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 of studies focuses on American elites’ relationships 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