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INTRODUCTION

Franklin’s Footnote

Benjamin Franklin was twelve years old when he was apprenticed to his older brother. It was an unpleasant experience. James, himself only twenty-one, was a difficult young man, as headstrong and argumentative as his younger sibling. The memories still rankled a half century later. In the autobiography he began when he was sixty-five, Franklin complained that James had “considered himself as my master,” an odd comment since James had been just that, both by time-honored usage and by the cold realities of law. But Franklin expected more. James, he noted, had been “passionate and had often beaten” him, rather than treating him with “more Indulgence”—as “a Brother.” Franklin eventually found the situation so oppressive that he revolted. Taking advantage of a legal technicality, he fled his brother’s custody at sixteen.¹

Almost two decades after writing his original 1770s account, Franklin returned to his manuscript, adding a note explaining the larger significance of his relationship with James. “I fancy his harsh and tyrannical Treatment of me,” he wrote, “might be a means of impressing me with that Aversion to arbitrary Power that has stuck to me thro’ my whole life.”²

Franklin’s footnote clearly recalled the American Revolution that he had done so much to further. Like his brother, Britain had also ignored its family obligations in order to press its prerogatives. The adolescent boy considered himself “demean’d.”³ So too the mature man. But Franklin’s addition went beyond individual experiences. His critique of his two would-be masters, his brother and his mother country, reveals an understanding of the connections between social relationships and political rule that had been widely shared for almost a century. Eighteenth-century American leaders such as Franklin had been deeply concerned about the dangers of anger and violence in both political and personal life. Both government leaders and individuals, they held, should reject arbitrary rule in favor of sympathetic concern.

Finding the proper means of restraining power formed a fundamental theme, perhaps the fundamental theme, in eighteenth-century political thought from John Locke to Thomas Jefferson. Recent discussions of the idea often emphasize structural issues, the use of elections and of checks and balances to keep government from being overbearing. But, as Franklin’s footnote suggests, eighteenth-century Americans considered the problem of limiting authority cultural as well as constitutional, personal as well as political.

This work considers the origins, development, and implications of this connection. It explores how and why views of limited political power developed in conjunction with a model of social relationships stressing personal refinement and emotional restraint. Eighteenth-century discussions about manners were intimately intertwined with fundamental political issues, closely linking politeness (discipline of the self) with power (discipline of others). Conversations about tea sets and tyranny were not precisely the same, but they were not as distinct as they usually seem. Both drew on a politics of politeness that rejected angry demands for obedience and instead sought to build restrained authority through sympathetic and responsive leadership.

Politeness and Its Politics

Politeness and its implications were much on the mind of another Bostonian in 1704, two years before Franklin’s birth. Jonathan Belcher, the future governor of Massachusetts (and the subject of Chapter 4), was only twenty-two when he traveled between England and Germany. His journal summed up the value of his trip—and of travel in general—by declaring that “A man without travelling is not altogether unlike a Rough diamond,” an uncut stone that was “Unpolisht and without beauty.”⁴

The meaning of the metaphor became clearer as Belcher continued. People who had not traveled, he suggested, were socially inept. Handicapped by “Selfishness & Sowerness,” they were “unaccomplish’d, & Ignorant” about how to handle themselves with other people and particularly with strangers. Only experience remedied these faults. Starting out “Sower, peevish, & fretfull,” travelers became “pleasant, affable & most agreeable,” with “a flexible & complaisant temper” that made them “ready to oblige all.” Broader experience also encouraged tolerance for other ways and even other religions, a recognition that “generally speaking Mankind is much the same.”⁵

Belcher’s account did not use the word “polite.” It did not need to. His diamond metaphor itself made the point. The term still retained its original meaning of smooth or polished. Sir Isaac Newton’s Opticks, a foundational work of the scientific revolution published the year Belcher made his trip, uses it in that older sense. Even the second edition from the following decade remarks on a particular crystal’s “glossy polite surface,” noting that it could be rubbed to become even more “polite.”⁶ But the term was also increasingly being applied to humans and their behavior as well—often with the same comparison between people and gemstones.⁷ A book on manners published in London two years before Belcher’s arrival suggested that “Honesty, Courage and Wit” were merely “rough Diamonds … till they are Polish’d” by “Company and Conversation.”⁸ Readers of Belcher’s journal might also recall the same image in John Locke’s enormously influential discussion of education from the 1690s. The philosopher recommended that parents help children develop that polish that allowed them “a due and free composure of Language, Looks, Motion, Posture, Place, &c. suited to Persons and Occasions.”⁹

As these discussions of personal “polishing” suggest, Belcher’s praise of travel drew upon ideas circulating widely on both sides of the Atlantic. Just as his journal asserted that travel helped a person learn “to behave himself well in Company,” an essay reprinted in Franklin’s newspaper in 1730 suggested similar significance for conversation. The piece, originally from a British magazine, emphasized the importance of “Complaisance,” calling it the first of “two grand Requisites in the Art of Pleasing.” The Latin quotation at the start the essay encapsulated the meaning of the term—and the central message of the essay—in describing a character that sought (in one English translation) “to comply with the inclinations and pursuits of those he conversed with.” The same passage had earlier been used as an epigraph in the Spectator, the enormously influential London periodical published by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in 1711–1712 that popularized the values and attitudes of eighteenth-century politeness. Addison’s essay similarly stressed the importance of “complaisance,” connecting it with the “affability” and “easiness of temper” that made up the ideal of “good-nature.”¹⁰

These ideas inspired Franklin’s resolution to give up his early habit of contradicting people and thereby (as he put it in his Autobiography) “souring and spoiling the Conversation.” This growing sensitivity rejected the example of his “passionate” brother. The essay he reprinted in 1730 instead celebrated people who were “easy, courteous and Affable,” qualities highlighted in the title of the international organization of the public-spirited that Franklin proposed about this time, “the Society of the Free and Easy.”¹¹

Figure 1. This painting shows Franklin as he appeared (or hoped to appear) in the late 1740s or early 1750s, about the time he retired from printing. The head seems to have been added later to a preexisting painting of a gentleman—much as the maturing Franklin attempted to embody the ideal of politeness in conversation, fitting in rather than insisting on his own position. Robert Feke, Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), c. 1746. Oil on canvas; 127 x 102 cm (50 x 40 3/16 in.). Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Harvard University Portrait Collection, Bequest of Dr. John Collins Warren, 1856, H47 Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

These themes, often discussed under the heading of conversation, continued to be significant after 1730. The pioneering English novelist Henry Fielding published a similarly conventional essay on the topic in the early 1740s, a little before the sixteen-year-old Virginian George Washington laboriously copied out rules prescribing proper behavior “in company and conversation.” In 1759 (when he was twenty-four), John Adams began a correspondence with a fellow Massachusetts lawyer by praising conversation for “promot[ing] Benevolence in general.” Just as Belcher thought travel cured “Sowerness,” Adams suggested that conversation “evaporates the Spleen” caused by solitary work.¹²

As these discussions of politeness note, polish was not mere adherence to rules or proper fashion. Locke had warned parents that providing properly tailored clothing or even instruction in posture by a dancing master was not enough. The issue was how actions were viewed, how other people responded to them—in Locke’s terms, whether they gave “Satisfaction, or Disgust.” As the “Polite Philosopher” (a work much reprinted in America) suggested, “Affection and Esteem” could only be gained by “the right Timing, and discreet Management” of the “Thousand little Civilities, Complacencies, and Endeavours to give others Pleasure” needed “to keep up the Relish of Life.” Close attention to other people, the piece continued, made up “the Essence of, what we call, Politeness.” As Franklin explained in a later newspaper piece, “The polite Man aims at pleasing others.”¹³

Of course, as contemporary observers and later scholars pointed out, not all eighteenth-century leaders were accomplished at what Franklin and others called “the art of pleasing”—or necessarily sought to practice it.¹⁴ But, although always imperfect and irregular, polite ideals were applied widely in settings that went far beyond the purely personal. Franklin’s Autobiography makes it clear that he suppressed his “Disputacious Turn” to increase his public influence. By eschewing “the Air of Positiveness,” he was better able to “persuade Men into [the] Measures” he “engag’d in promoting.” As he observed more generally, “disputing, contradicting and confuting People” might bring “Victory” but never “Good Will, which would be of more use.” He later applied the lesson during his successful diplomatic mission to France during the American Revolution, to the disappointment of his colleague John Adams, who favored direct appeals to morality and self-interest.¹⁵

Politeness was not simply passivity, as Adams sometimes suggested about the urbane Franklin. It also, as the latter recognized, helped build and exercise leadership, a means for the Philadelphian to encourage townspeople to hire street sweepers when he was a young man and to convince parliamentarians to repeal the Stamp Act when he was older. In both situations, he acted calmly and respectfully, refusing the role of the heroic figure who single-mindedly pursued vengeance and defied public concerns. Such harsh conquerors continued to have admirers—at least, many turn of the century American governors acted as if they did. Politeness by contrast emphasized “soft power,” attempting to win obedience rather than compel it. Recent studies of leadership often suggest similar lessons in opposing what a prominent figure in the field calls the “myth” of the “triumphant individual.” The key instead is cultivating “willing followers.”¹⁶ As the Scottish philosopher Frances Hutcheson suggested in the 1720s, although the “injudicious World” might believe that only people clothed in “external Splendor” deserved public honors, societies should also celebrate “the Promoter of Love and good Understanding among Acquaintances.”¹⁷

The Virginian William Byrd II (the subject of Chapter 3) used the same lesson to justify his own leadership after a problematic 1728 surveying expedition. According to the narrative he wrote soon after, his primary opponent had been disagreeable and domineering, demanding respect from his subordinates and cursing them when they failed to meet his standards. Byrd had acted differently. He treated the expedition members with sympathy and respect, encouraging them to work willingly even through the seemingly impassable Great Dismal Swamp. Rather than being (in the pseudonyms he gave his opponent and himself) a “Firebrand,” he was the emotionally intelligent “Steddy.”¹⁸

Byrd’s example suggests the usefulness of these ideals and practices in the eighteenth-century empire. His early account of the journey highlighted its polite and impolite interactions in order to convince his Virginian peers that he had acted honorably. Byrd revisited the expedition a few years later, crafting a different narrative that sought the attention of a transatlantic audience—people who might help him win economic and political advancement. Despite the differences from his earlier account, Byrd once again portrayed himself not as a heroic conqueror but as a sympathetic and encouraging leader.

Although Byrd never received the high office he sought, his desire to influence the central government was not unrealistic. Early modern nations had long been, as scholars suggest, “composite,” made up of disparate entities held together more often by continuing negotiations than by brute force. Lacking strong administrative structures fully staffed by paid officials, the eighteenth-century British empire was especially dependent on the aid of people on the peripheries. The ideals of politeness helped provincial elites present themselves as credible partners in this enterprise, socially and culturally as well as politically. At the same time, by developing a language to oppose harsh and arbitrary authority, politeness helped limit British control over its colonies.

Eighteenth-century elites in America as well as in England used politeness in a variety of settings, applying it to both personal and political relations, to the most local and individual circumstances as well as the most metropolitan and cosmopolitan. This breadth appears in a British response to the actions of an important colonial official around the turn of the century. Although Francis Nicholson (the subject of Chapter 1) spent forty years in America, his time as governor of Virginia from 1698 to 1705 was perhaps the most difficult. His towering temper hindered his attempts to court a sixteen-year-old woman from a prominent Virginian family (it presumably did not help that he was already in his mid-forties). The episode ended with her spurning the suit and him threatening to kill everyone involved if she married anyone else, including the minister who performed the ceremony. Hearing of such behavior, an English official advised the governor in 1702 to tread carefully—particularly in dealings with the woman who had spurned him. Nicholson should treat her and her family with “humanity, affability & courtesy.” English women, the letter noted, are “the freest in the world & will not be won by constraint but hate them who use them or theirs roughly.” The author did not limit this lesson solely to personal life. His description of English people in general used almost precisely the same terms—“the most freeborn people & the most impatient of servitude in the world”—making it clear that he was also counseling a broader approach to governing. Nicholson, he suggested, needed to steer clear, not just of his beloved and her family, but of “arbitrary & violent treatment of subjects” in general.

As Nicholson’s correspondent suggested, politeness taught the importance of limiting and softening the face of power (and the powerful), of making it (and them) less harsh, less frightening, less overwhelming. This lesson was more than theoretical. It offered a guide to practice that could help people become more like Franklin himself, who learned to forgo direct confrontation, than his “arbitrary” and “tyrannical” brother James.

Contexts

The goal of making power more acceptable became particularly important after 1670 when the already shaky structures of American authority came almost entirely unglued. Colonial leaders faced massive political disorder, both fighting among rulers and challenges from the ruled. At the same time the imperial government demanded new and unprecedented control. Almost every colonial regime experienced at least one major uprising. The insurgents of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 drove Virginia’s governor from the capital before burning it down. A dozen years later Massachusetts leaders imprisoned their governor for ten months before sending him to England for trial. Jacob Leisler seized control of New York that same year—and then was executed two years later. These conflicts, the historian Jack P. Greene and others have argued, convinced elites of the need to rebuild a sense of unity and common purpose among themselves and to reestablish their authority over others.¹⁹

The task was especially difficult because England itself was so troubled. By 1690 it was only part way through a century of distress that lasted into the early eighteenth century. These difficulties began with a 1640s civil war that overthrew the country’s two major institutions, executing both king and archbishop on the way to ending the monarchy and stripping the Church of England of its power. The two institutions returned in the Restoration of 1660, not surprisingly with stronger official teaching about obedience to authority and with harsh laws against its opponents, particularly Protestants outside the church, the “Dissenters” who had held substantial power during the Civil War era. Both groups, however, were equally frightened of a Roman Catholic monarch, a situation that seemed increasingly possible in the 1670s as the likely heir, the king’s brother James, duke of York, became an increasingly vocal convert. Attempts to head off this result in the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–1681 failed, setting off bitter partisan fighting over how to respond. After James was crowned in 1685, however, his overreaching led to the Glorious Revolution three years later. The uprising overthrew James II and placed his nephew and daughter, ruling together as William and Mary, on the throne. In turn the change allowed colonists in Maryland, New York, and Massachusetts to remove their own unpopular regimes.²⁰

Even as its American colonies grew more stable after 1690, England itself continued to be troubled. Disputes over James’s possible accession had created two political parties that would contend throughout the new century (and even into the nineteenth). At least at the start, the Whigs, associated most closely with commercial groups and Dissenters, were especially concerned about the rise of government power. The Tories, drawing upon the great landed families and the Anglican church, emphasized respect for traditional authorities. The character and strength of the two parties underwent a number of shifts over time, but the level of partisanship continued strong in these years, fed by the major wars that William and Mary began against France, conflicts that lasted, with only a brief interruption, for nearly a quarter century from 1689 to 1713. Although Queen Anne (the daughter of the deposed James and the sister of Queen Mary) took the throne in 1702 without difficulty, the lack of a clear heir proved similarly destabilizing. The succession was settled only by turning to a more distant German relative to avoid James II’s Catholic son.

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 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 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 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.