces of evil inherent in human interaction. Earlier eighteenth-century ideas instead identified social harmony as natural, opening the way for imagining a more restrained authority.32 The political revolution Paine called for marked a culmination of this new politics of politeness. The shared cultural values it fostered helped colonial leaders develop the cooperation necessary for effective resistance to the British. The politics of politeness was even more significant in shaping a permanent political settlement. By the time revolutionary leaders began to create new governments, they brought with them almost a century of thinking about the need to ground power in restraint and responsiveness, an extraordinary preparation that allowed Americans to avoid the pitfalls of most revolutions, either a coup d’état simply substituting one set of rulers for another or a rigid utopianism too fixated on moral purity to survive.
But the revolutionary years saw a repudiation as well as a culmination of eighteenth-century ideals. The politics of politeness had envisioned responsible leaders whose attention to the limits of power and local sensibilities earned the trust of their community. By contrast, the political culture that emerged out of the Revolution often suspected not only politicians but government itself, seeing it as something distinct, even alien. Mason Locke Weems’s immensely popular Life of George Washington similarly argued that public behavior could be deceptive but “private life is always real life.” Such a distinction between public and private was not entirely new, but it became central to the nineteenth-century culture of middle-class respectability and Evangelical religion. Despite these changes, however, American culture continued to celebrate values that had been central to the politics of politeness—moderation, self-control, and sympathetic concern for the feelings of others.33 The ideal of restrained power that had been part of polite ideals also remained at the center of America’s political culture.
The cultural divisions between public power and personal life that developed in the nineteenth-century rethinking of the politics of politeness underlie some central elements of modern thinking about freedom: free markets, privacy, and civil society. Yet the pervasiveness of these views has made it hard to see their roots in eighteenth-century thinking that saw governments and gentility as intimately linked. Paradoxically, the strongest evidence for the influence of the politics of politeness may be our continuing inability to recognize the eighteenth-century connections between society and government that made possible their later separation.
PART I
ATTACKING AUTHORITARIANISM
CHAPTER 1
The Rages of Francis Nicholson
Three years later, the conversations seemed more ominous than they had at the time. The first was in December 1698, on the day Francis Nicholson again became governor of Virginia. After six years of what he considered exile in Maryland, he should have been elated. Instead Nicholson was troubled by letters he had received from his English supporters. Each counseled him to be “moderate.” The new governor showed the correspondence to his closest ally, William and Mary College president James Blair. “What the Devil,” Nicholson asked, did “they [mean] to recommend moderacon to him.” Knowing the governor’s hot temper, Blair suggested that they had a point. Nicholson would have none of it. “If I had not hampered th’m in Maryland & kept them under I should never have been able to have governed them,” he told Blair: “G—, I know better to Govern Virginia & Maryland than all y’e Bishops in England.”1
Blair felt uneasy about the conversation. When the issue came up again six weeks later, he again noted the importance of a civil manner. Nicholson replied that he knew how to deal with discontented assemblies. He could even do without them. When the president refused to back down, Nicholson commanded him “in a great passion” never to speak with him about government again.2
The dispute was surprising. The two men had enjoyed a long and fruitful political partnership. While governing Virginia from 1690 to 1692, Nicholson had helped Blair obtain the charter for what became the College of William and Mary and backed him as its first president. But Nicholson was forced to accept a lesser post as lieutenant governor of Maryland. Even after becoming governor two years later, he still dreamed of returning to Virginia. In 1697, Blair, financed by Nicholson, traveled to London to lobby for his return, a trip that led to Nicholson regaining the post. Even after the arguments that marred the governor’s return, the two remained close allies, working together in such matters as moving the colony’s capital to what became Williamsburg.
Figure 2. James Blair (1705). Blair had this portrait painted in England while he was lobbying to have his former ally Francis Nicholson removed as governor in 1705. Soon to turn fifty, Blair had by then been president of the College of William and Mary for a dozen years. John Hargrave, English, Active 1693–c. 1719, Portrait of James Blair (c. 1655–1743), 4/1705. Gift of Mrs. Mary M. Peachy, 1829.001, Muscarelle Museum of Art at the College of William & Mary in Virginia.
As
