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 experiences. These portraits deliberately focus on people rather than abstractions, 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