All three ministers also agreed that what Cotton Mather called “ungoverned anger” was dangerous, requiring some counterforce to control it.107 Not surprisingly, the Mathers stressed the need for God’s grace. Blair, by contrast, highlighted the role of reason. He traced the origins of meekness to “an inward Calmness and Tranquillity of Mind.” But despite this less supernatural view, he did not consider internal moderation an end in itself. Rather it led to “affable, courteous, kind, and friendly Behaviour to Men.” The meek man is “not censorious or captious, hasty or precipitate; he has the Civility and Patience to give Men a fair Hearing, and to hear them to an End.”108
Contemporaries distinguished such outward calm under provocation from other established views. As the seventeenth-century English religious writer Richard Allestree lamented, proponents of aristocratic honor seemed to feel that a self-respecting gentleman “passes for a Phlegmatick foole” if his “blood boyles not at the first glimpse of an Affront.”109 A number of leading Virginians besides Nicholson held this ideal in practice if not in theory. According to an account that the governor preserved among his material on his enemies, the nickname given to Robert Carter referred to more than his great wealth. Carter could be generous to flatterers, the description noted, but he used other people “with all the haughtiness & insolence possible, in contempt of him he is sometimes called King Carter … even to his face.”110
Blair similarly noted Daniel Parke, another council member, as a model of such aristocratic touchiness, portraying him as a man who prided himself on his “quick resentment of every the least thing that looks like an affront or Injury.” Parke, he complained, “carried everything with an high hand in his violent blustering manner.”111 Before leaving for England in 1697, he had manhandled Blair’s wife in church and even horsewhipped Nicholson, then governor of Maryland, at a college board meeting. Blair’s later warnings about the dangers of neglecting meekness may even have referred at least indirectly to Parke’s fate. Appointed governor of the Leeward Islands in 1706, his stormy four-year tenure ended when his subjects, weary of his heavy-handed rule and his numerous sexual liaisons, shot and killed him in the street, making him the only English governor in America ever to meet such a fate.112
In the traditional classification of the humors, the opposite of such choleric temperament was a phlegmatic disposition insensible to provocations. But such a person did not fit the ideals of moderation either. Politeness instead celebrated a well-honed sensitivity to moral and sociable sentiments, a sympathetic response to other people’s actions. William Byrd wittily described the problems of this position in his third-person description of himself as someone whose moderation may have been too moderate: “His soul is so tun’d to those things that are right, that he is too ready to be moved at those that are wrong. This makes him passionate, and sorely sensible of Injurys, but he punishes himself more by the resentment than he do[e]s the Party by revenge.”113
Such meekness, Blair argued, formed the foundation not just of genteel character but also of social existence itself. Government existed primarily for the protection of the meek. Proper rule forced “Oppressors … to keep in their Horns, and let their meek and peaceable Neighbours enjoy their own in Quiet.”114 Meekness went beyond leaving people alone, however. It was “always joined,” he suggested, with “all other social and good-natur’d Virtues.” Balance, moderation, and willingness to live within limits of law all depended on the restraint of anger. “There is no Passion,” he argued, “more inconsistent with Society and good Government.”115 Not surprisingly, then, contemporaries considered moderation the antithesis of anger. When Blair ten years before had complained to the council that he had been 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