Tea Sets and Tyranny: The Politics of Politeness in Early America 9780812293333

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
List of Figures
Introduction. Franklin’s Footnote
PART I. ATTACKING AUTHORITARIANISM
Chapter 1. The Rages of Francis Nicholson
Chapter 2. The Treasons of Thomas Nairne
PART II. LEARNING TO LEAD
Chapter 3. The Histories of the Line
Chapter 4. The Affair of My Picture
PART III. CHALLENGING CONVENTIONS
Chapter 5. A Mumper Among the Gentle
Chapter 6. The Princess and the Pinckneys
Epilogue. The Dissolution of the Politics of Politeness
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments

Citation preview

Tea Sets and Tyranny

Early American Studies Series editors: Daniel K. Richter, Kathleen M. Brown, Max Cavitch, and David Waldstreicher Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial, revolutionary, and early national history and culture, Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the period from about 1600 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Tea Sets and Tyranny The Politics of Politeness in Early America

Steven C. Bullock

u n i v e r si t y of pe n n s y lva n i a pr e s s ph i l a de l ph i a

Copyright © 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104–​­4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-​­free paper 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Library of Congress Cataloging-​­in-​­Publication Data ISBN 978-​­0-​­8122-​­4860-​­9

In memory of my mother, who loved books and loved me

Contents

List of Figures Introduction. Franklin’s Footnote

ix 1

Part I. Attacking Authoritarianism Chapter 1. The Rages of Francis Nicholson Chapter 2. The Treasons of Thomas Nairne

19 50

Part II. Learning to Lead Chapter 3. The Histories of the Line Chapter 4. The Affair of My Picture

89 127

Part III. Challenging Conventions Chapter 5. A Mumper Among the Gentle Chapter 6. The Princess and the Pinckneys

163 187

Epilogue. The Dissolution of the Politics of Politeness

217

Notes 231 Index 277 Acknowledgments 285

Figures

 1. Benjamin Franklin, c. 1746   4  2. James Blair, 1705   20  3. Original Building of the College of William and Mary, 1705   22  4. Sarah Harrison Blair, 1705   37  5. Crisp Map of South Carolina, 1711   52  6. Nairne’s Map (from Crisp Map of South Carolina, 1711)   55  7. Sir Nathaniel Johnson, 1705   69  8. Charles Town (from Crisp Map of South Carolina, 1711)   75  9. William Byrd II, c. mid-​­1720s   92 10. Plat of North Carolina land owned by William Byrd   101 11. North Carolina Twenty Shilling Note, 1722   121 12. Jonathan Belcher, 1734   128 13. Jonathan Belcher, Jr., 1756   146 14. Burnet family coat-​­of-​­arms from Boston Map, 1728 (Detail)  175 15. The Family of Frederick, Prince of Wales, 1751   188 16. Charles Pinckney, 1740   193 17. Silk Dress owned by Eliza Lucas Pinckney, 1750s   202 18. Hampton Plantation, South Carolina   206 19. Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington, 1796   218

Tea Sets and Tyranny

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.

2 Introduction

Finding the proper means of restraining power formed a fundamental century political theme, perhaps the fundamental theme, in eighteenth-​­ 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



Franklin’s Footnote

3

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 Rich1712 that popularized the values and attitudes of ard Steele in 1711–​­ 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.



Franklin’s Footnote

5

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

6 Introduction

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



Franklin’s Footnote

7

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.

8 Introduction

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



Franklin’s Footnote

9

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

10 Introduction

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



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11

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 e­ ighteenth-​ ­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

12 Introduction

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-​ c­ entury 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



Franklin’s Footnote

13

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

14 Introduction

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



Franklin’s Footnote

15

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

16 Introduction

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

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.

Rages of Francis Nicholson 21

the governor’s return, the two remained close allies, working together in such matters as moving the colony’s capital to what became Williamsburg. As time went on, however, what Blair called “the violence of [Nicholson’s] Governm’t” increased. The governor engaged in “continual roaring & thundering, cursing & swearing, base, abusive, billingsgate Language.” He called the colony’s leaders “dogs, rogues, villains, dastards, cheats, and cowards”; its women “whores, bitches, [and] jades.”3 Nicholson’s rages were so extraordinary, Blair warned a correspondent, that his report would seem incredible to people who had not seen them.4 But other witnesses reported similar experiences. His “Huffing and Hectoring” was particularly strong, a local minister noted, after the failure of his attempt to woo the teenaged daughter of a prominent family. Though the governor (then in his mid-​­forties) had pursued her with poems about his “pretty charming innocent dove,” she finally rejected him. A furious Nicholson threatened “to cut the throats of three men” if she married, the bridegroom, the justice of the peace who issued the license, and the clergyman who performed the ceremony. The affair, he declared in a six-​­hour tirade, “must end in blood.”5 Another observer noted a similarly troubling outburst in 1702, when some naval officers assigned to Virginia were staying in the college building. Pacing the halls with one of the guests in the evening, the governor “flew out into . . . ​ a Passion.” Shouts and curses echoed through the building. Fearing a repeat of the fire that had broken out two days before, one sea captain left his room so quickly that he forgot to bring his wooden leg. The guests, amazed at Nicholson’s “Folly & Passion,” declared that “the fittest Place for such a Man” was “Bedlam,” the fabled London asylum.6 According to one of Nicholson’s friendly correspondents, this judgment was not far from that held by the bishop of London, a major figure in the Anglican church, who suggested that the most plausible excuse the governor could make for his behavior might be a claim of insanity.7 About the time of the incident (although not entirely because of it), Blair also began to question the governor’s fitness. The problem, he told London officials later in 1702, was not simply the governor’s “passions,” frightening as they were. Nicholson’s rages cloaked his true intentions, “a maine designe” to take further power. Blair’s frustration grew so intense that he finally embarked on another voyage to London. Once again, he succeeded, convincing the British government to relieve Nicholson of his duties in 1705.8 Blair’s assessment of the governor’s purposes is difficult to credit. No

Figure 3. The original building of the College of William and Mary. As the caption to this 1705 drawing by a French visitor notes, Francis Nicholson lived in this building as well, a setting that probably did not help the relationship between the governor and college president Blair. Franz Ludwig Michel, “Reisebeschreibung nach Amerika,” Burgerbibliothek Bern, Mss.h.h.X.152, p. 63r.

Rages of Francis Nicholson 23

further evidence of a secret plan has ever appeared. And Blair himself never raised it again. But Nicholson’s violent behavior was more than unfortunate personal idiosyncrasy. As Blair recognized, it expressed an authoritarian vision long present in European culture that had recently become more insistent in England in the wake of seventeenth-​­century turmoil. Blair’s resistance to Nicholson, furthermore, was deeply intertwined with another, more recent development, the rise of the ideals of politeness. The growth of both these changes in America, however, was not simply an echo of far-​­off English experiences. Further changes within the colonies both increased Nicholson’s frustrations and made his rages more troubling. America first suffered from a widespread failure of colonial governance in these years, difficulties created by governors and other officials seeking to deal with increased imperial expectations. At the same time, a newly confident group of elites in many colonies sought greater power for themselves and their provinces, often seeing imperial governors and governance as primary impediments to their aspirations. Together these political issues and social changes helped provide some of the most important settings for the development of the politics of politeness in America. Nicholson’s supporters sometimes claimed that his problematic behavior resulted from his unsuccessful love affair. The governor’s harshness may well have had psychological origins. But examining these fits and their historical contexts provides a broader understanding of his actions. Nicholson’s rages were at once expressions of his views about authority; symptoms of increasing tensions between the empire and elites; and stimulus for emerging Virginia leaders to rethink the connections between power and personal behavior by drawing on the ideals of politeness they found so lacking in Nicholson’s outrageous behavior.

A Terror to Evil Doers On July 9, 1698, Maryland governor Francis Nicholson faced down one of his most persistent opponents. Gerard Slye had been brought before the governor and his council on charges that he had libeled the governor and plotted against the government. Slye had allied with his stepfather John Coode, a perpetual malcontent who had overthrown the Calvert proprietors almost ten years before and now had set his sights on Nicholson. Slye struck an aggressive tone. With his hands on his hips in what the council minutes considered “a proud

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Scornful manner,” he informed the governor that he expected to be treated like a gentleman. Slye then sat down across from Nicholson without leave, presenting himself as the governor’s equal. Nicholson disregarded the affront, but could not contain himself when the prisoner addressed him as “Mister” rather than as his “Excellency.” The governor ordered Slye to stand. Did he, the governor demanded, “kn[o]w him to be his most Sacred Majestys Governor of this Province”? Faced to choose between submission and actual rebellion, Slye pulled back, fully acknowledging Nicholson’s authority.9 Nicholson’s combative stance served him well. Two days of questioning and browbeating forced the prisoner to admit his attacks on Nicholson. A more formal court prosecution, again overseen by the governor, followed. A weary Slye finally begged Nicholson’s pardon. Whereas before he had sat down with the governor, he now figuratively threw himself at Nicholson’s feet. “Your Excellencys humble Petitioner from the Bottom of his heart is sorry,” he wrote, adding that the governor’s “care prudence diligence & Circumspection may Justly deserve the affections & prayers of your Excellencys long Continuance in the Government.” Presumably prompted by Nicholson, he also included a separate statement that his offenses were not just against the governor but the government as well. Presenting the petition to the council, Nicholson noted that he was happy to see the last admission. Had the crime been against him, “he would have Scorned to have kept him in prison half an hour.” The council expressed concerns about Slye’s sincerity, but Nicholson pronounced himself satisfied. Asking only for bail to ensure Slye’s appearance at trial, he let the prisoner return home. Nicholson’s actions had deftly defused the situation. Slye and Coode did not challenge Maryland’s government for another decade. When Nicholson returned to Virginia later that year, he boasted to a member of the Board of Trade that Maryland was “in profound peace and quietness.”10 Scholars who have studied the governor’s record often seek to separate his ferocious temper from his faithful devotion to his duty. Nicholson’s unfortunate personal flaws, they suggest, undermined his real abilities as a governor.11 But Nicholson’s loyalty inspired not only his energetic administration, but his extraordinary anger. The strategy that Nicholson used against Slye also drove his rages. Nicholson’s aggressive tone and outrageous fits of passion demanded that subordinates fully recognize and accept his authority. Maintaining respect for government, he held, was not only the central task of governing. It provided the foundation of civilization itself. Nicholson’s anger, like his public persona as a whole, dramatized an authority that he believed brooked no competitors and admitted no questioning.

Rages of Francis Nicholson 25

Examining Nicholson’s outbursts in the context of his career and his views of governing shows that he carefully picked his targets. He never directed his anger at his superiors. Rather than lashing out in blind fury, Nicholson’s anger expressed his faith in the traditional hierarchy of English authority, and in the sacred nature of church and crown. Nicholson’s extraordinary American career began in early 1687 when he served as captain of a company of troops serving the Dominion of New England, King James II’s attempt to consolidate control over all the northern mainland colonies. The thirty-​­two-​­year-​­old officer had already served in the army for about a decade, in Holland, northern Africa, and England. In his new American post, Nicholson quickly advanced to become deputy governor of New York and the Jerseys (then divided into two colonies). One of the earliest American accounts of his anger comes from this period. A lieutenant who served under him testified in 1689 about the time he was ordered to report to Nicholson’s quarters. The officer, who presumably spoke primarily Dutch, asked his corporal to accompany him. The arrival of the second officer so outraged Nicholson that he threatened to shoot the corporal if he did not leave immediately.12 Nicholson’s anger could be as long-​­lived as it was sudden. Even after an unparalleled career that included governorship of four colonies from South Carolina to Canada, rank as general, and even a knighthood, he continued to nurse his grudges against Blair. The former governor (then seventy-​­two) published a collection of documents in 1727 refuting charges made by the college president some twenty-​­three years before.13 This combination of quick resentment and settled grievances made Nicholson formidable. Not long after the prosecution of Slye, the Maryland legislature objected to the governor’s demeanor. His belligerence in the courtroom, it complained, left jurors “unjustly vexed menaced overawed [and] Deterred.” The legislators admitted Nicholson’s aggressiveness frightened them as well. They “humbly Implore[d]” him that he would “neither Implicitely or ­Expressly . . . ​Menace Deterr or overawe the house or any member thereof from freely debateing.”14 Maryland legislators, already at odds with Nicholson politically, may have been particularly sensitive to his manner. But other people reported similar fears. The Virginia minister Jonathan Monroe told the colony’s council that he had been riding in the woods in 1704 when the governor appeared and “abused him.” Monroe traveled with him for four miles, fearful that Nicholson might shoot him if he tried to leave.15 Even the great gentlemen of Virginia’s

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Council, the proud leaders of the mainland’s wealthiest colony, found Nicholson frightening. “Nobody went near him,” Blair later testified, “but in dread & terour.”16 Yet Blair was wrong to suggest that Nicholson directed his “rage & fury” at “all sorts of people.” The governor treated his superiors with exquisite caution, proclaiming his loyalty at every turn. “I hope in God,” he wrote in 1697, “I shall never be so great a Rogue as to eat his Ma’tys Bread, & not to the utmost of my power serve him.”17 Even a request to procure birds for royal gardens led him to issue at least three official orders in two colonies.18 English officials clearly found such displays of loyalty appealing. Despite numerous complaints, Nicholson’s American career spanned almost forty years.19 Nicholson expected the same submission to authority from his subordinates that he gave his superiors—​­and his aggressive demeanor sought to make that expectation clear. Just as Slye needed to know his insolence was unacceptable, so too jurors and legislators needed to realize that they were being watched. Nicholson responded to the discontented Maryland legislators that he only sought to encourage people to do their duty. He asked incredulously whether they “desire to be despotick and [so much] above the Law so as not to be questioned?”20 Nicholson’s response to Slye’s accusation about the governor “Striking people” reveals the hierarchical vision that fed (and, he believed, justified) his anger. Nicholson readily admitted to beating two people. But when Slye raised the case of a “Burroughs,” the governor objected: “What if he had?” Burroughs was “his Servant and his Cook,” therefore his responsibility. The other two cases required more explanation. The first was that of Coode himself, who was not only the leader of the faction supported by his stepson Slye, but a prominent Maryland leader. Yet Coode’s transgression had been substantial. He first arrived drunk at a church service, making a “Disturbance,” and then he “affronted his Excellency in his own house.” Such insolence seemed just cause for physical discipline. Coode himself may have felt the same way. He quickly offered the governor a written apology.21 The final incident Nicholson noted suggests even more clearly his goal of upholding authority. While visiting a Captain Snowden, Nicholson observed some of Snowden’s men fighting with swords. Rather than reproving them, Nicholson turned his cane on the captain, the officer responsible for overseeing their behavior.22 The governor later threatened the members of the Virginia council in the same terms, promising that he “would beat them into better Manners.”23 This lively sense of authority also allowed Nicholson to be generous when

Rages of Francis Nicholson 27

his authority was fully accepted. His earlier anger was of a piece with his later magnanimous treatment of Slye after his submission. Nicholson remained popular with many Virginians during both his terms, even after many of the colony’s most prominent leaders turned against him. Nicholson’s dedication to these larger responsibilities also encouraged his commitment to intellectual and cultural projects. He provided essential support for the new College of William and Mary, the second college chartered in British America. Blair called him “the greatest Encourager . . . ​of this Design” in the colony.24 Nicholson’s support of the college continued even after he was moved to Maryland, where he spearheaded the creation of that colony’s first free school. His extensive donations to Church of England ministers and building projects went far beyond his official duties. Virginia’s clergy lined up solidly behind him, even as Blair, the bishop’s official representative in Virginia, sought to have him removed. Ministers in other colonies showed similar support, sending numerous letters to London testifying of Nicholson’s encouragement. A New Jersey minister called him the colonial church’s “nursing Father.” The artist Mark Catesby, engaged in creating a pathbreaking volume describing and picturing American animals, found Nicholson similarly helpful in the 1720s when he arrived in South Carolina. The governor offered an annual pension as long as he held office.25 Like his encouragement of the Anglican Church, Nicholson’s designs for new capital cities in both Virginia and Maryland sought both to strengthen authority and to make plain the structures of power. Nicholson’s early plan for Williamsburg arranged the streets to form a “W,” a visual reminder of the new town’s namesake, King William. In Annapolis, named for William’s sister-​­in-​ l­ aw and successor, Nicholson placed the capitol, the center of political authority, and the Anglican church, the center of religious authority, on its two highest hills. The city’s other streets were arranged around or radiated from these two centers, representing topographically the significance of what he elsewhere called the “2 inseperables, the Church of Engl’d and monarchie.”26 Nicholson believed such authority, displayed in the streets of the capital (and, he would have said, in the person of the governor), was essential to proper government. When members of the Maryland assembly protested against his treatment of jurors and legislators in 1698, the upper house, clearly representing Nicholson’s position, responded by reminding them that they were responsible for preserving “the pe[a]ce and quiett of the Province.” To do this, the statement explained, government must be, as St. Paul wrote, a “Terror to Evill doers.” Just as jurors should not think that they would go unpunished

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if they erred, assembly members should not expect “to debate at Random without any reguard to the dignity of his Ma’ty and hon’r of his Governm’t.”27 Although Nicholson himself had scolded the legislators the previous day, he called them in again to accept one of their requests, the need to preserve the House journals: “he looked upon Records,” he told them, “Especially the Records of Supream authority next to the Divine Laws to be sacred.” But he also warned that the survival of government required respect for the governor: “All Rebellions were begun in all Kingdoms and States by scandalizing and makeing odious the p[er]sons in Authority.”28 Like his deep respect for church and monarchy, literally placing them above the people in Annapolis, Nicholson’s concern about uprisings recalled the problems that had plagued England over the past century. Rebels had dethroned (and executed) one king in the 1640s and driven away another in the 1680s. Nicholson began his military career under the son of the first of these monarchs and came to America under the second. Nicholson continued to believe royal control was under threat in America. As Blair noted, the governor viewed the continent as “haughty, tainted with republican notions & principles, uneasy under every Governm’t, & . . . ​ready to shake off their obedience to England.”29 Blair may have exaggerated Nicholson’s position, but only slightly. The governor protested to the Board of Trade that accepting his opponents’ objections to his militia policy would lead to the “mere Skeleton of a [royal] Government.” If Virginians controlled their own military, they could use it “in the same manner as the Parliament did to King Charles the First” in the 1640s, first overthrowing and then executing him.30 Nicholson, of course, believed Blair the key figure in these plans. The minister had “hoped to [create] an Army” of followers by “sound[ing] the Trumpett of Rebellion [and] Sedition.”31 These concerns placed Nicholson in the mainstream of contemporary conservative thinking. The restoration of monarchy and established church in 1660, when Nicholson was only five years old, led to a flood of warnings from Tories and church leaders about the dangers of disobedience and rebellion. Pamphleteers and preachers alike insisted on the divine authority of both monarchy and church. Restraints on the king’s power could be dangerous, they warned, especially since even the people’s liberty originated in royal generosity.32 Nicholson’s political views affected his manner as well as his message. King James I, nearly a century earlier, had given similar advice about anger to his son. “Where ye finde a notable injurie,” he counseled, “spare not to give

Rages of Francis Nicholson 29

course to the torrents of your wrath.” Quoting a Biblical proverb, he noted that “The wrath of a King, is like to the roaring of a Lyon.” Although the ruler should be humble, that humility should not stand in the way of “high indignation” at evil doers. Kings (and by extensions other rulers) were like gods and fathers in their displays of righteous wrath and discipline.33 Machiavelli’s The Prince had similarly confronted the issue earlier in its famous discussion of “whether it is better to be loved or feared.” Although being hated is always bad, he counseled, being feared was more productive than either love or hatred: “men have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than one who is feared . . . ​fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.”34 Nicholson’s angry looks and terrifying rages sought the same hold on his subordinates, the same sense of irresistible power. As he told a priest who had criticized him, “You are now insolent and proud, but I’ll humble you & bring down your haughtiness.”35

In the Queen’s Name “If I were given to astrology,” Nicholson told the Board of Trade in March 1705, “I should fancy” that something new was happening. Perhaps, he suggested, “some Malignant Constellations were in opposition to the Governing Planets in these parts of our Hemisphere.” Such an event would explain why there have been “Complaints against most if not all the Governors” in America in recent years.36 Nicholson’s comment marked one of the few attempts at humor in a long (and often painful) plea that he be allowed to remain in office. The astrological reference allowed him to suggest, without explicitly criticizing his superiors, that he needed to be judged within a larger context of his peers. Although the governor’s unusually hot temper and strongly authoritarian views fueled the conflict between the governor and his opponents, both the origins and results of this harshness went beyond both Nicholson and Virginia. The decades of the 1690s and 1700s were particularly difficult times for English colonial governors. Along with increasing demands from imperial authorities, governors in Virginia and a number of other places also had to deal with resistance from increasingly powerful colonial leaders who were themselves seeking more say in their government. Virginia’s elites over the previous decades had developed resources that allowed them to resist even Nicholson’s relentless attempts to bully them into submission. The result was a dysfunctional situation in which

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Nicholson’s angry demands for obedience merely stoked further resistance—​­a vicious cycle of suspicions and cross-​­purposes that might well have seemed, in Nicholson’s metaphor, like constellations and planets “in opposition.” Nicholson expressed his own view of his role in his constant references to monarchical authority. He would send messages stating: “his excellency commands you in the queen’s name to come to him immediately.” Owners of boats or horses needed for the governor’s use were approached in the same way. “Whatsoever other command he gives, though no manner of way relating to the government,” Blair complained, “they are all given in the queen’s name.”37 The phrase was particularly galling because Nicholson’s orders often seemed less the monarch’s wishes than the governor’s whim. One man was summoned from forty miles away only to be kept waiting for days. Horses were impressed for the use of visitors and their servants when they could easily have been hired. Surely, Blair argued, the governor should reserve the queen’s name for higher purposes, rather than rendering it “cheap and contemptible” by using it on “frivolous” occasions.38 Nicholson rejected the distinction. All his actions, he believed, sought to fulfill his responsibility representing the monarch he almost invariably referred to as “most sacred.” He told the Board of Trade as he left Maryland in 1698 that he had done nothing unusual or particularly praiseworthy. It was simply “my bounden Duty to his Majesty: and [I] am heartily sorry that I have not been able to doe more.” The same devotion had led Nicholson’s commander in the 1680s to employ him in carrying urgent messages on the long trip from Northern Africa to London.39 The governor’s fervor was especially useful in a time of revolutionary change. The American colonies had been effectively autonomous before 1670. American leaders and English officials communicated only irregularly, and the central government exerted power only intermittently. After 1670, however, in what one historian has called “the end of American independence,” the English government under King Charles II and his brother, the future James II, sought further control. James, who had ruled without a legislature in New York, eventually extended this lack of representation to the Dominion of New England that brought together all the northeastern colonies. As part of the Dominion’s military and political leadership, Nicholson served in the vanguard of this change. Although the young officer left America in the wake of the 1688 Glorious Revolution that removed James II, Nicholson’s absence, unlike his royal

Rages of Francis Nicholson 31

master’s, was only temporary. In 1690 the new monarchs appointed Nicholson lieutenant governor of Virginia, operating as governor in all but name. The move signaled clearly that the goal of reshaping the colonies would not end with James’s departure. William and Mary rejected their predecessors’ radical remodeling of governments, allowing, for example, the northern colonies to resume their separate governments. But the new monarchs also expected more from the colonies and their governors than ever before. The efforts to regulate trade and to expand military and fiscal capacities included not just England, but its American colonies as well. Charles and James had attempted to bring the colonies to heel; William and Mary sought to make them active participants.40 Not surprisingly Nicholson threw himself into meeting these new expectations. He reported to the Board of Trade regularly and at length. A July 1699 letter to that body included not just the requisite report on politics and the economy, but both a broad analysis of Virginia’s history and extended thoughts about how to arrange the files in the province’s offices. In support, he attached fifty-​­four additional documents. He provided sixty in his June 1700 letter, sent from aboard a ship he had personally helped retake from pirates.41 “We have not from any Governour So Exact accounts as from you,” an impressed member of the Board of Trade had marveled several months before.42 Even Blair had to admire this dedication. He later testified that he had hesitated to oppose the governor because of his “vigor & dilligence in stirring about & driving on the business of his Government.”43 Nicholson believed this vigor necessary because royal government in America was so weak. Maryland, which he viewed as “not very well setled either in the Church, Civil, or Military Government,” had been a particular challenge.44 But Virginia (although much larger and more established) also required attention. When Nicholson returned in 1698, its government could not pay its expenses from the funds devoted to that purpose. Despite raids on other accounts, the colony had fallen deeply in debt. Five years later Nicholson reported that Virginia had accumulated a surplus of over £30,000, almost twenty times the amount he had paid off.45 He boasted in 1705 that he “had more Audits in a Year than any of ” his predecessors.46 Nicholson showed the same devotion to enforcing trade regulation. Even Edward Randolph, surveyor general of the American customs since the 1670s, was impressed. Despite unbounded scorn for most officials in the colonies, he considered Nicholson “sincere & indefatigable in his Ma’ties service.” The governor’s influence extended beyond Virginia. Besides financing and

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encouraging Church of England ministers as far north as New York, Nicholson also supported Pennsylvania customs officials struggling against the colony’s notorious inattention to trade rules.47 Military preparation received similar attention. Nicholson personally supervised some militia training. Robert Quary, who replaced the deceased Randolph as surveyor general in 1703, judged Virginia’s troops “under far better regulation than any other Governm’t on the Main[land].”48 But Nicholson wanted to go further. He created an elite militia force and proposed that the colony sponsor what would have been essentially a professional standing army. When Virginia’s legislature failed to comply with imperial calls for men and money to defend New York from the French and Indians, Nicholson advanced funds from his own pocket.49 The governor’s faithfulness seems all the more remarkable in comparison with his counterparts in other colonies. The cautious Nicholson suggested this indirectly through astrological metaphor. Quary was blunter, telling the Board of Trade in 1703 that he had challenged the governor’s opponents to explain the reasons for their virulent attacks: “Hath the Gov’r violated any of the Queens Commands, or Instructions, or acted contrary to them? Hath he omitted any occasion or oppertunity of serving her Majtie or the Interest of the Country?” Quary continued by citing Nicholson’s attention to crown revenues, “acts of Trade,” “illegal trade,” and the militia, certain that even the governor’s enemies could not fault his concern for the empire.50 Quary’s vigorous questioning revealed a central difficulty in the case against Nicholson. Lengthy rages and death threats could be terrifying in person, but officials an ocean away found it difficult to believe Nicholson’s behavior posed a serious danger. Unable to identify an outright criminal act, the governor’s opponents compiled long lists of actions they considered “maladministration,” few of which were so far out of bounds that they clearly warranted immediate dismissal.51 Nicholson was accused, for example, of arbitrarily taking men into custody, opening the mail of suspected enemies, stopping his opponents from going to England, and even listening at windows. The difficulty for Nicholson’s Virginia opponents was that other governors had acted similarly—​­and done so in much less defensible ways. While governor of Maryland, Nicholson had himself been taken into custody by his Virginia counterpart, Sir Edmund Andros. Bermuda governor Samuel Day got access to customs officer Randolph’s letters to England by forcing his scribe to surrender the drafts. And Nicholson’s attempts to stop people from traveling

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to England had never risen to the level of Leeward Islands governor Christopher Codrington. After Codrington discovered that former speaker of the assembly Edward Walrond had written a letter of complaint, the governor threw Walrond into prison, threatened him before the Council, hunted down his son with dogs, and murdered one of his slaves.52 Nor could opponents convincingly argue that Nicholson was driven by self-​­interest. Robert Beverley’s The History and Present State of Virginia, completed while Nicholson was still in office, spoke harshly about the governor. But Beverley could not charge him, as he did an earlier governor, with seeking to make “as much [money] as he could, without Respect either to the Laws of the Plantation, or the Dignity of his Office.”53 Other colonies suffered from similarly greedy leaders. Isaac Richier, Bermuda’s second royal governor, jailed the collector of the customs after the official failed to take into account that the ship he was prosecuting for illegal trading had been built by the governor, who had then sold it to a Scottish trader in violation of the Navigation Acts. When the next governor arrived in 1693, he in turn jailed his predecessor in a dispute over salary and perquisites. Richier regained his freedom only after the king had twice ordered his release.54 Other governors had difficulty with the military and trade matters that Nicholson handled so diligently. New York’s Benjamin Fletcher had such difficulties asserting control of Connecticut’s militia after he traveled there in October 1693 that he finally threw a naysayer down a flight of stairs.55 Massachusetts governor William Phips had attacked the captain of a royal ship earlier that year. After Richard Short reported to Phips that he could not carry out an order, the governor called Short a “Whore,” and beat him with his cane. He continued the attack even after the captain, who had a disabled right arm, tripped on a cannon and lay helpless on the dock.56 A few months after the January 1693 incident with Captain Short, Phips also publicly beat the customs collector, Jahleel Brenton, for his action in seizing a ship (the ironically titled Good Luck). Phips only threatened to “drubb” Edward Randolph, the surveyor-​­general of customs—​­for once acting in a more restrained way than some other governors, who almost universally hated the rigid and self-​ ­righteous official.57 Randolph was held for six months by Bostonians during their 1689 uprising against the Dominion. He spent more than seven months in a Bermuda jail a decade later. In between, he was also arrested by the Pennsylvania governor and escaped the same fate in Maryland only by hiding in a swamp.58 As Nicholson knew, these difficulties were being carefully watched by

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imperial officials. Although customs officials like Randolph often proved impervious to criticism, leaders coming under the Board of Trade’s direct control were kept on a tighter leash. The board wrote a scathing letter to Bermuda governor Samuel Day after he jailed Randolph, removing the governor from office soon after he complied.59 Phips suffered a similar fate after news of his attacks on royal officials reached England. In the same March 1705 week that Nicholson wrote his extended justifications, the Board of Trade recommended the removal of a Church of England minister in Newfoundland whose angry outburst had helped set off a mutiny in the garrison; wrote a letter to the lieutenant governor of Bermuda ordering him to live in peace with the formerly disrespectful secretary of the colony; and examined eleven affidavits from Barbados accusing the governor of tyranny and thirty-​­two documents attempting to refute the charge.60 Nicholson’s opponents in Virginia, however, could find little comfort in this broader context of new demands and problematic governors. They were facing a man who threatened to destroy their reputations, take away their possessions, and even kill them—​­who would accept nothing less than complete subordination to the sacred will of the queen. Unfortunately, Nicholson understood as little of the larger context of the situation as his opponents. While they failed to recognize the imperial pressures that drove his already authoritarian outlook, Nicholson refused to accept the existence of newly confident colonial elites who refused the status of mere subjects—​­and now had the strength to resist their governor’s demands. As Blair complained in 1702, Nicholson scorned “the best Gentlemen we had in the country.” considering them “no more than the dirt under his feet.” Nicholson sneered that the province’s smaller landholders had little regard for the colony’s leaders, fully aware that their grandparents (and sometimes their parents) had also been common people. Virginia’s “rouges” had risen to power, the governor asserted, by kidnapping their servants and “cheating the people.”61 Although elite Virginians considered these characterizations “most contemptable,” they knew they contained more than a measure of truth. By English standards, the worthies the governor referred to “the mighty Dons” were still raw parvenus not far removed from the “primitive nothing” that Nicholson threatened to reduce them to. They had built their fortunes over the past generation or two through forced labor whose origins were not far from kidnapping—​­the sweat of not just the English indentured servants that aroused

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Nicholson’s indignation, but also the Africans and the Indians taken from Carolina villages who made up the majority of field workers after 1700. Nicholson’s dismissive descriptions would have seemed even more plausible in the years before his first arrival in 1690. Particularly after the restoration of England’s monarchy in 1660, Virginia’s gentlemen struggled (often unsuccessfully) both to establish authority in the colony and resist the power of a resurgent empire. Holding power in Virginia was difficult enough. Colonial leaders had worried about the presence of an enormous number of white indentured servants, particularly when several plans for rebellion were discovered in the 1660s. The growth of African slavery in succeeding decades, driven partly by these anxieties, only raised further fears about what Governor Berkeley termed “the giddy multitude.” Bacon’s Rebellion in 1675 posed the most direct challenge to the colony’s leadership. Though himself wealthy and powerful, Nathaniel Bacon had little respect for Virginia’s other leaders. Like Nicholson, he contrasted their “vile” backgrounds when “they first entered the country” with the “sudden rise of their estates” since. Bacon aroused such support that he was able to capture and burn Virginia’s capital city.62 Although Virginia’s gentry defeated the rebellion, they had to contend with unwelcome attention from the English government. The troops sent by imperial authorities in response to the Virginians’ call for aid arrived too late to be of use, and the commission of inquiry that accompanied them soon blamed the unrest not on the rebels but the regime they had rejected. Crown policy increasingly focused on taming unruly Virginia leaders, demanding permanent revenue for the colonial government, strict limits on the powers of the House of Burgesses, and even royal approval before passing legislation. Delay (and, at a crucial point, a sympathetic governor) prevented the most substantial structural changes. But Virginia’s leaders still lost significant power in these years. Governors in the 1680s assembled the legislature less than once a year.63 The provincial leaders who challenged Nicholson’s governorship at the turn of the century no longer faced such dire difficulties. They often belonged to wealthy and politically active families who had given them a broader education in the ways of the larger English world. Just as important, they were often strong enough to pass along their political status, a continuity seen in the growing number of leaders bearing their parent’s name. A Benjamin Harrison had served in the House of Burgesses as early as 1642. His son, Benjamin Harrison II, entered the body in the 1670s and was chosen for the council in the 1690s. Benjamin III in turn received an English legal education before

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serving as the colony’s attorney general, holding the position for five years before Nicholson turned him out in 1702.64 Robert Beverley II, who lost his post as clerk to the House of Burgesses a year later, belonged to a similarly significant family. Both his father and his elder brother had held the position, with the latter going on to become the speaker of the body. The father of his late wife served on the Council at the same time. Beverley’s trip to England in 1703 allowed Nicholson to choose another clerk. The outraged Beverley joined in the lobbying campaign against Nicholson, as well as publishing the first substantial history of a British colony by a native-​­born American.65 The man who emerged as the leader of the anti-​­Nicholson camp, James Blair, seems an unlikely member of this increasingly powerful and interconnected group. As a Scot, he belonged to a distrusted minority; as a parish minister, he held his position at the whim of local leaders. Yet within two years of his 1685 arrival, the young clergyman had convinced Sarah Harrison, daughter of Benjamin Harrison II, to marry him, even though she was already betrothed to another. This alliance with the wealthy and influential Harrison family gave Blair colonial ties that equaled his impressive British connections. Blair had gained the attention of the bishop of London after being forced to flee Scotland because of a political dispute. The bishop, whose responsibilities also included the colonies, soon appointed Blair his representative in Virginia. Blair’s lobbying for the college and its presidency, and his attack on Governor Andros all relied heavily on the bishop’s support. The crucial meeting in that case (in which Blair was supported by Benjamin Harrison III) took place before the bishop and the archbishop of Canterbury. By then, Blair had also developed close ties with John Locke, the philosopher and political thinker who served on the Board of Trade during those years. Nicholson’s own correspondence with Locke seems to have begun only because of Blair. In this broader world, it was not clear which of the two Virginia leaders was more important. William Byrd II, who opposed the minister’s lobbying for the return of Nicholson in both England and Virginia, considered Blair the primary figure in the relationship. He told the hearing that the minister expected to “be able to lead [Nicholson] by the nose as much as he pleases.”66 The returning governor was determined to resist such dependence. Unfortunately for Blair—​­and for the well-​­being of Virginia—​­the governor could only imagine a relationship involving superior and subordinates. Obedience was a common theme in the governor’s tirades. When Harrison’s successor as attorney general suggested that one of Nicholson’s commands might be illegal,

Figure 4. Sarah Harrison Blair, painted on a 1705 trip to London with her husband, was part of a prominent Virginia family that would include two nineteenth-­century American presidents and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Her brother served as the colony’s attorney general until Governor Nicholson removed him from office. John Hargrave, English, Active 1693–c. 1719, Portrait of Mrs. James Blair, née Sarah Harrison (c. 1670–1713), c. 1705. Oil on canvas. Gift of Mrs. Mary M. Peachy, 1829.002 Muscarelle Museum of Art at the College of William & Mary in Virginia.

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“the Gov’r in great wrath took him by the Collar swearing that he knew of no Laws we had but would be obeyed without hesitation or reserve.” Angered by another gentleman, he complained that “he must hang one half of these rogues before the other would learn to obey his commands.”67 The governor delighted in an unlikely story he had heard about Blair’s wedding ceremony in which the bride three times refused the traditional promise to obey her new husband. Needless to say, Nicholson did not admire Sarah Blair’s supposed independence so much as the idea that the man who more than anyone else had challenged his leadership had himself faced insubordination within his own household.68 The clash, however, was not just between two men who sought to command. It was also between two larger groups, the imperial government and colonial elites, with each side seeking greater control—​­and each believing the other side’s demands (at least at times) dangerous and illegitimate. And, although Virginia offered a particularly intriguing pair of central adversaries, similar controversies took place in all parts of British America. A number of American colonies had also experienced crises of authority in the 1670s and 1680s. Jamaica, after being taken from the Spanish in the 1650s, became a haven for marauding pirates. Carolina’s government was briefly overthrown in 1677, while New England’s Indians began what was known as King Philip’s war two years earlier in 1675, the same year Chesapeake nations began their attacks on Maryland as well as Virginia—​­and the year before Nathaniel Bacon set up a force to fight back before turning on the latter’s government. For Massachusetts leaders just as much as for Virginia, these clashes raised the problem not only of physical survival during the war, but of political survival afterward—​­in the northern colony’s case, because of the high taxes necessary for recovery. A few years later, England’s 1688 Glorious Revolution set off another series of American upheavals as Boston elites overthrew the Dominion government, and New York and Maryland toppled their regimes as well.69 The aggressive colonial policies of Charles II and James II sought to rein in these problematic provincial elites. The attempt to remake Virginia’s governance followed a policy suggested earlier (and on a larger scale) in Jamaica, where the royal governor sought to push through laws that would have made the colonial assembly virtually unnecessary. After this program failed, a new Jamaica governor deliberately removed established leaders from their position in favor of less wealthy and well-​­connected men who would presumably be more loyal. English rule in New York, recently captured from the Dutch,

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showed a similar disregard for the province’s notables. The duke of York did not even create a legislative body there—​­and he failed to include one in the Dominion of New England he established when he became king in 1685.70 Despite these difficulties, however, a number of other colonies besides Virginia also developed more stable local leadership. A powerful native-​­born elite emerged in Maryland and the Caribbean Leeward Islands during these same years. And Jamaica’s leaders, facing an intense imperial offensive against their power, grew strong enough to mount an English lobbying campaign on a scale that dwarfed Blair’s efforts—​­emerging with unprecedented control over English colonial policy. Other colonies, however, followed more troubled routes to stability. Provincial elites in both New York and (as Chapter 2 notes) the Carolinas remained weak until far into the new century. Massachusetts, where provincial leadership developed earlier than in other colonies, offers a particularly telling comparison with Virginia. The contemporary governorship of Joseph Dudley created similar discontent. But Dudley had deeper roots in his colony. Son of a Massachusetts governor, Dudley had been part of the provincial leadership since his young adulthood, even serving in the London delegation that unsuccessfully opposed the revocation of the colony’s charter. But his decision to serve as the temporary governor of New England in the Dominion and then (alongside Nicholson) as a member of its council aroused intense anger. He was imprisoned along with Andros when Bostonians overthrew the government in 1689. Both were sent to England, where Dudley remained in virtual exile for more than a dozen years. Although Dudley was a native rather than a newcomer, his 1703 return to Massachusetts as governor was more divisive than Nicholson’s restoration to Virginia five years earlier. While the latter’s reappointment was widely celebrated, Dudley’s commission reopened old political wounds. Still the two governors shared a common desire to strengthen royal government. Dudley collected more money during his governorship than the colony had raised in all its previous history. His opponents complained that impoverished New Englanders were being forced to sell even the feathers from their beds to discharge their tax bill.71 Both governors, furthermore, saw the Anglican Church as a central part of strengthening royal power. Although personally a Congregationalist, Dudley carefully steered patronage to church members. His strong sense of duty almost matched Nicholson’s. “The strongest command,” Dudley told colleagues, was “a request from a superior.”72 Like Nicholson as well, Dudley aroused strong ministerial opposition. He faced ferocious attacks from the father-​­and-​­son combination of Increase and

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Cotton Mather. Although the two ministers were Dissenters rather than members of the church, the elder Mather shared with Virginia’s commissary both strong English connections and a history of successful lobbying.73 The Mathers, however, failed to dislodge their governor. Dudley stayed in office for thirteen years and was finally removed only when the death of Queen Anne required an explicit renewal of his commission. Dudley’s greater success depended upon two significant advantages over Nicholson. The Massachusetts native’s 1690s exile helped him develop strong English ties that even Nicholson found difficult to match. By the time the latter returned to Virginia as governor in 1698, he had been in America for almost a dozen years, with only a single return visit lasting less than a year. Dudley moved back to Massachusetts in 1703 with the strong support of Lord Cutts, who had earlier given him the post of lieutenant governor of the Isle of Wight and sponsored his election to Parliament. No other mainland-​­born American colonial served in either position. Dudley’s support of the Church of England proved similarly astute, helping to keep his Dissenter opponents from developing the close ties to the ecclesiastical hierarchy that served as the foundation of Blair’s political strength.74 Dudley’s longevity rested on more than English ties. His relatively mild temper won him substantial support. Dudley occasionally displayed flashes of anger. He and his son drew their swords on some carters who refused to give way to their carriage in 1705—​­and, like Nicholson, he received advice from England suggesting that “moderation is a virtue.”75 But Dudley showed a sensitivity to the aspirations of the colony’s leaders that Nicholson never developed. As an early supporter noted, Dudley lacked his predecessor Phips’s “Natural passionateness.”76 Nicholson’s harsh demeanor, by contrast, intensified Virginia’s political difficulties, provoking a bitterness that led each side to work tirelessly to undermine the other. The governor complained that Blair and his group seemed to be following the “the old diabolical saying” (about excrement rather than soil): “Fling dirt enough and some will stick.”77 Yet he himself made numerous charges about his enemies’ “artfull trifling, malitious insinuations, and many notorious falsities.” He pressured the burgesses, grand juries, and ministers to prepare addresses of support.78 Nicholson’s opponents fought back by sending numerous affidavits, letters, and memorials to the home government, leading Nicholson to dub his opponents the “Affidavit Sparks.”79 They also circulated writings in both Virginia and England, including the “ballads, Pasquils & Lampoons . . . ​posted upon trees in high roads” cited by Virginia clergy. As

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they noted there were “Criminations & Recriminations on both sides (God knows).”80 The result was a lengthy standoff. Blair and his allies would not accept the subordinate role that Nicholson demanded of them. Such submission to the governor, Beverley argued, would mean “Slavery and utter ruine.”81 But Nicholson’s views of government allowed no other position, no other result. The contest ended only in spring 1705 when the Board of Trade removed Nicholson—​­and even then they refused to admit the dangers of his temper. Responding to the governor’s pleas, they issued a public statement that he had done nothing wrong. Nicholson’s harshness had heightened the problems of an already difficult situation. The imperial government needed to renegotiate its relationship with colonial elites if it wished to expand its power. Virginia’s gentlemen needed not only to come to terms with British expectations but to reconsider how they presented themselves to the broader world as well as to other Virginians. As Nicholson’s supporters rightly complained, provincial leaders were hardly models of self-​­control. But (as the next section suggests) their difficulties encouraged them to define the link between government and personal demeanor in ways that Nicholson never did. While Virginia’s elite began to explore the ideals of politeness, the governor’s attempts at gaining support, as Blair came to recognize, “appeared more like a design of perpetrating a rape than obtaining a consent.”82

A Publick Callamity Nicholson’s successor, Governor Edward Nott, seems aptly named. A former army officer of no particular distinction, he arrived in Virginia in August 1705 and died a year later. His list of accomplishments was as short as his tenure. Other than gaining funding for a governor’s mansion and encouraging passage of a widely popular port bill (a measure soon disallowed by the British government), Nott instituted no lasting change or policy initiative. Yet Virginians found Nott irresistible. A minister just arriving from England about the time of his death observed that the late governor “is very much lamented.”83 Blair reported that the loss “put this poor Country in a great consternation.”84 Virginia’s House of Burgesses erected a monument to him more than a decade later. Cautious representatives removed William Byrd II’s dramatic peroration: “if a Stranger, pity the country: if a Virginian,

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thy self.” But even the revised inscription still observed that Nott “was deservedly Esteemed A Public Blessing while he Lived & when He Dyed a Publick Callamity.”85 The celebration of Nott went beyond the fact that he was not Nicholson. Many Virginians felt relieved simply that the colony’s most powerful official no longer threatened to kill people. But Nott did more than abandon threats. Although “the divisions . . . ​were very hot at his Coming,” Blair noted, Nott helped resolve them through his “very calm healing Temper.”86 Nott’s calmness, like Nicholson’s anger, was not simply a personal trait. Virginians understood Nott’s actions as part of an emerging cultural framework that helped provincial leaders rethink their political experiences, their self-​­presentation, and their views about anger. The moderation recommended to Nicholson (and revered in Nott) did more than condemn excessive anger. It formed part of an ethic of polite social and political interaction that struggled to keep disruptive emotional reactions within careful bounds. Careful control of aggression also restrained power and helped societies avoid the dangers of arbitrary and absolute rule. Of course, neither Nicholson nor Nott caused or created this cultural shift, which spanned America as well as the Atlantic. The goals of politeness everywhere remained ideals rather than realities, aspirations rather than descriptions. But they were not divorced from everyday experience. Virginians’ responses to their two governors reveal the experiences and contentions that gave meaning to this emerging ideal of human relationships. The central theme of the inscription that Byrd prepared for the monument to Nott in 1718 was the late governor’s respect for the boundaries of authority. Nott used his powers “to do good to the People,” Byrd noted, not “to insult and oppress.” With a “passion” only for “doing good” and a concern for “mildness, prudence, and justice,” Nott “was content with the limited Authority of his Commission, and stretch’t not the Royal Prerogative to make his Power absolute, and his Government arbitrary.”87 These descriptions were not simply polite commonplaces. Byrd’s arguments sharply critiqued both Nott’s predecessor and his successor. The legislative committee reviewing the draft removed a number of his more fervent claims, worried that they might be taken as criticisms of their current governor. Nicholson of course had a different view of his failure to follow the letter of the law. He believed his sacred duty to keep order sometimes required

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extraordinary measures. You “speak so much of the Prerogative,” noted a concerned supporter in England, “& so little of the law.” Blair complained that Nicholson went even further, speaking “in the most contemptible terms of the English Laws & even use[d] that Expression Magna Charta, Magna F[art]a.”88 Contemporaries often referred to this broad view of official power in another term used by Byrd. “Arbitrary” had originally not been a negative term. It was closely connected with arbitration, allowing a mutually agreed-​­upon authority to determine an appropriate result without being shackled by technicalities. Since judges had the freedom to consider divine “wisdome & mercy” as well as “Justice,” the Puritan leader John Winthrop noted, they were “Gods upon earthe.”89 By the end of the century, however, the term “arbitrary” had largely lost its positive connotations. Robert Beverley II’s 1705 history praised Nicholson in his first term as governor for being a “strict Observer of the Acts of Assembly, making them the sole Rule of his Judgment.” This “Regularity,” however, broke down in council meetings. There Nicholson had been “Imperious” and “Arbitrary.”90 This issue of arbitrary government lay at the heart of John Locke’s influential critique of the authoritarian ideas that Nicholson continued to hold into the eighteenth century. Locke’s First Treatise on Government, first published in 1689, responded to the late Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, a book that defended monarchical power as an extension of the universally accepted authority of the father within the family. Since the king played the same paternal role within the community, he too ruled by “his own will.” As Filmer had argued elsewhere, such arbitrary or absolute government formed “the first and the safest government for the world.” Locke rejected this approach. Without “settled standing Laws” constraining leaders, he warned, people were slaves, a status he held was only acceptable for prisoners taken in warfare. “Absolute Arbitrary Power” created a nightmarish situation when a leader could “force [the people] to obey at pleasure the exorbitant and unlimited Decrees of their sudden thoughts, or unrestrain’d, and till that moment unknown Wills without having any measures set down which may guide and justifie their actions.”91 The unpredictable Nicholson posed just such a danger. An English correspondent warned the governor in 1702 that his harsh words and actions were risky in the current political environment. In the past, he suggested, “a more violent treatment would not only have been endured even by Englishmen, but perhaps would have been well enough approved of.” But “the case is quite altered now,” especially since the Glorious Revolution. If you should be charged

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with “arbitrariness” in Parliament, he warned Nicholson, not even your merits or your friends “will be able to save you.”92 Nott by contrast seemed to embody the opposite ideals. He was known, a clergyman noted, for his “Exactness in doing Justice to all Persons” and his “great Moderation.”93 The last term had by then become central to discussions of governance. “Moderation” had previously referred to regulation and control. Massachusetts’s earliest law code provided that church elders “guided and moderated” church assemblies. By the middle of the century, moderation also came to mean something larger and more politically pressing, freedom from overt and harsh partisanship.94 Late seventeenth-​­century discussions of religion used the term to criticize a narrow orthodoxy that accepted only a limited range of Protestant beliefs, in particular noting the post-​­Restoration laws that pushed numerous Puritan-​­inclined ministers out of their Church of England pulpits. In calling for greater toleration, the Quaker leader William Penn in the 1680s wrote both “a plea for moderation” and “a perswasive to moderation.”95 Daniel Defoe twenty years later published “Moderation maintain’d.” The religious associations of the term may well have been part of the reason the enthusiastically high church Nicholson resented letters recommending moderation.96 As these letters also suggested, however, moderation referred to government as well as religion. A minister who had noted Nott’s death in Virginia also witnessed the aftermath of Governor Edward Tynte’s demise in South Carolina four years later. With partisans promoting competing elections to choose a temporary governor, “violent Proceedings” seemed a distinct ­possibility—​­until one of the contestants agreed to end the contest, earning the author’s commendation for “his Moderation.”97 Blair’s 1702 sermon on the death of King William similarly celebrated the same qualities in noting “the mildness and gentleness of the King’s reign.” As with Byrd’s use of the term “arbitrary,” this was not an apolitical argument. An angry Nicholson accused the clergyman of attacking William’s predecessors Charles II and James II—​­and suspected that Blair was also referring to him.98 The ideal of moderation included a distinct way of thinking about the boundaries of legitimate power. Earlier theories of authority tended to emphasize the broad powers and responsibilities of magistrates. In practice, however, common religious values, local connections, and personal ties often restrained the exercise of power. By the late seventeenth century, however, the balance between broad theory and limited practice became deeply problematic. English revolutions, American rebellions, and the expanding reach of the

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English state, all within an Atlantic world both drawn together and pulled apart by increasing trade and communication, made older conceptions of power difficult to defend except in extreme forms—​­although this did not stop people from trying to do so. Tory politicians and Anglican Church leaders endlessly preached the obligations of nonresistance and unlimited submission in the wake of the Civil War. Some political philosophers attempted to make the same case. Filmer, drawing on Jean Bodin’s argument about the indivisibility of sovereignty, rejected any restriction on monarchical authority. These proponents of absolutism found even Thomas Hobbes suspect. Although Hobbes (born the same year as Filmer) was gratifyingly clear on the obligation to obey government, he traced this duty to communal agreement rather than divine authority.99 Facing the new imperial demands, however, emerging Anglo-​­American leaders found political theories emphasizing obedience to central authority troubling.100 But they did not therefore turn to promoting the rebellions that Nicholson believed resulted from such opposition. Calling instead for moderation in exercising power and responding to diversity, the emerging ideals of politeness provided a means of opposing authoritarianism that proved widely popular. “It were to be wished indeed that we could all be of one opinion,” admitted South Carolina governor Charles Craven in the early 1710s, “but that is morally impossible.” Instead, he continued, people should “agree, to live amicably together,” by “consult[ing] the common good, [and] the tranquillity of our province.”101 The Boston minister Benjamin Colman provided a fuller description of such leadership in 1737. “The spirit of Constancy & Resolution, Authority & Government,” he told Harvard’s governing board in discussing the qualities of a college president, needed to be combined with “the Man of Prudence & Temper, Moderation, & Gentleness, Modesty humility & Humanity.”102 As Colman suggested, such attitudes also had implications beyond politics. Rather than (like Nicholson) seeking to emphasize authority and precedence at every turn, the ideals of politeness rejected the harshness of naked power. Instead, as a later author stated, politeness sought to “make persons easy in their behaviour, conciliating in their affections, and promoting every one’s benefit.” A student club at Harvard in 1722 called for meetings to “be Managed with Temper & Moderation.” Rather than “Contempt,” they commended “a Deference Paid to Each other.” Having experienced the “Feuds and Heart-​­burnings” that Beverley attributed to Nicholson’s administration, Blair similarly called on his parishioners to adopt “an . . . ​affable, courteous, kind,

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and friendly Behaviour to Men.” A properly controlled person, he suggested, would have “no Fierceness or Haughtiness in his Countenance, no Rudeness or Haughtiness in his Speech, [and] nothing that is insolent or affronting in his Action.”103 Soon after Nott arrived in August 1705, James Blair called a meeting of the colony’s clergy. He faced a difficult situation. His archenemy Nicholson remained in Virginia, waiting for a suitable ship to England, and continuing to meet with Virginia’s ministers. Their friendly relationship with the ex-​­governor contrasted sharply with their antagonism toward Blair. The commissary chose the text of his sermon with an eye toward reconciliation. The significance of Jesus’ call to “take my yoke upon you, and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart” would have been readily apparent to contemporaries. As Blair noted elsewhere, meekness was “a right Government of the Passion of Anger.”104 Despite his good intentions, Blair’s sermon did not go well. In praising the new governor “as studious of union & quiet,” Blair could not resist an invidious comparison with Nicholson who had instead sought “Party & faction.” A hostile clergyman present at the meeting later complained that, although Blair had criticized Nicholson, the commissary himself had used “overawing methods” in his “Sermon of meekness.”105 Polite ways of thinking about political and social relationships also recommended an emotional demeanor that best served these ideals. Even more than his ideas and perhaps even his actions, Nicholson’s unbounded anger had seemed to embody the harshness of arbitrary rule. Treating people generously through more carefully controlled expression, Blair and other people argued, worked better than seeking to frighten them into submission. Contemporary discussions of these issues by Blair and Boston’s Mather family reveal the relevance of Nicholson’s behavior to some of the central issues of personal and political relationships. Blair addressed the issue of meekness more extensively (and less troublingly) in another sermon on meekness, a discussion of the beatitude “Blessed are the meek” that formed part of the lengthy series of addresses on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount he published in 1722. Like Increase and Cotton Mather, Blair rejects the idea that anger is bad in itself, comparing it to sheep-​ ­ erding dogs that can be dangerous but very useful if trained properly. The h ministers differed, however, on the proper uses of anger. The Mathers both focused on what Cotton calls “holy Anger,” passionate hatred for sin. Blair instead presents it as a tool of government that should only be unleashed on

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“such [things] as Reason has before taught it are Enemies.” In particular, subordinates (perhaps thinking of the students and slaves he himself commanded) could sometimes need “a Bark of Reproof ” or even “a gentle Pinch of Punishment.” “If in the whole Management of Anger we keep a good Command,” he commented, it can be “of excellent Use in the Government both of larger and lesser Societies.”106 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

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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

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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 he had won election to the colony’s legislature. Even then, however, the governor warned the Commons House about the accusation. Legislators first refused to seat Nairne and then took him into custody. After posting bail, Nairne fled to England. When he appeared before the Lords Proprietors, Carolina’s governing body, the members promoted rather than prosecuted him and encouraged him to write a tract extolling the colony. With his accuser Governor Johnson no longer in office and charges never formally filed, Nairne returned home in 1711 to resume his place as a legislator and (soon afterward) as the colony’s Indian agent.2 Nairne blamed the baseless treason accusation on the governor’s “hatred.” “This Countrey,” the Indian agent explained to a British official, has been “divided into two parties” since Johnson’s “reign” began three years before.



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Nairne himself belonged to the group opposed to the governor. As a legislator, Nairne had played a lead role in passing an Indian trading act over Johnson’s objections—​­before taking up the demanding post of agent it had created. Carolina’s ministers usually took Johnson’s side. But they shared Nairne’s frustration with the “unhappy divisions” of the colony’s public life. Carolinians, one clergyman wrote, were “miserably divided among themselves.”3 Carolina’s difficulties went beyond the disruptions caused by Governor Johnson. Six years after his removal in 1709, the Yamasee War threatened the colony’s very survival. Nairne, not surprisingly, participated in the conflict. Having gone to a village to hear Indian grievances in April 1715, he was taken in a surprise attack the next morning in the war’s first battle. He died after three days of excruciating torture. Although Nairne never achieved, and perhaps never aspired to, the high positions held by Francis Nicholson, the Indian agent’s career may have been as extraordinary as the Virginia governor’s. Nairne worked with Native peoples almost his entire adult life, living (as contemporaries noted) “among the Indians” of southern Carolina, and traveling with them not only westward but south into the Everglades. As agent, he stood up to Carolinians who sought to exploit Natives. Nairne also participated in provincial politics, angering the governor because he both worked with Johnson’s enemies and broke with his fellow Anglicans to support their religious opponents. Nairne’s world, however, went even beyond Carolina and the southeastern part of the continent. He also saw himself as an active leader within the empire, seeking to extend British control over Florida and Louisiana, the centers of Spanish and French power in that part of the world. Undertaken in the middle of a major European war, his 1708 inland trip sought to build a Native coalition that could remove the French from their new settlement at Mobile.4 Each of these settings was deeply problematic. Connecting them—​­and an accused traitor—​­to the politics of politeness appears almost as challenging as navigating them in the first place. A man lying in a prison like “a dog in a hot hole,” or tied to a tree with lighted wooden splinters inserted in his body hardly seems a model of refinement.5 But Nairne himself applied a common set of concerns to each of these three seemingly distinct settings, an approach shaped by the emerging politics of politeness. His letters from Indian country in 1708 noted limited government and shocking levels of equality in each nation he visited. Two years later he celebrated the same characteristics in a pamphlet about Carolina itself. But Nairne did more than pay tribute to theories. He also worked to put them into practice by opposing not only the

Figure 5. The sections of this 1711 map of Carolina published in London portray the elements of Thomas Nairne’s world. The main map moves from Johnson’s plantation in the upper right down to Charles Town and then south to St. Helena’s Island, where Nairne lived. The upper left places Carolina within the southeastern part of the continent. A small map beneath shows St. Augustine, where Nairne had fought with Carolinians and Indians against the Spanish. A Compleat Description of the Province of Carolina in 3 Parts (London: Edward Crisp, 1711). Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.



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arbitrary French, but oppressive Carolinians as well. His fight against traders in Indian villages and the governor in Charles Town over their exploitation of Indians and religious minorities led directly to his time in prison. Nairne’s Carolina was dangerous—​­more hostile to politeness than Virginia under Nicholson only a few years before (Johnson’s tenure began two years before Nicholson’s removal). In both colonies, adherents of the Church of England claimed an important role in governing, opponents of the governor called for moderation, and rulers were accused (as Nairne not surprisingly said of Johnson) of acting “arbitrarily.” But Nicholson’s opponents successfully challenged his authoritarianism by using the ideals of politeness, values that also helped them lead an increasingly settled society. Carolina was more troubled, more diverse religiously, and more immersed in the ferocious divisions of contemporary English political culture. It was also more dependent on Native Americans both for military protection from hostile Spanish and French settlements and for the English colony’s brutal and destabilizing trade in Indian slaves.6 Not surprisingly, Nairne’s concerns were not precisely the same as those of Virginia gentry or London theorists. Caught in a world dominated by the powerful, Nairne not surprisingly spoke less often about building up elite authority. His work in Indian villages or his time in a Carolina jail cell furthermore did not allow fussy attention to elegant equipage. A life living among Native peoples, he wrote in 1705, was not well suited for “the nice delicate sort.”7 Rather than avoiding difficult situations, Nairne characteristically sought them out—​­and attempted to improve them. There is no occupation “more great and noble than that of a Soldier,” Nairne wrote two years after his imprisonment. He hastened to add, however, that this commendation applied only to the soldier who imitates “the Ancient Heroes,” who “makes it his Business to destroy Monsters, . . . ​and root out Oppression from the Face of the Earth.” It was an idealistic vision, one that he himself sought to fulfill. Even more extraordinarily, the values he attempted to defend were shaped less by ancient mythology or medieval chivalry than by the politics of politeness, by a vision of restrained power that sought social harmony not just among Carolinians but the Indian peoples that lived among and around them.8 Having come of age in the late seventeenth century, Nairne’s connection with polite ideas was perhaps not especially surprising. But his commitment to these values was extraordinary, an allegiance that spanned three distinctive settings—​­Indian country, Carolina politics, and the British empire—​­that each

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Figure 6. Noted as the work of “Capt Tho. Nairn,” the upper part of the 1711 map of Carolina is almost certainly based on his 1708 map. It shows Carolina on the edge of an expanse of land controlled in part by the French and the Spanish, but primarily by the region’s numerous Indians. Nairne notes the number of warriors in each nation, as well as the more important paths among them, including the route he took on his 1708 trip. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

posed significant challenges to his ideals. Nairne’s willingness to pursue these goals within such hostile environments suggests that politeness was as important to him as it was to men and women who lived among what he called English “Delicacy.”9

Indian Country In 1708, Nairne wrote a letter to the British secretary of state, the earl of Sunderland, offering advice about empire and Indian affairs. Nairne did not know Sunderland, who had probably never even heard of the agent, but Nairne still wanted to ensure that the southeastern part of the continent would not be neglected in the coming peace negotiations with the French (negotiations that, despite rumors at the time, would not begin for several years). The



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lengthy letter emphasized the importance of the region and its Indians to British interests. An enclosed map detailed the numbers and locations of the peoples of the southeast part of the American mainland. Covering an area stretching from Carolina south to Spanish Florida and west to the new French settlement at Mobile, Nairne’s chart gave special attention to the many Indians who controlled the areas between these European settlements. Together the material offered the fullest account of the region’s human geography then available.10 Nairne’s letter was dated July 10, more than two weeks after he was imprisoned. Yet he gave no indication of his difficulties, describing himself not as a victim of oppression but as an “an Agent, and Intenerary Justice, among the Indians.” Careful attention to self-​­presentation was essential to Nairne’s activities. As agent he singlehandedly mediated endless disputes between traders and natives in Indian villages. On his westward journey a few months before, he had traveled across barely charted territories to the Great Village of the Choctaws, Carolina’s long-​­time foes. And a few months later, he traveled even farther to London, where, despite being a fugitive and an accused traitor, he earned the confidence of Carolina’s proprietors.11 Nairne, however, was not a chameleon, simply fitting into his surroundings. He was also committed to encouraging the relationships recommended by the politics of politeness. Some of these ideals, he believed, were already at work in Native villages he had seen on his western trip, a view that only added to his outrage at European traders who took advantage of their power to treat Indians selfishly and arbitrarily. After Nairne had been imprisoned for ten weeks with little prospect of release, more than sixty residents of his home county of Colleton petitioned the governor to grant bail. Nairne was no traitor, they argued. He had fought for the queen “with great bravery & zeal,” served in the legislature “faithfully,” and labored “with equall Currage and Diligence . . . ​among the Indians.” Keeping him from his work “for the Safety of the country,” they predicted, would lead to “many bad consequences.” The commendation (which petitioners assured the governor was shared by “the generallity” of the county) went beyond mere words. They also offered bond in the substantial sum of £10,000, several times the colony’s annual budget.12 As his neighbors noted, Nairne had by 1708 became an important figure in the colony. Formerly an active legislator, he had become North Carolina’s sole representative in Indian country. His expertise in dealing with Native

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peoples made him a significant figure in defending against attacks from both nearby Indian nations and more distant (but sometimes more troubling) European powers. Though Nairne failed to mention his imprisonment to Sunderland, he truthfully represented himself as someone who worked “among the Indians.” He had already gained local reputation as a dependable figure in Indian affairs when he first appears in the legislative records (bearing the first of many subsequent misspellings of his name). In 1701 the legislature noted Nairne as the center of a local “allarum” system on the edge of Indian country. In the event of an attack, the watch-​­house guard on the Savannah River was to go first “to Cap’t Nearnes.” After warning a nearby settlement, the “2 white men & Six Indjans” were then to “return . . . ​and follow his ord’rs.”13 Nairne’s life before the creation of this plan remains obscure. Born in Scotland, he had arrived in Carolina by 1695, when he appeared as a witness to the will of a recently deceased Carolinian who had moved from London. Nairne soon afterward married the Scottish-​­born widow. The marriage suggests that he was an adult by that year—​­although perhaps not much beyond twenty-​­one since he was serving in the demanding role of Indian agent on his death two decades later.14 By the turn of the century, Nairne lived in Colleton County, the province’s most southern settlement, working among the Yamasee Indians who lived nearby. He accompanied a number of them to the legislature in 1702 so they could complain about “the abuses done to [them] by the Indjan Traders.” The legislators accepted the charge—​­and appointed Nairne to oversee restitution. He commanded both Indian and European troops in Carolina’s attack on the Spanish city of St. Augustine the same year. Nairne joined with thirty-​­three Yamasees in 1703 in an attack on Indians allied with the Spanish in southern Florida, making the first recorded trip into the Everglades by a European.15 Nairne gained his first colony-​­wide office soon afterward, winning election to an ill-​­fated legislature that failed to sit in 1705. He finally joined the Commons House in 1707, becoming one of its most active members. Although he worked on a range of significant measures, he was particularly important in establishing regulation of the colony’s Indian trade. He achieved that goal in July 1707 with a bill that created the position of agent. Presumably to foil the governor, the new law specifically named him to the new post.16 The role of agent was important. The legislators (and all thoughtful Carolinians) knew that the colony’s survival depended on good relationships with nearby Indians. Numbering fewer than 6,000 Europeans and Africans in



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1700, the southernmost English settlement on the mainland faced dangers on all sides. To the north, where North Carolina (still not fully differentiated from South Carolina) technically bordered on Virginia, Native groups like the Tuscarora divided them from the older colony’s settlements. To the south, what would become the British colony of Georgia would not be settled for decades. Spanish Florida lay farther south. To the west were Indian country and a revived French claim in Louisiana. As Nairne noted to Sunderland from the jail cell, Carolina was “a frontier, both against The French and Spaniards.”17 The threat of these European powers was even greater because of a major European conflict. Queen Anne’s War, as it came to be called in America, had already been going on for a half dozen years when Nairne became agent in 1707. It would last a half dozen more, ending only two years before Nairne’s death. Carolina’s fears about France and Spain were not unrealistic. The two countries had staged a sea-​­borne invasion of the colony’s capital in 1706 that lasted four days before it was repulsed. Nairne made his westward journey two years later to prepare a counterstrike against the increasingly active French, a work halted soon after his return because of rumors they were planning another direct attack on the province.18 These military and imperial issues could not be separated from relations with the Native Americans that surrounded and far outnumbered Carolina residents. As Nairne pointed out in 1705, the colony dealt with more Indians than any other British colony in America, perhaps “almost as many as all other English Government put together.” Nairne’s 1715 census of “all the Indian Nations that are subject to the Governmt. of South Carolina and solely traded with them” makes these connections clear. Despite years of population decline, he found twenty-​­one distinct Native groups operated within Carolina’s sphere of influence, some 27,000 Native people.19 Nearly 1,100 of these lived “Mixed with the English Settlements,” almost exactly one Indian for every ten Europeans and Africans in those areas. Except for the Creeks and the Cherokees, both hundreds of miles away, the Indian population around Carolina consisted of smaller nations numbering in the hundreds rather than the thousands, increasing the difficulties of maintaining good relations with all.20 A “breach of friendship between the Indians and us” would be disastrous, the legislature declared in 1707, leading to “the dreadfull Effects of an Indian Warr.” As Nairne warned Sunderland the following year, the French could make things “Intollerably Troublesom” by building alliances with the Indians

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from Mobile to Carolina. The resulting difficulties would endanger even the British colonies to the north of Carolina. Nairne had sought a similar large-​ ­scale coalition to oppose the French. Even smaller partnerships seemed essential. Nairne reassured potential settlers in 1710 that Carolina’s Indian allies could defeat any potential European threat. Nine years earlier the colony had even given the Yamasee a cannon.21 The representatives’ choice of Nairne to represent the colony in this perilous situation testified to their confidence in his leadership abilities. Nairne was an energetic man of action who found parts of the 1708 trip so tame that he spent his days with the hunters seeking game. But he was also thoughtful and deeply inquisitive. His 1710 pamphlet carefully noted both how much more a Carolina blacksmith typically made per day than a bricklayer (one shilling, six pence) and how many female pigs a new farm needed (four). He showed similar care in his work with Native Americans. As he told Sunderland, he sought “to have a very minute account, of all people as well Europeans, as Salvages, from Virginia to the Mouth of the Mississippi,” mastering the fine distinctions separating Saraws from Catapaws, Apalatchees from Apalatchicolas, Congrees from Corsaboys.22 Nairne offered Carolina more than practical expertise. Although he possessed a military man’s desire to push ahead and to make a clear distinction between allies and enemies, he was also deeply idealistic, compelled to oppose injustice, especially the unfair treatment of Indians. These characteristics shaped Nairne’s views of Native societies and his responses to the Europeans who worked within them. Although the purpose of his 1708 trip to the west was primarily diplomatic and military, Nairne seized the opportunity to learn more about Indian life. Despite his long working relationship with more eastern Indians, Nairne seems to have been surprised at what he saw—​­societies with weak governments and hierarchies but strong societies. Already tired of a governor he found selfish and authoritarian (and who would soon throw him into jail), Nairne found that his trip raised these issues in new settings. “Nothing can be farther than absolute monarchy,” Nairne observed at the start of the first extant letter. The Native societies he had visited so far possessed only “the shadow of an Aristocracy”: “One can hardly perceive that they have a king at all.” Since the community punished violations only by disapproval, the “Chief ” and his “councellers” “never venture to sent out any order but what they’re sure will be obeyed.”23



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Leadership in such a setting offered few rewards. Village chiefs (their “micos”) received little preferential treatment, perhaps an elevated seat in the town house, community preparation of his cornfield, and the first deer and bear taken when the town hunted together. They were “honest men,” Nairne decided, seeking to set “a good Example” rather than burdening people “to maintain a needless grandure.” But even this modest position seemed dangerous to the Ochesees and Tallapoosas he first visited. Observing a leader receiving a Carolina commission shake with fear, he learned that local Indians believed that “men of power and authority” were liable to supernatural attack.24 Government was stronger among the Chickasaws, the next major nation he visited, but there too the power of the village leader had “dwindled away to nothing.” Nairne described that shift in terms recalling English history. Tellingly referring to a “king” rather than his previous term “chief,” he suggested that “the king[‘]s own mismangment [had] brought his Authhority to be Disregarded” because, like the deposed James II in England, he had acted contrary to the “constitutions of their Government.” Nairne makes this comparison even clearer by using English political language. He termed the Indians’ view “that the Duties of king and people are reciprocal” “whiggish.”25 Besides this constrained leadership, Nairne also discovered an extraordinary lack of social hierarchy. Villagers worked and played together “without any marks of Destinction,” wearing the same clothing, eating the same food, and living in the same houses. Such equality, Nairne judges, was virtually unimaginable to European theorists. Even the most “republican” writer “could never contrive” such a system. Only the radical John Lilburne, the leader of the mid-​­seventeenth-​­century Civil War’s Leveller movement, would have felt comfortable there. “If this be not Compleat levelling” he declares, “I don[‘]t know what is.”26 As Nairne knew, European political theory scorned societies without strong government or clear hierarchies. He believed that he had found something different. Rather than being hopelessly disordered, Native peoples built other sorts of connections. Friendship became a formal institution, created and confirmed by a ritual that, like a wedding, included presents between families, an “entertainment,” and some characteristics of kinship. Time-​ c­ onstrained travelers could perform a more limited “Freind dance” that included exchanging weapons and clothing. These bonds, Nairne was surprised to find, could even be created between men and women.27 Nairne’s interest in the connections that held together Native societies also

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led him to make the first extended European investigation of the clan system. These ties, he wrote, had “pu[zz]led” him at first. Despite being separated by different languages and “constant quarells,” Indians recognized kinship ties with people throughout the entire southeast, even in nations they otherwise considered enemies. These clans, Nairne noted, were not simply anthropological curiosities. Carolinian traders took Indian “mistresses” in the villages where they worked, not only to connect themselves with her family and the local community, but to make “relations in each Village, from Charles Town to the Missisipi.”28 The clan system also shed light on contemporary European political discussions. The smaller Indian societies he visited, he argued, tested the argument that parental power was the foundation of monarchical authority. John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government, published less than two decades before, had challenged this belief using logic, theory, and biblical example. Nairne’s discussion rested instead on Indian prohibitions against marrying inside one’s own clan. As a result, Nairne noted, even the smallest new society could not operate for long without bringing in members outside the authority of a single father. As another late seventeenth-​­century political theorist, Algernon Sidney, had argued of all legitimate governments, Indian polities required the “consent of a willing people.” Nairne’s speculation about the origin of this prohibition, however, extends his discussion further. He suggests it also meant to encourage respectful social ties, “a politick contrivance” not only to “keep peace” but “to encrease Freindship”—​­in short, an example of the politics of politeness.29 Nairne displays these ideals even more clearly in a comparison among tribes he visited. The Chickasaw, he noted, looked and carried themselves better than the less-​­wealthy eastern nations of the Tallapoosas and Ochesses, much as British “men of Quality” differ from “peasants.” Yet Nairne did not consider the Chickasaws superior. Although outwardly more impressive, they were also so “arrogant” they could not “be[a]r the least affront.” Carolinians, he recommended, would need to make allowance for the “roughness of [the Chickasaws’] temper” until they could be made more “pliable.” Fortunately, their eastern neighbors were more “mannerly and Complaesant,” more “quiet and good Natured.”30 Although Nairne admired Native societies, he was not uncritical. He noted that they lacked “religion, law or useful Arts.” Their government was “mean” and inadequate, especially because it lacked a mechanism for punishing crimes. The last seemed so significant that Nairne paid a subordinate



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leader to visit nearby villages and encourage them to impose “punishments.” Still, he argued, Indian governments were “much better than none at all.”31 In praising limited governments and social cohesion, Nairne was partly playing to his audience. His first letter was addressed to Thomas Smith, speaker of Carolina’s Commons House. Smith was a central leader of the Dissenters’ Party, a group that had allied itself with British Whigs (including Nairne’s jail-​­cell correspondent Sunderland) to oppose Governor Johnson’s authoritarian actions.32 Nairne’s account of “Whiggish” Indians may also have sought to build sympathy for Native Americans. But Nairne’s letters did not simply seek to curry favor from his colleagues—​­or to encourage them to support his Indian policies. Nairne did more than theorize about restrained power, sympathetic interaction, and good nature. As agent, he attempted to make them a reality. In 1705, Nairne called on English leaders to sponsor a missionary among the Indians surrounding South Carolina. Such a person, he wrote, could gain their “fidelity & friendship,” allowing Carolinians to learn more about attitudes and events in Indian country. Indians themselves would gain greater “Ease and Satisfaction” by having “a good man live among them . . . ​who would be a Protector to represent their Grievances to.” Nairne recognized that this would be a challenging assignment. Besides being willing to take up the “hardship & Troubles” of living among the Indians, the missionary could not be allowed to profit from his position. He would instead need to be “disinterested from all the wrangles of Trade.”33 Two years later, Nairne took up the task himself. Although the new post of Indian agent did not include religious responsibilities, it sought to fulfill the goals he had sketched out earlier. Although he too was barred from the Indian trade, Nairne threw himself into the role of “Protector,” displaying the missionary zeal he had expected from an English priest. The new agent worked so hard to restrain the attempts of European traders to take advantage of Indians that some came to see him as a traitor to his nation. The position of agent that Nairne shaped first in the legislature and then in the field gave him legal oversight over the Carolinian middlemen who operated in Indian villages. These traders exchanged European goods for deerskins and slaves in transactions that formed the largest single part of Carolina’s economy. But, as Nairne recognized, this commerce also shaped the colony’s military and diplomatic ties. The region’s Native peoples, he explained in a 1708 letter, chose their allies in large part based on trade, generally aligning

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themselves with the European trading partners that “sell them the best pennyworths.” Though the French had offered substantial presents to gain the favor of the Chickasaw, he noted, the group had maintained their loyalties to Carolina because of its “much beter trade.”34 Despite its importance, however, the Indian trade that contributed so much to Carolina’s economy and its security was not committed to the hands of self-​­denying missionaries or seasoned diplomats seeking the broader public good. Instead, the colony’s commerce was carried out by a somewhat less reassuring group of one or two hundred traders. These men, who generally worked for wealthy Charles Town merchants and planters, could be thoughtful and responsible. Thomas Welch advised the legislature on dealing with the French in 1707 and then accompanied Nairne on the outward-​­bound leg of his journey. He then headed even farther west to the nations along the Mississippi. But many traders richly deserved their reputation for disreputable behavior. As Nairne noted in 1708, their actions “hath been much and long complained of.” Traders defied Carolina’s authority, refusing to take out the licenses required by the trade reform act, pretending not to have seen governor’s orders when they were inconvenient, and even tearing up official notices after they were served.35 Traders were no more respectful to Indians. Even though they lived in Native villages for much of the year, establishing themselves by taking an Indian mistress and thereby claiming membership in family, village, and clan, they often refused to accept community expectations. The Board of Commissioners established by the trade act heard numerous cases against traders, including such misdeeds as taking “a young Indian against her Will for his Wife” and attacking an Indian he suspected of involvement with his sexual partner. After John Frazer had been accused of attacking a town’s leader, another trader called in to testify noted that it was common knowledge that Frazier “was apt to beat and abuse the Indians.”36 Traders also challenged the accepted standards of the slave trade. Customary Native practices such as the sorting of captives during the first several days after the return of a war party or the institution of a peace chief who discouraged fighting often seemed only barriers to further profits. Traders provided guns, ammunition, and encouragement for raids in return for a portion of the captives (and the right to sell the others). Less scrupulous traders even sponsored attacks on Carolina’s allies. The trader James Child arranged an attack on friendly Cherokee villages in 1706, an action that deeply troubled



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legislators and spurred the desire for reform. Nairne called Child’s actions “kidnapping.”37 The office of agent created by the Indian Trade Act passed the next year responded to these concerns. His job, Nairne explained a year later, was to “do justice, among the traders and Indians, [and] to redress all abuses.” Nairne, not surprisingly, took these responsibilities seriously. He quickly arrested Child and intervened in a variety of other cases. Some traders grew so upset at these actions that they began to complain to the governor, even accusing the agent undermining the governor’s authority to Indians. Although Nairne’s statements probably involved explanations of the new system of legal oversight, which placed control of the trade under a Board of Commissioners rather than the governor, Johnson took the traders’ complaints seriously. He sent them to the legislature in fall 1707. Within a few months traders were willing to go even farther. They now swore that Nairne was disloyal not only to the governor but to the queen herself. By then, the agent seemed to be not a protector but a betrayer, a traitor.38 Nairne, however, had few doubts about his actions, believing strongly that he was doing what was best for both Indians and Carolina. He gave little credit to these accusations, in part because he knew the character of his accusers, particularly the two who ended up extending the earlier complaints into more specific testimony in June 1708 that provided the pretext that spurred the governor into action. Nairne explained his lack of concern in a later letter to Sunderland. He wrote off one of the men as a “perfect Lunatick.” Nairne noted that he had jailed the other, John Dixon, a few years before, for bestiality, on the complaint of a trader who witnessed Dixon “Buggering a Brown Bitch.” Perhaps aware that the story might seem improbable, Nairne had his allies get a deposition from the witness (along with testimony from an innkeeper who had heard the offender explain how to have sex with a cat). Despite his conviction, Dixon continued to work in Native villages for years after Nairne’s own arrest—​­and continuing to challenge his authority even after he returned from England.39 In contrast to the casual cruelty of many traders (to animals as well as humans), Nairne treated Native peoples with respect. The Board of Commissioners heard many complaints about traders, but almost none about Nairne. This was not simply the result of the agent’s official position. John Wright, who took over as agent after Nairne’s arrest, was willing to challenge traders in ways that Johnson, whose son-​­in-​­law was a major figure in the Indian trade,

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resisted. But Wright’s relationships soon became deeply problematic. After he was removed in favor of the returned Nairne in 1712, Wright began a seemingly endless series of complaints and suits against the board. His experiences with Indians were even more fraught. Like Nicholson in Virginia, Wright attempted to establish his authority through aggressive demands for obedience. He forced large numbers of Native Americans to wait on him and carry his effects when he traveled, seeking, he explained, to “make them Honour him as their Governor.” The leaders of a Yamasee village complained of Wright’s demands that they provide a lot for a house in its center, and even that residents cut the timber for him.40 Even after he was removed as agent, Wright’s continued dealings with the nation proved troubled. He told a group of Yamasee, one their leaders noted later, that their men were “like women,” and that the Carolinians would capture them all “in one night,” kill their “head men,” and “take all the rest of them for Slaves.” The Yamasee were not the only Native people to resent this severity. Angered at their dealings with Wright, the Albama decided to ally themselves instead with the French.41 Nairne, by contrast, avoided such harshness. The commissioners eagerly sought his return to his position as agent as soon as he returned from England. Less than nine months after he arrived, he agreed to serve as a special commissioner for the Yamasee, perhaps because his seat in the legislature kept him from serving as general agent. Nairne took up the broader position by the end of the year. The relieved commissioners were glad to be rid of the troublesome Wright, but they also made it clear they were pleased to have Nairne back. They were “fully satisfied with your Capacity and Diligence,” they wrote, certain that that he lacked neither “Art nor Adress to manage” relations with the Indians.42

Carolina “Since my last,” Nairne wrote to Sunderland in July 1708, “my ffortunes have mett with a strange turn.” His previous message, with the map of Indian territory, had actually been sent from the same jail cell only two weeks earlier. His revelation of his plight was similarly studied. Having learned, he stated, that Sunderland was “an enemy to all illegall and unjust oppressions,” he had the confidence to “begg yr. Ldsp’s protection” from the “present Governor” of South Carolina. Ever since the beginning of Johnson’s “reign,” he explained, the province had been “divided,” with the governor’s party the



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“most violent.” Nairne had fallen prey to men who “often use their power to crush others.”43 Nairne’s complaints about a governor ruling “arbitrarily” would have seemed much more familiar to Sunderland than the discussion of Indian affairs that followed. But Nairne believed his difficulties in both locations raised the same issues. His discussion of Carolina life, prepared a year after Johnson’s 1709 dismissal, highlights the same limited government and social harmony he had noted in Native communities. Nairne held that both Johnson and the Indian traders undermined these values by seeking their self-​­interest at the expense of the community’s health and safety. In Carolina as well as Indian country, Nairne believed, his opponents failed to treat less powerful people with respect and concern. The disputes between Nairne and Johnson involved more than their personal differences. Nairne and Johnson, and the factions they belonged to in Carolina (and that they associated with in England), proposed different means of establishing the political stability so lacking in England and its empire. Even as the Indian agent sought to make broader connections, the more restrictive governor typically attempted to declare Nairne an alien and an unfaithful Anglican even before calling him a traitor. As a look at Sunderland’s relationship with these same issues reveals, the battles between Nairne and Johnson were fought on terrain also being contested in contemporary British politics. A little less than two years after he feared dying in a jail cell, Nairne was considerably more optimistic. Having successfully moved to London (and with Johnson no longer in office), Nairne published a 1710 pamphlet encouraging people to move to Carolina. The author presented himself anonymously as a “Swiss Gentleman” who had emigrated and now led a “quiet peaceable life.” This new persona, however, did not signal new preoccupations. Nairne’s praise for Carolina’s government and society recall his earlier work in Indian country, his difficulties with the former governor, and the politics of politeness.44 Freed from Johnson’s attacks, Nairne had personal reasons to feel satisfied. But he was also convinced that Carolina’s limited government and healthy society would be deeply appealing to continental Europeans. Nairne believed the Yamasee had been similarly drawn to the colony. They had left Spanish Florida, a minister who had talked with him reported in 1705, “to live under the mild Government of the English.”45

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Nairne ranges widely in the pamphlet, offering advice on costs and planting as well as careful estimates of the size of racial and religious groups, not surprising from a man who took censuses and made maps in his previous position as Indian agent. But Nairne also includes an extensive celebration of Carolina’s commitment to the restrained government and social harmony he had already previously observed in letters from Indian country. While continental European societies subjected their inhabitants to “the Caprice and absolute Pleasure of a[n] . . . ​Intendant,” he argued, Carolina was “founded upon the generous Principles of civil and religious Liberty.” Further legislation had helped secure those “valuable Privileges.” As a result, Carolina’s legal rules rather than the “arbitrary Decisions of the Governours and Judges” defined “the Measure and Bounds of Power.” Admittedly, “politick Diseases” and “Mismangements” could still develop. “But Liberty is so well and legally established” in Carolina that the people could “throw off ” these difficulties “and restore the Publick to a State of Health.”46 Nairne’s account paid particular attention to Carolina’s legal system. He admitted that collusion between a “bad Governour, Judge, and Attorney General” working with corrupt witnesses could “easily” create “frivilous,” “unjust,” or “illegal” prosecutions. But convictions, he pointed out, required similarly corrupt juries—​­and Carolina was well prepared to resist that possibility. Nairne lovingly details the colony’s complex rituals of jury selection, beginning with a young child choosing the names to be called from a triple-​­locked box whose keys are held by three different people. Another child picks a smaller number from that group to serve when the court assembles. This “noble Law,” Nairne noted, prevented the “Ruin” of people who had incurred the “Malice or Displeasure” from a powerful official.47 Nairne’s confidence seems surprising from someone who had suffered so much from Carolina’s governor and legal system. But these earlier difficulties perhaps inform the pamphlet’s discussion. Despite his prolonged imprisonment Nairne had always remained certain he would prevail in court. Even though Johnson had made the law “a strange sort of Proteus capable of putting on all shapes and figures,” Nairne had sought not an end to the prosecution itself, but release on bail and assurance of a speedy trial. Even the governor, Nairne believed, knew conviction was impossible. He was certain that no Carolina jury would “hang a kitten” upon such evidence.48 Nairne’s account describes a society as healthy as its legal system. Carolinians were more “generous” than any other group, seldom showing any signs of “Moroseness and Sullenness of Temper.” Even though they had been



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persecuted in France, Huguenots were “belov’d by the English.” European servants were “treated with as much Gentleness as any where in the World.” Even orphans were generally taken in by the wealthy. Nairne attributed some of this compassion to Carolina’s ministers, who he praises for “refining those Dispositions that were otherwise rude and untractable”—​­in other words, making people more polished, complaisant, and polite.49 Nairne’s celebration of Carolina seems to have been sincere, not an attempt to impress his sponsors or his readers. He had displayed similar attitudes in letters from Indian country two years before. Both discussions were deeply concerned with the power of leaders and proper limits. Both celebrated social cohesion developed without coercive rulers and institutions. Nairne had preferred the more sociable Tallapoosas to the haughty Chickasaws—​­and he praised Carolina itself for the same good qualities, looking to the health of the society (or at least of its free people) more than to the power of its leaders. Such broader measures of politeness led him to recover his optimism even after both he and Carolina itself had suffered through Johnson’s “violent” rule.50 Nairne called Johnson arbitrary and violent. The governor’s opinion of Nairne was even worse. The 1708 treason charge capped a history of accusations that had begun five years before and grown more intense over time. The first evidence of these suspicions came when the governor dismissed Nairne’s request to provide religious instruction for Indians. Johnson next attempted to keep the future Indian agent out of the legislature. These disputes went beyond specific personal and political differences. They also drew on issues that had been part of British discussions about both politics and politeness. Many of these concern can be seen even in the first recorded interaction between the two. The Reverend Samuel Thomas arrived in Carolina on Christmas day 1702 fully expecting to work with the Yamasee Indians. He had been sent by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, a new organization seeking to strengthen the Church of England by supporting ministers within the empire. Nairne, who had been the first to suggest the idea, invited the new minister to live with him.51 Unfortunately for Nairne’s plans, Thomas called upon the governor before going to Nairne’s house. The young man was received “with great Kindness” and “extraordinary respect and civility”—​­and warned that his plans were dangerously naïve. The governor considered living among the Yamasee

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hazardous. Thomas could be captured by “Spanish Indians” who might sell him into slavery or, worse yet, burn him alive. Even if he remained safe, he was unlikely to succeed since the Yamasee language was too “barbarous” to communicate the truths of Christianity. Thomas would be better advised to stay at the governor’s house near the Cooper River, serving as his chaplain and holding daily services in the household, while also ministering to the other planters in the colony’s wealthiest neighborhood.52 Despite Nairne’s assurances that he would be safe, Thomas chose to stay with the governor. The decision was not surprising. Johnson was one of the colony’s wealthiest men and certainly its most prominent. His household, Thomas noted, was “very large, with many servants and slaves,” in part because he had been accumulating large tracts of Carolina land even before settling there in 1689. Thomas must have been even more impressed by Johnson himself, a former member of Parliament who had been honored with a knighthood.53 Nairne, not surprisingly, was less pleased. The Society’s “good & charitable intentions,” he complained, had been “quite P[er]verted.” Thomas’s contention that he was working primarily with Africans (and thus fulfilling his plan to work with “Heathens”) was a laughable “untruth.” Even if it were accurate, the idea that the “People who have the best Estates in this Country” needed financial assistance to educate their slaves was “highly base & dishonorable.” Wealthy planters should pay for such instruction themselves rather than “Spunging upon the Society whose Charity ought rather to be employed to help them who are not otherwise able to help themselves.” With Thomas lured away from working among Indians, Nairne proposed a new plan for the same purpose to be paid for by shared sacrifices from the crown, the Proprietors, and Indian traders. Rather than simply replacing the waylaid Thomas, he recommended bringing in a half dozen ministers to live among the Indians.54 The incident reveals some characteristic differences between Johnson and Nairne. By bringing Thomas into his neighborhood, into his very household, the governor sought to strengthen both the older institutions of church and state, and traditional distributions of power. Nairne by contrast attempted to bring the marginal Yamasee literally into communion with white Carolinians, even with the staunchly Anglican governor. Nairne similarly emphasized elite responsibility to sacrifice for their community, the idea of “reciprocall” obligations he attributed to British Whigs and American Chickasaws. This goal of broader inclusion (although not without limits) was also central to the politics of politeness. Rather than seeking to discipline society strictly, it insisted that

Figure 7. Sir Nathaniel Johnson, governor of South Carolina, wears both armor and lace, displaying his military role and social rank. The image was painted in 1705, the year before the French and Spanish invaded Charleston—​­and three years before he imprisoned his nemesis Thomas Nairne. Gibbes Museum of Art. © Image Gibbes Museum of Art/Carolina Art Association. Artist unknown.

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good order and authority could be strengthened by broadening the boundaries of concern.55 Although there is no evidence that the dispute over the Thomas case became public, or even that Johnson or Nairne contacted each other directly, the governor clearly knew about the future Indian agent’s complaints—​­or at least his broader opposition to Johnson’s plans. A few months after Nairne proposed a plan for further missionaries, the two came into conflict over a very different issue, this time in Carolina’s late 1705 legislative elections. After Nairne was declared a winner, the governor (as he would in 1708) intervened with the legislature to oppose seating him. Johnson even threatened to punish the sheriff who certified the election. Nairne could not serve, Johnson argued, because a recent English law had made him ineligible.56 The governor’s argument was problematic. It was, first of all, wrong about the specifics of the law. Passed in February 1705 (allowing plenty of time for text to arrive in Carolina), the act declared that after December of that year Scots would be barred from receiving “any Benefit or Advantage of a Natural-​ ­born Subject of England.” But its first sentence explicitly excluded from these provisions Scots who were “now settled Inhabitants within the Kingdom of England, or the Dominions thereunto belonging,” a clause that clearly included Nairne.57 Johnson’s application of the law disregarded not only its specifics, but its intent. Whereas the governor used it to exclude Scots from power, English law sought to include them. England and Scotland had long been separate countries under a common sovereign, but Scotland had recently refused to ratify English plans to name a successor to Queen Anne if (as seemed likely) she remained childless. This resistance spurred attempts to maintain the tie between the two nations. Supported by the queen, the English government recommended a full political union, creating the 1705 Alien Act to push their northern neighbors to agree. After Scotland was committed to negotiations, the English government repealed the act’s punitive measures in December 1705 (probably too late to have been transmitted to Carolina before the formation of the legislature in early January 1706).58 Johnson’s attempt to block Nairne’s rise is particularly telling because it followed patterns set in English politics. The 1707 Act of Union, creating Great Britain out of England and Scotland, was not universally popular. While Whigs largely supported it, their Tory political opponents were more skeptical, in part because they were too invested in preaching obedience to the monarch to find considering a distant German relative to succeed Anne fully acceptable. Some Tories continued to feel similar discomfort about the



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Glorious Revolution, even though it was by then a settled reality. Tories also disliked the prospect of bringing the non-​­Anglican Church of Scotland into the nation, a development less troubling for the Whigs, who relied on the support of Dissenters and Church of England moderates. The earl of Sunderland played an important role in each of these events. Not only was he a member of the powerful Whig “Junto” that led the party in these years, but he had served as one of the commissioners that negotiated the pact with Scotland and as the party’s manager when the House of Lords considered the resulting 1707 Act of Union.59 Whereas Nairne turned to a Whig for help in 1708, Johnson owed his earlier elevation to the governorship to a Tory. John Grenville, a staunch supporter of the Church of England, had taken over as head of the Lords Proprietors in 1701. He joined the Privy Council the same year, appointed by the recently crowned Queen Anne in her quest to strengthen the previously out-​ ­of-​­favor Tories. Under Grenville’s leadership, the Proprietors made Johnson governor in 1702. The following year, Grenville received a peerage, making him a counterweight to the enthusiastic Whig, Sunderland. Johnson lost his position as governor only after Grenville stepped down.60 Having dismissed Nairne’s concerns about Indians in 1702–​­1703 and labeled him an alien in 1706, Nathaniel Johnson soon came to see Nairne as even more dangerous. He was not simply someone who did not belong but someone who defied the obligation to belong, less an outsider than a traitor. Although it was not until mid–​­1708 that Johnson charged Nairne with being a false Briton, the governor and his allies had previously considered him an unfaithful Anglican. The two issues were closely related. Nairne’s letter to Sunderland suggests that his resistance to the governor’s deeply controversial religious policies was one of the central causes of the antagonism that culminated in the treason charge. The intersection of religious loyalties and politics had been central to Nairne’s first election to the Commons House in 1705, a process that proved difficult at every stage. Even finding candidates to run in Nairne’s Colleton County had been problematic. Only a few residents were both eligible and willing. Even fewer voted. The only surviving account of the election notes that fourteen people appeared on the Colleton ballot and ten people went to the polls. These problems only grew worse when the Commons House met in January 1706. Eventually so few legislators agreed to take the oaths prescribed by recent laws that it became impossible for the assembly to meet.

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The governor dissolved the session and called new elections for the following month.61 Johnson’s attempt to exclude his opponent Nairne had been part of his attempt to strengthen the Church of England. He had taken the post, he told a minister in 1708, for religious reasons. Normally, the minister reported, Johnson “wou’d Scorn such a poor and precarious Government as this is, were not the Preservation & Establishmt of the Church a Consideration Superior to all others.”62 This religious concern went beyond the personal attention and encouragement shown by his Virginia counterpart, Francis Nicholson. The Carolina governor also wanted to give the church and its members greater political power. He began by calling for extending religious restrictions. Officials in England had long been required to take the Anglican sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. These rules, however, had been so loosely enforced that less rigid Dissenters could meet the legal requirements simply by participating irregularly in the Anglican rite. Angered by the ruse, zealous Anglicans introduced the controversial Occasional Conformity Bill banning the practice in 1702, the year Johnson took up the governorship. Two years later, Johnson called for a similar measure in Carolina, pushing it through a lower house that had not yet fully assembled. Although the new law largely brought the colony only into line with older English practice, it applied to a very different setting. Attendance at the Anglican sacrament could be more easily monitored in Carolina, with its handful of churches. Even more important, unlike in England, church members were a minority in Carolina. Johnson’s measure, explicitly declaring its intent to keep “persons of different persuasions” out of the Commons House, at one stroke banned both a majority of voters and a substantial proportion of sitting assembly members from serving in the future. Later that year Johnson used the new power granted to Anglicans to pass a bill providing their church with tax support.63 Johnson’s opponents fought back first in Carolina and then in London. The Commons House itself voted to repeal the Exclusion Act less than a year after its passage. In response, the governor dissolved the body and blocked the measure in the upper house. Frustrated at home, Carolina’s Dissenters took their complaints to England. After the Proprietors, still dominated by Johnson’s Tory patron, proved unsympathetic, the Dissenters’ agent found a powerful ally in the Whig leader Lord Sunderland.64 Sunderland may also have helped Carolina Dissenters enlist a key figure in the English debate about religious conformity, a man already employed by the government.



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Cosmopolitan Carolinians would already have known of the work of Daniel Defoe, particularly his 1702 satire of Anglican attacks on Dissenters and occasional conformists, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters. Defoe produced a pamphlet on the Carolina situation that labeled the offending measures “Party-​­Tyranny.”65 The Dissenters’ new English allies helped turn the imperial government against Johnson’s innovations. Accepting Defoe’s clever argument that Johnson’s measures actually reduced the church’s power, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel voted to oppose the changes in Carolina law. Their complaint in turn helped Sunderland bring the issue to the House of Lords. The Whig leader took a particular interest in the matter, managing a vote condemning the Carolina measures, serving on the committee drafting an address, and then personally presenting it to the House. After the queen voiced her support of the Lords’ action, the Board of Trade ordered the governor to void the measures. Johnson complied in late 1706, but only after the legislature passed a revised bill continuing funding for the Church. This public support, he told the representatives, had been the primary purpose of the Exclusion Act. Once these taxes were established, there was no harm in repealing the legislative ban.66 Nairne played no discernable role in the English side of the struggle, but he clearly followed it closely. His 1708 jail cell pleas to Sunderland called him an opponent of government “oppressions.” Nairne described Johnson’s decision to hold him without bail as “the shortest way” to oppress him. When he finally gained an Assembly seat in spring 1707, not coincidentally in the first election after the end of Johnson’s policies, he quickly threw his support behind the newly energized Dissenters. The body approved an address of thanks to the queen and House of Lords for opposing Johnson’s innovations in its first month of meeting, leading the angry governor to dissolve the legislature. As Johnson undoubtedly knew, the address had been drafted by Nairne.67 The governor and his supporters considered Carolina Anglicans an important cause of their defeat. The Dissenters themselves, of course, were the true villains. Johnson described them as “Domestick ffoes” in his call to replace the Church Act. Driven by hatred of the Church and civil government, he had argued earlier, they were its “Declared” and “open Enemyes.”68 But the hostility of Dissenters was expected. Church of England adherents, on the other hand, had a responsibility to defend it. “True [sons] of your Mother the Church of England” could not support the Dissenters’ program. Johnson’s opponents instead were “Hypocriticall Pretenders” and “false heart’d friends,”

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even “Januses to the Church” who claimed to be loyal while, like that Roman deity, displaying another face that countenanced the Dissenters’ false claims. Adopting a similar metaphor in 1708, a newly arrived minister called the governor’s opponents “half faced Churchmen” who were actually Dissenters, a more generous view than Chief Justice Nicholas Trott, who, the previous year, had judged them “really of no Religion.” These “Seditious and Designing persons,” he explained, were responsible for the defeat of the governor’s party in the 1707 elections that brought Nairne into the legislature.69 Neither the governor nor his supporters named these opponents but the category likely included Nairne. He certainly thought so, telling Sunderland that opposing the “Excludeing Act” and writing the Assembly address celebrating its end had “laid [him] open to the hatred of the Governor.”70 The conflict between Johnson and Nairne over religion followed patterns already visible in their earlier conflicts. While the governor once again sought to strengthen traditional centers of power, Nairne worked closely with the Dissenters. The disputes between the two men furthermore went beyond the personal. Johnson’s policies raised issues that were central to both the period’s political divisions and the politics of politeness that sought to ease its tensions. Contemporaries summed up their concerns in the term “moderation,” the word that had played an important part in criticism of Francis Nicholson and had become closely identified with the Whig party’s call both for broader acceptance of marginalized religious views and for restrained government power. A 1703 attack on the Occasional Conformity Bill went by the title “Moderation a Virtue.” In a sequel proclaiming “Moderation Still a Virtue,” the author judged the ideal “absolutely necessary to the Tranquillity of all Societies.” Former Carolina governor John Archdale, a proprietor who sympathized with the Dissenter party, not surprisingly spoke of it as the “Moderate Party.”71 Already convinced Nairne was an unfaithful Churchman, the governor did not have to go much farther to declare Nairne a disloyal Briton as well. Indian traders had already sent the governor in the fall of 1707 reports that Nairne had spoken slightingly of the queen. After his return from his westward journey, the same two men informed the governor that Nairne had again spoken disloyal words, this time not in Indian villages but in Charles Town. He had been part of a group reading a Boston newspaper that included a message from the House of Lords to the queen. In an address drafted by a committee that included Sunderland, the Lords had warned against relying on people who had not supported the 1688 Glorious Revolution. Nairne

Figure 8. This inset in the 1711 map of Carolina shows Charles Town, the province’s capital, with its five churches and meetinghouses as well as the defensive fortifications built by Governor Johnson. Near the bottom left is “Johnsons Fort,” recently built to defend against French and Spanish attack. It was later used to fire the first shots on Fort Sumter in 1861, starting the Civil War. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

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commented on the perils facing the nation at that earlier time, pointing out that the birth of James II’s son had increased the possibility of another Catholic monarch. The two bystanders reported to the governor that Nairne had declared the former king’s son, now the pretender supported by the French, the rightful heir to the throne. It was little to go on, especially for a capital crime. Nairne himself was certain the charges resulted from the earlier interactions between the two. Only “malice,” Nairne argued to Sunderland, would explain why the governor was not “ashamed to make use of such evidences of talk of dethroneing a great prince among the pine trees 4000 miles from her.”72 Treason itself was a particularly sensitive issue at a time when each side of the political divide accused the other of betrayal: Tories charged that Whigs preached resistance to authority; Whigs that Tories rejected the Glorious Revolution. Recent British history offered few fixed principles. A society that defined treason as betraying the monarch had executed one king in 1649 and deposed another some forty years later. In both cases, furthermore, children of the previous king remained active for years afterward. But two sons of the first became king, while the son of the second, although his sisters became monarchs, continued to be barred from the throne. The situation in 1708, when the pretender attempted to invade Britain, was particularly worrisome. Britain was at that time ruled by a monarch without a clear heir, and British officials had been forced to name as her successor an obscure German relative who did not even speak English. In this charged atmosphere, Johnson may even have taken some satisfaction in the irony of his claim against Nairne. One of the governor’s enemies had seemingly voiced support for the pretender, the very charge that Whigs often made against Tories. Nairne had done so, furthermore, in a discussion about an address from the House of Lords to the queen, the very circumstance that had led to the defeat of Johnson’s earlier policies. Nairne made these comments in the presence of Edward Marston, a Charles Town priest who drove the governor to distraction. Marston’s anger at Johnson’s religious policies had led to harsh denunciations from the pulpit. The governor’s party responded just as harshly, encouraging the governor to withhold the minister’s salary for over a year (and create a Church Act provision designed specifically to remove Marston, a clause Defoe seized on to raise opposition in the British church).73 Like many of Carolina’s leaders, Marston was caught up in the tangled history of loyalty in the recent British world. He had become a nonjuror after the Glorious Revolution, joining a significant number of Anglican priests in



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refusing to swear allegiance to the new monarchs. As a result, he lost his clerical position. Although Marston accepted the new regime before leaving for America, he still suggested as late as 1705 that other former nonjurors could be sent to Carolina.74 Johnson never noted Marston’s problematic past in his attacks on Nairne, perhaps because the governor himself had a similar history. As governor of the Caribbean Leeward Islands in 1688, Johnson had been unwilling to renounce the deposed James II, continuing to declare his fealty even after the king fled to France. The governor replied to the Board of Trade’s call to proclaim William and Mary by declaring that, since the “doctrines of the Church of England” taught that active resistance was wrong, he could not continue as governor. Johnson remained in office until a replacement was named, failing to stop either domestic unrest or even foreign invasion effectively. He then moved to Carolina with no prospects for further government position. He swore allegiance to the new regime only in 1702, after the death of the deposed James—​­just in time to accept the Carolina post offered by the staunch Anglican Tory, Lord Grenville. This shift did not put the issue behind him. Johnson undoubtedly knew that the controversy over his church policies raised charges in England that he was “disaffected to the late Government.”75 The issue of treason helps clarify the connections between party divisions and the politics of politeness. Politeness was clearly not the exclusive possession of a political party. But the ideas of the early Whigs, their rejection of arbitrary government, and their emphasis on moderation and inclusion in church and state, were clearly more identified with politeness. Both Whiggery and politeness responded to the widespread desire to reconstruct social order on firmer grounds than Tory’s authoritarian attempts to reinforce older distinctions and sacred institutions.76 At the same time, however, politeness and political divisions were also at odds. Parties ultimately sought to gain power rather than represent particular ideas. The demands of political battles and the compromises necessary for gaining and keeping power wore away any consistent identification with a single idea or ideology. Yet parties also found it difficult to resist the temptation to attack opponents as disloyal. Politeness attempted to do something different. Without repudiating policy debates or party competition, it rejected divisiveness and poisonous hostility, seeking instead to create a space outside political divisions. As Addison wrote in the Spectator in 1711 just before Nairne left England, the “dreadful spirit of division” in British life had destroyed “the seeds of good-​­nature, compassion, and humanity.” Nairne the previous year

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had already carefully assured potential immigrants that Carolinians were not, in Addison’s terms, “furious zealots,” or “barbarians toward one another.” Instead they were, Nairne stated, “hospitable, generous, and willing to do good Offices to Strangers.”77

The Empire Even a charge of high treason did not diminish Nairne’s desire to advise her majesty’s government. Along with his map of the southeastern part of the mainland, his first jail-​­cell message to the earl of Sunderland in July 1708 included an extended discussion of the region’s geopolitics. French control of southeastern Indians, he warned, would be disastrous not only for Carolina, but for the colonies to the north. At the same time, however, English alliances with these Native nations could drive the French from Mobile. Nairne’s vision did not stop there. By removing the French, Britain could then take over the French Mississippi River fur trade far to the north—​­and share in the profits of trade with New Mexico, the Spanish viceroyalty stretching from Mexico to what is now Canada.78 Neither of these scenarios developed, in part because Native nations refused to side fully with either French or English aspirations. Instead of aiding widespread European conquest, the Indians around Carolina banded together for the large-​­scale assault on the colony that Nairne had long feared. The Yamasee War led to great suffering not only for the agent, but for the Indians and colonists he had worked to protect. But the conflict also made possible the more restrained and peaceful society he had celebrated, a society where the politics of politeness could develop. All Nairne’s skills, the “Art” and “adress” the commissioners praised as he returned as agent, could not save him in the end. On the Thursday before Easter in April 1715, he traveled with other colonial officials to the Yamasee central village to hear their complaints. After a long discussion and a fine dinner prepared by villagers, the Carolinians awoke Good Friday morning to discover “a great multitude” painted in red and black, the colors of war and death. Many of the assembled colonial leaders (including Wright) met their fate immediately. The Yamasee took special care, however, in torturing the man who, more than any other colonist, had attempted to balance Indian, Carolinian, and British interests. He remained alive (and in agony) for three days.79



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As Nairne would have known, such treatment did not necessarily indicate hatred or contempt. Torture also expressed respect for an opponent’s bravery and importance. But the Yamasee’s actions clearly rejected Nairne’s attempts to protect them. Although he had long lived among them, they now declared him (like all Carolinians) an enemy, a betrayer. Killing Nairne signaled to Indians as well as colonists that the Yamasee no longer believed in the possibility of compromise.80 The Yamasee’s final judgment of Nairne was not entirely wrong. The Indian agent had long been a prominent defender of alliances with Indians in Carolina—​­and, more important, their most active and most committed British protector in their villages. Yet the Yamasee also recognized the danger of Nairne’s activities. His work as military leader and Indian agent made him complicit in the warfare and slavery that blighted the region.81 The potential for such damage was particularly clear in Nairne’s 1707 and 1708 plans to push back French power in Mobile (the first partially put into action with his westward trip; the second sent to Sunderland later that year). In each, Nairne argued that an alliance between Carolina and Native Americans could defeat the French and their supporters. Both plans relied heavily on Indian warfare and slavery. Drawing on the distinctive experience of earlier attacks on Spanish Florida, Nairne did not request British money or military aid to attack Mobile. Carolina, he told Sunderland, could expel the French by itself—​­”only by trading and other mannagement.” Nairne proposed using 1,545 soldiers, a force that would have required more than one-​­third of his colony’s free population. But 1,500 of these troops would be Indians. Carolina would contribute only forty-​­five. The colony would need to pay the latter and perhaps provide military supplies for both groups, but its initial outlay primarily would have required buying presents to gain the support of recalcitrant nations. Indian fighters went to war based only on the promise of plunder—​­the opportunity to take enemy goods and, more important, people that could be sold into slavery.82 Earlier campaigns against the Spanish and their Native allies using this model had been extraordinarily effective militarily, dramatically reducing Spanish power. But the conflict had also brought great misery. The flight or capture of Spanish-​­allied Indians created a depopulated zone of perhaps 800 square miles across the Panhandle, an area, Nairne told Sunderland, “full of Catle and horses” that were now “all wild.” Nairne’s plan suggested a similar strategy for the area around Mobile. Besides the French themselves, the

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Indian nations that supported them would also need to be attacked. Nairne expected, he told Sunderland, “quite to ruine” them.83 Nairne’s plans for a full-​­scale assault on Mobile and the Native nations around it would have spread not only war but slavery. Originally an extension of the traditional Native practice of enslaving war captives, Carolina’s slave trade had begun in the 1670s on a relatively small scale, a minor part of a commerce focused primarily on deerskins. Over time, however, Europeans turned what had been local custom into commercial enterprise—​­making captives into what Nairne called “merchandise.” As Europeans began to engage in warfare of their own after the turn of the century, Carolina’s trade grew rapidly, selling Native people not only within the region but beyond, from New England to the West Indies. In all, Carolina sold 30,000 to 50,000 Native people, mostly noncombatant women and children, in the years before 1715.84 Nairne’s personal role in these developments is unclear. Like both the Yamasee and the free Carolinians he worked with, he seems to have had no scruples about slavery when it was practiced by Carolina or its allies. One of his 1708 letters sympathized with Chickasaws being captured by cunning “man-​­stealers,” but he showed no corresponding concern when he observed the Chickasaw taking columns of slaves to market. Nairne’s own involvement is less clear. His growing role in Indian affairs after the turn of the century suggests that he was involved in at least some trade, and presumably in dealing in slaves. The Indians he joined on military expeditions in Florida would have sought to bring back captives (although the only specific evidence of his own plunder is a report of him bringing back a bell or two from St. Augustine).85 Nairne’s appointment as Indian agent banned him from personal commercial activity, but gave him a new public role. Legislators called on him to advise on military matters and to command the proposed attack on Mobile. More important, his new position gave him a central role in the slave trade itself. Despite his attempts to promote more just interactions (and in some ways because of them), his four years as agent helped make possible the continuation of a trade that inflicted untold harm not only on individual Native peoples but also on their villages, their nations, and the region as a whole. By moving under the protection of Carolina in the 1690s, the Yamasee became powerful aggressors rather than potential victims, prepared to profit from the system of warfare and slavery spreading into the Southeast. Spanish Florida, their former home, offered particularly rich opportunities for slaving. By the



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second decade of the century, however, the area no longer offered the ready source of captives that had enriched the Yamasee people. Aggressive traders intent on collecting debts increasingly attempted to hold families or even entire villages responsible for repayment. A number of Yamasee became convinced that Carolina creditors might take possession of their lands or even their families.86 Nairne’s second term as Indian agent operated in the shadow of these anxieties. Some Yamasee saw his appointment in 1712 as a prelude to the confiscation of their land. Nairne himself does not seem to have become more difficult or threatening. Even as Native people continued to raise regular complaints to the commissioners—​­particularly about Wright, even after he returned to work as a trader, they made no comparable charges against Nairne himself. Still his 1715 census of Indian populations became another focus of anxiety. These fears of enslavement made the Yamasee eager participants in the pan-​­Indian alliance forming secretly to challenge English domination of the region. Although they were not the prime movers in that group, they were the first to attack in April 1715. The Yamasee remained the colony’s most committed enemy throughout the war.87 Five years before, Nairne had praised the nobility of “Ancient Heroes.” He contrasted this role, one that he clearly thought he had himself taken on, with the mercenaries who served as “instruments in the Hands of Tyrants, to ravage and depopulate the Earth.” Nairne may have thought of himself as a protector, but he also served a system that ended up creating the same harsh realities. Such actions, he had warned, would be held to “a strict and severe Account.” Both for Nairne and his colony, the war that began in 1715 led to just such a reckoning.88 The Yamasee War proved devastating on all sides. Nairne, Wright, and two-​ ­thirds of Carolina’s Indian traders were killed. In all, nearly 7 percent of the colony’s population died in what became the most destructive war between Natives and colonists since the first years of English settlement, proportionately twice as much as New England in King Philip’s War. The Yamasee suffered even more, losing about one-​­quarter of their total population to death or captivity. Nearly all the rest left the area. Many went back to Spanish Florida, returning occasionally to attack Carolina into the 1720s.89 Yet, unexpectedly, these deaths, the burnt and torn flesh of Nairne and hundreds of other Indians and Europeans, helped give birth to new societies better suited to Nairne’s ideals. The years after the Yamasee War saw the

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development of the more controlled government and harmonious social interactions he had valued (and, although idealistically, had described)—​­a world more hospitable to the politics of politeness. Just as surprisingly, these developments also involved significant expansion of government capacities, a series of changes not as far removed from the aspirations of Nairne and Sunderland as might be expected—​­or from the origins and broader meanings of the politics of politeness. The remaking of Nairne’s world began in Indian country. The Indian slave trade ended almost immediately and never returned. Along with the end of the sustained large-​­scale warfare that had encouraged its expansion, this change spurred a reconfiguration of Native authority. As the Yamasee nation collapsed in the wake of the war, many members joined the Creeks and Seminoles, two of the coalescing societies that emerged from the wreckage of the region. These nations were better able to resist warfare and concessions to the English than the smaller groups that had previously peopled the region. This new balance of power directly affected the experiences of South Carolina governors, who went from profiting from the presents given by Indians (until Nairne’s reform bill applied these gifts to public purposes) to investing significant energy in managing relationships that over time came to require significant amounts of public money for gifts given to reconstructed Native nations.90 The war also changed Carolina. The end of the Indian slave trade accelerated the shift to African labor that had begun a decade before. Enslaving Africans was no less brutal than holding Indians, but it was more sustainable. Partly because it did not require warfare on the frontiers of the province, African slavery could be seen as a private, household relationship in a way the servitude of relatively nearby Natives could not. At the same time, Carolina itself became less divided. The expansion of the Anglican church engineered by Johnson made it Carolina’s dominant religious organization, easing the religious bitterness that had convulsed the colony’s politics.91 Carolina’s new stability also rested on closer relations with the British government. The war and its aftermath exposed more plainly than ever the problems of proprietary rule. Spurred by Carolina discontent, the British government took over political control in 1719, two years later sending as its first royal governor the still pugnacious but somewhat subdued Francis Nicholson. Not surprisingly, Nicholson instituted a program of extensive communications with the home government (as well as numerous meetings with Native peoples). The growing stability of British politics along with this



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imperial assertiveness helped extricate Carolina from the bitter partisanship that had upended the colony. Having developed the internal order that had eluded it so long, South Carolina became the least fractious colony on the mainland—​­and its capital a significant center of polite society.92 By 1729, when the British government took over the last vestiges of the Proprietors’ power in the Carolinas (leaving them only a small remnant of land in the north), the world that Nairne had sought to negotiate was almost completely gone. The ideal of an ancient hero seeking to destroy monsters that so impressed Nairne no longer proved as relevant in a society where both internal and external authority were stronger and more stable than ever before. This expansion of government in both Carolina and Indian country, however, did not represent a repudiation of Nairne’s vision. Although his letters from his westward trip suggested that Indian society operated relatively effectively with almost no government and his promotional pamphlet celebrated ancient heroes, his own consistent response to tyrants and the lack of freedom was to build proper authority. Carolina’s Indian trade reform, the policy initiative he was most closely identified with, dramatically increased government oversight, creating a bureaucracy with a full-​­time agent, a board of commissioners, and a secretary all supported by public funds. Nairne also sought to expand authority in Indian country. As agent, he paid deputy chiefs to travel among the Tallapoosas and their neighbors speaking out against “such Crimes as would disturb their Societys.” In the future, he wrote, he hoped to help Indians move beyond informal reprimands and shaming of criminals to “introduce punishments.”93 Nairne sought to expand imperial government as well. “The English American Empire,” he warned Sunderland, should not be “unreasonably Crampt up.” His own plan went even further, seeking to expand British control across much of the continent. This institutional interest continued when proprietors appointed him a judge-​­advocate in the colony’s Vice Admiralty court, making him part of an imperial tribunal created by a recent Navigation Act to enforce maritime law.94 In seeking both to restrain illegitimate governmental power and to expand legitimate activities, Nairne followed the pattern of British Whigs. The party had emerged in the late seventeenth century to challenge the authoritarian claims of church and state at a time when both claimed divine origins and preached submission to their authority as a sacred duty. Sunderland, considered “a violent Whig” by contemporaries, even espoused republican

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government as a young man. He became less radical over time, but he still opposed occasional conformity bills and supported both uniting Scotland with England and providing British citizenship to immigrating German Palatines, all positions opposed by Tories.95 Even as they attacked illicit power, however, Whigs also supported expanding government capacities they considered legitimate. As William and Mary, the monarchs brought into power by the Glorious Revolution, led England into what became a series of anti-​­French wars, the Whig party engineered a vast expansion of government bureaucracy, military capacity, and fiscal resources that outstripped even its major rival, the seemingly less constrained French government. The military buildup on both sides of the channel allowed the two nations to project their power into America as well, bringing their colonies into European conflicts for the first time.96 As secretary of state for the Southern Department between 1706 and 1710, responsible for relations with Spain and France as well as the American colonies, Sunderland played an important role in the war with the French, coordinating preparations for expeditions and communicating the queen’s and cabinet’s desires to field commanders. His enthusiasm for invading Canada helped smooth the way for the acceptance of the plans of Samuel Vetch, a New England merchant who proposed taking over France’s northern domains within weeks of Nairne’s similar plan for the south. The campaign (commanded by Francis Nicholson) conquered what became Nova Scotia.97 Whigs such as Sunderland also helped encourage the spread of politeness and genteel sociability. Perhaps the greatest book collector of his era, Sunderland supported some of the most important figures in this development, including providing employment for both Joseph Addison, who served as an undersecretary, and Richard Steele, who prepared the official London Gazette.98 The two men went on to start the Spectator in 1711, the London periodical that spread and came to symbolize gentility and the politics of politeness both in Britain and America. The authors dedicated their sixth volume to Sunderland—​­a decision even more notable in 1712 when Sunderland was out of office and his policies under attack by a resurgent Tory party. The dedication noted some of the central elements of the emerging politics of politeness. It praised both his “Candor,” highlighting his integrity, fairness, and good temper, and his “Condescention”—​­his respectful and generous treatment of people who were not his social equals. These qualities, the dedication noted, encouraged good relationships within the department, making “Business a Pleasure to those who executed it under You.” As secretary, the dedication



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further suggested, Sunderland had acted “in the interest of mankind” rather than seeking to benefit himself, another political leader, or a party.99 Sunderland did not join the Whig Kit-​­Cat Club, a sociable organization that brought together political leaders and writers such as Addison and Steele, but the group often toasted his petite wife as “The Little Whig.” Not surprisingly her obituary also noted key elements in the new values, praising her “good-​­nature, and affability.”100 Nairne lived much of his life away from the centers of refined sociability, but he shared the same set of concerns and supported the same values. His own candor and good nature allowed him to move between exhorting Indians “by fair means” to accept Carolina’s “friendship” in Native villages and encouraging Swiss immigration with promises of greater liberty. Even after regaining his seat in the legislature upon his return and playing a significant role overseeing South Carolina’s response to the Tuscarora War in the north, Nairne returned to the task of preventing Indian traders from exploiting their Native partners, a fight that lasted to the end of his life. Yet, despite his dedication, he avoided the harshness, the impoliteness, of the former agent John Wright, who ended his life deeply at odds with both the commissioners and the Indians he had sworn to protect. A Yamasee account of Wright’s actions discovered after his death noted that his threat to enslave them if they did not obey had not, as he had hoped, increased his authority. Instead his words “vex’d the great Warrier[s], and this made them begin the war.”101

Part II

Learning to Lead

Chapter 3

The Histories of the Line

Fifty miles beyond the last European settlement, the North Carolina leaders announced they were ready to head home. They had already spent fifty days surveying the boundary line between Carolina and Virginia. Further effort would not be useful. The decision startled William Byrd, II, the unofficial leader of the Virginia contingent. According to his account of the event in his The Secret History of the Line, Byrd told the Carolinians it was a “little unkind” not to let the Virginians know earlier. They were sorry to lose their “Company,” he noted, but the surveying would continue without them.1 Things grew more difficult after supper. Richard Fitzwilliam, the Virginia commissioner closest to the Carolinians, asked Byrd if he could check their official instructions. When Byrd replied that he had not brought them, Fitzwilliam took a “Minute” of their conversation—​­and then read the note aloud. William Dandridge, the third Virginia commissioner, produced his own pencil and mockingly announced his plan to prepare a minute of the discussion of the minute. Fitzwilliam lost his temper. He grabbed a wooden table leg—​­“big enough,” Byrd noted, “to knock down an Ox”—​­and threatened the offending commissioner. Byrd intervened. After harsh words with Dandridge, Fitzwilliam retired. Byrd later pronounced himself pleased that he had “ke[pt] the Peace without coming to Extremeties.” But he had further support at the ready should things get more problematic. Byrd notes that “The men [had] instantly gathered about the Tent” upon his command, ready, if necessary, to arrest Fitzwilliam. He left with the Carolinians the next day.2 The events of October 5, 1728, were not completely unexpected. Byrd’s account makes it clear that they marked the culmination of a long-​­simmering dispute. He had been frustrated with Fitzwilliam since the start of the expedition. When the journey resumed about two and a half weeks before, their

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relationship grew even worse. Their fellow Virginia commissioner, Dandridge, was more upset. He could barely bring himself to speak to Fitzwilliam. Byrd’s Secret History placed the responsibility for these divisions squarely on the difficult Fitzwilliam. In the pseudonyms assigned the characters, Fitzwilliam was “Firebrand.” The author by contrast presented himself as the calm, sensitive, respectful leader, “Steddy.” Byrd highlights the differences in the account of Fitzwilliam’s departure. After Byrd calmly replied to the Carolinians, he prevented violence when Fitzwilliam lost his temper. Byrd’s graciousness to the workers (detailed extensively in the text) had built the authority that allowed him to remain in charge through the tense situation, even as Fitzwilliam’s personal servant refused to come to his aid. Once Fitzwilliam and the Carolinians left, Byrd successfully led the Virginian contingent through difficult terrain for another fifty days. The contrast between the two men—​­the polite and effective Steddy and his difficult opponent—​­makes Byrd’s Secret History the fullest examination of the politics of politeness written in British North America. Byrd’s account, however, does not analyze theories, offer sage advice, or even chronicle great deeds. Instead it mocks Byrd’s opponents, often using otherwise mundane specifics such as Fitzwilliam complaining or failing to pay his laundry bill. While the values of polite interaction and its connection with authority are sometimes noted directly, they often lie beneath the surface, beliefs and attitudes that remain unspoken even as they give everyday interactions larger meaning. The relentless concerns with Fitzwilliam’s failings in the Secret History reveal that its purposes went far beyond instruction or amusement. The expedition had left Byrd bruised and embarrassed. He had been challenged by his fellow legislators; lost the support of the Carolinian commissioners and one of the three Virginians on the trip; and returned without winning Virginians the additional land they were sure was theirs. He spent the next decade struggling to come to terms with the journey, seeking to turn failure into at least partial success. Byrd’s presentations of his experiences changed over time. He had taken on a central role on the journey itself only to find his leadership questioned by other members, a dispute that reached the governor even before their task was completed. After Byrd returned, he and Dandridge prepared a response to the Carolinians to be placed in the official journal that he prepared for the colony. Then, over the next months and perhaps years, Byrd put together the Secret History—​ ­offering a detailed defense of his own polite leadership in part by revealing his

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opponent’s own failings. But he was still dissatisfied. Some six years after the expedition, Byrd began preparing another account of the experience for a British audience that presents a very different perspective on the events. Byrd’s new work barely mentions his opponents. Although polite and impolite interactions were no longer its explicit subject, both the text and the context in which it was written were directly shaped by the demands of politeness. The centrality of the politics of politeness in these two very different texts suggests its growing importance in the decades since the turn of the century. These values had become part of the lingua franca of provincial leaders not only in Virginia but throughout British America. Byrd experienced this change in his own life. The son of an English immigrant who had rapidly risen into prominence, Byrd’s polished manners, his elegant mansion with its extensive library, his British learning and active participation in a transatlantic world all displayed the material and cultural sophistication that increasingly distinguished elites from common people. American leaders, like their British counterparts, saw these shifts as evidence of a growing “gentility,” a term closely connected to politeness. While eighteenth-​­century English usage made no fixed distinction between the two, gentility retained its original connections with high social status and elegance in material goods, self-​ ­presentation, and expression, qualities Byrd also attempted to embody.3 Recognizing the significance of politeness in Byrd’s writings about the boundary line expedition reshapes views of both the man and his writings. Byrd in recent studies seems less the self-​­assured, self-​­satisfied gentleman of some Southern legends than the model for the colony’s “anxious patriarchs” and America’s “patriarchal rage,” leaders deeply distressed by challenges to their authority. Byrd’s experiences running and then writing the dividing line reveals not only a similarly uneasy individual, but also a range of further cultural resources that explicitly considered the proper uses of power. If Byrd was troubled by challenges to his authority, he also held to a set of ideals that stressed respectful interaction and adjustment and rejected the idea that obedience was the only means of ensuring authority.4 These ideals also suggest new ways of understanding Byrd’s narratives. The Secret History and the History have become, if not major works, then at least minor classics that appear regularly in anthologies of American literature.5 But the Secret History has been difficult to place in a larger context, in large part because it seems to lack purpose. It has usually been seen as a “satirical,” candid, even “gossipy” piece of humor, an assessment that largely accepts Byrd’s later portrayal of the expedition as triumphant rather than traumatic.6

Figure 9. When William Byrd II had this painting made in the mid-­1720s, he was on the last of his many journeys across the Atlantic. He returned to Virginia in 1726, two years before embarking on the expedition to determine the boundary line between Virginia and North Carolina. William Byrd II (1674–­1744) by Hans Hyssing (1973.6). Virginia Historical Society.

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Byrd’s experiences and his Secret History, however, suggest another perspective, one that recognizes his frustration and his attempt to attack Fitzwilliam and justify himself through a narrative built around the politics of politeness. These contexts also make the History more interesting, highlighting the ways Byrd carefully shaped and reshaped his retelling of these problematic experiences. In the History Byrd moved from mocking his opponents to celebrating his own success as a leader. But all of his presentations portray himself avoiding the often-​­angry demands for submission that had been a primary tool of Nicholson and other authoritarian leaders. Revisiting this complex history, uncovering its secrets, reveals that politeness was not a mere decorative ornament, but a foundation of Byrd’s cultural world.

The Journey and the Journals William Byrd’s difficulties representing the dividing line expedition did not begin with the Secret History. Even before the journey ended, Richard Fitzwilliam had objected to Byrd’s descriptions of the events. Byrd had prepared the group’s official journal for the first leg of the journey before the second began. But Fitzwilliam refused to sign the account (labeling it “too Poetical”). He relented only when it became clear that the governor was prepared to submit it to the Board of Trade even without Fitzwilliam’s signature.7 Controversy dogged every stage of the project of determining the boundary line between Virginia and North Carolina, a process that began long before the contending leaders embarked. The question originated in conflicting claims, was negotiated amid disagreement, and ended (for Byrd at least) in acrimony and disappointment. Virginians had been certain that their poorer and less populous neighbors had wrongfully claimed some of their territory, but the deliberations instead lost them land. This result was particularly galling for Byrd because his leadership, indeed his honor, was called into question even before the Carolinians left the camp. Byrd’s difficulties in sustaining the honor of his colony led to fear that his own reputation had suffered as well. Unfortunately these anxieties, the result of a troubling task, an exhausting journey, and frustrating opposition, could not be fully noted in the expedition’s official journal, Byrd’s first attempt to explain the meaning of his experiences. Byrd begins the Secret History by noting that the commissioners had been appointed because of “an Express Order from his Majesty.” He considered this

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royal sponsorship highly significant as a powerful reminder of the honorable nature of his appointment. But royal involvement also reveals the difficulties of the task. Had the question been merely one of finding proper precedents or taking accurate measurements, the colonies might have resolved the issues quickly on their own. But as Virginia’s governor had noted thirteen years before Byrd set off, the question had led to “frequent trouble” and “many years” of “fruitless Endeav’rs.”8 The dispute over the border between Virginia and North Carolina went back at least to 1680, when Byrd was only six. In that year a number of settlers living near the boundary line refused to pay Virginia taxes, claiming that they were residents of Carolina even though they had received their land from the other colony. The complaint led to decades of dispute as each side sought control over the land. An official surveying expedition finally began in 1710, only to be stopped by rebellion and Indian war in North Carolina. By the 1720s, the issue had become pressing as more settlers moved into the area, sometimes taking advantage of its uncertain status to escape Virginia prosecution. The king and Privy Council finally approved a call for a new commission in 1727. Not surprisingly, the two colonies remained suspicious. The governor of Carolina prepared official instructions that carefully coached his commissioners how to respond if their Virginian counterparts refused to read the compasses properly.9 While Byrd’s discussions of the dividing line expedition always mention the king’s commands, he is less forthcoming about his companions. They receive extended attention only in the mocking Secret History. Even in Byrd’s earlier personal correspondence, they are already a shadowy presence. His May 1729 message to his longtime English friend Baron Boyle of Broghill uses the term “we” in describing the journey, but implies his companions were merely helpers. “I had men enough with me,” he explains, “both for a guard, and for performing the business I went about.”10 Despite this account, Byrd was not the expedition’s official leader. Until he was given control over the Virginia workers for the second leg of the journey, he was only one of three commissioners from the colony. The North Carolina government furthermore was anxious to ensure that the two colonies possessed equal power in the decision making. Even when they acknowledge his compatriots, Byrd’s accounts fail to note that Carolina’s commissioners were important political leaders in their own right, men chosen to provide weight to their colony’s quest to regain land they believed was rightfully theirs. Not surprisingly such men were hardly anxious to cede control. Except for the less

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ambitious Virginian Dandridge, all Byrd’s fellow commissioners came to resent and challenge his attempts to control the process. Byrd’s sense of his own standing was not entirely surprising. While the other commissioners had been born outside the region, William Byrd II came from a family deeply rooted in Virginia. His father, the first William Byrd, had risen from relative obscurity to become one of the colony’s wealthiest men and one of its most powerful, serving as a council member, auditor, and receiver general. A county tax assessment from 1704 (the year of his death) credited him with almost 20,000 acres of land, twice that held by the next largest landholder.11 As the eldest son, William Byrd II was groomed to continue his family’s remarkable ascent. Byrd (like all but one of the other commissioners) never attended college, but he both served a mercantile apprenticeship in Brussels and received a legal education at London’s Inns of Court. In 1696, the year after he was admitted to the English bar, he was elected to the Royal Society, the institution at the heart of the emerging scientific revolution. Although a few other colonial Americans, including Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin, attained similar status, Byrd was the only one to serve on its Council until Franklin’s election in 1760. Byrd joined the Board for the first of four terms in 1697, serving alongside its future president, Sir Isaac Newton. By 1728, when Byrd was chosen for the boundary expedition, he had extensive experience on both sides of the Atlantic and, although he would never again leave America, he still considered himself a full participant in the British cultural world. Cosmopolitan Virginians hungered for British newspaper accounts of events such as the coronation of George II (an event that took place about the time the appointments for the commissioners were being made); Byrd received a full description of the proceedings in a personal letter from an English aristocrat.12 Byrd’s experiences and knowledge also prepared him to lead the expedition. As the son of a leading Indian trader (and still somewhat involved with the trade himself), Byrd knew more about the colony’s interior than most leaders in either colony, a breadth of experience reinforced by his interest in natural history and his extensive land speculations. Within a dozen years of his father’s death, Byrd had doubled his family’s already substantial holdings.13 He owned much of the land that would become Richmond, laying out Virginia’s future capital city about the time he began work on the second full version of his dividing line narrative. Byrd was as at home with powerful leaders as he was with provincial land. As one of the most cosmopolitan Virginians of his

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time, he had often been called on to serve as an agent for the colony in England. Despite Byrd’s position and experience, however, North Carolina’s commissioners were unwilling to grant his claims. Long experience had convinced them that Virginians looked down on their smaller and poorer neighbor. Carolina’s governor, clearly concerned about the dangers of working with overbearing Virginians, appointed the colony’s most prominent leaders to the commission, including its secretary, treasurer, chief justice, and attorney general.14 Even the second surveyor was a member of the Assembly and the son of one of the colony’s richest men; he would be appointed the judge advocate of the Admiralty Court between the two parts of the expedition. Although they lacked Byrd’s polish, Carolina’s commissioners were powerful leaders at the top of a tumultuous political system, men unlikely to defer to superior cultural attainments or political connections.15 Byrd faced even greater challenges from Virginia’s commissioners. The original appointment had paired Byrd with the equally eminent Nathaniel Harrison, but Harrison died before the expedition began. The governor and council soon afterward appointed two new commissioners from their number. The first, William Dandridge, was an English immigrant who had arrived in the colony a decade earlier with a substantial fortune.16 Like the recommendation from an English duke that he also brought with him, Dandridge’s subsequent commercial ventures with Governor Alexander Spotswood showed a knack for making significant connections. Dandridge’s niece, Martha, shared the trait. Born in 1731, four years after her uncle joined the council and was appointed to the expedition, she married first Daniel Parke Custis, son of a council member and grandson of a governor—​­and, after she became a widow, George Washington. Alongside Dandridge and Byrd, the Virginian government also appointed Richard Fitzwilliam. Like Dandridge (and three of the four Carolinians), Fitzwilliam was an English immigrant; but he was an imperial official rather than a planter. Having served as collector of customs in the lower James River, Fitzwilliam gained appointment as surveyor general of customs of the southern district in 1725. The post made him America’s most prominent customs officer, overseeing operations from Pennsylvania to the West Indies and serving on the council in the district’s major colonies. The new official seemed so impressive to North Carolinians that the council considered him their senior member upon his first attendance, placing Fitzwilliam “next the Governor.” (The high position did not, however, ensure correct spelling; as in many

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colonial and metropolitan documents, he appeared in the record as “Fitzwilliams.”)17 The appointment of Dandridge and Fitzwilliam changed the balance of power among the commissioners. Neither of the new men could be considered nonentities. But they were markedly less prominent than either Byrd or Harrison—​­and less well suited to the needs of the commission. Although Byrd got along well with Dandridge, and even showed some affection for him, he clearly did not consider him his equal in leadership. Even writing for an audience that would have known Dandridge (and possibly included him), Byrd’s Secret History only gave him the pseudonym “Meanwell.” Fitzwilliam had more impressive abilities, but also more glaring faults. He had so impressed treasury officials that they promoted him from a local collectorship into high position. Seven years later he became governor of the Bahamas. But Fitzwilliam just as often failed to win the trust of his co-​­workers or subordinates. His tenure both as Virginia councilor and as Bahamian governor ended in contention and mutual mistrust. The appointment of Dandridge and Fitzwilliam left Byrd in an odd position. He was now clearly the delegation’s central figure, a position he was eager to take on. But Byrd’s formal position did not match this standing. His attempts to dominate the proceedings caused significant problems once the expedition began. Byrd and the other commissioners began work in eastern North Carolina on March 5, 1728, and continued for thirty-​­five days before halting to avoid the rattlesnakes that became common during the warm weather. Despite some bickering and ill feelings, the first leg at first seemed a success. The group resolved the primary issues in dispute and completed seventy-​­three miles of surveying, including plotting the Great Dismal Swamp, an area people had previously thought impassable. So Byrd was surprised at the end of the first leg of the journey when the governor treated him coldly. The puzzled Byrd soon discovered that Fitzwilliam and Professor Alexander Irvine (one of the Virginian surveyors) had complained about Byrd’s actions on the journey. The news was Byrd’s first inkling of the controversy that would surround the expedition. The commissioners knew from the start that their journey would pass through difficult terrain not only geographically but politically. But Byrd did not realize how substantial these difficulties would become for him. Fitzwilliam’s and Irvine’s earliest complaints about Byrd primarily concerned his treatment of the latter. The two contended that Byrd had favored

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the incompetent Virginia surveyor, William Mayo. The governor, however, soon realized the weakness of this claim. Although he taught mathematics at William and Mary College, Irvine knew little about surveying. The real target of the malicious stories, however, was not Mayo but Byrd himself. The two malcontents claimed that Byrd had treated Irvine unjustly and disrespectfully. Byrd had refused to allow the workers to assist Irvine and even supported “their rudeness to him.”18 These tales reveal the frustration at the central role Byrd had assumed during the expedition. Byrd’s own writings suggest this place. When someone needed to go back for Irvine’s horse, the Secret History notes, Dandridge had written the order for one of the workers, but it had been Byrd who had signed it. Byrd furthermore had made a number of speeches to the surveyors and workers. Such pretensions to command deeply offended Fitzwilliam, so much so that the customs official spent the interval between the two segments of the journey trying to remedy the injustice. He solicited an address of support from the Carolina commissioners and refused for a time to endorse Byrd’s journal of the expedition, rejecting his claim to define (or even describe) the events. Fitzwilliam also took his concerns to the Virginia council. Cleverly waiting until both Byrd and Dandridge were absent, Fitzwilliam convinced the body that only half of the workers hired by Byrd were actually needed and that each commissioner should command one-​­third of the smaller contingent. Byrd objected vigorously to the rebuke. He prevailed on the governor to schedule a full meeting of the council the following week, and before the session, tendered both his and Dandridge’s resignation. Working with Fitzwilliam, they complained, “destroyed all chances of “Harmony.” Facing the possibility of losing his commissioners, the governor asked Byrd and Dandridge to continue. The governor’s support allowed Byrd to win a similar victory in the council. Despite Fitzwilliam’s vigorous opposition, the previous vote was rescinded. Fitzwilliam could choose and command three men, but Byrd alone would command the remaining workers.19 Despite these victories, Fitzwilliam’s persistent complaints had placed Byrd in a dangerous position. The governor continued to be concerned. In early September, only a couple of weeks before the expedition resumed, he extracted a promise from Byrd to avoid further difficulties with Fitzwilliam. “For my part,” Byrd responded, “I intend to be perfectly easy my self, and shall [do] every thing that is reasonable to make him so.”20 The grudging language, however, reveals that Byrd was hardly perfectly easy.

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The threat to Byrd’s reputation were particularly great because the commissioners’ decisions gave little comfort to either the governor or Virginians in general. Even before the second leg of the journey began, it was clear that the colony would be a loser in the deliberations. Instead of confirming a substantial area of land to Virginia or even deciding in favor of Carolina’s claim, Byrd and the others gave Carolina more land than it had asked for. The journal of its commissioners boasted to the Lords Proprietors of a “Great many hundred familys” that lived in Carolina’s “much Enlarged and Increased” territory.21 The ever-​­optimistic Virginia governor sought to present the news in positive terms, but even he was compelled to confess that the result was a “great surprise.” Searching for good news, he argued that the determination might increase “His Majesty’s Revenue” since people would no longer be discouraged from “making settlements on that Frontier.”22 By the time Byrd left for the second leg of the journey on September 17, a great deal more than official business was on the line. He had alienated some of the other commissioners, been challenged in his colony’s highest political forum, and failed to prevent major losses for Virginia. Relations between Byrd (with his supporter, Dandridge) on one hand, and Fitzwilliam and the Carolinians on the other soon deteriorated even further, making the groups almost literally two camps whose physical separation mirrored their psychological distance. The Carolinians’ decision to end the expedition, which had reconvened only seventeen days before, only made the split official. Byrd could no longer claim to be cooperating with the other commissioners. His desire to continue the journey was decisively opposed by all of the Carolinians and one of the two other Virginians. But it was one of the few ways to salvage some success from an increasingly dismal situation.23 With Byrd firmly in control, the reduced group pushed seventy-​­two miles farther into the interior. Byrd finally arrived home on November 22, sixty-​­five days after leaving. Even after spending one hundred days running the dividing line, however, Byrd’s work was not finished. He still needed to refute Carolina’s objections to continuing the expedition. Less than three weeks after their exhausting journey, he and Dandridge finished a lengthy letter about their activities. The official journal that he sent to London six months later placed this response directly after the Carolinian letter about the decision. Yet Byrd remained uneasy. In a phrase he soon applied to Fitzwilliam when he faced an imagined slight, the situation “broil’d upon his Stomach.” Byrd spent another decade writing about his experiences in an attempt to convince others—​­and himself—​­that he had been successful.24

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The Secret History A little over two weeks after the expedition began, the surveying party entered the Great Dismal Swamp, the journey’s most difficult terrain. Byrd did his best to underline its importance. Byrd, Dandridge, and a Carolina commissioner accompanied the men to the edge of what Byrd called the “dreadful Swamp, which no body before ever had either the Courage or Curiosity to pass.” Byrd gave a short speech praising the party’s “Vigour.” The commissioners, he explained, were not joining them because their presence would only add to the men’s “Burthens, (which are but too heavy already,) while we are sure we can add nothing to your Resolution.” The men responded with three huzzas.25 Having underlined his sensitive treatment of the workers, Byrd’s Secret History highlights the contrast with the other commissioners. Richard Fitzwilliam remained in the camp that day with a Carolina commissioner, choosing “rather to toast their Noses over a good Fire, & spare their dear Persons.” Fitzwilliam created further problems that evening. Finding that he was expected to share with the chaplain rather than being given “the best Bed,” Fitzwilliam “sullenly” declared that he would rather sleep on the floor. Byrd comments that the minister’s presence that night was particularly necessary because Firebrand swore in his sleep even more than usual. He also, Byrd carefully notes, failed to pay his two-​­shilling laundry bill before leaving the next day.26 Although the Secret History also offers extensive lore about Native Americans, natural history, and North Carolina, its primary concern is the ­commissioners—​­and particularly Fitzwilliam. Byrd notes other people and topics as needed, but Firebrand appears in every one of the daily entries from his arrival to his departure. These discussions furthermore are unadorned by the genial humor that softens descriptions of the expedition’s other members. The Carolina commissioners receive the pseudonyms “Jumble,” “Plausible,” “Puzzlecause,” “Shoebrush.” Fitzwilliam is “Firebrand.” Even when he astutely advises a means of breaking an impasse with the Carolinians, Byrd considers his suggestion “lucky.” The rest of the time “Firebrand” kindles distrust and dissension.27 Byrd’s depiction, from the nonpayment of a small laundry bill to the thwarted attempt at violence against Dandridge, frames an extraordinarily harsh indictment that is all the more compelling because it often does not seem to be an attack at all. Students of the Secret History often fail to see

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Figure 10. This engraving of a map in William Byrd’s papers was prepared for the first publication of the “History of the Dividing Line” in 1841. Byrd bought the 20,000-­acre parcel after seeing it on the 1728 expedition. The Irvin River coming down from the upper left (and crossing the dividing line itself) is named after the surveyor who allied himself with Fitzwilliam. The two claimed that Byrd had favored William Mayo, the surveyor of this plot. William Byrd, The Westover Manuscripts (Petersburg Va.: E. and J. C. Ruffin, 1841), 121. Courtesy Amherst College Library, Archives & Special Collections.

Fitzwilliam as a significant figure—​­and, more important, to see Byrd’s desire to diminish him. But Byrd’s work was neither a simple literary entertainment nor a careful chronicle. It responds to the complaints about the expedition and about Byrd in particular that had begun even before the journey ended. The work sought (literally) to retell the story. In the new narrative, Fitzwilliam’s harshness and ill-​­temper hinder the expedition even despite the best efforts of “Steddy.”

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The larger purposes of the Secret History have been difficult to discern in large part because the larger cultural framework in which Byrd wrote has not been fully explored. Byrd’s account drew heavily on the politics of politeness, a set of values that had gained new importance over the previous generation. Although Firebrand and Steddy operated in the smaller world of swamps and laundry bills rather than the exalted spheres of public policy and royal authority, the Secret History has the same vision of legitimate leadership as his high-​ t­ oned 1718 inscription for the monument to Governor Edward Nott. Byrd had then praised the late governor’s “mildness, prudence,” and his refusal to “insult and oppress.”28 Byrd himself had experienced some of these central shifts in the development of the politics of politeness. Byrd’s first surviving letter warns the prickly Francis Nicholson, then in exile in Maryland, about the dangers of his quarrel with his Virginia replacement Sir Edmund Andros. The ill-​­considered intervention earned the enmity of the once and future governor, driving the younger man into opposition.29 Politeness in these years had been closely tied to criticisms of authoritarian leaders such as Nicholson or Thomas Nairne’s antagonist Nathaniel Johnson. By the time of the dividing line expeditions, however, both Virginia and South Carolina (though not North Carolina), had resolved many of their major political dysfunctions. Governors, colonial elites, and imperial office holders now largely recognized the need to establish a working relationship with each other. Politeness had become a settled, transatlantic language that encouraged these connections. These emerging values played an important, although not immediately obvious, role in Byrd’s Secret History. The title itself refers to a genre that relates personal failings to public life. His portrayal of Fitzwilliam’s failings furthermore draws on the problematic reception the customs official had already gained among elite Virginians, showing him to be an unfeeling, inconsiderate, and ineffective leader. While the Secret History shows Fitzwilliam flouting the ideals of polite authority, it presents Byrd himself as its exemplar. The Secret History is an elusive text, not least because so little is known about it. The specific circumstances of its writing and its circulation, if any, are unclear. The evidence for Byrd’s life is particularly thin in the years he wrote, and then seemingly abandoned, the piece. The manuscript remained unknown for nearly a hundred years and unpublished for another hundred. But Byrd’s title, The Secret History of the Line, did not express his desire to keep the manuscript from being known. Byrd’s original journal offered a foundation for defending

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his actions, but the format did not allow him to note the personal failings he considered so important. For that, Byrd used a different genre, the “secret history” that purported to reveal the private behavior (or rather misbehavior) that underlay public events. Byrd was an active, if distinctly minor, participant in the British literary world. He knew a number of authors (including the prominent dramatist William Congreve) and was himself an enthusiastic reader and collector (with a 4,000 volume library that exceeded any other collection in British America). He also wrote and published his own pieces, including a paper in the Royal Society’s Transactions, chivalrous verses on women, and a pamphlet on the plague. He even couched some of his personal correspondence in literary terms, copying many of his letters with the correspondents into his letterbook using erudite pseudonyms such as Charmante, Sabina, and Minionet. Byrd’s longest and most sustained literary activity, however, was a purely private work, written in a shorthand that was not decoded until the twentieth century.30 As its title suggests, Byrd wrote in what he called his “journal” virtually every day of his life. The entries, occasionally as long as 400 words,31 recorded everything from rumors about the death of the French king to reports of his sexual activities (including a tryst with his wife on the billiard table). Since the mid-​­twentieth-​­century publication of the surviving three volumes, they have been known as Byrd’s “Diary.” But his own term, “Journal,” highlights the continuity between his normal daily writing and the dividing line narratives. Eighteenth-​­century “journals” were not necessarily purely personal records. The term could also be used for newspapers (an expression that first appeared the year of the dividing line expedition), business account books, ship’s logs, travel guides, and the records of legislative activities. Travel journals blending accounts of daily activities with information about celebrated sights gathered from guide books as well as personal experiences were often expected of men making tours of England or the continent. As a young man, Byrd accompanied one such gentleman on a trip through Britain in 1701 on the request of Robert Southwell, one of his primary English mentors. Byrd assured Southwell after they left that the two were not passively enjoying the sights, but were actively seeking “matter to put into our journall.”32 Having made his younger charge’s account “our journal,” Byrd not surprisingly later took on himself the task of preparing the same sort of report for the Virginia commissioners on the dividing line expedition. He composed this official account after each leg of the journey, perhaps working from a separate

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record or simply revising the entries he normally kept. The Secret History notes that Byrd sent Fitzwilliam the journal of the first part of the expedition “As soon as I cou’d compleat” it. The second journal took considerably longer. He did not submit it until July 1729, seven months after his return.33 These earlier works form the foundation of his Secret History, which also uses the journal form. The revised version similarly recounts events day by day rather than summarizing a group of days or foreshadowing later events. The Secret History at one point even calls itself “my journal.”34 Byrd borrows liberally from specific phrases or sentences in his original submissions, particularly in the second leg of the journey. Both versions noted in their October 9 entry the problems of surveying because “the Bushes were so intollerably thick.” The journal starts the next day by noting, “We began this day very fortunately,” lightly revised in the Secret History to “very luckily.”35 Despite this close connection to genre of the journal, Byrd’s title significantly eschewed the term. He instead called the piece The Secret History of the Line, making it something quite different, a revelation of hidden actions that lay behind official accounts. The term “Secret History” could refer to particular information that might have been the subject of such works or even simply gossip. Byrd’s History of the Dividing Line cited a scandalous “piece of Secret History” to explain that William Penn had gained Pennsylvania not because of his Catholic sympathies like his royal benefactor but because, as “Man of Pleasure about the Town” in his younger days, he fathered a child with the duke of Monmouth’s mistress.36 Although “secret history” could be applied to simple gossip, the lineage of the term extended back to the seventeenth-​­century recovery of a sixth-​­century Greek work of the same name. Claiming to reveal the hidden “vices” of the Roman emperor Justinian, the author, Procopius, wielded, in Edward Gibbon’s description, “a malevolent pencil.”37 The term began to appear in English titles in the 1670s, at a time of public instability and political division, when print and news account were becoming more widely available. In such a setting, the genre offered simple explanations of public events based not on larger social or economic trends but on individual actions. The Secret History of the Reigns of K. Charles II, and K. James II, appearing in 1690 after the removal of the latter, described outrages that include Charles II incestuously sleeping with his stepsister on the eve of taking up the crown and the future James II causing London’s Great Fire.38 Besides that volume, Byrd also owned The New Atalantis, a work that he was “much affected” by on reading it in 1710. The purported revelation of the moral bankruptcy of Whig party leaders so

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intrigued Byrd that he prepared his own key to the characters, noting the names of people identified in the text by such pseudonyms as Lady Vertue and Mademoiselle Frippery.39 Although moving in considerably less influential circles, Byrd still found the genre particularly relevant. Like Procopius, whose early works had praised the emperor who would became the target of his wrath, Byrd believed that existing accounts of the dividing line expedition (even the journal he had himself written) concealed the true character of events. But the secret history genre created two problems. Byrd’s desire to portray himself positively distinguished him from other authors of the genre, who presented an amoral world where passions ruled and virtue, if not hypocritical, at best went unrewarded. The circles in which Byrd’s text was meant to circulate also raised difficulties. Unlike the increasingly anonymous world of the British metropolis where vicious political attacks were common, Virginia’s political culture operated on a more intimate scale. The colony did not even support a newspaper until the late 1730s. Byrd’s willingness to attack Fitzwilliam so boldly requires a closer look at the public history of the man Byrd called Firebrand and at the text of the Secret History. According to Byrd’s account, Fitzwilliam’s interest in the expedition came largely from possible profit. He had only offered to fill the late Harrison’s place after learning that the commissioners would be paid. Similar calculation, Byrd suggested, lay behind Fitzwilliam’s later decision to leave with the Carolinians. His return to Williamsburg would have allowed him to be paid for his attendance when the council served as judges of the general court. These were significant accusations, especially for an activity funded by the royal treasury. But Byrd had good reasons to believe a local audience would accept his assertion. By the time he wrote his account, “Firebrand” had already offended many Virginian leaders. Virginia readers seeing Byrd’s allegations about Fitzwilliam’s greed might have recalled the custom officer’s anger at the governor’s plans for paying the commissioners. When the question of compensation came before the council in early 1730, the governor recommended (as he had previously suggested to the British government) that the commissioners be paid according to the time they had spent. Fitzwilliam disagreed, arguing that he deserved the same pay as the others. After the council rejected his argument, Governor Gooch reported to the Board of Trade that the customs officer was “much dissatisfied.” The governor agreed with the council. Fitzwilliam’s arguments were

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unconvincing, even “very strange.” Gooch apologized for discussing the dispute but explained that he felt obliged in case Fitzwilliam made a formal complaint, “Your Lordships may judge with how little reason it is that he is offen’d.” Having quit his post, the governor grumbled, Fitzwilliam was lucky to be paid at all.40 The usually genial governor’s complaints suggest how deeply Fitzwilliam had alienated Virginians. Many of the colony’s leaders had resented his initial appointment to the council and had been angered at his later opposition to Virginia’s ban on North Carolina tobacco. When Fitzwilliam returned from the dividing line expedition in the fall of 1728, he found that a majority of the council objected to his joining the rest of the body as a judge on the general court.41 But these issues were minor compared to the furor that erupted two years later, soon after the debate about payments for the surveying expedition. Once again the subject involved money. In June 1730, the council considered a bill passed by the House of Burgesses seeking to ease the burden of the poll tax assessed on each Virginian that was used to pay legislators. Representatives had voted instead to pay themselves out of the colony’s duty on liquor. As the province’s senior customs officer, Fitzwilliam reported to the British government that the change was illegal, unfair, and even selfish. After demanding to see his statement, legislators prepared a substantial rejoinder that branded Fitzwilliam’s paper “a false Scandalous and malicious Reflection upon the Members of this House.” As the governor reported to the Board of Trade, Virginia’s leaders considered Fitzwilliam “a Person of a turbulent Spirit unfit for Society.” The governor objected strongly, however, to the final part of the legislature’s proposed petition, asking the king to remove Fitzwilliam. Although the governor took what he called “great pains to mollify their resentment,” legislators rejected the provision only because the speaker broke the tie. As with the dispute over the payment of the commissioners, however, the governor sided with Virginia’s leaders. “I shan’t,” he told imperial leaders, “trouble your Lordships with my sense of that Gentleman’s Behavior.”42 By the time Fitzwilliam returned to England later that summer, he had long since worn out his welcome. His quarrel with Virginians continued after his departure. He accompanied another former commissioner, Christopher Gale (the “Judge Jumble” of the Secret History), to the Board of Trade to present a North Carolina petition against Virginia’s ban on their tobacco. Fitzwilliam worked even harder against the colony’s 1730 measures to improve crop quality. He had seemed to support the law while in Virginia. The governor

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recalled him terming it “the best Law that ever passed here for the King’s Revenue.” But Fitzwilliam changed his tune after arriving in England, taking his complaints to both the Commissioners of the Customs and the Board of Trade. The governor found the shift particularly upsetting because he had been the bill’s prime supporter, expending both political and economic capital to gain its passage.43 Despite losing support in Virginia, Fitzwilliam retained the confidence of the imperial government in London. He left the position of surveyor general in 1731, perhaps because he had no interest in returning to Virginia,44 but he soon received an even higher position, the governorship of the Bahamas. The post represented a logical extension of his alliance with the Carolinians on the expedition. The Lords Proprietors of Carolina had previously owned the Bahamas as well, and North Carolina commissioner Christopher Gale had been the islands’ first royal attorney general in the 1710s. Writing the Secret History during these Virginia disputes, Byrd presumably felt little compunction about presenting Fitzwilliam as the expedition’s villain. But a written case against the customs officer still needed to move cautiously. Whatever Fitzwilliam’s failings, he was still a member of the Virginia council and a prominent royal office holder. Byrd (whose own leadership had already been called into question) could not afford to seem unduly harsh. Rather than directly labeling Fitzwilliam dangerous, Byrd’s narrative reveals his inadequacies over the course of the early expedition. Fitzwilliam’s offenses increase as the work progresses. Both he and “Meanwell” (William Dandridge) start poorly, arriving late at the meeting place. But while Meanwell is “so civil” as to apologize, Firebrand is “too big for Apology.”45 His boorish behavior extends to everyday problems as well, the ordinary activities that gentility attempted to infuse with extraordinary grace. While Byrd dines with a local worthy two days later, Firebrand refuses to go “because he was not sent to in due form.” Later he loudly objects to a landlord’s substandard food, leading Byrd to comment that “surely when People do their best, a reasonable Man wou’d be satisfied.”46 Firebrand is as harsh toward his social inferiors as his peers, displaying a prickly concern for the perquisites of his social standing. He boards his servant separately during the early days of the expedition, implying that even his servant is too good to dine with the workers—​­an action that, Byrd notes, they regarded as an “Indignity.” When the expedition resumes in the fall, he instructs one of the three men placed under his direct command to call him

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“Master,” seeking to enlist him as a personal servant.47 Even other customs officials meet with similar treatment. When two collectors under Fitzwilliam’s supervision visit the camp, they offer him “a world of homage” and follow Fitzwilliam’s demands that they do him “a hundred little services.”48 Firebrand’s crudity and obsession with respect, Byrd suggests, also hindered the expedition itself and its workers. Firebrand’s failure to show up on the proper day injures the men even more directly, for the customs officer had been responsible for the tent where they were to sleep, which “gave us but an indifferent Opinion of Firebrand’s Management.” When the pilot of the boat maneuvering tricky shoals at the start of the surveying runs aground several times, Firebrand scolds him unmercifully. “Our pilot wou’d have been a miserable Man,” commented Byrd, “if one half of [Firebrand’s] Curses had taken effect.” Byrd grows so anxious about this behavior that he refuses an invitation soon afterward to visit a nearby town because a disagreement involving Firebrand has led to fears that “the Men” might “be ill treated” in his absence. When a surveyor returns from the Dismal Swamp with a complaint against one of the men, Byrd suggests waiting for a formal accusation, so “that the Person accus’d might have the English Liberty of being heard in his turn.” Firebrand disagrees, arguing that “a Gentleman shou’d be believ’d on his bare word.”49 Firebrand treats women as badly as his male peers and subordinates. When the other commissioners invite a woman to drink with them, Firebrand is foremost in “ranging over her sweet Person.”50 And after he sullenly rejects a landlord’s food, “he endeavored to mend his entertainment by making hot Love” to one of the women who works there. Firebrand’s servant attempts similar liberties with the woman’s sister; Byrd judges that only the intervention of the other workers prevented a rape.51 The other Virginia commissioner, Meanwell, finds Firebrand’s behavior even more irritating. When he fails to visit Meanwell when the latter is sick, Meanwell is “in great Dudgeon,” and the two have “very high Words” the next night after Byrd retires. When the expedition resumes in the fall, Byrd works “to keep up a stiff Civility.” Meanwell cannot even manage that: “all Ceremony, Notice, & Conversation seem’d to be cancel’d betwixt them.”52 Fitzwilliam provoked the same reaction as governor of the Bahamas four years later. Once again, he worked well with superiors, helping complete the crown’s purchase of the island’s remaining land from the proprietors before his departure. But he was less successful in the islands, for reasons that would not have surprised Byrd, who had witnessed him “raise his Voice, & roll his

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Eyes with great Fury.”53 Fitzwilliam’s Bahamian opponents complained that he had called them “beasts of burthen” fit only to be “led with a rod of iron,” and labeled legislators “headstrong, simple, ungovernable Wretches.” According to the many complaints that arrived in England, Fitzwilliam intimidated courts, used questionable means to gain business for the store he operated on the side, and contended that ships he invested in were free from customs duties. When the attorney general questioned the legality of one of his trading ventures, Fitzwilliam hit him so hard that he broke his walking stick. Weary of his imperious demands, mutinous soldiers fired on him in 1736. In response, the governor hanged a third of the rebels and viciously flogged the rest. The imperial government finally ordered Fitzwilliam back to England to answer charges in 1738. He never returned to America.54 Byrd originally seems to have planned to appear as himself in the Secret History. He used “I” in at least one of his early drafts before crossing most of them out and replacing them with “Steddy.” Although Byrd’s final version of the Secret History occasionally refers to himself as “I,” his move to the third person marks a significant change. Rather than a detached “Spectator” (the fictive observer who narrates the periodical series), Steddy became a character with an important role to play.55 The character of Steddy helped Byrd contrast himself with his companions. Steddy is a model of proper leadership who wins the loyalty of the expedition’s workers by carefully observing the etiquette of authority. While Firebrand’s crude insensitivity spreads frustration, Steddy both physically and emotionally provides a healing presence. The character helps Byrd dramatize a type of leadership that builds authority through mutual respect, peaceful interaction, and emotional dependability. These admirable attitudes and actions emerge largely through an often implicit comparison with Firebrand. While Firebrand makes “every day uneasy,” Steddy consistently displays good humor and concern for others.56 He diagnoses illness and provides medicine as the unofficial camp doctor, nursing his compatriots through gout, injury, and even a chronic case of constipation. These actions, Byrd comments, “gain’d the Men’s Affection,” a solidarity he builds by often sharing their sleeping arrangements as well. Early in the trip, Byrd writes, Firebrand and “the other Commissioners indulg’d themselves so far as to lie in the House,” while Steddy “encampt in [the] Pasture with the Men.”57 While the sour Firebrand finds fault, Steddy looks for opportunities to praise the men.

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In accompanying the men to the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp, Steddy follows a ritual of respect usually reserved for distinguished guests who were similarly met at or escorted to the border. Steddy further marks the occasion by a short address. Rather than recalling their duties or warning of possible punishments, he instead praises their vigor and their resolve. Like the talks offered by Steddy on other occasions, this attention to the workers at the swamp, Byrd notes, gave the send-​­off a “better grace.” In return, the men capped off the speech with “3 Huzzas.”58 Steddy distinguishes himself further through careful control of his temper. He gets angry only twice in the narrative. He responds to Firebrand’s harshness only after weeks of frustration. “I was weak enough,” Byrd confesses, “to be as loud & Cholerick as he.” But even here the ultimate result was further peace. Faced with someone who stood up to his “big looks” and “big Words,” Firebrand “cool’d as suddenly as he fired.”59 Steddy shows similar fire only one other time. This anger, significantly, was not directed at other members of the expedition, but at outsiders stealing “our People’s Meat.”60 Steddy’s carefully nurtured relationships with the rest of the party come to fruition in the six weeks after the departure of Firebrand and the Carolinians. Freed from these troublesome companions, Steddy interacts with the workers more fully and enthusiastically than ever. He refuses to complain when he falls off his horse into a creek. Although “bruis’d [on] the back part of my Head,” Steddy “was the merriest of the Company at [his] own disaster.” He even invents an honorary order, the “Order of Ma-​­osty” (turkey beard in the local Indian language), that includes the entire party.61 Byrd’s fullest comments on the ideals underlying his portrayal of Firebrand and Steddy appear not in separate descriptions but in discussing the icy relations that developed between them after the surveying party completed work in the swamp. Firebrand’s determination to punish and Steddy’s to protect the men leads to an “inward uneasiness” between the two that makes them “indifferent Company.” “To be formally civil,” Byrd notes, “was as much as we cou’d afford to be to one another.” The situation troubles him. “When People are join’d together in a troublesome Commission,” he argues, “they shou’d endeavour to sweeten by Complacency & good Humour all the Hazards and Hardships they are bound to encounter.”62 Byrd’s use of the term “complacency,” or what is sometimes referred to “complaisance,” is significant. Rather than simply accepting whatever came (being complacent), the older term noted the need to go beyond “stiff civility,” mere formal manners, to an active concern with the feelings and well-​­being of others. Steddy might not be

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able to do so with Firebrand, but the account underlines the broader attempts at sweetening that he considered essential to his leadership of the expedition.63 Byrd’s portrait of himself as a polite and effective Steddy was nothing new. His writings, both before and after the expedition, regularly celebrate these ideals. About a decade before, he recalls his early mentor, Robert Southwell, as “so great a Master of Perswasion, that he cou’d charm people into their duty, without the harsh methods of discipline & severity.”64 In 1736, about the time he decided to rewrite his history of the expedition, Byrd objected to the harshness of a complaint about a North Carolina governor lodged at the Board of Trade. “Good arguments,” he warned, “always suffer by being urged with ill manners, and many a righteous cause has been weakend by an ill-​­bred way of managing of it.”65 The following year, he told London’s preeminent tobacco merchant that his imperiousness had hurt his relationships with Virginian planters. Referring to (and partly quoting from) the rejected advice of counselors in the biblical story of the unsympathetic Israelite king Rehoboam, Byrd suggested: “Had you . . . ​sooth’d this people with good words, they woud have been your servants for ever.”66 Firebrand had set a similarly problematic example. As Byrd informed the governor during the expedition, he was “a Person of such uneasy Temper, that there were no hopes of preserving any Harmony amongst us.”67

The History Although he had worked hard on the Secret History, Byrd soon refused even to admit its existence. In December 1735 Peter Collinson, one of Byrd’s longtime English correspondents, asked to see Byrd’s “history of the line.” The request put Byrd in a difficult position. Although Collinson’s interest was flattering and he wanted his approval, Byrd also worried that Secret History would not gain him that respect. The result is one of the most painful paragraphs in all of Byrd’s writings.68 Byrd begins by calling Collinson’s request “the most difficult part of your letter to answer.” Although it was a “trifle,” he was constitutionally unable to share unfinished writing. A less anxious author might have stopped there. But Byrd launches into a lengthy comparison of himself to “the bashfull bears,” who legendarily refused to allow their cubs to be seen until they are licked into shape (adding for good measure a biblical reference about imitating the

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industrious ants). Having justified his reluctance, Byrd instead offers a copy of his official journal. But even this was accompanied by an apology. The piece is only, Byrd warns, “the skeleton and ground-​­work of what I intend.” He would add “Vessels,” “flesh,” and “skin” when he had time to put together his collected “materials.” Although the journal had long since been delivered to the governor and to the Board of Trade, Byrd asked Collinson not to lend or copy it.69 Byrd’s troubled response to Collinson reveals a continuing anxiety about how to justify his leadership of the expedition. By 1736, Byrd had decided that he needed to prepare yet another narrative. This new version, what came to be titled The History of the Dividing Line betwixt Virginia and North Carolina Run in the Year of Our Lord 1728, was twice as long as the Secret History. But Byrd did not simply add material. He also excised what had been the heart of the older version, the extensive accounts of bickering among the commissioners and the egregious conduct of Fitzwilliam. He also removed the pseudonyms that had distinguished Steddy and Firebrand, the older version’s main characters. Byrd undertook this task so fully the History seldom even mentions the other commissioners and almost never notes their names. These changes mark a major shift in Byrd’s purpose. He had written the Secret History largely to justify himself, to regain his good name. By 1736, this goal was no longer paramount. Byrd had not given up his desire for approval. But he had decided to present his leadership in a new way, by turning from micronarratives of individual encounters to emphasize his larger concern for society. Issues connected to politeness and leadership appear at every turn in his journey of writing the History, not only in his purpose and his subjects, but also in his omissions. About a year after his uncomfortable letter conveying the official journal, Byrd again wrote to Collinson, hoping to elicit the Londoner’s promised responses. Once again, Byrd could not resist apology. The journal’s “stile” is “plain.” It was “compos’d in the rough woods, and partakes of the place that gave it birth.” But, he suggested further, the style was well suited to its subject, and “in that there can be no impropriety.” Still he hoped to make it less like a “dry [skele] ton” so that it could “appear more to advantage.”70 Issues of propriety and advantage were clearly on Byrd’s mind as he contemplated yet another return to the dividing line. In the years after the writing of the Secret History, old anxieties had faded. New ones loomed larger. Collinson’s request forced him to reconsider both his audience and his approach.

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Rather than a provincial circle enjoying mockery of a rival, Byrd now envisioned a readership that included not only Collinson and his friends (a daunting prospect in itself) but even the broader public. Byrd’s second letter to Collinson suggested that a mutual friend be employed to illustrate some of the plants and animals appearing in the contemplated work, a clear sign of a desire to seek publication.71 Byrd’s desire to create a new narrative was spurred by the writing he had done after the Secret History. In 1732 he visited former governor Alexander Spotswood to discuss mining and then prepared an account of his travels. Like the Secret History, “A Progress to the Mines in the Year 1732” seems directed at a Virginia audience, who would have been curious about the popular former governor who had moved westward to concentrate on iron making. It took Byrd a week to reach the relatively unsettled region around Fredericksburg where Spotswood had built an elegant mansion that Byrd termed an “enchanted castle.” As with the earlier Secret History, Byrd used his journal to prepare a fuller and more finished travel account, one that runs some thirty-​ ­five pages in a modern edition. Byrd took another trip the following fall to survey a region of frontier North Carolina that he had earlier visited on the dividing line expedition and then purchased from the North Carolina commissioners who had received it in payment for their service. Once again he prepared an account of his trip, calling it “A Journey to the Land of Eden Anno 1733.” Both works share with Secret History and with the journal that had preceded it a focus on the specifics of the trip, including Byrd’s interactions with the people he meets and stays with. Neither notes any dissension within the traveling party, except for an occasional servant punished for carelessness or a workman who complains, thereby breaking what Byrd called “the laws of traveling.”72 Byrd seems to have realized that his journal about the trip to the “Land of Eden” might be of broader interest. In 1734, he sent it to Collinson, who in turn shared it with other people. Although Collinson’s comments have been lost, Byrd responded to them saying he was glad the readers “were merry.” The success of the Land of Eden journal (especially since it mentioned the earlier trip) prompted Collinson to ask for Byrd’s account of the dividing line expedition. Byrd was clearly pleased at his success with what he called “such polite judges.” But sending his more pointed piece on the dividing line raised concerns. Collinson was a significant figure, the single most important Briton in the development of early American science. His immense correspondence

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included not only Byrd (who had promised him a number of specimens from the dividing line expedition in 1729), but Benjamin Franklin.73 Collinson sent the Philadelphian his first electrical apparatus, and later arranged for the publication of Franklin’s experiments, bringing him international fame. Collinson was especially important to Byrd in 1736 because of the Londoner’s ties to Sir Charles Wager. As head of the British Navy as well as a member of both Parliament and the Privy Council, Wager was even more significant in Britain’s government than Collinson in its scientific life. Byrd had been delighted when Collinson had sent his Land of Eden journal to Wager; writing that “What he desired woud have been a law to me, and therefore he might command any thing that was mine.” Byrd’s restrictions on the use of the dividing line journal included a single exception. Collinson was not to loan or copy the document “unless Sir Charles Wager shoud have a fancy to see it.”74 Envisioning an audience at the center of British intellectual and political life placed the Secret History’s mockery of expedition members in a new light. Memories of Fitzwilliam’s unpleasantness would have faded in Virginia by 1736. The customs officer had left the colony almost six years before. Criticism of Fitzwilliam carried greater risks in British circles. By 1736 the former Virginian was no longer simply a customs officer, but a royal governor. Rehearsing eight-​­year-​­old grievances against a man who had won the confidence of the king might appear petty, even (ironically, given Byrd’s purposes in writing) difficult to get along with. A British reader might have seen Byrd as more “Firebrand” than “Steddy.” These considerations seemed particularly compelling in the mid–​­1730s. While the threats to Byrd’s standing in 1728 had been primarily provincial, his reputation within the broader world now seemed increasingly important. He had just been appointed to another royal boundary commission, representing Virginia and the king in a dispute over the massive land claims of the British aristocrat Lord Fairfax. Byrd was also promoting a major settlement of Swiss immigrants on his Virginia land, a plan that called for the arrival of a hundred families in 1737. A tarnished personal reputation in Britain would make both projects more difficult. Furthermore, a favorable account of the land opened up by the dividing line expedition might encourage further immigration. Byrd had written to an influential Swiss leader in London only three days before replying to Collinson about the dividing line journal, making special attempts to assure his Continental correspondent that his representations were not “dictated by any narrow views to my own interest.”75 Byrd’s ultimate goal, however, was gaining a major royal

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appointment—​­and, as he saw it, the most likely chance of that happening was through Wager himself. As Byrd reminded Wager less than three weeks before sending the dividing line journal to London, the two had been friends for four decades. By the mid-​­1730s, however, it was abundantly clear who was the dominant figure. Byrd not only asks Wager for a substantial loan, but for appointment as a governor. Byrd even raised the possibility of taking over in Virginia, although he was exquisitely cautious in doing so (arguing only that the present governor was doing such a fine job that a better position might be warranted).76 Byrd pressed Wager the following year for appointment as surveyor general of the customs for the southern district in America, the position formerly held by Fitzwilliam. Although nothing came of these requests, Byrd had reason to believe that presenting himself unflatteringly was dangerous. He had argued for his appointment as a governor by suggesting that he could provide better leadership than most other men who held the post, men who were too busy making their own fortunes “to study the good of the people.”77 Over the next few years, Byrd would reimagine his narrative of the dividing line expedition to stake a claim that he was just such a leader. Like its predecessor, the new version presents Byrd as an effective director of the expedition. But the History was written not for Virginians familiar with the frustrations of a common enemy, but a broader audience that needed to be approached in a different way. Byrd makes his purpose in remaking the Secret History visible right from the start. The March 1 entry in the Secret History makes a nicely turned implicit comparison between Steddy and Firebrand. While the latter arrives late (and refuses to apologize), Steddy, attentive to proper etiquette, arranges the men to receive Firebrand and Meanwell. Byrd also jokes that the wife of a Norfolk, Virginia, worthy who invited him to dinner proved her standing as a fine lady by her “Contempt for her Husband.”78 The later History makes short work of these two events even as it triples the size of the day’s entry. The new text notes the commissioners’ arrival only briefly and completely ignores the dinner. Instead, it describes Norfolk’s trade, buildings, and method of building wharfs, praising the inhabitants for possessing “the two Cardinal Vertues that made a place thrive, Industry and Frugality.” Byrd also notes three curious plants he observed on the way to town, moss (eaten by cows and horses in the winter), an unusual variety of myrtle, and the gall bush (which required extensive watering if grown in a garden).79

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Byrd’s revisions reveal careful recalibration. The History excised nearly all criticism of individuals, particularly the commissioners themselves. Instead, Byrd turned his attention to two primary issues, each foreshadowed in the March 1 entry. The History first spends more time discussing North Carolinians, in effect replacing the angry Firebrand with Carolina’s common people as the prime target of abuse. Byrd also gives increased attention to natural history and other lore about the area, a move allowing greater attention to the (previously relatively neglected) later part of the journey. Both changes shift the focus from internal issues to external matters. While the Secret History dramatizes Byrd’s differences with the commissioners, the History highlights his interactions with the outside world—​­displaying his abilities as a leader in new and different ways. The most noticeable change in the History is the reduced role of the other commissioners. Going beyond simply removing the pseudonyms and evidence of dissension, the History comes close to erasing the commissioners themselves. Except for the documentary materials at the end of the work, William Dandridge, Byrd’s closest companion and most faithful supporter, is not mentioned by name at all. Fitzwilliam comes into view only while telling the other Virginians that he is leaving. Carolina’s commissioners appear in a respectful but detached way. In the days following the arrival of the other commissioners, Byrd refers to “our Carolina Friends” and even includes Fitzwilliam in his comment that the commissioners patiently endured sleeping among the fleas and dirt. They were “all Philosophers enough to improve such slender Distresses into Mirth and good Humour.” Similarly, the trip where Firebrand harshly berated the boatman becomes an occasion for noting the self-​­control of the entire party. Even “the most impatient amongst us,” the History notes, “. . . ​swallow’d their Curses, lest . . . ​they might sound like Complaining.”80 But highlighting genteel complaisance and generosity in the History also removed the interest and humor that made the earlier version compelling. This was a particular problem in the early part of the work, where the struggles with the commissioners had been the center of the narrative. Except for the Dismal Swamp, eastern North Carolina lacked the natural or manmade curiosities that would interest British elites. The area instead presented scenes of rural poverty, precisely the sort of “mean,” “low” settings that gentlemen sought to remake or avoid. In reworking his description of this part of the expedition, Byrd turned his attention to the shortcomings of North Carolina’s residents. Byrd’s praise for Norfolk, Virginia’s “Industry and Frugality” fore­shadowed

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a less positive view of the colony he would soon enter. The expedition slept in North Carolina for the first time the next night. In a description added to the History, Byrd calls the place they stayed “a miserable Cottage,” a “wretched Hovel” where the party was “almost devoured by vermin of various kinds.” Byrd attributed these difficulties to a characteristic he would often note in subsequent entries: a “strong Antipathy . . . ​to work.”81 Byrd’s entries for the next month elaborated this critique. Men in North Carolina (and, he suggested at least once, in southern Virginia as well) were lazy, prone to sleeping late, and doing little when they arose. This idleness was made possible by the bounty of the land and the work of women. Pigs and cows found their own food in the winter, a passivity that forced Carolinians to go without milk for much of the year and led, he suggested, to a “Custard-​ ­Complexion.” Corn was plentiful: “a little pains will subsist a very large Family with Bread.” As a result, the men “Loiter away their lives.” Byrd’s observations about Edenton, the only Carolina town he visited, highlight the same issues. Unlike Norfolk’s “industry,” Edenton’s houses were mostly “small and built without Expence.” Few of them even “aspire[d] to a Brick-​­Chimney.” Most people seemed more interested in an impressive outhouse than “a handsome Dining Room.”82 Byrd’s discussions of Carolinian laziness extended the mockery of their food and religion begun in the Secret History. Byrd had earlier made great sport of the southern colony’s reliance on pigs. Their “pork upon pork” made them “extremely hoggish in their Temper.” Neither of these pungent phrases survives into the more elegant History, but the complaint about eating “so much Swine’s flesh” is noted several times, including a suggestion that it led to a disease that ate away at the nose. The lack of religious observances similarly impressed Byrd. The History even calls Carolinians thorough “Pagans” claiming that Edenton was the only urban place in the Christian or the Muslim world without a house of worship.83 Byrd was not choosing a surprising target. North Carolinians were looked down on by virtually everyone. Hugh Jones, an English minister who lived for a time in Virginia, called them “vastly inferior” in 1724. The governor of the colony similarly told the British government in 1732 that “the Inhabitants of North Carolina, are not Industrious.” As late as 1765, one resident noted that people “considered it the rudest part of the whole continent.”84 The issue of industriousness was not just a means of mocking Carolinians. It was a continuing concern for Byrd, an inveterate improver. The Virginian spent years trying to interest influential Britons (including, of course, Wager)

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in draining the Great Dismal Swamp so it could be used to raise hemp and cattle. By 1736 Byrd was already intent on a different project, attempting to settle large groups of Swiss settlers on his land. Several days before sending his journal to Collinson, he had offered to give 10,000 acres of land to a hundred families if they would come by the following spring. Byrd’s proposal suggested his eagerness to start settlement on his western land, and to encourage “Switzers,” who he believed were especially “honest [and] industrious.” To Britons, Byrd’s complaints about lazy Carolinians likely called to mind another group. The History explicitly compared Carolinians to the ethnic (“Wild”) Irish who “find more Pleasure in Laziness, than Luxury.”85 Byrd’s careful positioning of Carolinian commoners as cultural contraries usefully allowed him to avoid criticizing not only wealthy Carolinians (who, as will be seen, were having their own difficulties), but also Native Americans and poor Virginians. Although he also considered Indians lazy, he also called them “our “honest Countrymen” and suggested that Europeans should intermarry with them to build greater harmony. Byrd also sought to avoid criticizing the common people of his own colony. He carefully avoided noting the location of the “wretchedest Scene of Poverty” they witnessed, perhaps because it actually came in Virginia.86 Mocking lazy settlers helped Byrd fill the first part of the History, but they provided little help in discussing the lengthy period after the expedition moved beyond European settlement. The Secret History had given relatively little attention to this later segment, devoting only one-​­third of the text to a time that took up most of the entire expedition. Byrd’s History goes beyond redressing that imbalance. It devotes disproportionate space to the latter part of the expedition. These unsettled regions, Byrd found, allowed opportunity for extensive observations about the region and its Native American inhabitants. He ranges widely from the uses of plants to the eating habits of both bears and woodsmen, often moving beyond his own observations. He notes a lightning strike that occurred in 1736, eight years after the expedition, and (in the course of a single entry) refers to both the Swedish habit of making socks with otter skin and the Siberian custom of drinking toasts with whale oil.87 Despite this breadth of reference, the materials in the History were not simply miscellaneous. They followed the practices of an established genre, the travel journals prepared by young gentlemen reporting on a journey bringing together their direct experience with information from printed materials and other sources. But Byrd, as he himself realized, had a distinctive subject, one that went far beyond the well-​­traveled ground of the continental grand tour.

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His ability to comprehend this world—​­and to explain it—​­was deeply interesting at a time when natural history was central to scientific activity and elite Britons often established their own gardens. Byrd’s knowledge furthermore had economic implications. His extensive discussions of plants and animals were less concerned with pure science or aesthetic appeal than with possible utility. The October 16 entry, for example, notes “a sweet kind of Grass” near Indian villages that offered “excellent Forage for the Horses.” Byrd also discovered “a tall kind of Hickory,” leading him to remark on the value of the oil from Virginia’s nut trees. The following day, Byrd saw rocks by a waterfall that could be easily flaked, perhaps making them useful for pavement or sharpening cutting tools. A “prickly Shrub” found near the camp might be used for tea that could be marketed as a luxury good.88 Byrd’s descriptions also had political significance. American animals and plants might help gain the attention of British leaders. In 1736 Byrd had sent Prime Minister Robert Walpole a quantity of ginseng, a plant he believed had impressive medicinal qualities. The attempt at currying favor was not as successful as Byrd hoped. He learned later (to his disappointment) that the prime minister offered the plants to Sir Hans Sloane, an important scientist, but hardly a significant political figure. Byrd was fully aware of the value of his knowledge. He strengthened his request for a governorship the following year by claiming to Wager that “every one of the colonys might with little contrivance be made more profitable to Great Britain.”89 The History served the same purpose. It sought to show Byrd as a leader who could both work with other gentlemen and understand the natural and social worlds in which he operated. While the Secret History showed Byrd struggling against opponents undermining their shared project, the revision presented him as the unchallenged leader of a successful expedition. But both attempted to show that he possessed the understanding, skills, and sensitivity necessary to exercise power in a polite and compelling way. Removing the small-​­scale stories about the successes and failures of authority that gave the Secret History its narrative drive allowed Byrd to highlight his leadership abilities in new ways. But even the History, with its more direct relationship to formal authority, still avoided two central issues of power. The work failed to note both North Carolina’s government and slavery, issues that challenged the limits of Byrd’s view of restrained power. The difficulties he had dealing with each reveal both Byrd’s commitments to these ideals and the problems of putting them into practice.

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Byrd’s later narrative often criticizes Carolina’s government and its laws, calling them “Loose” and ineffectual. But even the Secret History hints at larger difficulties of the province only once, when two Carolina commissioners went into a nearby town while waiting for the surveyors to finish in the swamp—​­seemingly, Byrd suggested, “to pick up new Scandal against their Governour.” Byrd’s phrase gives little indication of the virtual war that had recently erupted between the governor and his enemies, a group largely led by the Carolinians on the expedition.90 Carolina’s commissioners had long been involved in the colony’s factious politics. Commissioner Edward Moseley had engineered the seating of a rival slate of legislators in 1711 that led to Cary’s Rebellion, a full-​­scale breakdown of the colony’s political life. But the specific origins of the 1728 crisis can be traced more clearly to the early part of the 1720s when future commissioner John Lovick, then provincial secretary, prepared a will for Governor Charles Eden naming himself rather than the governor’s relatives as the primary heir. Eden’s successor was rightly suspicious of the document, and the issue became one of the chief causes of his contention with not only Lovick, but his supporter (and fellow future commissioner) chief justice Edmund Gale. The dispute grew so intense that the governor threatened Gale in open court. After the governor, “cursing and threatning,” tried to attack him at his house, the justice fled to England, where he convinced the Lords Proprietors to appoint a new governor. Not surprisingly, when new governor Richard Everard arrived in 1725 (on the same ship as his Carolina sponsor), he allied himself closely with Gale’s circle. Two years later he chose Gale and a number of his allies as the colony’s commissioners for the dividing line.91 By the time the expedition began in 1728, however, the alliance had worn thin. Three weeks after the first leg of the expedition ended, Governor Everard publicly beat one of Gale’s friends. When the colony’s grand jury called for the indictment of the governor, Everard accused Lovick of tampering with the jury. A few days before, the governor had demanded that the court act against attorney general William Little (yet another commissioner), because he had taken the colony’s copy of the laws for his own use.92 On September 10, the day the expedition was originally scheduled to resume, Lovick allegedly assaulted the governor.93 By the beginning of the next year, the situation had deteriorated so far that Governor Everard publicly branded Commissioners Lovick, Little, and Gale “enemies to the Repose and quiet of this People.” The three, he later complained, were “flagrant Villains.”94 Byrd’s silence about these difficulties is particularly surprising because the

Figure 11. The North Carolina commissioners of boundary expedition of 1728 included some of the province’s central figures. Three of the four had been signers of the colony’s first paper money in 1722. Unable to support a printer in the colony, North Carolina used handwritten bills, evidence of the poverty Byrd noted in his narratives. Courtesy American Antiquarian Society.

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virtual collapse of Carolina’s public life almost certainly affected the dividing line expedition, presumably encouraging the Carolinians’ unwillingness to socialize freely with the Virginians as well as their desire to finish the surveying early. Although the accusation that he had beaten the governor would ultimately be dismissed, Lovick himself was taken into custody soon after his return.95 Byrd could not have been ignorant of this larger context. But highlighting Carolina’s troubles in the works themselves would have taken attention from his own role as a leader—​­and undercut his attempts to settle the land had bought on the Carolina side of the line. Furthermore, by the time Byrd began his History, the old Carolina proprietors were gone and their final governor Everard was long out of office. Yet it is also significant that Byrd never called for more aggressive assertions of power in North Carolina, as governors such as Nicholson or Johnson in its neighboring colonies undoubtedly would have done. Byrd’s fullest discussion of Carolina’s weak government concluded by celebrating careful limitations on power. Byrd’s letter, written in July 1736 only days before he told Collinson of his plans to prepare the History, attempted to dissuade the representative of a group of potential Swiss immigrants from their plans to settle in Carolina on someone else’s land. “The government of that province,” he warned, “is quite unsettled and full of confusion.” Its officials furthermore “are hungry as hawks,” ready to “make a prey of every poor creature that falls into their pounces.” Byrd’s praise of Virginia’s more settled government uses terms that explain the seeming contradiction of Carolina having both weak government and strong government officials. Using language that recalls Nairne’s celebration of South Carolina, he argued that Virginia’s government was “much better constituted than any of His Majestys colonys and the libertys of the people more intirely securd,” in part because Virginians “endeavour to keep” officials “within the decent bounds of justice.”96 This link between active government and secure liberties was central to his thinking about authority. Byrd’s 1726 letter to the earl of Orrery, often cited because of his comparison of his situation with the “patriarchs,” actually spends more time noting how Virginians prevented governors (who were often “tyrants in their nature”) from gaining too much power. Since they could neither command the colony’s armed forces nor rule its courts, Byrd notes, “both the teeth and the claws of the lion are secured.”97 Byrd had similarly praised the beloved governor Edward Nott in his proposed 1718 monumental inscription for being “content with the limited Authority of his Commission.” Byrd made his own claim for a governorship in 1736 by

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suggesting to Wager that most previous governors had sought benefits for themselves not the “good of the people.” A letter to his long-​­time correspondent, the Earl of Egmont, written about the same time, noted that people who saw the earl’s portrait at Byrd’s house immediately recognized him as “generous, benevolent, & worthy.” Byrd hoped that readers of the History (especially potential patrons such as Wager) would see its author in the same way.98 Byrd’s History omitted more than Carolina politics, however. It also ignored many of the people on the expedition itself. Both of Byrd’s narratives include lists of commissioners, surveyors, and the “Men employed on the Part of Virginia.” But other members of the party appear only in passing. “Astrolabe’s Negro” was mentioned in an entry of the Secret History because he became sick and was left behind. Byrd’s “two Servants” appear at the beginning of the work (in the same breath as his pack horse). Only one of them (“my Man Tom”) is noted again. Added together, Byrd’s offhand references in the Secret History suggest that each of Virginia’s commissioners and surveyors brought his own servant. Of these, only Fitzwilliam’s servant receives more than a passing mention. Except for “Tipperary,” a clearly Irish pseudonym, the servants were probably African slaves. Not surprisingly, the History is even more guarded; other than noting “all the Servants” at one point, it is generally silent about this substantial group. Near the end of the second leg, however, the text notes something otherwise unexpected, that three of the thirty members of the party were women. Beyond that passing reference (noted for the sake of a joke) only one woman is mentioned elsewhere, a “Mulatto Wench” who, the Secret History records, was enlisted as a cook for at least part of the second leg of the journey.99 Byrd’s casual omission of perhaps one-​­quarter of the Virginia contingent highlights the extent to which his discussions of power and leadership applied primarily to interactions among white men. Wealthy male household heads and their sons (and soon the women in their families) were the original participants in the politics of politeness, perhaps not surprising for a set of ideas largely concerned with establishing authority. But these ideals did not remain limited to that domain. As the new ideas connecting power and politeness became more widespread, they began to influence thinking about other relationships as well. Although Byrd fails to note the diverse members of the expedition in the dividing line narratives, his other writings suggest that he did not consider the principles of polite interactions irrelevant to other relationships. In July 1736, the same month he struggled with his letter to Collinson about his writings, he called for Parliament to end slavery in Virginia.100

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Byrd made his comments about slavery to his old friend, John Perceval, the Earl of Egmont. The two had gone on the tour of England around the turn of the century in which Byrd helped prepare Perceval’s journal. Perceval had since received an Irish title and become a major leader in the movement to settle Georgia, serving as the first president of the new colony’s board of trustees.101 He informed Byrd about the trustees’ 1735 decision to ban rum and slavery in the new colony later that year. Byrd’s July 1736 reply struggles to deal with the issue of slavery in a way that convincingly applied the ideals of polite authority that he had made central to his identity.102 Responding to Perceval was difficult for Byrd in part because of personal reasons. His father, who began his American career in the Indian trade, had been heavily involved in selling both of the items that Perceval was trying to keep out of Georgia. By the late 1680s, when Byrd’s father had moved beyond his earlier focus on the Indian trade, he was ordering over a thousand gallons of rum a year, and soon owned a ship bringing slaves directly from Africa. Upon his death in 1704, his eldest son inherited two hundred Africans (and presumably some Indians as well), making him one of the largest slaveholders in Virginia and thus on the American mainland. Their labor provided Byrd with a substantial income that allowed him to live in England for years at a time. Slavery underwrote Byrd’s status as well as his wealth. The two slaves he brought on the dividing line expedition, twice as many as the other Virginian leaders, underlined his claim to be the group’s leader. Despite this deep investment in slavery, Byrd told Egmont that he endorsed Georgia’s decision to ban it, even declaring that “I wish . . . ​[Virginia] coud be blesst with the same prohibitions.” His strongest arguments against slavery concern its “publick dangers.” Noting the Caribbean experience, where a small number of whites held huge numbers of slaves, Byrd warns that Virginia’s slave population was growing rapidly, thereby increasing the chances of rebellion, an event that Byrd suggests was likely to be headed by a white man of “desperate courage” and “a desperate fortune.” Slave traders were almost as worrisome, “ravenous” men who, if given the opportunity, would even sell their own families. Byrd’s “publick” concerns about slavery were common, perhaps even commonplace, by this time, but his letter spends more time discussing its “private mischeifs.” Byrd begins with an issue that became central to the History he was then planning to write. Slavery, he notes, discourages industry among whites, suggesting to them that only slaves should labor. And when “idleness” is celebrated, Byrd warns, poverty always results. Just as important, the growth of

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the slave population actually injures the slaveholders themselves. As slaves grew in numbers, they grew “insolent,” forcing owners to be “severe.” Virginia, Byrd noted, did not yet exhibit the “inhumanity” of the West Indies. But the growth of slavery in the mainland colony encouraged harshness, since masters will resort to “foul means” of discipline if the “fair” do not work. The “base tempers” of slaves required “a tort [taut] rein”; otherwise they were “apt to throw their rider.” The choice between being “either a fool or a fury” was “terrible to a good naturd man.”103 These prospects seemed so troubling to Byrd that he even suggests to Egmont that Parliament consider ending not only the slave trade, but slavery itself. Although such action clearly was utterly unlikely (and Byrd’s support for the measure purely speculative), he also knew that Egmont, an active member in the Commons from 1728 to 1734, continued to have close ties to many British political leaders.104 Although Byrd’s arguments and his recommendation became widespread only in the revolutionary era, his critique was rooted in earlier ideals of polite power. Byrd’s discussion of the dangers of severity references the key points of the politics of politeness. Proper leadership, he suggested, needed to be moderate, to avoid the extremes of fool or fury—​­making oneself neither very weak nor overly harsh (as personified by North Carolina government and Fitzwilliam respectively). Proper balance, furthermore, required fair means, a term that significantly referred to both aesthetic and moral qualities. Good leadership required good nature, a character that was complaisant and sympathetic. Even what today seems the most distasteful part of his case, Byrd’s metaphor of riding slaves, appears less despotic within its context. The root of his term “management” originally referred to the exercise of horses, an authority gained through interaction and adjustment rather than aggressive and inflexible demands. As Byrd suggested to the governor a few weeks before leaving on the second leg of the dividing line expedition, he would do his best to have the men treat Fitzwilliam respectfully, but the imperious commissioner also needed to recognize his obligation to “give them good words”: “Those I think are due even to slaves.”105 Byrd never put his criticism of slavery into action, for reasons that suggest the limitations of the ideals of politeness. Beyond referring to Africans as “our fellow creatures,” Byrd’s comments show almost no sympathy for slaves, even the limited concern that led Thomas Jefferson to note the “degrading submissions” required of them. Such a lack of concern contrasts dramatically with his boasts of broad (even overly strong) sympathy for other creatures that

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formed a central part of Byrd’s 1724 self-​­description. Claiming “good nature” as “the constantest of all his virtues,” Byrd portrays himself as “the never failing friend of the unfortunate.” He considered this characteristic so important that he closed the piece with it, noting “His good-​­nature is so universal as to extend to all Brute creatures.” They “must submit to all sorts of tyrany,” he declared, having “no refuge, no friend, no laws to protect them from injury.” Seeing them “ill us’d” evoked “the tenderest sentiments of compassion.”106 Byrd’s failure to see slaves as fully worthy of sympathy or even to acknowledge slavery in the dividing line narratives points to a final characteristic of gentility and genteel authority. The calm and carefully groomed representation of leaders depended in large part on hiding discordant and impolite activities, on avoiding troubling topics. Byrd removed slaves, disagreements among the commissioners, and troubles within North Carolina’s politics from his History just as Jefferson famously placed his Monticello slave quarters out of sight. For both men, failure to publicize qualms about slavery seems to have been easier—​­and more polite. In a broader sense, Byrd’s difficulties composing these narratives grew out of the same ambiguities. Byrd and his circles considered politeness relevant to a variety of situations from squabbling with a local opponent to impressing a high-​­level cosmopolitan audience, from the wilderness to Whitehall—​­and from slaves to English aristocrats. But finding the polite means of managing particular situations was not always easy. It is perhaps not surprising that Byrd had so many difficulties deciding how best to present his journey, that he took a decade to decide, as he told Collinson, how to have “a decent skin drawn over all to keep things tight in their places, and prevent their looking frightfull.”107

Chapter 4

The Affair of My Picture

In 1734, England’s preeminent mezzotint engraver, John Faber, Jr., prepared a print of Jonathan Belcher, governor of Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The image expressed extraordinary confidence in Belcher’s significance. No other British-​­American governor, virtually no British-​­American at all, had ever been portrayed in a separately published engraving. The men who commissioned the piece, Belcher’s son, Jonathan, Jr., and Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge secretary Henry Newman, believed not only that Belcher’s reputation justified the print, but that it would be welcomed in New England—​­not least by its subject.1 Belcher, however, hated the idea. “I am surprized & much displeas’d,” he wrote his son upon learning of the project in August 1734: “How cou’d you presume to do such a thing without my special leave and order?” “Such a foolish affair,” he complained, would provoke “envy” and provide “occasion to your father’s enemies to squirt & squib & what not.” Without even seeing the print, he ordered both the impressions and the plate itself be destroyed—​ d ­ oing away not only with the offending images but the possibility of making more. Even two months later, Belcher could not quite forgive what he still considered a “wrong step.”2 What Belcher later termed “the affair of my picture” touched some of his deepest anxieties. Born in Massachusetts in the early 1680s, the governor had spent much of his early life developing and strengthening ties with leading figures on both sides of the Atlantic. The project culminated in his appointment to the governorship of his native province in 1729. But the universal acclaim that greeted this news in Massachusetts soon degenerated into a firestorm of angry criticism. Despite a long eleven-​­year tenure marked by some major accomplishments, Belcher found himself continually harassed by

Figure 12. Jonathan Belcher, Jr., had this portrait print of his father made in England in 1734. The painting used by the engraver commemorated his appointment as governor of Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Belcher holds his commission with the city of Boston in the background. Courtesy American Antiquarian Society.

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attempts to unseat him. As he noted to his London agent upon learning of the print, “My Enemies are always watching” me.3 The ambitious provincial caught between loyalty to his place of origin and the broader metropolis is a common character in both history and literature, but the issue took on particular poignancy in Belcher’s case. The governor responded to the problems of provincialism not by choosing a side or even veering between them, but by committing himself fully both to New England and to the monarch—​­living up to the family motto blazoned on the print: “Loyal Au Mort,” loyalty unto death. It was a high-​­minded commitment, one that could boast that “No man can exceed me in the love of my country’s liberty” and at the same time praise the king as “the best Monarch upon Earth.” His eulogist praised both his “religious regard to . . . ​the Instructions of his Royal Master” and his “tender regard to the liberties of the people.” As Belcher wrote to a fellow colonial official at the end of 1734, he believed that “The prerogative of the Crown and the just rights & privileges of the people may doubtless be compatibly maintain’d.” The difficulty was that few others fully shared this faith in the 1730s—​­even Belcher’s use of “doubtless” suggests that others had doubts. Belcher paid a high price for his stance. By 1734, when the print was made, many people in Massachusetts saw him as too compliant to royal wishes, while others believed him too bound up in provincial prejudices.4 Belcher’s biographer suggests that the governor’s anxieties expressed personal issues. His commitment to preserving New England ideals, the work suggests, was crippled by a “rage within” that made the world seem “dark, foreboding, and threatening.” Viewed from the perspective of “the affair of my picture,” however, Belcher’s anxieties take on a different significance. The governor’s enemies were real and they spent substantial time and money to remove him, eventually resorting to lies and forgeries. The governor’s personal and policy mistakes clearly played a role in his 1741 removal, but his problems were less the result of a troubled psyche than his (and his colony’s) troubled place in the empire.5 Like Byrd’s parallel struggle with responses to the dividing line, Belcher’s career reveals a new stage in the development of the politics of politeness, a period in which America’s most cosmopolitan leaders found these ideals a powerful means of shaping their thinking and their actions. What had been a set of ideas to deploy against authoritarian opponents had become a foundation of people’s public identity, and a means of understanding and responding to a wide range of personal issues. For Byrd, the politics of politeness shaped

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his shifting responses to his difficulties with the dividing line. For Belcher these same values helped define both his career as governor and his relationship with his son in London. Despite his difficulties, Belcher remained committed to win over both sides through peaceful, respectful relationships rather than abject obedience on one side and harsh demands for complete authority on the other. What Belcher called “the affair of my picture” brought together some of the central elements of his position. The decision to prepare the print reveals his success in shaping himself as a cosmopolitan and polite leader skilled in dealing with London and Boston, a positioning that allowed the British government to entrust him with perhaps the most substantial post on the mainland even as New Englanders also acclaimed him the “favorite man.” This extraordinary success also inspired the governor’s frustrating, expensive, and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to establish his son as a major London lawyer. Belcher’s governorship provoked similar anxiety as he faced continued carping in Boston and attacks on his standing in London that inspired even more intensive concern with his self-​­presentation.

The Favorite Man Belcher’s fears about the print primarily lay in its medium, not its message. He had proudly posed for the painting from which the engraving was made, praising it as “a good piece of paint.” Made in London during the first flush of success in the interval between gaining the governorship and returning to New England, the image showed a baby-​­faced Belcher (“I think it is not much like,” he admitted) holding the king’s commission set against Boston, the capital city of his province.6 The picture portrayed a seamless connection between London and Boston, the imperial and the provincial capital. This fusion took some imagination. The painter, “Mr. Philips of Great Queen Street out of Lincoln’s Inn Fields,” had never been to Boston; nor had the commission itself. The image of the harbor, with its ships and city buildings in the background, seems to have been taken from another source, possibly a recent engraving of Boston.7 But the painting’s attempt to span these worlds accurately represented its subject’s ambitions. In his career and his self-​­presentation, Belcher struggled to create a similar sense that Boston and London were closely connected, that they were part of the same picture. In the roughly six months after receiving

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the appointment in November 1729, Belcher had reason to hope that this goal was within reach. The favorite son of his father and his province, he was now hailed by the most widely known of all living English poets as “the Favorite Man.” Early images of Boston always portrayed it from the harbor and the perspective is especially appropriate for Belcher. Boston itself looked outward, toward the sea, and Belcher himself took advantage of that orientation as well as anyone. His father, who had risen to become Boston’s most successful merchant, had also been defined by the harbor, but for him it represented the mercantile world that marked the limits of his aspirations. Belcher himself had built on, and then gone beyond, both his father and Boston itself. Going beyond Andrew Belcher was a daunting assignment. The son of early English immigrants, Andrew was born in 1649 inland from Boston, in Cambridge, and began his mercantile career not in the lucrative maritime trade, but as a land-​­based peddler. Andrew went on to run a tavern in Connecticut, where he developed agricultural connections that allowed him to supply the troops fighting King Philip’s War. The profits allowed a return to Cambridge by 1682, when Jonathan, his second son, was born. Moving to Boston soon afterward, Andrew skippered and then bought ships that ranged both southward into the Caribbean and eastward to Britain and the continent. Growing commercial success led to increased public responsibility. Andrew became part of the committee of safety established after Bostonians imprisoned Governor Edmund Andros in 1689. When William Phips, the first royal governor under the new charter, arrived in 1692, Andrew took up the judicial post of provost marshal.8 By the time Jonathan Belcher entered Harvard in 1695, he too had experienced great changes. His mother had died in 1689 and his elder brother, Andrew, Jr., was killed in battle soon afterward. His father’s status had also risen dramatically. The school, ranking students according to their family’s social position, placed Belcher second in his class. His father paid additional fees so that Belcher could room with his tutor rather than with the other students. Granted such privilege in the wake of family tragedy, Belcher might have relaxed or rebelled. Instead he did the opposite. Sharing the sense of obligation that drove his father, Belcher (he later told his own son) developed an “aversion & hatred to any thing that carrys the face of indolence or laziness.”9 Andrew’s rise continued even as his son entered manhood. Elected to the Massachusetts House a year before Jonathan’s 1699 graduation, Andrew joined

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the even more exclusive governor’s council in 1702. About that time, he also became the official supplier to both the Massachusetts and the British troops engaged in fighting the French. After leaving Harvard, Jonathan himself joined his father in the increasingly busy counting house on Belcher’s Wharf. A few years later the young Belcher was ready to move beyond Boston, embarking on an extended voyage to England and to the continent in 1704. Andrew clearly approved of the trip (perhaps he even suggested it), but it still worried him and he held a private religious service at his house to mark the occasion, inviting a minister from his church to preach. Ebenezer Pemberton’s sermon spoke directly to the situation, noting that even though parents “have a lively sense of the dangerous Stage [their children] are ent[e]ring upon,” these new experiences would make them “more fit to serve God and their Generation.” Children also had a responsibility. They must not be “giddy,” forgetting their belief in God and their moral obligations in the excitement of new and unfamiliar experiences. Only divine aid, Pemberton warned, could ensure “you will not be hist off the Stage with reproach, but retire with honour, with the applause of God, good Men, and a good Conscience.”10 Belcher took this message with him literally as well as figuratively. Without the prior knowledge of Pemberton and perhaps even his father, the young man arranged to have the address printed when he arrived in London. The action was complicated. It partially proclaimed his allegiance to religion, his father, and his region’s values—​­to seeking the honor and applause Pemberton recommended. But the publication was more than a simple sign of loyalty. It also asserted Belcher’s competence in the broader metropolitan world, a place where he would also come to feel at home.11 Such an Atlantic voyage represented the logical step for an aspiring provincial. As “the only son of a wealthy father,” later governor Thomas Hutchinson noted in his history of the province, Belcher “had high views from the beginning of life.” These attitudes were shaped in part by his particular location in Massachusetts history. Most New Englanders old enough to remember the virtual independence that the colony had enjoyed before the 1684 revocation of the charter found it difficult to see Britain’s expanded role in the colony as normal or positive; even the new charter that arrived in the colony in 1692, despite its relatively generous terms, failed to quiet these anxieties. Belcher was old enough to understand these reactions, but for him royal oversight—​ ­and royal governors—​­formed an everyday part of his life in a way that many New Englanders of the previous generation found difficult to accept.12

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Having traveled beyond Boston, Belcher threw himself into preparing for the broader stage of the empire, even traveling to the continent to visit both the Dutch home of the former king, William III, and the German palace of the next, George I. Belcher became perhaps the only American colonial to visit Hanover before the succession, a remarkable journey that became known in both England and America. Besides meeting the branch of the royal family that would rule England during his tenure as governor, he also gained worldly wisdom about such things as traveling with a sword (avoid holding it point up while riding in a coach in case you fall asleep) and entering a new town (go to a high point like a steeple to get a view of the town, then seek out the “best comp[any], & men of learning”).13 Belcher continued to develop his understanding of the broader world over the next quarter century, building connections that would serve him well in both Massachusetts and Britain. “The novelty of a British American, added to the gracefulness of his person, caused distinguishing notice to be taken of him” in England, Hutchinson noted.14 By the time he became governor, Belcher had spent some five years abroad, allowing a range of fictive family connections across the Atlantic. He became perhaps the first native-​­born colonial to join the Freemasons, becoming a brother to British aristocrats and Fellows of the Royal Society. Princess Sophia (then heir to the English crown) treated Belcher generously during his 1704 trip, he boasted, “as if she had been my mother.” Returning to Hanover four years later, he attempted to strengthen this tie by giving her an Indian slave named Io. The gift illuminates the complexity of the young provincial’s cultural and political networks. As an American colonial seeking status in Britain, Belcher transferred a Native American boy, already given the name of a woman from a Greek myth, to a German aristocrat.15 By the mid-​­1710s, Belcher had become savvy enough to derail a potentially troubling appointee to the Massachusetts governorship. Elizeus Burgess’s reputation as a morally suspect soldier and duelist frightened provincial leaders. Belcher, working with his Harvard classmate Jeremiah Dummer, successfully offered Burgess £1,000 to withdraw, with the Belcher family personally donating half the sum. Belcher recruited the brother of a leading Dissenter M.P. to seek the now vacant post—​­and then helped convince imperial officials to appoint him. Belcher’s standing grew within New England as well. As son of a leading political figure, he had long been in the public eye. Cannons were fired from

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Portsmouth’s forts and Boston’s ships when he was married in January 1706. Samuel Sewall, the diarist who served on the Council with Belcher’s father, noted that the wedding procession returning to Boston from New Hampshire consisted of “About 20 Horsmen, Three Coaches and many Slays.” Belcher and his new wife immediately went to dine at the lieutenant governor’s. Belcher achieved high political office, however, only after his father’s death in 1717. A year later he took his father’s place in the Council, serving four times in that office before he became governor.16 The next decade, however, frustrated both Belcher and his colony. The governor Belcher had recruited proved unexpectedly obstreperous, eventually arousing so much opposition that he left for England without warning in December 1722. A key point of contention had been the king’s demand that the province grant governors a permanent salary at the start of their tenure. Massachusetts had always voted such money annually. Giving up that practice would reduce the province’s power to influence its highest official and require accepting the dangerous principle that the king could unilaterally change the colony’s charter. The new governor, William Burnet, arrived six years later determined to force the issue. Refusing to compromise, he kept legislators in extended sessions at inconvenient places to maintain the pressure. The equally unyielding Assembly instead voted to send a representative to London to protest. Their choice was Jonathan Belcher. Belcher arrived in London in April 1729. A few months later, as Belcher attempted to resolve the standoff, Burnet died suddenly. After first determining that his predecessor was not interested in returning, Belcher succeeded in gaining the post for himself. It was an odd choice for the imperial government. Seeking to gain its goal of a permanent salary, it appointed one of the policy’s most notable critics. Belcher’s statements to imperial officials are unknown, but his acceptance of the post meant that he also (whether explicitly or implicitly) accepted the goal of a permanent salary. Belcher’s appointment in November 1729 marked the culmination of his activities on both sides of the Atlantic. The connections between New England and the empire that he had worked to build now seemed complete. Having left home in 1704 with the blessing of his father, he returned having surpassed him. Belcher was no longer simply the favorite son of his family, or even his province. Now no less a figure than Isaac Watts, the hymn writer who became the century’s most popular English poet, celebrated Belcher’s return home as governor in a long poem calling him “the Favorite Man.” Belcher, Watts suggested, was going to “New-​­Albion” to “assume [his] glorious Sway.”

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The poem even explicitly draws the comparison to Jesus himself who also had left an “Envoy and returned a King.”17 Belcher had not quite returned as a king, but the reception he received could hardly have been more rapturous. Watts’s prediction to Belcher in the poem was correct: “On thy native strand/ Thy nation throngs to hail thy bark to land.” Hutchinson, both a student of the colony’s history and a contemporary resident of Boston, later observed that “No governor has been received with a shew of greater joy.”18 A local governor who had proved his loyalties to the province by standing up to imperial officials seemed to promise the awareness of local sensibilities that his immediate predecessors had lacked. Belcher displayed this virtue even before entering Boston. Arriving in the harbor on late Saturday, he held off disembarking until Monday to honor the Sabbath, attending services at Castle Island in the harbor. The delay also allowed further time to prepare. By Monday, turrets and balconies were hung with carpets; ships decorated; and the militia and horse-​­troop arranged in carefully composed ranks. A newspaper account even counted the showers that began during the procession as a sign of divine favor: “the Guns, which were bursting in every part of the Town, were answered in mild & rumbling Peals by the Artillery of Heaven, which introduced the plentiful and refreshing Showers that succeeded a very dry Season.” The Boston ministers who visited Belcher the next day similarly turned to a meteorological metaphor. When they heard of Belcher’s appointment, they noted, “The Cloud that hung over us scatterd in a moment, as the Sun breaks out in a dark Day”: “we were like Men that Dream.”19 The favorite son had become the “Favorite Man.” But this universal favor did not last. He had been told as much on his first departure from New England. In the sermon arranged by his father, the Reverend Pemberton had warned him that children “must not expect always to bath their feet in Butter, or [their] steps in Oyl.” Instead, the world was a “Scene of mutabilities” where they will also “meet with sinking Tryals, amazing Sorrows, distressing Disappointments.”20 Pemberton’s predictions soon came true.

The Favorite Son In 1734, the year he produced the Belcher print, John Faber, Jr., was also finishing a major project, a set of forty-​­seven engravings of the members of

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London’s Kit-​­Cat club, the famous Whig literary and political society that included some of the most prominent leaders in both those worlds. Since most of the portraits were offered for sale individually before being bound into a book in 1735, the series included more separately published prints than appeared in all the mainland British colonies before the Revolution. Faber’s Kit-​­Cat portraits were only part of a prolific career that eventually numbered more than 400 portrait prints and made him perhaps the most important mezzotint engraver of his generation.21 Although the Belcher print would have been much less unusual in London than in Boston, Faber would not have started such a project on his own. The initiative in creating the print came from two other men less interested in profits than prestige. Like Belcher himself, Henry Newman was both a Massachusetts native and a Harvard College graduate. But, rather than remaining in New England, Newman, twelve years Belcher’s senior, settled in London permanently in 1703, the year before Belcher’s first trans-​­Atlantic trip. Four years later (about the time of Belcher’s second voyage), Newman took up the position he held for the rest of his life, secretary of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge. As administrator of Britain’s most important voluntary religious organization, Newman moved in rarified circles that included many leading figures of Britain and the empire; among his friends were key members of the Kit-​­Cat club, including the influential authors Addison and Steele—​­and Governor Belcher.22 The other person who commissioned the print hardly loomed as large in London’s cultural or imperial circuits. But the experiences of the governor’s son, Jonathan Belcher, Jr., reveal some of his father’s deepest fears and aspirations in both old and New England, Having been appointed governor in late 1729, Jonathan Belcher knew he had reached the height of his career. But his ambitions did not rest. Belcher attempted to develop a Connecticut copper mine in the early 1730s, pouring much more money into it than ever came out.23 He also assembled a fine estate of nearly 4,000 acres in the same colony and offered it for sale, billing it as “a fine choice Tract of Land, and what is called Cream.”24 But the governor’s greatest hopes centered on his son. Jonathan, Jr., was not the first of his family chosen to carry on the family’s ascent. His elder brother Andrew had joined Belcher on his 1729 trip to London. Andrew, however, showed little interest in making a figure in the broader world. He returned home to run the family mercantile business after his father gave it up on his appointment as governor. Andrew’s younger brother became the new focus of Belcher’s aspirations.

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Soon after entering his governorship, he sent his son Jonathan, Jr., to London. Still only twenty-​­one, the Harvard College graduate took rooms in the Middle Temple at the Inns of Court, Britain’s preeminent legal training ground. Just as Belcher had moved beyond his father to establish a transatlantic career and identity, the governor hoped that Jonathan, Jr., would crown the family’s rise by becoming what the elder Belcher called “a compleat lawyer & a fine gen’m” in London itself.25 Not surprisingly, Belcher did not allow his son simply to find his own way. He tirelessly explained the elements that had gone into his rise—​­and his education in politeness. Although separated by an ocean, the governor struggled to overcome the distance by a stream of correspondence counseling his son on matters from marriage (“a plentifull fortune,” although not everything, was “a real, necessary ingredient in matrimony”) to wigs and word usage (always buy the former at the “Court End of the town” and avoid the New England usage of the word “resent,” which is “hardly known in the polite world where you are”). “My soul is unwearied in its care for your wellfare & happiness,” he wrote soon after Jonathan’s arrival.26 Belcher believed that he could be particularly useful by helping his son make contact with some of the empire’s most prominent leaders. “I . . . ​will bring you into the best acquaintance I can,” he promised his son in 1732, noting Jonathan, Jr., would need to “cultivate it.”27 Belcher wrote endless numbers of letters of introductions to significant British figures and often asked Jonathan, Jr., to carry his dispatches, advising him to deliver them “when you can do it to your best advantage.”28 Belcher’s intense attention to the matter appears clearly in his letter to his son of November 11, 1734, a few months after he had learned about the portrait print and more than three years after Jonathan, Jr., had arrived in London. The packet, the governor explained, had originally contained twenty-​­one letters “in your favour.” After they were completed, however, he learned that the lawyer William Shirley knew several other influential figures. The governor added to the pile some letters from Shirley (a recent immigrant who soon became his rival and successor), with an additional note to the recipients that provided an excuse for Jonathan, Jr., to deliver them. Still not satisfied, Belcher finally added copies of two letters written to him (and excerpts from two others) that he thought Jonathan, Jr., would profit from reading.29 The only thing not included in the pile were gifts like the pair of wild geese he designated for the duke of Newcastle in 1731 or the five flying squirrels he had sent for his son to present to the royal princess two years later.30 “Few fathers,” he had suggested in 1732, show the “care &

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affection for you” that I have maintained “from your infancy to your youth & manhood.”31 Along with his constant efforts to enlarge his son’s acquaintance, Belcher insisted that Jonathan, Jr., apply himself closely to his education. When Belcher’s London agent wrote that Jonathan, Jr., was “pretty diligent at his Studies,” Belcher replied that he had hoped the term would be “very” diligent. “You must live a Recluse for Some Years,” he advised his son, repeating the call for a “monastick life” he had made the previous year. The law, he warned, was “a crabbed, knotty study, not to be obtain’d by fits & starts, jerks & violence, but by a sedate, steady application.” Especially because the discipline of studying was so demanding, Belcher also encouraged exercise. He commended the “gentlemanly science” of fencing and urged his son to “endeavour to be a fine dancer.”32 Belcher could push his son both to cultivate a wide acquaintance and to live a monastic life because he knew that a legal career in the metropolis, let alone a political career, would require both the aid of the great and the knowledge that would impress them. But success would also require other qualities. Belcher pushed his son to become not only a fine lawyer but a fine gentleman as well—​­as he told Jonathan, Jr., “a correct, acomplisht gent’m to an iota.”33 And this required politeness. “Pride, supercilliousness, affectation, & stiffness,” he warned, made people “the object of hatred & contempt.” He counseled instead that his son “Delight . . . ​in the study of humanity,” seeking to “be admir’d for his real humility, condescention, courteousness, affability, & great good manners to all the world.”34 Belcher’s expectations excited the younger man’s ambitions. A year into his London residence, Jonathan, Jr., confessed to his father that he looked at great aristocrats “with fond & longing eyes.” His father termed it “a laudable pride & ambition,” even having his clerk copy a letter patent for a peerage that had recently been published and noting that “it mayn’t be impossible for you to get beyond a Commoner.”35 The younger Belcher’s ability to navigate the complex world of the British metropolis grew rapidly. The governor encouraged his son to read the enormous correspondence he carried on with British notables and officials. He also called on his son for a variety of tasks, from procuring pens and paper from the Board of Trade to joining his agent in representing him in various offices. Jonathan, Jr., carried out the task of preparing a bookplate for the governor’s library, correcting the Latin inscription in the process and gaining experience with engravers that may have encouraged his desire to

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commission the portrait soon afterward.36 By 1740, he felt confident enough to place an item about his father from a Philadelphia newspaper into a London gazette seemingly without explicit instructions—​­and promise Boston minister Benjamin Colman that he would insert his “ingenious Compliment” on the poet Alexander Pope into the London Magazine, and then pass along Pope’s reaction.37 By then, the younger Belcher himself had already published both a Latin song and a poem on the wedding of the royal princess. The cosmopolitan Colman found the family partnership impressive. He told Jonathan, Jr., in 1734, just before the creation of the print, that he considered Belcher “the Happy Father & you the happy Son”: “Great is his Joy in You.”38 Jonathan Jr.’s decision to commission a portrait print of his father may have played the same role in his life as Belcher’s publication of the sermon commissioned by his own father, a public expression of competence in the metropolis. But the image may also have had a more specific purpose. Jonathan, Jr., was engaged in another activity in 1734 besides his studies, one whose audaciousness rivaled even his father’s travels to Germany. The young law student was seeking a seat in Parliament. Even making the attempt, what Belcher called “the great affair,” was extraordinary.39 The only other native-​­born colonial from mainland America even to have sought such office was Belcher’s predecessor, Joseph Dudley, who spent a year in the House of Commons at the turn of the century. By that time, however, Dudley was already older than Governor Belcher himself would be in 1734, and an experienced leader who had already served as president of the Council of New England, chief justice of New York, and lieutenant governor of the British Isle of Wight. He also had the support of a powerful noble patron, a lord who used his control of a borough to place his client in Parliament. Jonathan, Jr., by contrast was twenty-​­three years old, had been in England only three years, and had never even held political office.40 Despite these obvious limitations, the quest was not entirely quixotic. Running for a seat in the borough of Tamworth (near Birmingham in the Midlands), Jonathan, Jr., ended up polling a respectable number of votes, failing to gain a seat by a mere twelve votes of a total of 376. Besides encouragement from some significant local leaders, he also had been promised the aid of the bishop of Lincoln, a powerful man whom Belcher noted as having “friendship and interest at Court,”—​­and who for a time seemed to be acting the part of a “kind father” to Jonathan, Jr. The bishop’s son lent him the property needed to qualify himself for election.41

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The bishop’s willingness to help Jonathan, Jr., grew out of a desire to help his own family. When the bishop’s son, Anthony Reynolds, arrived in New England in early 1731 (about the time Jonathan, Jr., was heading the opposite way across the Atlantic), he carried with him a packet of letters to the governor not only from the bishop himself but also from the Board of Trade and its influential member Martin Bladen. Not surprisingly Belcher quickly wrote back to the bishop, instructing his son to deliver the reply, taking Henry Newman to make the introduction.42 In his letter, Belcher promised to “leave no Stone unturn’d to Serve Mr. Reynolds.” He soon fulfilled his promise by appointing Reynolds first collector and then naval officer of New Hampshire. The governor also took the opportunity to suggest that the new arrival replace the appointed lieutenant governor there, an appointment that would also have removed a troubling rival.43 The Belchers soon reaped the fruits of this aid. The bishop, the governor wrote happily, showed Jonathan, Jr., “the Respect & Tenderness of a Father.” The church leader encouraged the young man to consider running for Parliament in the spring of 1733. The governor added what resources he could. Committing two years worth of the salary he had been strenuously contending for, he sent a bond for £2,000 to help pay expenses, noting that he hoped not much more than £500 would be spent. The governor also signed over the title to his magnificent Connecticut estate to provide security for the loan offered by the bishop’s son. Belcher even went so far as to encourage Boston merchants to order cloth from Tamworth and to tell the town’s notables that he would be “unwearied to serve the borough of Tamworth in this article.”44 The younger Belcher’s own activities are unclear, but he seems not to have spent extensive time in Tamworth itself. Part of his campaigning, however, probably included commissioning the print as a means of showing both Tamworth and the broader political nation his family’s standing. It is perhaps telling that Newman served as go-​­between for Jonathan, Jr., with both the bishop and the engraver Faber. By the time Belcher learned of the print in August 1734, however, any further political advantages for Jonathan, Jr., would have been remote. The election had been held in May. And although there still was a distinct possibility that the winner of the second seat would withdraw to take up another constituency, any further election increased the likelihood that other notables would sponsor their own candidates. The bishop furthermore had grown less interested in helping Jonathan. After the polls closed without the bishop engaging fully in support, Belcher wrote his son ruefully that, “I see you are to

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expect no further favour from my Lord or his family.” Unfortunately for Belcher’s hopes, the bishop’s son had entered into a romance with a New Hampshire woman Belcher described as being “of low Birth & Education & less Fortune.” The governor intervened, chastising Reynolds and then informing his father, who quickly brought his son back to England. Despite Belcher’s efforts to secure his return by promising him the much more lucrative Boston collectorship, Reynolds married a wealthy British woman and remained in England. Belcher noted to his son that the incident confirmed his earlier understanding of the situation: “the B[ishop]’s respect center’d in what service your father cou’d do for his son.”45 The governor had been aware of the dangers posed by his son’s candidacy almost from the start. His fears of embarrassing failure emerged in a mid-​­May letter complaining about lack of news about the election. Think more carefully next time before “you ingage yourselves & me in such a great affair,” he admonished his son, “because the [noise] of it (to no purpose) makes both me & you contemptible among mankind & gives occasion to the ill natur’d to sneer.” A few months later, news of the print aroused the same anxieties. He had warned Jonathan, Jr., about his emerging political aspirations almost two years before: “Mankind is wicked, full of ill nature & Envy, and when a man misses his aim they are full of Sneer & Ridicule.” Such a possibility seemed deeply troubling to a man so concerned about people’s responses. Unfortunately, for both the governor and his son, the search for a London career would become deeply entangled in Belcher’s view of his connections with New England and the metropolis—​­a set of issues that became increasingly problematic as the decade progressed.46 About the time that Jonathan, Jr., ran for Parliament, his father began referring to him differently. As Belcher explained to his brother-​­in-​­law and London agent, they now needed to give him “due honour.” Rather than saying “He is a pretty youth,” he recommended, they should instead say, “Mr. Belcher of the Temple is a gent’m of good sense, &c’a,” a description he believed would “give him respect among mankind.” When he saw that his son listed himself “Jonathan Belcher, Jun’r, Esq’r” in a subscription list later that year, he raised the issue again. The Junior, he told his son, “does not look so honourable.” He suggested instead that “Jonathan Belcher of the Middle Temple, Esq’r” would be more appropriate, with himself noted as “His Exc’y Jonathan Belcher, Esq’r, Gov’r of N. Engl’d.”47 Belcher’s careful consideration of terms of address was of a piece with a

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lifelong concern with proper self-​­presentation. Two years before, he had argued strenuously with a British relative who had altered the name “Belcher” to the seemingly more elegant “Belchier” (the governor only indirectly hinted at the difficulties of the latter, which meant beautiful excrement in French).48 His son’s actions and reputation were particularly problematic. Not only did they affect the governor’s standing in the political and cultural center of the empire, but they would come to challenge Belcher’s own attempt to balance his sense of himself as both a colonist and a cosmopolitan. The issues, central to the affair of the governor’s picture, had begun earlier, most notably with Jonathan, Jr.’s arrival in the metropolis in 1731—​­and continued through the son’s somewhat more discreditable departure a decade later. Belcher may have been just as worried about his son traveling to England as his own father had been about him. But the governor was less concerned about whether his son would leave New England behind than about whether he would fit into the old. Each of the numerous letters of introduction he wrote for Jonathan, Jr., offered preemptive apologies for the missteps he fully expected the new arrival to take. “You must not expect to see in him a Briton,” he warned a customs official: he is “just come from the wilds of New England.” Even writing Samuel Shute, who as former governor of Massachusetts had long experience with Boston’s wilderness, Belcher begged him to “excuse any disadvantages or peculiarities in his mein & behaviour which will be too readily observ’d by those nice & polite judges of manners at Court.”49 Belcher was not simply being what he often called a “fond father.” His English reputation was essential to his career—​­and to his own view of himself as a cosmopolitan gentleman as at home in London as in Boston. As Belcher feared, the son soon committed a significant faux pas, failing to pay proper respects to the province’s agent, Francis Wilks. The governor not only apologized to Wilks, but included a copy of the reprimand he had written to Jonathan, Jr.50 Although Jonathan, Jr., soon learned to avoid such missteps, he found success in the metropolis elusive. By 1736, after two years struggling as a London lawyer, he despaired of establishing a substantial legal practice and began to consider returning to New England or taking up a promised appointment in Dublin. The governor would not hear of it. He warned his brother-​­in-​­law not to encourage either option. Coming back to Boston would mean “all the money” spent on his son’s London education would be “in a manner lost.” New England is not, Belcher declared, “a Country for a Man of Genius & Learning to raise his Fortune in.” Returning there after “a Temple education,” he told Jonathan, Jr., “would be but a dull story.”51

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The governor’s hopes for a triumphant ending proved even more problematic in the coming years. By 1740, as the possibility of losing the governorship seemed increasingly real, Belcher began to warn his son that returning to America might be necessary. “Had I imagin’d you would not have been handsomely and honourably setl’d in the world after 9 years study, & at so great an expence,” he complained in mid-​­1740, I would have kept you “this side the water or [had you] return’d some years agoe.” “You must soon come home,” Belcher gloomily told his son the following year, “if at 31 you can’t maintain yourself.” Still, it was “but poor doing” to “drudge along as other New England lawyers do.”52 Despite Belcher’s bleak assessment of his country’s economic opportunities, however, he remained fully committed to its cultural inheritance. Though he had spent extended periods in Britain and engaged in endless transatlantic correspondence, he had remained true to the advice he had been given on the eve of his first trip abroad about preserving his religious faith as he entered onto “the dangerous Stage” of the larger world. As governor, Belcher continued to support New England’s Congregational churches personally and publicly, including introducing Massachusetts minister and theologian Jonathan Edwards to a British audience. Belcher’s religious affiliations shaped his political life as well. He drew on and extended the alliance between New England’s churches and Britain’s Dissenters. The prominent nonconformist minister and hymnist Isaac Watts had praised Belcher in verse not only because he knew Belcher and his Dissenting faith but also because of a deep respect for New England, a place, Watts noted, where “God has a large people.” Belcher had also established close ties with Quakers, another group at odds with the Church of England. “If there be occasion,” he wrote to his London agent (himself a member of the Society of Friends) in 1737, “I depend the Quakers will appear in a body in my Interest, and so will a number of the Dissenting Ministers.”53 Belcher’s close identification with New England’s churches made it particularly troubling when he discovered that his son had started attending the Church of England soon after arriving in London. Belcher had some inkling of the situation in 1734, but he seems to have seen it as a minor concession, perhaps similar to his own occasional visits to Boston’s Anglican churches. By the end of the decade, however, Belcher had come to realize that his son’s commitment extended beyond the “constant attendance” he had worried about in 1734 to complete “conformity,” a situation he viewed as a grave matter. “It was the greatest folly you could be guilty of,” Belcher warned. His

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frustration involved not only spiritual concern but also political self-​­interest. Jonathan, Jr., had offered seeming support to the Rev. John Checkley, a New England Anglican who had alienated both the Dissenters and the Church. Belcher noted that this action had “made all the Dissenting interest cool towards you in Engl’d & here,” a situation he believed created difficulties both for the son still seeking success in London, and for the father fighting for his political life in Boston.54 Belcher was correct at least about his own problems. Jonathan’s adherence to the Church of England was mentioned in a letter forged by his political opponents to undermine him. Sent to leading British Dissenters, the letter suggested that Belcher himself had shifted his support to the church. Belcher told his son the fraud could have been turned to his advantage in Boston but he had not dared to print a letter that noted what he called “your wild conformity.”55 But while Jonathan’s new affiliation may have injured his father’s career, the governor’s religious rigidity may have harmed his son even more. After Belcher lost his governorship in 1741, the broad-​­minded Colman, a Boston minister who was also close to Watts and other English Dissenters, suggested to Jonathan, Jr., the possibility of becoming an Anglican clergyman. Jonathan, Jr., broached the subject to Henry Newman, whose own move into the Church of England after a New England upbringing had made possible a career within its highest circles. Newman confirmed Colman’s judgment that taking holy orders might allow “a great preferment.” Yet Newman still could not recommend it. Becoming an Anglican priest, he noted, “would be shooting your good father (who has doted on you from the Cradle) through the head.”56 Despite the increasing tension between the father and son over finances and future activities, Jonathan, Jr., could not bring himself to take such a step. His father’s removal from office in 1741 made his situation even more problematic. Belcher had already grown weary of supporting his son’s high-​­toned life in London at a yearly cost of upward of 40 percent of his governor’s salary. The loss of the position removed the financial foundations of that support, especially since Belcher received no other compensation from the British government. Jonathan, Jr., found the situation overwhelming. In September 1741, after sending home a letter about his debts that his father characterized as full of “melancholly scenes,” he took up a post as deputy secretary to the lord chancellor of Ireland. Although Belcher had previously signaled approval of this move, he still believed (and hoped) Jonathan, Jr., would actually return

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home. The young man instead broke off correspondence with his father.57 Nearly two years later, Belcher still had not heard anything, writing to his London agent seeking news about “my lost son.”58 Rather than being lost, however, Jonathan, Jr., had begun to find his own way.59 He remained in Dublin for thirteen years, publishing an abridgment of Irish laws and receiving an honorary degree from the University of Dublin. These accomplishments gained him a more prominent post in America. In 1754 he became chief justice of Nova Scotia, a position he held almost until his death a dozen years later. As a member of the Nova Scotia council, he sometimes served as acting governor.60 Jonathan, Jr.’s imperial career reveals the limits of Belcher’s family aspirations. The movement from Andrew Belcher’s New England success to his son’s transatlantic identity could not be continued by a third generation rooted in London yet remaining loyal to Massachusetts. Jonathan, Jr., had to accept the limitations of provincial beginnings that Belcher had hoped could be transcended. Leaving New England, the scion of the Belcher family ended up in Nova Scotia—​­literally New Scotland.

Banter and Ridicule Belcher gave his “possitive order” to destroy the plate and any printed copies of his portrait print only a day before the anniversary of his return of Boston as governor, a perspective (Belcher would have known) portrayed in the portrait. This coincidence might have inspired nostalgia about his extraordinary reception or gratitude for his continuance in office. But Belcher was preoccupied with the possible reactions of his opponents. The print, he complained to his son, “will pull down much envy.” As he told his London agent the same day, the entire idea was “imprudent,” creating opportunities for his “enemies” to “banter & ridicule.”61 Belcher was just as interested in managing the reactions of other people in 1734 as he had been in 1730. But while his earlier delayed landing had been a masterful gesture of solidarity with the Puritan sabbath, his reaction to the print was merely defensive, concerned more to avoid criticism than gain praise. His confidence had been deeply shaken since 1730 both by the original hostility to his position on the permanent salary and by the opponents that had arisen since. “You say there is constant plotting & caballing with you,” Belcher had written his New Hampshire secretary nine months before the

Figure 13. Jonathan Belcher, Jr., had this portrait made in 1756, having finally achieved success as chief justice of Nova Scotia. Painted by the young John Singleton Copley, the image was based on a print of a British jurist by John Faber, the engraver Jonathan, Jr., had approached some twenty years before to prepare a print of his father. After his years of advice about imitating polite models, the father (now governor of New Jersey) may been pleased to see his son in a pose modeled on a distinguished London lawyer. John Singleton Copley (American, 1738–­1815) Jonathan Belcher, 1756. Ht : 121.28 x Wi : 101.92 cm
oil on canvas. Gift of the Canadian International Paper Co. The Beaverbrook Art Gallery.

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news of the portrait print.” “So there is here” and all of it was “levell’d against the . . . ​Governor.”62 Belcher had carefully cultivated a dual identity as a loyal New Englander and a cosmopolitan Briton that had borne fruit in his appointment as governor. Since then, however, the limits of that identity had become clearer. His role as a native-​­born representative of the king laid him open to attacks both from New Englanders angry at his failure to espouse their cause completely and from Britons nervous about his commitment to the imperial agenda. By 1734, Belcher was more concerned and confused than ever about how to represent himself in public. Both by office and by personal conviction, he seemed to stand virtually alone in seeking the success of both crown and colony. The fall of the favorite man ironically began with the issue that allowed him to become governor. Having gone to London in 1729 to resist Britain’s demand for a permanent salary, Belcher accepted the governorship and returned with official instructions on the subject that were even stronger than before. Though he worked to moderate the demand in his correspondence with London, he continued to profess full commitment in public—​­a stand that infuriated many New Englanders. Belcher seems to have said nothing about these official instructions about the salary before addressing the New Hampshire legislature two weeks later. Even then he did not make it clear that the demand applied to Massachusetts until he spoke there as well. His silence during that period worried people in that colony. Even before his second speech, they spoke of publishing a volume contrasting the governor’s previous statements on the salary, a work to be titled “Belcher against Belcher.” Other Boston residents swore that “if he does the like to them they will spitt in his face.”63 This hostility, which grew dramatically after the speech, involved something deeper than frustration at the continuation of the official demand, something more than a belief that Belcher, as Bostonians had previously said about candidates, now “stunk of the prerogative.”64 As a minister noted, “Governor Belcher’s returning with the Same Instructions which He went Home to oppose, is a little Surprising.”65 Many New Englanders could not manage such ironic distance. To them Belcher’s repudiation seemed an act of betrayal. The dramatic turnabout inspired the first play ever written in Massachusetts. Created as a closet drama rather than a performance piece, it portrayed the appointment as a transformation noted in the title given to one of the two extant manuscript copies: “Belcher the Apostate.”66

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As the play opens, Belcher is universally acclaimed as the people’s champion in the battle against a permanent salary. “Jonathan Belcher, Jonathan Belcher,” the crowd cries, “let him be agent, a good Choice.” But this unqualified praise only heightens the contrast with later events. The newly appointed Belcher is so taken with his standing that he commands his wife to address him as “Excellency.” He is, he tells the audience in an aside, merely following the new fashion of “rising upon the ruins of our Country.” “Sincerity’s no more,” the epilogue mourns, “And Antient Honesty’s turn’d out of door.” Yet the play also promises, “With all his art we will not baffled be / But Roman like preserve our Libertie.”67 As the drama predicted, the legislature rejected the new governor’s demands for the permanent salary. A Bostonian told a friend in April 1731 that Belcher “now is as little beloved as his Predecessor.” When the criticism even reached London, the fervent Whig journalist Abel Boyer denounced Belcher. The governor’s response to the Assembly, Boyer declared, used “Terms more proper for a French Monarch, or a Turkish Bashaw than for an English Governor.” The significance of these demands, his piece continued, went far beyond New England: “Oppression and arbitrary Sway” often began in the “most remote Parts” before spreading to the center and destroying “the Body Politick.” Angry colonists promptly reprinted the article in America.68 Belcher’s predecessors had felt similarly overwhelmed. Shute had decamped in the night; Burnet had pushed Massachusetts political leaders almost to the breaking point before his sudden death. But, whatever approach they took, the governor stood in the middle, operating in what sometimes seemed a no-​­man’s land between the colony and the imperial government. Although the crown appointed other officials in New England and the colonies hired representatives in London, only the governor was officially part of both the governing structure of the empire and of the colony.69 The dispute over the permanent salary revealed the dangers of this situation. Short of seeking parliamentary action (and accepting its unpredictable consequences), the Board of Trade could achieve its goal of a permanent salary only through Belcher; and, although the Massachusetts legislature could petition and lobby in London, the governor was the representative of the empire they needed to work with regularly. Each side in the standoff could find satisfaction in the purity of its principles. But Belcher himself had few options. He continued to demand that recalcitrant legislators comply with imperial demands, while at the same time asking the British government to allow him to take a temporary salary grant for the previous year. In the meantime, he

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was forced to make do. “I have . . . ​been living near a year & an half upon my own fortune,” he complained in October 1733, “without any support from the King, my master, or from his people here.” He also ran the risk that his family would receive nothing if he died. The legislature had approved Burnet’s final salary grant shortly before his demise, but, despite Belcher’s urging, refused to pay it for years.70 This difficult position preoccupied Belcher in the months before “the affair of my picture.” Although much of the earlier rancor over the salary had dissipated, the governor had never fully regained his original standing. And new threats loomed just as large. Many Bostonians expected that another governor would soon be appointed. An official noted to a friend near the end of 1733 that some people were already positioning themselves for posts in the new administration.71 To make matters worse, the rumored appointee was none other than Belcher’s bitterest enemy. Belcher and other New Englanders had good reason to fear Col. David Dunbar. As surveyor general of the woods in America, the crown official responsible for forest policy, Dunbar was charged with selecting trees to be reserved for ships’ masts—​­trees that could be taken by the government even if they were on private property. Although these regulations had often been ignored, Dunbar attacked violators of these rules with a will, even with a ­vengeance—​­both in and out of court. In spring 1734, he beat a New Hampshire townsman with his cane before similarly turning on a local officer who would not (or could not) satisfactorily answer his questions about a local sawmill. Dunbar gathered fifteen men to advance on the town, attacking two more men before personally attempting to destroy the mill blade. Only gunfire from the townspeople forced him to retreat. Hostility to Dunbar was not limited to the northern woods. A Boston mob attacked a naval captain in 1731, believing him to be Dunbar. Even the surveyor himself recognized that many colonists considered his actions “obnoxious.”72 Dunbar’s harshness grew not only from zeal for the empire, but from contempt for New England. “I never knew” of a place, he complained to an imperial official in 1731, where “truth [was] less regarded.” New Englanders, he had earlier informed the Board of Trade, were “remarkably insolent,” “a selfish dogmatical people.” Even Belcher’s faithful calls for a permanent salary failed to impress Dunbar, who believed the situation called for far stronger methods. He recommended a more restrictive government backed by British troops and supported by new import duties. Since the Irish already paid similar levies, he recommended a further punitive tax on salt so that New Englanders would be

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“distinguished from H.M. better subjects” and made “the jest of their neighbours.”73 Dunbar considered Belcher as unacceptable as the people he governed. The surveyor’s attacks began even before the new governor arrived in Boston. Members of the Church of England, he reported, were already “in great dread” at the appointment of a Dissenter. Belcher, he claimed, had announced he would cut off his daughter’s legs rather than allow her to marry an Anglican. Dunbar’s brief against Belcher went beyond the personal. He objected to “any native of this country” becoming governor. The complaints redoubled after the men met. Within two months of Belcher’s arrival, Dunbar complained of the governor’s “incredible malice,” arguing that it was a response to his earlier criticisms. By mid-​­1731, Dunbar was convinced that the governor had “murthered [his] character in this country” and even intercepted and distributed a letter from his wife.74 Dunbar clearly lacked the local good will and personal sensitivity that might have made him an effective governor (Belcher considered him “one of the most uneasy creatures I ever had to do with”), but the surveyor of the woods still posed a powerful threat. Dunbar possessed the primary requisite for imperial success, support from London. As with Governor Nicholson before him, what seemed insufferable and overbearing in person appeared as commendable zeal in correspondence, especially when the subject concerned mast trees, an issue dear to the heart of the Board of Trade. No previous holder of the position, they remarked happily, had made the progress that Dunbar seemed to be making.75 This imperial support made the surveyor a persistent thorn in Belcher’s side. Dunbar began by attempting to establish himself as unofficial governor of part of Maine—​­until the Board of Trade finally admitted what Belcher had been telling them all along, that the land that Dunbar insisted belonged to the crown actually belonged to Massachusetts. Soon afterward, Dunbar received appointment as lieutenant governor of New Hampshire. Belcher was incredulous at being saddled with a deputy actively trying to undermine him. But imperial officials were adamant, arguing that the appointment increased Dunbar’s authority as surveyor. Once in office, Dunbar demanded that he be granted authority over the colony while Belcher was in Massachusetts, claiming that the governor was then absent from his New Hampshire jurisdiction—​ a­ position that would have made the common practice of appointing a governor over more than one colony an absurdity. Belcher’s complaints about Dunbar’s affronts, however, gained him no sympathy in London. Instead, the

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Board of Trade rebuked him for undermining Dunbar’s character without censuring the surveyor’s even harsher attacks. Dunbar’s role in enforcing royal control of the woods and his close ties to Board of Trade member Col. Martin Bladen, his “fast Friend & advocate,” meant that, as Belcher informed his New Hampshire associate the day after he ordered the destruction of the portrait print, “there’s no Prospect of [Dunbar’s] Removal.”76 As the governor predicted, Dunbar remained a problem for years to come, but the threat to Belcher had been particularly troubling the previous year. Bostonians in late 1733 became convinced that Dunbar would succeed Belcher in Massachusetts because the surveyor had recently won the support of a man as popular in New England as Dunbar was unpopular, Elisha Cooke, Jr.77 The man whom Belcher called “the hero of the mob” (that is, of the crowd) and “his mobility” was the leader of the so-​­called popular party in Massachusetts politics. The group opposed expanding royal prerogative at the expense of provincial liberties, precisely the opposite of Dunbar’s demands for unquestioned submission to the king’s will. Cooke’s father had fought the new charter of 1691 from the beginning. His son, Elisha, Jr., took over leadership of the group from his father—​­and matched his popularity. Just as Cooke, Sr., had been chosen by the legislature to the Council a dozen years running only to have the governor refuse each time to appoint him, so too the younger Cooke was elected speaker of the lower house in 1720 before being vetoed by Governor Shute. Cooke and Belcher had a troubled relationship. Their alliance in the late 1720s had led to Belcher’s mission to London, and, despite Cooke’s continued opposition to the permanent salary, they continued to work together during the first three years of the governor’s administration. But Cooke grew restless. When the leader of the popular party returned to the more congenial stance of opposition in 1733, Belcher dismissed Cooke from the judgeship he had given him. Cooke entered new territory, both literally and politically, by visiting New Hampshire to seek an alliance with Dunbar.78 Dunbar, not surprisingly, had previously shown nothing but scorn for Cooke—​­and the feeling seems to have been reciprocated in what Belcher called “a most malicious enmity.”79 Yet the two men, despite their differing policies and political philosophies, had a common opponent, the governor. The coalition deeply worried Belcher.80 He considered each a “mortal enemy,” and their combined influence, as he noted in November 1733, “seems to have rivall’d the Gov’r’s interest.”81 He begged his London agent the same month to “leave no stone unturn’d” to prevent Dunbar’s appointment. Isaac Watts and

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other Dissenting ministers could lobby for him, he suggested. And Lord Townshend might write to the king or queen.82 By August 1734, when he learned of the print, Belcher had grown less anxious. The alliance between his enemies seemed to be coming to naught. In the same letter that urged destruction of the print, Belcher boasted that “C—​­k has almost lost his sting.” In the end, even Cooke’s great popularity could not withstand connection with the widely despised Dunbar. The hero of the mob was learning what Belcher had learned before, that attempts to move beyond loyalty to one side (whether king or charter) provoked criticism from both.83 The political storms threatening Belcher provided reason enough to worry about the engraved portrait. But the news of its creation also spoke to broader anxieties. The print threatened the self-​­presentation he had invested so much in building over the years. As Belcher knew, portrait prints were unusual in America. British examples circulated widely, but only one other such print had been published separately in the colonies, a portrait of Cotton Mather made in 1728. That print had appeared after Mather’s death and no successor had yet appeared (the next would be released in 1735). An engraved print threatened Belcher in ways that a painting did not. Paintings played an important part in the public display and personal exchange that knit together eighteenth-​­century elites and reinforced their power. Belcher had seen “a great many fine pictures” in the palace in Berlin on his 1704 trip to the continent. When he arrived in Hanover, he asked the electress to donate her portrait, a painting that soon graced the colony’s council chamber.84 Belcher himself sat for a portrait twice in the year after receiving the governorship. The London image became the basis for the print; the other was begun in Boston only a few months after his return. Local gossip suggested that the full-​­length image being prepared by John Smibert was intended “to answer the King & Queens” images in the State House.85 As this presumed destination suggests, paintings possessed considerable cultural power. The electress, Belcher declared, had “done our Countrey the honur of her picture.”86 When the leading English minister John Guyse sent his portrait to him personally, Belcher placed it, he noted in thanks, “with those of my Family.” As the twentieth-​­century German philosopher Walter Benjamin famously argued, paintings, like other individual works of art, possessed significance that distinguished them from everyday objects. Prints, by contrast, were works of “mechanical reproduction.” Appearing in multiple copies, their circulation and uses could not be so easily controlled. Belcher

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later criticized Massachusetts’s depreciated paper money as “fit onely for Pyes or other bottoms,” useful in the bake house or the outhouse. As he must have realized, prints could also be subject to similar mockery—​­ and similar indignities.87 The possibility of such ridicule troubled Belcher. He had spent his life trying to perfect a proper, polite self-​­presentation. As a young man, he traveled extensively, arguing in his journal that the experience polished his behavior. Later accounts suggest that he had been successful. Thomas Hutchinson’s recollections noted that Belcher “lived elegantly,” setting off “the gracefulness of his person.” College of New Jersey president Aaron Burr (whose son and namesake, the vice president, gained his own reputation for elegance and show) similarly noted that Belcher “was excelled by no Man in his Day” in the “peculiar beauty and Gracefulness of Person.” He was not only a “scholar” and a “true Christian,” but an “accomplished gentleman.” Using central terms in the ideal of polite power, he particularly praised the governor’s “frank, open, and generous manner” and well as “his polite and easy behavior.” There was, he recalled, “a certain Dignity in his Mein and Deportment which commanded Respect.”88 Belcher believed that governors, as both leaders of their society and representatives of the king, had a particular obligation to present themselves properly. His position placed him, he later noted, at “the tip top of honour, & power, in this part of the world.” As Hutchinson’s history noted, governors possessed the “right of precedence in all companies”; the governor’s wife had similar status among women. Governors furthermore had particular royal responsibility. “As the King’s Gov’r I dare not take freedoms with the power & honour his Majesty has repos’d in me,” he warned Dunbar in 1733. The surveyor’s assertiveness challenged the governor not only because it signaled his uncontrolled ambition (what Belcher called a “thirst of being bigger than he is”) but also threatened to undermine the governor’s special standing. Although you are the surveyor of the woods and a lieutenant governor, Belcher lectured Dunbar the following year, “you must alwayes consider the distance” you “are at from the King’s Gov’r & Cap’t General, whom his Majesty under his royal hand & signet is pleas’d to call the represent’ve of his royal person.”89 Fulfilling this royal obligation required more than words. As he later observed to his son, “I . . . ​alwayes appear drest as Gov’r of N. England.” “Private men may do as they please, but Gent’m in publick Station cannot,” he told Richard Waldron, his primary New Hampshire lieutenant in April 1734: their

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“every motion & Syllable, even the Gestures of their Bodies, must pass the Censure of the Staring Croud.”90 Belcher had been particularly aware of this obligation over the few months as he contemplated his role in New Hampshire’s late 1733 election. Prominent men were commonly escorted by groups of gentlemen as they entered or left a locality. Even as a young man, Belcher himself had been met by “several Gentlemen” at the New Hampshire border in 1706 on the way to his wedding. Later visits by the celebrated English minister George Whitefield led the governor to make similar arrangements. He sent his son to meet Whitefield on his first arrival in Boston—​­and then escorted the visitor out of town himself in the governor’s coach. In preparing for the late 1733 New Hampshire elections, Belcher consulted his advisors about changing his normal route to the capital, suggesting that traveling through some different towns while making “a grand appearance” might aid his allies’ electoral chances. But he wondered if the “very bad Road” in one section would mean that “the Cavalcade will not look so well.” “A good Cavalcade must be ready at Hampton,” he reminded a supporter two months later. In December, once the election was over, he suggested that an official reception might not be necessary during the winter. Still he seems to have expected the participation of “our Friends o’ horseback.”91 Belcher’s bitter, defensive response to the news of the print the following year represented a similar concern with protecting himself against the complaints of opponents. Such rivalry seemed inevitable. “I think Governours of any considerable Countreys must of Course, have Enemies,” he suggested in 1740. This was not sour grapes. His successor Shirley, Belcher’s most determined foe, similarly argued in 1750 that “no Prudence can prevent” opposition. The “secret Practices, or open Clamours of particular malignant Persons,” he wrote, “are to be found, I believe, in every government where his Majesty’s Governour is active in doing his Duty.” As both knew, nearly all governors ended up being removed. Only one royally appointed governor of Massachusetts escaped that fate—​­William Burnet, who died after only ten months in the post.92 Despite the great excitement that greeted news of his appointment, Belcher faced a particularly difficult set of circumstances. The three other native New Englanders who received royal appointment to the office after the new 1692 charter also faced the charges of apostasy, of unfaithfulness to the community, that dogged Belcher. William Phips had been deeply compromised by the unpopularity of the new charter he brought with him from England. Even the

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ceaseless pens of the Mather family could not stop him from being recalled to London to answer charges. Joseph Dudley, the next native-​­born governor, faced even more cries of outrage, not only at the return of a man who had been jailed by Boston leaders for his role in the hated Dominion, but for his questionable activities with the French, hints of trading with the enemy that led to actual accusations of treason against a subordinate. And Thomas Hutchinson aroused such furious opposition later in the century that he was virtually forced from the colony even before the Revolution began. As Hutchinson noted of Belcher (and perhaps of himself), “A man of high principles cannot be too jealous [that is, careful] of himself, upon a sudden advancement to a place of power.”93 Yet, while Belcher suffered from his ambiguous role as go-​­between linking crown and people, he also helped resolve some of the constitutional issues that had convulsed the colony’s political life in the 1720s. Despite charges of betrayal, Belcher dealt shrewdly with the issue of the permanent salary. Publicly the governor continued to insist that the legislature comply with the king’s instructions. Continuing stubbornness, he pointed out, could encourage the ministry to take the issue to the House of Commons, a body almost certain to support the crown position—​­and perhaps to use the occasion to reconsider the colony’s generous charter. At the same time, however, Belcher annually petitioned the government for leave to take the salary offered for the year, arguing that neither side gained from the standoff. His arguments helped the imperial government recognize the difficulties of their demand. In 1735, after struggling for five years, Belcher received permission to accept an annual appropriation as long as it was granted at the beginning of a legislative session, a compromise that virtually ended contention about the issue.94 Belcher’s actions brought to a close a long period of Massachusetts politics dominated by constitutional matters. But this considerable achievement may have actually made his own position less secure. The issues that now came to the fore tended to pit colonist against colonist—​­situations where Belcher’s balancing of Massachusetts and the empire had less relevance. The boundary line between Massachusetts and New Hampshire proved particularly difficult. His role in settling the issues only encouraged complaints from New Hampshire political leaders convinced that Belcher had manipulated the process in favor of Massachusetts—​­even as the final result, which actually benefited New Hampshire, did him little good in his home colony either. Banks and corrency proved even more problematic. Belcher did not oppose paper money, and his support of Massachusetts’s emissions helped prevent Britain from imposing a

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more restrictive policy. But he also had long complained about the severe inflation created by excessive currency, a view also held by a British ministry heavily influenced by London merchants. Within the colony, however, the governor’s position seemed merely partisan, an endorsement of one side in a contentious debate. When Belcher intervened decisively against inflationary plans for a land bank in 1740, much of the colony again erupted in anger.95 The new firestorm faced by Belcher furthermore came during a period of renewed opposition. The 1734 “affair of my picture” came at a lull between two periods in the governor’s political difficulties. As the threat from Dunbar and larger constitutional issues weakened, Belcher faced a series of new opponents. Dunbar had demanded stricter limits on lumbering. The emerging New Hampshire leaders sought to engage more fully in it. William Shirley, the Massachusetts advocate general and a man Belcher had gone out of his way to help, began an extensive (and ultimately successful) campaign to take over the governorship that included using his wife as his key London lobbyist. By 1740, Belcher’s enemies had grown so determined that they forged letters falsely claiming that Belcher encouraged illegal lumbering and supported the Church of England at the expense of the Dissenting churches who had always supported him.96 Belcher did not go easily. He fought his opponents on every front. “I have not been idle one moment for a twelve month past, nor my friends at home,” he wrote near the end of 1740, noting that the battle extended to “almost every county in England.” By then, however, Belcher’s enemies had grown too strong. He was replaced the following year.97 The governors that replaced him in Massachusetts and New Hampshire turned out to be unusually successful, not only because of the skills they had honed in their long campaign against Belcher, but also because they were less intent on keeping faith with both old and New England. Each of the new governors emphasized a different side. In New Hampshire, Benning Wentworth successfully resolved the two key issues that bedeviled Belcher’s experience with the colony. Wentworth was first able to satisfy British desire for masts, the imperial interest that gave Dunbar the power to oppose Belcher, by taking over the surveyorship himself and making certain that the colony supplied the requisite number of masts without standing in the way of loggers who wanted to control their own lands. Wentworth further advanced provincial interests by distributing land on a large scale (including, despite good claims by New York to the area, the whole of what is now Vermont). Besides

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ensuring that the Church of England and its missionary organization received land, the governor required that his political allies be included among the grantees and that he himself be given a share as well. Until imperial investigation into his land grants in areas contested by New York in the 1760s led to his downfall, Wentworth held such a tight grip over the colony’s political life that he convened the council at his house.98 While Wentworth kept the empire at arm’s length, Belcher’s Massachusetts successor Shirley embraced it fully. His involvement in military matters during the War of the Austrian Succession in the 1740s and the Seven Years’ War the following decade so impressed imperial officials that he was chosen in the early 1750s as head of all British forces on the continent. He had been, he boasted to the crown in 1758, “instrumental in every part of your Majesty’s Service in North America, which was attended with Success.” Although subsequent military reverses led to his being removed and recalled to Britain, he was able to clear his name and gain the governorship of the Bahamas. Shirley was less consistently popular in provincial affairs. While he worked to limit the impressment of Bostonians by the British navy, when mob action against the practice broke out in 1747, only unusual circumstances kept troops from following the governor’s orders to fire on the crowd. Belcher commented in the aftermath that Shirley would not care if Massachusetts “sunk like a millstone into the midst of the sea.”99 By the 1740s, however, neither governor could survive without attention to both local and imperial matters. Even Wentworth, who achieved an impressive measure of autonomy, was forced to cooperate in providing troops for British wars. And Shirley began his Massachusetts governorship by deftly dealing with the problems of banking that had driven Belcher to distraction. Tellingly, the only one of the main figures in the story who focused entirely on the imperial side, David Dunbar, eventually received a governorship as well in 1743. But he presided only over St. Helena’s Island, an Atlantic way station so isolated that it was later used for Napoleon’s final exile. As Belcher could have predicted, Dunbar soon wore out his welcome. His four stormy years on the island included attempting to arrest a council member and provoking a minor mutiny.100 Even as Dunbar lost his governorship, Belcher, nearly sixty years old, again succeeded in his search for high office. A few years after having lost his Massachusetts post, he embarked on a lobbying campaign seeking vindication of his claims to have supported the king’s interest fully. He finally received a

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new government in 1747. As governor of New Jersey for the next decade, he helped end the land riots that had bedeviled the colony and played a crucial role in founding what is now Princeton University.101 Even in early October 1734, two months after learning of the portrait print, Belcher still judged it a mistake. “I am sorry, I say I am sorry, for what is done about my picture,” he told his son. Still he had to accept that “there is no help for it.” The blame, he decided, actually lay with Henry Newman, who could be forgiven “because I know he thought it might be an honour to the Gov’r.” By then, Belcher knew his calls to destroy the prints had come too late. Newman and Jonathan, Jr., had already sent out copies. To Belcher’s surprise, the image did not provoke ridicule. Instead, as he reported to his son in late November, the prints were “rec’d here by people of common manners & humanity with great respect.” “It’s well[.] I am satisfied,” he wrote: “The affair of my picture is all over.”102 Belcher grew even more reconciled to the idea over time. Four months later, he asked his London agent to send additional copies so they could be sold in Boston. Within two years, he had accepted the print so fully that he asked Jonathan, Jr., to present copies (“in a handsome frame”) to Isaac Watts and another prominent Dissenting minister, suggesting that the visits would further his son’s relationship with these men. Belcher’s resolution of the affair pointed to some of his deepest concerns. His realization that the print could be useful in Boston and London was characteristic of his commitment to span the province and the metropolis, in his career, his political concerns, and his hopes for his son—​­a concern that encouraged his intense focus on careful self-​­presentation and attention to the other people’s responses.103 Although the print did not turn out to be as problematic as he feared, Belcher was not wrong to have been worried about his opponents. The governor’s difficulties dealing with these “enemies” so impressed Thomas Hutchinson that he later judged Belcher’s harshness toward them a major reason for his removal. Belcher had been too open in criticizing other people, Hutchinson suggested, taking “great freedom in conversation” and expressing “unreserved censure.” Such emotional insensitivity, Hutchinson commented, might be accepted in private persons, but it was “very hardly forgot” in governors. It created implacable enemies intent on seeking “revenge.”104 Belcher undoubtedly would have disagreed with this diagnosis. From a broader perspective, however, what is particularly telling about the argument is the later governor’s reliance on the basic tenents of the politics of politeness,

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on principles that Belcher spent so much time and energy struggling to embody and urging his son to so the same. The governor had himself made the same argument to Jonathan, Jr., near the beginning of his tenure. Although Belcher may have placed too much faith in the idea that good qualities brought “love & esteem,” he also warned his son that the lack of “condescention” and “courteousness” led to “hatred & contempt.”105

Part III

Challenging Conventions

Chapter 5

A Mumper Among the Gentle

Sometime in late spring 1741, a man in clerical attire entered a Princeton, New Jersey, tavern. Magistrate John Stockton immediately recognized the Reverend John Rowland, an important figure in the religious revival then taking place in the region. Stockton hurried over to invite the visiting worthy to his house. To his surprise, the man responded that Stockton was mistaken; his name was not Rowland. Remarking the strong resemblance, the embarrassed Stockton apologized. The visitor, however, had spoken the truth, perhaps the last time he would do so for nearly a week. He was not Rowland, who was on a preaching tour with William Tennent, Jr., a member of the middle colonies’ most prominent clerical family. Stockton did not realize it, but he had met an even greater celebrity—​­the famous confidence man Tom Bell.1 Bell’s tavern appearance seems to have been a trial run. The next morning, he hastened to a nearby town to introduce himself to a prosperous farm family as the revivalist. The self-​­styled Rowland was invited to deliver the Sunday sermon. He lodged with his hosts for the remainder of the week, seemingly preparing his sermon, perhaps even counseling and praying with townspeople and family members. Then, going to church on Sunday with the family, he suddenly claimed to have forgotten his sermon and took the family’s best horse to retrieve it. The congregation never heard “Hell Fire Rowland.” When the family returned home, their guest, their horse, and their valuables were gone.2 The elegant deception (for months afterward residents believed the thefts the work of the real Rowland) was only one of Tom Bell’s more spectacular swindles. Expelled from Harvard in 1733, Bell enjoyed a nearly twenty-​­year career in crime that took him as far south as Barbados and as far north as New Hampshire. The Pennsylvania Gazette reported in 1743 that he had been to “every Colony on the Continent, and . . . ​some Parts of the West-​­Indies” and

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that he “knows and talks familiarly of all Person[s] of Note as if they were of his Acquaintance.” Newspapers record the use of eighteen names besides Rowland. In the Carolinas alone, Bell posed as Nathaniel More, Robert Middleton, John Campbell, Nathaniel Butler, and Captain Randall from Havana. In Barbados, he was the son of the late William Burnet, former governor of New York and Massachusetts. As these poses indicate, Bell’s impostures went beyond acting the part of a minister. His frauds, the Pennsylvania Gazette warned, included “personating different People, forging Bills, Letters of Credit, &c. and frequently pretending Distress.”3 Such exploits made Bell not just a common thief but one of the most famous colonial Americans. One hundred stories about Bell appeared in American newspapers from 1738 to 1755—​­enormous coverage at a time when British America’s few papers focused on international news and published only one issue a week. Even English newspapers noted Bell. This fascination continued after his public career ended. A Boston publisher included Bell’s name on the title page of a humorous pamphlet in 1762, seven years after the last newspaper report of his adventures. Even in 1790, an Elizabethtown, New Jersey, magazine reprinted a story on Bell taken from an Irish periodical published eight years before. Although Carl Bridenbaugh’s description of Bell as “the most widely known individual in all English America before the advent of the revolutionary generation” cannot be sustained—​­George Whitefield’s celebrity eclipsed Bell’s—​­perhaps no native-​­born American outside politics and religion achieved such notoriety.4 At first glance, the prospect of wringing truths out of one of the century’s most notorious liars seems remote. Bridenbaugh spent years tracking the man, noting “I have pursued him in the colonial newspapers as resolutely as Inspector Javert did Jean Valjean.” Bridenbaugh’s primary focus, however, was biographical, an aim suggested by the ways he framed his narratives: in 1950, he presented Bell as “a successful Harvard man” with an “amusing career” and, thirty years later, as “a disreputable loser.”5 But Bell’s career can be seen as more than a good yarn or a moral tale. Like all confidence men (and perhaps all salesmen), Bell sold himself. And, like a good businessman, he shaped his product to his market. In this perspective, Bell appears less a figure of daring originality or deep depravity than one who sensed the gaps and contradictions within prevailing cultural ideals and practices. The stories Bell told and the stories told about him thus illuminate the broader stories his contemporaries told about social interactions—​­and the contexts that gave these narratives their power. The development of Bell’s

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unusual career drew on the elements that helped elites establish themselves within their communities; more important, his activities provide a vantage point from which to view the elite self-​­presentations that he counterfeited—​ ­and to comprehend the larger purposes of the ideals and practices of politeness. Bell, however, did not simply rehearse some of the central narratives of his culture; he also subverted them. By exploiting their ambiguities, his actions challenged their coherence and questioned their power. If Bell could gain people’s confidence solely because of his seemingly genteel ways, then other American gentlemen might also be using their outwardly appearing public presentation to conceal their less-­than-­noble motives.6 Bell’s New Jersey escapade illustrates this process of affirmation and subversion. Bell used accepted dress, behavior, and language to counterfeit ministerial status, but his misbehavior called them into question. The real Rowland suffered directly from Bell’s ruse: he was (ultimately unsuccessfully) prosecuted for theft. Beyond such immediate mischief, Bell’s use of clergyman’s clothes to perpetrate fraud broke the presumed connection among piety, morality, and ministerial garb, rendering it more difficult to trust the sartorial symbolism of a “man of the cloth.” The evidence documenting Bell’s career is at once unruly and revealing. Unlike most criminals or confidence men who have attracted scholarly attention, Bell neither wrote nor inspired a lengthy text that lends itself to sustained analysis. Nor did he engage in a substantial correspondence. Instead, the primary accounts of his life appear in some fifty separate periodical pieces, more than half of which were reprinted (sometimes more than once) in other newspapers. These accounts consist almost entirely of short reports of Bell’s latest exploit or calls for his capture. The reports are generally consistent though frustratingly incomplete. They only rarely discuss, or even comment on, the larger implications of Bell’s actions. The first lengthy article devoted to Bell appeared only in 1782, long after his public career had ended. His own words appear in print only in a signed letter to a New York newspaper in 1749. The precise status of this and other reports is open to question. The letter is probably Bell’s (the rival newspaper he criticized never questioned its authenticity), but other stories may have mistakenly attributed actions to him, perhaps even because a clever criminal pretended to be the more famous pretender.7 The significance of this material does not rest solely on its factual accuracy. Colonial Americans not only believed the stories to be true; just as important, they found them fascinating—​­and this engagement also requires explanation. The different accounts of Bell’s career confirm widespread

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interest in the man. They also focus attention on the cultural issues his exploits raised. Bell’s activities took advantage of the ideas and practices of politeness that had, by the 1730s, become central to elite life. Both William Byrd II and Jonathan Belcher had found them invaluable means of building authority within the colonies and across the Atlantic. Bell was also a virtuoso of such interactions, perhaps even more aware of their effect on other people. Furthermore, like the South Carolinian Eliza Lucas Pinckney (the subject of the next chapter), who was able to use her sensitivity and emotional expressiveness to win people’s affections, Bell was able to wield these symbols outside the realm of formal public power. Unlike the deeply earnest Pinckney, however, Bell aroused confidence only to abuse it. For contemporaries, his activities raised the possibility that other members of the elite were similarly selling themselves, seeking the support of subordinates without fully engaging in the mutuality promised by polite ideals. Bell’s polished appearance, quick tongue, and chameleonlike identity place him in the tradition of the American confidence man. The term itself came into use a full century after Bell became famous. Newspapers instead labeled him a “cheat,” an “impostor,” or a “sharper.” A biography of a contemporary English confidence man describes its subject as a “mumper,”8 someone who cheats as well as begs. As this range of existing terms suggests, Bell was not the first to assume a new identity to defraud others. Benjamin Franklin’s future in-​­laws were “half ruin’d” by a confidence man in the early 1720s; early in the following decade, another trickster traveled through Pennsylvania and Massachusetts pretending his tongue had been cut out by Turks (until a suspicious minister literally choked it out of him).9 Bell, however, is particularly significant. As the one of the earliest American criminals to pass himself off as a gentleman—​­and the first to gain widespread celebrity for such exploits—​­Bell marks the start of a tradition that scholars have previously seen as beginning with Stephen Burroughs in the late eighteenth century. Just as important, Bell’s story makes clear that these two models of character, the gentleman and the confidence man, constituted part of the same processes that remade eighteenth-​­century culture. Tom Bell’s life and celebrity suggest that the confidence man can be seen as more than an indicator of key values and patterns. Bell was also a subversive, someone who undermines the power of a rule by breaking it. Viewing culture as context too easily leads to seeing it as essentially static. As Pacific anthropologist Marshall Sahlins argues, simply recording “the contingency of

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events, the recurrence of structures” is not enough. He instead suggests a model that highlights an ongoing “interaction between the cultural order as constituted in the society and as lived by the people.” In this view, events and texts often replicate structures and prevailing patterns but they also can place them “at risk”—​­challenge, undermine, and even contradict them.10 Pursuing Bell and the values and practices he exploited for his frauds reveals this interplay between culture and contingency—​­between (in Sahlins’s terms) prescription and performance. Bell’s career involved creative manipulation of the available structures of opportunity, the use of common ways of gaining elite status to pursue an uncommon craft. Bell’s actions (and the stories about them) also performed cultural work, revealing and challenging the norms of colonial society and culture. Finally, Bell’s stories about himself note the importance of his relationship with his audience. Although a continuous narrative of Bell’s career or an intensive examination of any of his individual exploits is not possible, the scattered and disjointed evidence offers a variety of perspectives on his activities that help explain why, as the South-​­Carolina Gazette noted a dozen years after Tom Bell entered the Princeton tavern, his “Character and romantic Life, has made a great Noise in every American Colony.”11

Saucy Behaviour Five years after the Rowland episode, the improbably named Captain Dingee met a man in Newcastle, Pennsylvania, who introduced himself as Lloyd. Dingee treated Lloyd “courteously,” not only because he claimed to be a ship owner, but because he “affect[ed] the air and deportment of a gentleman.” Dingee agreed to take the man to Philadelphia, some twenty-​­five miles up the Delaware River. There, left by himself at the dock, Lloyd proceeded to help himself to a pair of stockings, two shirts, three handkerchiefs, and a pair of “scarlet breeches.” Dingee realized too late that Lloyd had “chang’d from the Gentleman to the Thief,” just as he had previously “chang’d his Name from the FAMOUS INFAMOUS TOM BELL.”12 Although not as spectacular as the New Jersey incident, the 1746 riverside encounter features two elements of particular importance to Tom Bell’s career and self-​­presentation: crime and clothing. Clothes were both the object of many of his thefts and a means by which he projected the persona of a gentleman. Dingee’s scarlet breeches formed part of a sartorial history that included

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a silk jacket at Harvard, “several costly Suits of Cloaths, one of black Velvet” in Barbados, and a pair of “black silk Stockings” worn while escaping from a Philadelphia prison.13 Bell used clothing to present himself as a gentleman when he had it and made excuses when he did not. He also stole it when he could. Dress was a significant part of establishing the air and deportment that impressed the captain. Such a demeanor was difficult, especially for someone without the family advantages of a Byrd or a Belcher. Bell’s early years allowed him to accumulate the knowledge and skills needed to operate in the genteel world, even as his criminal activities kept him from taking advantage of the opportunities for more legitimate means of advancement. The specifics of this career path can be further seen by comparison with two other eighteenth-​ ­century figures with unusual careers who also shaped themselves to circumstances and circumstances to themselves, Stephen Burroughs and Benjamin Franklin. Bell’s Harvard years molded his life, although only partly in the way his parents had expected. As an eldest son, Tom Junior bore the hopes of an upwardly mobile family whose hard-​­earned wealth included two slaves and some Boston real estate. Boston’s Free Latin School prepared young Bell for college, but his sea captain father died suddenly in 1729, failing to leave the capital necessary to fund the ambition of a Harvard degree for his sixteen-​ ­year-​­old son. Bell’s family thus needed to sacrifice to allow his matriculation the following year. Among his classmates were Elisha Hutchinson, a member of the prominent family that included, in addition to the first-​­generation outsider Anne Hutchinson, the ultimate colonial insider, Governor Thomas Hutchinson, Elisha’s older brother. Elisha, the faculty decided, belonged at the head of his class; in this largely social classification of the thirty-​­four new students, the sea captain’s son ranked twenty-​­first.14 The promise of social advance proved elusive. Bell found himself at odds with the rowdy jostling of student culture. His tongue got him into trouble almost immediately. No sooner had he arrived than he provoked a severe beating from an older student. The faculty declared the latter primarily at fault, but Bell still received a private reprimand for his “Saucy behaviour.” He became a loner and a thief, engaging in misdeeds that included purloining private letters from a study and two bottles of wine from an underclassman. The last straw came in 1733, when the faculty found “the strongest suspicion of [Bell’s] having stolen a cake of chocolate,” a theft compounded by “the most notorious complicated lying.” Such misbehavior, along with a

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“scandalous neglect” of studies, led to Bell’s expulsion in February of his junior year. Bell’s misadventures had many precedents. As an oversight committee noted five months before his final theft, Harvard tutors faced “great disorders.” Faculty sanctions ranked Bell’s offense as comparable to the mutilation of a tutor’s horse that got some of his classmates expelled the previous year and more serious than placing glass in the bed of an older scholar, an infraction that brought only a suspension for some more socially prominent students. Bell’s offenses, however, were distinctive. Unlike most college pranks, his misdeeds were individual and furtive. He never engaged in (or perhaps simply never was caught at) the common undergraduate vice that attracted his class’s three highest-​­ranking members, “playing at cards and dice.”15 The dangers of life beyond Harvard were made clear by a suit brought against him just before his suspension—​­and his twenty-​­first birthday. Bell had bought, on credit, a silk jacket and expensive hose from a tailor and then refused to pay. Once again Bell failed to fulfill expectations. Suits for debt were common (colonial courts often seemed to do little more than consider them), but the vast majority went uncontested. As in the chocolate incident, where he justified himself through complicated lying, Bell not only refused to admit his guilt but also placed faith in his powers of persuasion. Bested in an inferior court, he appealed the case and, in the same month he left Harvard, lost again.16 These suits—​­legal and sartorial—​­foreshadowed Bell’s career. In the future, he would repudiate, not the offense that caused the trouble, but the circumstances that led the tailor to prosecute. He would seek fine clothing not through commerce but through theft, avoiding transactions under his own name. The debt case also underlined Bell’s precarious economic position. His family had sold property to pay for an education that provided access to trade, the professions, and political office, and his expulsion came too late for an alternative investment of family resources. The Bells, furthermore, lacked a powerful patron. City fathers turned down the mother’s 1731 application to sell liquor, even though such licenses were increasingly granted to needy widows. Without education, reputation, or the support of family and friends, the twenty-​­one-​­year-​­old Bell thus faced the problems of adult labor in particularly stark terms.17 Bell’s next steps probably included at least some school teaching but are obscure until 1738, when authorities in Virginia and New York charged him with crimes. In July, having been arrested for posing as Francis Partridge

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Hutchinson, perhaps to defraud the wealthy Fairfax family, he escaped from a Virginia county jail. Near the end of the year, he was convicted of forging a letter (presumably a letter of credit) from Boston merchant William Bowdoin to New York’s Livingston family. A New York City court sentenced him to thirty-​­nine lashes. Although these are Bell’s first known brushes with the law, it seems unlikely they were his first criminal acts. The Boston Evening-​­Post reported the following year that Bell “has been a Fortune hunting for several Years past.” In the dozen years that followed, he would also stay in (and often escape from) jails in Barbados, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts.18 Even for the man who became America’s most famous felon, crime was only a part-​­time job. The precise extent and location of his other activities are unclear, but a 1749 letter to a New York newspaper signed with Bell’s name lists five different occupations he had followed—​­merchant, sailor, soldier, surveyor, and schoolteacher. A 1755 account added that Bell had also “practiced Physic, [and] pleaded Law.” He even seems to have played the role of a New Light minister after the 1741 New Jersey incident. A 1743 newspaper report placed him in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, “preaching and exhorting . . . ​ in the new Way.”19 The range of Bell’s résumé, while extreme, is not as unusual as it may look. Colonial American men and women commonly turned their hands to a variety of tasks. Even while building a printing business that enabled him to retire at forty-​­two, Benjamin Franklin held salaried posts as assembly clerk and city postmaster. Paul Revere not only engraved prints and crafted fine silver but also cleaned teeth.20 Bell’s travels made him more distinctive. Most Americans, even prominent ones, kept close to home. The meeting of the Continental Congress marked the first time John Adams traveled outside New England and only the second time Thomas Jefferson left Virginia.21 Apart from governing and seafaring, work-​­related travel in eighteenth-​­century America generally involved peddling, preaching, or thieving. Rural peddlers were already common by the time Bell hit the road. Dr. Alexander Hamilton, traveling from Maryland to Maine in 1744, met one on Long Island in July the day Franklin’s newspaper reported Bell’s arrest in Philadelphia. Just a short time later, Hamilton found his genteel “portmanteau” being mistaken “for a pack” by another peddler in Walpole, Massachusetts.22 John Stockton, fooled by Bell in the Princeton tavern, was again duped by two peddlers in 1757. The men, carrying “Packs of Linen and some other dry Goods,” were caught passing counterfeit Pennsylvania ten-​­shilling notes. When magistrate Stockton allowed them to go to

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Trenton to seek an alibi (leaving their goods as security), they never returned.23 God, not Mammon, prompted the most visible examples of mobility. John Rowland’s 1739 ordination by the revivalist New Brunswick Presbytery had been not to a specific church but “to the ministry of the Word in general.” Within a year, Rowland was preaching with the “grand itinerant” George Whitefield, one of the few contemporaries who could match Bell’s travels. Accounts of Whitefield’s journeys often appeared in newspapers alongside reports about Bell. Although the minister assiduously courted the publicity that the thief shunned, their movements resulted from broadly similar purposes. Like peddlers, both continually sought new markets where demand for their product (whether gentility or the gospel) was greatest and where novelty heightened the dramatic effects of their presentations.24 Desire for easy pickings also impelled the itinerancy of professional felons. Although most eighteenth-​­century property thefts involved irregular crimes of opportunity rather than of systematic activity, persistent lawbreakers needed to keep moving to stay ahead of the law. Some of the more successful pretended to the same kind of genteel knowledge as Bell. Counterfeiter ­Joseph-​­Bill Packer traveled from Boston to North Carolina making and passing false bills while posing as a doctor who specialized in “curing cancers.” One of his associates called himself “Doctor Dunston.”25 Bell shared not only varied activities and continued mobility with such criminals but also school teaching. Historians point to the many metallurgists and doctors who engaged in crime and counterfeiting; they less often note the number of teachers who appear in these accounts. Like Bell, Packer spent a stint at a Virginia school. Counterfeiter Joseph Wilson was captured while running a school. Elizabeth Castle, a confidence woman who (like Bell) traveled through Philadelphia in the mid-​­1740s, pretended to be a “Doctoress” and a “School-​­Mistress.”26 Such activities suggest not only the many opportunities available for educational employment but also the marginal nature of positions contracted for a few months at a time and for low wages. Teaching provided a starting place for upwardly mobile men as well as a haven for strolling criminals. Over one-​­third of Bell’s Harvard classmates kept school, most in the years immediately after college.27 Teaching was attractive to both privileged young men on the verge of lucrative careers and criminals fearful of capture, in large part because it postponed the problem of capital. Schoolteachers could board with local families rather than establish their own households (perhaps providing insight into the ways of the

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relatively well-​­to-​­do that would have been useful for confidence men), whereas security beyond the vagaries of casual labor required capital. The nature of this stake could vary, ranging from land for agriculture to craft skills for artisans and financial aid among the most wealthy. Bell possessed none of these, and he refused to act within the networks of family and friends that other young men such as Franklin called on when they left their home base.28 Lacking these resources, Bell took full advantage of other, less obvious, assets, what might be called the cultural capital he assembled at Boston Latin School and Harvard. Bell’s frauds gained credibility first from understanding and exhibiting the social skills, attitudes, and cultural practices of gentility. Such tangible signs as knowing how to wear a silk jacket and such intangibles as displaying what Captain Dingee called “the Air and Deportment of a Gentleman” served as the foundation for Bell’s lies.29 Furthermore, although Bell was clearly not a model student, he would have acquired some learning in Greek, Latin, the Bible, and philosophy, topics that helped establish elite standing. A North Carolina gentleman cheated by Bell judged him “a pretty good Scholar.”30 Bell’s broad knowledge of people and events proved more directly useful. Grammar school and college offered close contact with people whose names would have been known outside the region and whose own connections and information would have been similarly wide. Although the accounts of Bell’s methods are not full, some of his crimes suggest the use of such personal knowledge. In a society where gentlemen knew more than most people about the outside world, Bell exploited the uneven diffusion of knowledge to refer to incidents that people in other colonies might only have heard of and to provide details that might be checked to certify his credentials. Bell probably used information about the illness of Colonel Thomas Hutchinson, father of his classmate Elisha, to sustain his claim to the Hutchinson name in 1738. Knowledge of a new locality could further the illusion. Bell’s perceptive choice of a gullible New Jersey family almost certainly relied on earlier conversations with the Reverend John Guild, onetime minister of a neighborhood parish and Bell’s Harvard classmate. Perhaps unwittingly, Bell returned the favor. Guild’s candidacy for the new pulpit had been blocked by Rowland supporters until Bell’s activities discredited the rival candidate and allowed Guild’s ordination.31 The ways in which Bell worked within and beyond provincial American

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contexts can be seen more fully by moving from the common experiences of criminals and other workers to the uncommon lives of two other eighteenth-​ ­century men, Burroughs and Franklin. The Memoirs of the New Englander Burroughs, who began his activities as a confidence man in the 1780s, make no reference to Tom Bell, but Burroughs’s experiences reveal substantial similarities to his predecessor. Burroughs also had a checkered college career that ended in expulsion. Besides working as a soldier and a sailor, he impersonated a minister and taught in a variety of schools, sometimes under a different name. Both men seem to have ended their lives as teachers. They also had a pool of cultural capital, premising their frauds on the behavioral and cultural attributes of gentlemen.32 Burroughs differed from Bell in two important ways. First, Burroughs was an active counterfeiter who spent long periods of time in jail—​­a result of the growing resort to imprisonment in post-​­Revolutionary New England. Bell, who never seems to have engaged in coining money, was often incarcerated, but he seems to have spent little time in jail, because he escaped (as Burroughs often did) or was released. More important, Burroughs took his legitimate activities more seriously. Unlike Bell, who simply exploited clerical garb for short-​­term gain, Burroughs sought to fulfill the duties of a minister and teacher. Accordingly, he disingenuously claimed he was not an impostor, because, unlike someone who “puts on feigned appearances, in order to enrich or aggrandize himself, to the damage of others,” he sought only to make a living.33 Burroughs’s professed belief in labor as a means to stability and perhaps success drew on the older language of station and office. His activities and his accounts of himself also suggest the shifting meaning of “career,” a word that by the early nineteenth century described a person’s progress through life, particularly through work. Bell paid little attention to filling an office, much less to advancing in it. His career suggests instead the term’s earlier, less teleological, meanings—​­a racecourse or rapid movement. “This Fellow has had a large Swing over this Continent, as well as in some of the West-​­India Islands, for these several Years,” noted a New York newspaper editor in 1748, predicting Bell’s probable end, “the Swing his Merits deserve.”34 Nineteenth-​­century mythology connected the new meaning of career most directly to another figure, Benjamin Franklin. Second only to the Charleston, South Carolina, newspaper Franklin helped establish, his Pennsylvania Gazette printed more stories about Bell than any other American periodical. Such intense coverage reflected public curiosity, but the interest

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may also have been personal. Franklin and Bell had similar backgrounds. Both were Boston Latin students from families outside the city elite. Both left family and other possible patrons to engage the world by themselves, relying on book learning and self-​­presentation. As others have noted, Franklin’s rise depended in large part on the confidence man’s canny ability to manage his self-​­presentation, impressing the Pennsylvania governor soon after his arrival, chatting up New Jersey gentlemen while printing their paper money, and borrowing a rare book from an assembly member to improve his chances for patronage.35 Franklin also cultivated internal morality as well as a public face. He later noted that he not only “took care . . . ​to avoid all Appearances of the Contrary” but “to be in Reality Industrious and frugal.” Outward images required manipulation, yet they ultimately needed to be backed by inner character. This ideal, vigorously pursued through careful self-​­examination and epitomized in Franklin’s “Project of arriving at moral Perfection,” grew even more important in the years after the Revolution, when character increasingly denoted the sum of a person’s moral qualities. Bell, by contrast, exemplifies an earlier meaning of character—​­a literary genre that delineates a recognizable type through details and idiosyncrasies. Unlike the printer and philosopher of virtue Franklin (who saw type as a means of making permanent impressions that could convey instruction), Bell sought only a distinctive mark that could create the illusion of reality.36 Bell’s representations may even have fooled Franklin himself. In 1739, the printer met a former “school-​­master” who claimed “to understand Latin and Greek,” gaps in Franklin’s education that he labored to overcome by teaching himself Latin. The young visitor took advantage of Franklin’s hospitality to make off with some of his clothing, including a “fine . . . ​ruffled” shirt and a handkerchief “mark’d with an F in red Silk.” The identity of the man, whom Franklin knew as the Irishman William Lloyd, is unknown, but the similarity to the later Captain Dingee incident (both con men used the name Lloyd and stole clothes when their host’s back was turned) suggests the theft may mark the only recorded meeting between two of the most famous colonial Americans.37

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Figure 14. The Burnet family coat of arms was portrayed in a 1728 map of Boston dedicated to Governor William Burnet. In Barbados, Tom Bell ordered a seal using this image as a model, presumably using it to secure his letters and certify his identity as “Gilbert Burnet.” Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

Like a Gentleman In 1739, a man claiming to be Gilbert Burnet, son of the late governor of New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, arrived in Barbados. Named after his eminent grandfather, a key figure in England’s Glorious Revolution and Hanoverian Succession, the visitor moved among the upper echelons of Barbadian society. He persuaded local worthies to lend him £250 and ingratiated himself with the Jewish Lopez family, whose head “made very much of ” him—​­until the visitor was caught stealing at a family wedding. The father beat

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the guest and took him before a magistrate. Professing shock at the affront, Burnet sued Lopez for ten thousand pounds. The incident sparked anti-​­Jewish outrage. Local merchants petitioned the president of the council about the conduct of “the Jews towards the Christians,” citing especially “their daring Insolence to . . . ​a Gentleman of a distinguish’d Family.” A crowd took more direct action; it destroyed the Speightstown, Barbados, synagogue and drove the Jews out of town.38 Soon afterward, even Burnet’s most ardent defenders changed their minds. The visitor surreptitiously attempted to catch a boat to Jamaica and, when these plans were thwarted, went into hiding. A week’s search located a disguised Burnet lurking outside the town. Replies to inquiries sent to the mainland identified him as the Bostonian Tom Bell.39 According to a former supporter, who now pronounced him “the greatest Villain that was ever born,” Bell finally confessed his identity but not his guilt, arguing that “he [had] done no Harm.” The court disagreed. He was sentenced to be whipped, placed in the stocks, and branded on both cheeks with the letter R (for “Rogue”). Unfortunately for his later victims, a new governor remitted the branding. Reported in the mainland press from Williamsburg, Virginia, to Boston, the episode points to yet another side of Bell’s activities—​­something deeper than the difficulty of getting a livelihood or the inconvenience created by the theft of money or scarlet breeches. The stories told by and about Bell also performed cultural work—​­raising charged issues and helping people think about and through them. Bell’s activities and the reports about them drew on some of the period’s most compelling cultural narratives, the stories that people told to explain themselves and their society. The Barbados incident drew on two of these. First, by claiming a distinguished lineage, Bell adopted the role of the gentleman, a status that required a polished self-​­presentation combining learning and self-​­control. A second closely related theme was compassion, the gentleman’s sympathetic concern for the less fortunate. The gracious new governor played the part in Barbados, probably releasing Bell as part of a general amnesty celebrating his arrival. Later, the impostor himself assayed the role. Linking power and status to morality, these narratives helped ground the attempts of early eighteenth-​­century elites to reconfigure their claims to authority in the wake of late seventeenth-​­century crises. Bell raised awkward questions about this project. His plausible misrepresentations undermined elite claims by suggesting that the presumed links between power and self-​ ­presentation were neither as obvious nor as unquestionable as they wanted

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themselves and others to think. Polite behavior could be counterfeited, compassion misplaced. Such reinterpretations undercut claims to authority by feeding into another issue of increasing concern to mid-​­eighteenth-​­century Americans, hypocrisy. Struggling to hide his identity, Bell could hardly have found appealing the widespread belief that fine outward professions often hid a foul inward reality. Yet colonial leaders, seeking to regain authority by presenting themselves differently, could also find at least some applications of this idea similarly uncongenial. If fine clothes did not make the man—​­or, more important, reveal him—​­then their attempts to justify their leadership through display might be only another confidence game. In 1723, James Franklin’s New-E ​­ ngland Courant posed the dangers in stark terms. People who too often observe hollow religious pretensions, the author warned, sometimes “conclude, that Religion itself is nothing but a cunningly devised Fable, a Trick of State, Invented to keep Mankind in awe.”40 The troubles stirred up by Bell show the dangers of a similar conclusion about social authority. In Barbados, the community rallied to expel a group of cultural outsiders. In New Jersey, the Rowland incident turned angry villagers, who still believed the real minister responsible, against him and his supporters. When his accusers failed to prove Rowland’s guilt because of testimony that he had been preaching in another colony that day, they indicted the witnesses themselves—​­including the Reverend William Tennent. Most of the cases were eventually dismissed, but a local church leader was not so lucky. He was convicted and sentenced to public shaming for “wilful and corrupt perjury.”41 Bell’s relative success in avoiding a similar fate depended first on his ability to fulfill expectations about the appearance and behavior of a prominent person. Although fine clothing expressed this status most clearly, Bell also relied on other advantages. A Boston jailer described him by noting his “handsom Set of Teeth” and “pleasant Countenance” as well as by recalling that “his Discourse is polite, and he is of a spritely Look and Gesture.” A Portsmouth, New Hampshire, man similarly cited Bell’s “good Elocution.” He “appears like a Gentleman,” declared a New York correspondent.42 Such descriptions suggest that Bell had mastered the complex grammar of gentility, manipulating goods, gestures, and attitudes literally to embody refinement. As the people who readily accepted Bell’s representations recognized, such mastery was uncommon. “Narrow notions, ignorance of the world, and low extraction,” complained Doctor Hamilton, were common among “our aggrandized upstarts in these infant countrys of America.”

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Hamilton’s extended examination of American refinement in 1744 found few who met his standards. A New York doctor, James McGraw, Hamilton noted with disgust, would drink to a person’s health and then bow to them “sometimes for the space of a minute or two, till the person complimented either observed him of his own accord or was hunched into attention by his next neighbour.” McGraw also practiced “an affected way of curtsieing instead of bowing when he entered a room.”43 Bell seems to have exhibited none of the awkward gestures and lapses of taste that made Hamilton so uncomfortable with McGraw. The confidence man had internalized genteel standards, learning not only the basic ideals but also the less often articulated details that, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu suggests, provide the most accurate measure of class background because they are seldom learned through formal education. Gentility stressed transcending affectation. The aesthetic of politeness, a term originally meaning polished, privileged seemingly effortless grace, not strenuous exertion. Rather than a carefully ceremonious curtsey, Hamilton expected an elegant gesture that, in the words of a 1763 almanac, “moves with easy, tho’ with measur’d Pace, / And shews no Part of Study but the Grace.”44 Bell’s genteel air validated his specific claims, but his acts undercut the values gentility sought to represent. Coming from the Latin gens (family) and thus referring to particular blood lines, the term originally denoted high birth. Eighteenth-​­century ideals of gentility, seeking both to incorporate new kinds of wealth into elite circles and to justify the rule of this expanded elite, increasingly emphasized moral qualities that imparted refinement to ­behavior—​­a major element in the shift that Norbert Elias has called “the civilizing process.” This inner quality was expressed most clearly in outward behavior, which could be counterfeited more easily than official titles or family connections. In a period when increased travel and communication required rapid judgments about whom to trust and respect, this difficulty spurred a continuing discussion of the attributes of “true” gentility.45 Bell’s encounters point to a relatively neglected aspect of these developments—​­the attempt to remake the character of human relationships. This goal involved not simply aping aristocrats or seeking status through consumption but efforts to build a society around peaceful social interaction rather than aggression and arbitrary power, a society that could welcome even strangers like Hamilton (or Bell) on relatively equal terms—​­if they fulfilled polite expectations. Bell’s experiences show two important sides of this new view of society. In each, he fulfilled the letter but not the spirit of these new cultural imperatives.

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Gentility first helped build solidarity and trust among elites that had been bitterly divided by English revolutions and colonial rebellions. The ideals of politeness provided standards that linked gentlemen across county and colony lines in a time of expanding population and commerce. Franklin had expected familial concern from his domineering brother; as he grew older, he extended this vision, through his involvement in Freemasonry, to gentlemen around the world.46 Bell seems to have met these expectations. Although he aggressively sought money and goods, none of the accounts of his activities suggests a resort to violence or harsh words. According to a 1755 newspaper report, he claimed that he “never swore a prophane Oath.”47 Bell thus exhibited a major component of what Max Weber called the “spirit of capitalism,” the ability to defer gratification in hopes of later reward. A comic piece published in Boston in 1762 recognized this quality: “The famous TOM BELL,” a character relates, “once told me that he never was drunk in his Life.” In the common eighteenth-​ c­ entury locution, Bell was never “disguised in liquor”—​­because he was so anxious to disguise himself. Bell used this self-​­control to take advantage of others, undermining the trust that, Thomas Haskell argues, provided an essential precondition for an emerging market society—​­and, it could be added, for a stable political order based on limited government and civil society. Bell’s activities thus undermined one of the main supports of the social order promoted by gentlemen—​­the clarity about intentions and morality supposedly revealed by polite behavior.48 Bell’s exploits also subverted gentility’s other key purpose, expressing and legitimizing moral authority over common people and outsiders. Physical and verbal signs pointed to politeness, but they were not its essence, for the ideal also possessed a strong moral dimension. As the biography of an eighteenth-​ c­ entury English confidence man, one Mister Bampfylde-​­Moore Carew, noted, gentlemen and ladies have only “the mercer [merchant] and taylor” to distinguish them from common beggars if their claims are defined solely by “their equipage.” Among the truly genteel, polished presentation assured honorable morality and careful manners legitimized gentlemanly authority. Not surprisingly, Franklin’s master, Samuel Keimer, was not only “an odd Fish . . . ​slovenly to extreme dirtiness, [and] enthusiastic in some Points of Religion,” but also, in Franklin’s description, untrustworthy—​­”a little Knavish withal.” Bell played on this presumed link between cultural presentations and moral character to take advantage of a Chester County, Pennsylvania, man who believed that Bell could be trusted because he acted “like a Gentleman.”49 Bell used this connection for his own advantage, a subversion of intent

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seen in the parallels between his impostures and his financial swindles. Besides taking goods, Bell forged financial instruments to steal representations of value. The bills of exchange (roughly the eighteenth-​­century equivalent of traveler’s checks) and letters of credit (similar to bank checks or store credit) that he counterfeited in his earliest frauds offered signs of value that could be used beyond local and personal connections. Bell’s financial activities warned against the dangers of such paper representations of wealth; his impostures raised similarly inconvenient questions about the physical representation of authority. Like financial instruments, the ideal of gentility provided widely accepted signs of high status and personal authority. Polite bows, polished conversations, and proper clothing all vouched for the gentleman when an extensive check of social and commercial credit was impossible. Bell’s activities subverted this expectation, warning colonial gentlemen and others that such performances could not be taken at face value.50 Bell’s undermining of the gentleman’s cultural stock-​­in-​­trade can be seen in another crucial issue in his story, compassion—​­a key term in yet another of his encounters. On a July morning in 1743, a gentleman “without either Coat or Wastecoat” entered a New York tavern. After eating breakfast, he requested pen and paper, saying that he needed to write to some of the city’s most prominent men about his loss of £600 at sea, a substantial sum even for the professed son of a wealthy man in eastern Long Island. He was “well acquainted” with these worthies, he claimed, but could not visit without “Cloaths to appear in.” The customers’ suspicions grew. Finally they confronted him. Wasn’t he the famous impostor Tom Bell? The stranger denied the charge. He had never heard the name but, he added, “whoever Tom Bell was, he was a Man that deserved Compassion.” Soon afterward the stranger picked up his hat and silently left by the back door.51 Bell repeated the theme six years later, arguing to New York newspaper readers in 1749 “that I appear to the Gentry and Clergy, as an object of pity, and subject of prayer.” Newspaper items about Bell suggest that this expectation of sympathy was not simply a delusion. The South-​­Carolina Gazette warned in 1743 that not only did Bell “impose upon the Compassionate,” but “he is remarkably successful in exciting Compassion in the Ladies.” Although other accounts differ, the Gazette writer suggests sympathetic Barbadian women saved Bell from the pillory.52 The repeated (and unexpected) use of the term suggests its larger ­importance—​­and the dangers that Bell posed to elite self-​­definitions. The genteel face of power was not only carefully controlled but also compassionate. Bell himself contrasted the better gentlemen, marked by prayerful

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compassion, with his “implacable and ungenerous Enemies,” who “authoritatively and arbitrar[il]y commanded” a newspaper editor to print “malicious, cowardly, Reflections and Accusations.”53 A 1732 correspondent to Franklin’s newspaper suggested a similar division in discussing Philadelphia’s slippery winter streets. Unlike either the “thoughtless and indifferent” or the “malicious and ill-​­natured,” the “humane, kind, compassionate, benevolent Class” thoughtfully prevented slips by spreading ashes on the sidewalk. Franklin’s own patron, Andrew Hamilton, was similarly eulogized: “as a Judge . . . ​he was compassionate in his Nature, and very slow to punish.” He was, the author noted, “the Poor Man’s Friend.”54 This renunciation of vengeance and cruelty formed a linchpin for another eighteenth-​­century civilizing process, the attempt to tame the exercise of power. Human ability to sympathize with one another first justified limited government. People were not perpetually at war with each other, as Thomas Hobbes suggested, but actually possessed an innate sense of fellow feeling, of benevolence, that united them and made Hobbesian absolutism unnecessary. Sympathy also helped justify the power of American elites. In the decades after 1690, leaders increasingly rested their claims on consent, public service, and the repudiation of physical coercion and arbitrary power. As the Reverend William Smith, Franklin’s choice to head the new College of Philadelphia, told its first graduating class in 1757, “authority” that was “lasting” depended on more than “superior Talents” and “inflexible Integrity”; it also required “unconfined Benevolence.” These new attitudes about power spread slowly and unevenly (at first virtually bypassing race relations and only partly affecting gender relations) but they marked the start of a new vision of authority later expressed in revolutionary republicanism and humanitarian reforms.55 In 1736, Franklin published a story about a Bermuda sea monster whose upper “Body was in the Shape and about the Bigness of a Boy of 12 Years old with long Hair.” The deformed and the prodigious had previously been a key sign of imminent judgment or apocalypse, and townspeople pursued the creature. When they were about to strike it, however, “the human likeness surpris’d them into Compassion, and they had not the Power to do it.” Bell’s appeal to compassion was perceptive, encouraging people similarly to see the human likeness, not the criminal monster. Bell thus turned elites’ attempts to justify their power into a claim on their protection, a strategy that seems to have been at least partly successful. Whipped and nearly branded in the 1730s, the increasingly notorious con man seems to have escaped physical punishment in succeeding decades.56

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Bell’s continued transgressions also revealed sympathy’s dangers. As his less generous enemies pointed out, compassion could be misplaced—​­an argument that played into a third set of stories that went beyond gentility and compassion, that of the outwardly respectable but inwardly vile hypocrite. Once again, Bell raised the issue himself. “Prosecutions Imprisonments, Censures, and Reproaches, &c,” he argued in 1749, work only on “incorrigible Slaves and Offenders,” not on “persons of Education, Penetration and of tractable and ingenious Natures.” Rather than making “sincere Converts,” such tactics produced “multitudes of Hypocrites.”57 Of course, stories about Bell’s deceptions pointed to the problem even more directly. The parallels between Bell’s implied lessons and the explicit moralizing of New Light ministers such as Whitefield and Rowland are striking. Both suggested that surface image was not enough, that social convention and outer display did not necessarily reveal inner truth. Bell’s activities as a New Light preacher were thus deeply ironic, placing an impostor in the position of warning against impostures. Bell’s deceptions also played a part in a rethinking of the concept. Religious arguments previously had singled out primarily those who believed themselves saved but were not—​­ those whom a theologian called “self-​ ­deceivers.” Such a category not only reaffirmed God’s sovereign freedom to save whom He chose but also provided a means of attacking religious opponents whose sincerity could not be plausibly questioned. John Rowland made the theme a central one. According to Gilbert Tennent (whose brother had led the ill-​­fated preaching tour that provided Bell his opening), Rowland possessed a special “Talent of convincing the Secure.”58 Bell, however, was a deliberate deceiver, not an inadvertent imposter. Perhaps encouraged by the widespread interest in his activities as well as an emerging view of human nature as less deeply conflicted and more easily knowable, warnings about intentional hypocrisy grew dramatically in the years after Bell began his deceptions. By the end of the eighteenth century, fears about dissimulation suffused American culture, seen in both endless charges of political conspiracies and a vogue for novels about the seduction of innocent women who sympathized well but not wisely.59 Both Bell’s activities and the increasing fears about deception they helped feed were intimately intertwined with the rise of the newspaper, the medium that spread reports about Bell beyond the people who encountered him. These “public prints” conveyed information that was literally disembodied, abstracted from the teller and increasingly seen as operating in a broader public sphere beyond local ties and interests. This abstraction is visible in reports

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about Bell. Whether printed for the first time or merely clipped from other papers, newspaper accounts spread news of Bell’s activities but did little to explain them.60 The dimensions of the difficulties created by knowledge that was at once broader and thinner can be seen in the problems contemporaries had labeling Bell. Newspapers characterized him most often as “famous.” Even before he returned from Barbados, they called him “a famous impostor.”61 Soon he became known everywhere as “the noted,” “the famous,” “the very famous Mr. Thomas Bell.”62 Yet some writers distrusted the term. A 1743 Portsmouth, New Hampshire, correspondent called him “the famous, or rather infamous Tom Bell.” Others labeled him “famous and notorious,” even “the famous infamous.”63 This tension between fame and infamy reveals the limitations of eighteenth-​­century categories. The thief was not famous in the highest classical sense of possessing great virtues or performing great deeds. Rather, he was, in modern terms, a celebrity, someone known because of the mass media, so much so that a New York article reprinted in Philadelphia in 1752, several years after the last warnings about Bell’s crimes, could refer to a deceiver as “almost a second Tom Bell,” and Daniel Dulany in 1755, ten years before he himself gained fame writing against the Stamp Act, could similarly describe a “rascal” who “imposed upon almost as many people as Tom Bell.”64 In 1743, the South-​­Carolina Gazette reprinted a story from Philadelphia about “young Mr Livingston, Son of Robert Livingston of Albany,” yet another gentlemen whose “proper Name” was soon discovered to be Tom Bell. “He imposed the Name of Livingston on one Mathers of Chester,” the report noted, “and this Bell appearing like a Gentleman, persuaded Mathers to let him have two Horses and a Man to bring him up here.” A week later, the paper presented the same lesson in moral terms. “Honesty, Plain-​­dealing, and Simplicity of Manners,” it complained, “are laid aside for Good-​­Breeding, Politeness and Complaisance: Which, interpreted by Actions, mean little else but Dissimulation, Flattery, and Deceit.” “Sincerity,” the author argued, “is generally profess’d, but scarcely found.”65 Within a few decades, revolutionary radicals employed such elite self-​­criticism (reinforced by such stories as Bell’s) against social leaders such as the Livingstons. “Men affect to know and feel so much more than they do, and to be so much more sanctified than they are, that great abatements must be made from their presentations,” Connecticut’s Abraham Bishop told an audience celebrating the defeat of John Adams: “ ‘Surely every man walketh in a vain show.’ ”66

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The Rocks and Shoals of Immorality After vigorously asserting his innocence in a long letter to a New York newspaper in September 1749, Bell ended his crimes and settled down in Hanover County, Virginia, as a schoolteacher. In 1752, bearing letters of recommendation from local leaders, he traveled to Williamsburg under his own name to solicit subscriptions for his memoirs. The volume would be “useful to others,” he argued, warning them about “those Snares and Temptations, by which I have been often entangled.” It would also (recognizing the need for capital) “lay a Foundation for my future Livelihood” by helping him “acquire a Subsistance suitable to my Genius and Education.” He would not accept advance payment, however, beyond an optional piece of eight. Bell continued to promise publication until the last certain account of him in the West Indies in early 1755. A 1782 Irish magazine author found Bell at Edenton, North Carolina, where he sought pupils by arguing “he was . . . ​more able to steer youth clear of the rocks and shoals of immorality, than those who had been careful to avoid them.”67 Bell’s new narrative of repentance and reform added to his repertoire of stories about himself—​­self-​­definitions that confuse the issue of how Bell should be identified. Even his self-​­proclaimed change of heart raises questions. The evidence for this newfound rectitude came in precisely the sorts of materials that Bell had previously forged so well, his own word and letters from gentlemen who could not be easily contacted. And his later activities, from collecting subscriptions for memoirs that never got written to advertising his school, continued to use his impostures to gain money. Bell’s “going straight” thus turns out to be almost as difficult to read—​­as full of twists and turns—​­as his previous stories, tales that Bell kept on telling. He continued to boast of his experience and abilities. In 1743, he had told Philadelphia’s mayor that “he was well acquainted with Books, skill’d in Law and Divinity, and believ’d no one could tell him any Thing he was not acquainted with before.”68 The 1755 Antigua article introduced the new claim that he had impersonated a physician. Once again, Bell’s ability to manipulate expectations seems to have been successful. According to the New York editor who provoked Bell’s 1749 letter to a rival paper, his boasting attracted many admirers. He would have been hanged long ago, the editor argued, without the people “who flock round him in every Place, grinning Applause to his redundant Chattering, and thereby supporting him in his unparallel’d

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Impudence.”69 Like his repeated attempts to excuse his crimes and protest his innocence, Bell’s continuing boasts of his exploits undercut his new claims to repentance. The 1755 article suggests the seemingly reformed con man still wished to preserve a measure of purity by arguing that he “never took Advantage of, or debauched, Virgin Innocence” and “never stole a Horse.”70 Such claims (challenged even by the reporter) suggested that his misdeeds had been limited, perhaps even easily forgivable, an argument that he had used also in 1749: “with a little Indulgence, less Assistance, a favourable Censure, and a generous Pardon, I may be easily reclaim’d.”71 Establishing Tom Bell’s identity—​­locating a “true self ” beneath his fine clothing and fine words—​­is more difficult than it first appears. Bell drew on identities established by others. Indeed, his impostures merely placed him in the role that he had prepared for and could have expected after attending Harvard. Bell became even more theatrical when he was unmasked, boasting or loudly repenting as the situation required. But he was not limited to the ready-​­made roles of a hegemonic culture. A 1762 pamphlet noted that Bell was so self-​­controlled that “No Law can bind” him. As contemporaries noted, Bell was an “extraordinary man,” who, if he did not create his roles out of whole cloth, at least put them together in a new way.72 Bell seems to have been an accomplished actor, able to shape his persona to suit the people around him yet keep part of himself distinct from their expectations. Eighteenth-​­century Americans recognized this theatrical quality. In the words of the last known newspaper comment about him, Bell was a “universal comedian.”73 The image of humans as actors has a long and tangled lineage. But Bell’s career points to the real reason for the theater, the audience. If people author their own lives, others authorize those actions, accepting or rejecting them, at times approving the familiar, at times applauding the new and different. Bell made his living gauging the reaction of his customers. In playing to the crowd, his goal was not self-​­expression or artistic integrity but the fruits of successful performance. The metaphor of acting also focuses attention on the interchanges among institutions, players, and patrons. Each possesses different experiences, structures, and stories, yet all work together to create a performance. Bell invented his extraordinary career within the limitations formed by his audience (American elites and the people they hoped to dominate) and by his theater (the expanding networks of communication and trade that had already forced colonial leaders to present themselves differently). Bell’s relationship with print culture suggests the complexities of these

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interconnections. Printed materials helped support his activities; the seal with arms of the Burnet family that he carried in Barbados was copied from a map published in Boston. But Bell’s career was also limited, perhaps even ended, by newspaper reports that made him a celebrity in an endeavor that required him to remain unrecognized. In turn, such stories also allowed others to experience these performances apart from their local consequences, a separation from the physical privation of theft and the psychological indignity of being bamboozled that eventually allowed the confidence man to become a romantic hero. Nearly a century later, a New Jersey judge could pronounce the newspaper accounts of Bell “really amusing.” This intricate intertwining of the particular decisions of an individual, the spread of a communication medium, and the development of a literary genre warns against seeing individuals, events, texts, and contexts as completely separate entities.74 A popular eighteenth-​­century term for Bell’s activities, “mumping,” hints at some of the same insights about theatricality. A mumper begs and also, the Oxford English Dictionary notes, plays the parasite. As a mumper (and a mummer) among gentlefolk, Bell was both actor and parasite, representing and challenging the eighteenth-​­century elite’s ideas of themselves and the society they sought to dominate. To return to a commercial metaphor, Bell both bought into—​­and sold out—​­the elites’ own confidence game, their attempt to reconfigure their image and their authority through new stories about themselves. When Bell told some North Carolina gentlemen in 1745 that he would “make free with their names,” he may have meant something more than that he might assume their particular identity: his activities also undermined the larger structures that gave these names their power.75

Chapter 6

The Princess and the Pinckneys

Gaining an audience with the dowager princess of Wales, the widow of the late prince of Wales, had not been simple. Charles Pinckney, South Carolina’s colonial agent, was acquainted with someone who knew members of the princess’s household, but they initially responded coldly to the idea. It was, they noted, “a thing very rarely permitted.” But their friend’s assurances finally prevailed and on a summer’s day in 1753, the Pinckney family, Charles Pinckney, his wife Eliza, and their five-​­year-​­old daughter Harriott, arrived at Kew house, carefully clothed in “full dress.” They did not need the court’s prompting to know the occasion was extraordinary. The princess was mother to the heir apparent, the future George III, and, until her son was of age, next in line to rule Britain. Even her name, Augusta, was resonant, recalling George I’s vision of himself ruling over his own Augustan age of power and intellectual achievement.1 After enduring endless negotiations and preparations, and passing through “3 or 4 grand rooms” on the way, the Pinckneys had expected stiff formality. Instead, as Eliza Pinckney noted in a long letter to a now unidentifiable correspondent, they “were received in a manner that surprized us.” The princess’s “behaviour,” she marveled, “exceeded every thing I had heard or could imagine.” Sending away her attendants, she (with her four younger children by her side) met the Pinckneys with “all the chearfulness and pleasure of a friend who was extreamly glad to see us.”2 Within a few minutes, Eliza found she “could converse with as much ease with her as with almost any of my acquaintance.” Charles, mindful of proprieties, offered to leave after a half hour, but their host would not hear of it. She insisted that they must stay, even meet her older sons—​­including the future king. During the next hour and a half, the princess held Harriott in her lap and, in violation of what Pinckney believed a settled rule, encouraged her to

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Figure 15. Two years before Eliza Pinckney saw Augusta’s “most lovely family,” the princess gathered her children for this studiously casual painting. The younger children play with a dog, a lute, and a model ship. Her late husband, the prince of Wales, looks down from a painting in the upper left, with his outstretched hand over the future George III but pointing to Augusta holding their youngest in her lap. Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2015.

sit down. In the most symbolically charged moment, the princess, the prospective regent of Britain and the empire, got down on one knee to comfort a crying five-​­year-​­old. As Eliza noted of the entire visit, “This, you’ll imagine must seem pretty extraordinary to an American.”3 The sight of royalty kneeling before a child was indeed extraordinary, perhaps even shocking. But what surprised Pinckney was not just that the princess’s actions were so unexpected. It was also the emotional connection between the two.



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The account still seems extraordinary today, in part because it seems more characteristic of the nineteenth century than the eighteenth, more reminiscent of Queen Victoria at Balmoral in the Scottish Highlands than the season at Bath that the Pinckneys had enjoyed earlier that summer. But the emotional sensitivity and expressiveness particularly centered on the family visible at Kew Palace was an important part of later eighteenth century culture as well. Its impact would be particularly strong among culturally cosmopolitan young women reaching maturity in the 1740s—​­women such as Pinckney and the Princess Augusta. The stress on affectionate connection was not, however, purely personal—​­not arising solely from the heart, as it sometimes seemed to suggest. It was part of an important web of new ideas that represents a new phase in the politics of politeness—​­and that was used by such central figures as the theologian Jonathan Edwards and the economist Adam Smith to explain God, government, and human society. These developments marked yet another stage in the movement away from the authoritarian world of Francis Nicholson. Pinckney was arguably culturally farther from the man who was governor of South Carolina when she was born than from Victoria and Albert a century later. Nicholson saw himself as a military commander forced to compel obedience. Pinckney saw herself as a tender mother encouraging cooperation without coercion. This is not a timeless distinction between the military and the family, not the bachelor soldier versus the benevolent mother. The family itself had followed such a model not long before, similarly emphasizing duty and obedience. Pinckney’s attitudes reveal a significant rethinking of power. Her language of emotional connection, seemingly simply a precursor to nineteenth-​­ century Romanticism and sentimentalism, was closely tied to the primary themes of the eighteenth century’s politics of politeness, the attempt to create a refined self-​­presentation and the struggle to restrict the reach of government. Although these new perspectives were rooted in politeness, they also represented a further stage in the movement from oppositional critique to an accepted language of leadership. Pinckney’s emotional expressiveness responded to the fears about hypocrisy and dissimulation that Tom Bell had raised and traded upon. Bell took advantage of the lack of personal knowledge. Pinckney tried to bridge it with an emotional clarity and intensity that seemed to reach behind public presentations, just as the princess had done with her visitors in 1753. Exploring Pinckney and her writings helps identify these developments and place them in the context of the broader world and their origins in

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politeness. More than merely domestic or personal matters, these values of affection and restrained power shaped not only Pinckney’s childrearing and correspondence, but contemporary thinking about regulating and reforming society and government. Her language of affection rested heavily on a vocabulary of restraining power that could be used in personal as well as political life. Pinckney’s affectionate parenting was built around careful self-​­discipline. The experiences of Pinckney and her family through the age of the American Revolution finally help link this language to some distinctive American characteristics, including the development of nineteenth-​­century culture.

Affections Despite their assiduous efforts, the Pinckneys at first nearly failed to meet the princess. When they arrived at the palace, the family was told that the princess was busy, out “a airing” with her daughter. The disappointed Pinckneys left a card and some gifts before heading home. That evening they received a note from the princess. The message, however, was not directed to Charles, the colonial official, or even to his wife. The princess instead stated that she would be “glad to see Miss Pinckney,” their five-​­year-​­old child. The conversation at the resulting meeting included not just talk about political matters, but about the future prospects of the two families’ children and what Pinckney described as “many little domestick” issues including breast-​­feeding children.4 But the meeting between the two families was only partly personal. Pinckney found the experience compelling because the ideals that she saw in the princess’s demeanor—​­of sentiment and sensibility, of human relationships grounded in sympathy—​­had been profoundly important in her own life, had helped her establish herself, and would help sustain her through the rest of a problematic life. At the same time, however, these ideas were not completely about individual experience; contemporaries also used them within social encounters, in describing society, and in contemporary literature. Elizabeth Lucas Pinckney’s meeting with the princess came during a time she recalled as the happiest period of her life. She had been born on the West Indian island of Antigua in 1722 to a family substantial enough to be able to send her to London for schooling at about the age of ten. After five years, however, economic reverses forced her to return and then settle in South Carolina two years later with the rest of her family. This move to the mainland did



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not bring stability. Her father’s military duties soon forced him to return to Antigua, leaving behind a sickly wife—​­and a seventeen-​­year-​­old daughter given the task of overseeing the family’s several Carolina plantations.5 The role of overseer was unusual for any woman, let alone an adolescent, but Eliza Lucas took on the task energetically. Her letters show her not only supervising rice growing, but also tracking changes in currency values, planting trees, and pursuing her father’s project of adapting the dye plant indigo to Carolina conditions. She performed these activities energetically, assuring her former host in London that, by “rising very early,” she could “go through much business.” This self-​­discipline was particularly necessary because the young Lucas was intent on another sort of cultivation as well. Besides farming, she also wrote poetry, learned genteel crafts, and carried on a substantial correspondence. This range of activity can be seen in a letter to her father that describes her harpsichord lessons with Charles Theodore Pachelbel (son of the composer of Pachelbel’s Canon) just before considering the advisability of selling cows.6 Eliza’s accomplishments, especially when combined with her unusual burdens, attracted the attention of some of Charles Town’s leading women. The most notable of these new friends was Elizabeth Lamb Pinckney, wife of Charles Pinckney, one of the colony’s most learned lawyers, and formerly the colony’s attorney general and speaker of the house. Seventeen years older than Lucas and already suffering from illness, the older woman invited Lucas for long visits and lent her books from the family’s extensive library. After one stay in 1741, Lucas wrote to her mentor that home had seemed so different, so “gloomy” on her return that she had looked in John Locke to see if she was still the same person as before, cleverly referring to the philosopher’s argument that memory formed the basis of personal identity.7 Lucas’s bookishness and extensive practice with business and familiar letters nurtured a precocious rhetorical virtuosity, a combination seen in the nineteen-​­year-​­old Lucas’s critique of Pamela. In returning the final volume of Richardson’s novel to the Pinckney’s niece in 1742 (only a year after it was published in London), Lucas noted that she generally admired the book and Pamela herself. Yet the title character, she suggested, was also “very defective” because she repeated the compliments of other people and thereby indulged in the “disgusting liberty of praising her self.” Pinckney noted that she herself had received such comments but attributed them only to the partiality of friends or attempts to encourage her to develop those virtues.8 At least some of that praise, however, was not purely conventional, as

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Lucas learned when Elizabeth Pinckney died in January 1744. Charles was then forty-​­four, twice as old as his late wife’s protégé, but he quickly proposed, and they were married four months later. The soon-​­to-​­be Eliza Pinckney was characteristically gracious to her parents about the relatively meager dowry they could offer. Her education, she assured them, was “a more valuable fortune than any you could now have given me; as I hope it will tend to make me happy in my future life.”9 For some fourteen years, this expectation seemed fulfilled, a time she recalled as one of “the most uninterrupted felicity.” Her first child arrived a year and a half after the ceremony, followed (after a second son who died in infancy) by a son and a daughter. The family built a large house in Charles Town with ten rooms and at least five outbuildings, a mansion impressive enough to house a later governor. Even when Charles lost the position as chief justice he had expected, it merely encouraged the couple’s plans to move to England. They arrived during the late spring of 1753, in time for the summer season at the fashionable resort of Bath—​­and to meet with the princess. Eliza in particular found the experience deeply satisfying. When they settled in London at the end of the year, she became a regular theatergoer, making a special effort never to miss a production starring the preeminent actor of the era, David Garrick.10 By 1758, however, declining revenue from the Pinckneys’ family estates required a trip back to Carolina. The event dramatically changed her life when Charles died two months after their arrival, leaving Pinckney a widow at thirty-​­six. Her situation became even bleaker when it became clear that her finances presented a stark choice: she could return to England only if she was willing to cut short her sons’ education. Pinckney remained in America for the rest of her life. She would not see her eldest son, Charles Cotesworth, for another eleven years. Thomas, following his brother in attending Oxford and then taking legal training at the Inns of Court, did not return to Carolina until 1774.11 While Pinckney had coped with her father’s absence without being “moaped,” the loss of her husband was devastating—​­”a bitter cup indeed.” She was confined to her bed for two months of what she called “bitter anguish.” Even describing Charles’s illness could be overwhelming: “My tears flow too fast; I must have done,” she explained to her mother, “’tis too much, too much to take a review of that distressful hour!”12 But Pinckney’s correspondence, with her family in the West Indies and England, and with friends she had made in the latter who had known Charles, forced her to recount her

Figure 16. Charles Pinckney had himself painted in 1740, a year after his future wife, Eliza Lucas, moved to South Carolina and four years before they were married. Pinckney is casually but fashionably attired in a loose-­fitting banyan prepared for reading and study. Gibbes Museum of Art. © Image Gibbes Museum of Art/Carolina Art Association.

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husband’s death and her own experiences in a series of wrenching letters. “Thus am I from being the happiest of mortals become most wretched and afflicted by the loss of this worthy man!” she explained to a friend the following year.13 About ten months after Charles’s death, Pinckney wrote to a friend in London to inform her of the event. She apologized for delaying so long in sending along promised news of her move to South Carolina, a delay she recognized could be seen as “great ingratitude.” She explained, however, that she had been “wholly taken up with my own moloncholy concerns” since her “dear, dear Mr. Pinckney is no more!” “The loss of the tenderest and most affectionate of all husbands” meant an end to more than fourteen years when she had been “the happiest of mortals.” “I was truly sensible of ” his virtues, she stated, “and therefore as truely feel the sad reverse!”14 Pinckney’s references to herself as “truly sensible” and “truely feel[ing]” (like her regular use of the exclamation point) highlight her careful depiction of her feelings. Emotional expression and connection were important to Pinckney and she used her letters both to dramatize and to discipline her responses and to build connections with her correspondents through a virtuoso use of a series of ideas and attitudes that were becoming increasingly important in these years—​­and were helping to reshape the politics of politeness. Pinckney’s letters could be painfully sincere, but they were not direct expressions of her feelings. Her correspondence dramatized her reactions, seeking to make the reader understand and experience them. No sooner does Pinckney suggest to another correspondent that “’Tis not in the power of words to paint my distress,” than she vividly does so: “My Nights have passed in tears and my days in sighs without a single exception since the fatal 12th of July when I was deprived of what my soul held most dear upon Earth.”15 In communicating her struggles, furthermore, Pinckney also brought them under control, presenting them in socially acceptable ways that built and reinforced emotionally rich connections with her correspondents. Pinckney’s letters show not just an impressive awareness of her own feelings and how they could be properly displayed, but (just as important) a sympathetic and imaginative participation in her correspondents’ emotional responses. Closing the letter to a Mrs. Pocklington sharing news of Charles’s death, Pinckney stated that she hoped for further correspondence, but recognized that her “gloom and sorrow” made it unlikely that she would be able to respond with anything “lively or entertaining.” A similar attention to people’s



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responses led her to shorten her account of Charles’s death in writing to another correspondent, stating that she feared “indulg[ing] my own meloncholy at the risk of increasing it in you.”16 Similar emotional intelligence shaped Pinckney’s vocabulary as well. “Affection” is one of the most common and most resonant terms in her correspondence. Almost every letter she wrote uses some form of the word. Her letters to her children are signed variously as “your truly affectionate,” “your ever affectionate,” or “your most affectionate mother.” She similarly describes Charles, always presented as an ideal figure, as the “most affectionate and sincere of friends,” the “most affectionate and best of fathers,” and the “most tender, partial and affectionate of husbands.” Elizabeth responded to this devotion in kind: “I have the greatest esteem and affection imaginable for you,” she wrote him soon after they were married. It was “as great an affection,” she recalled after he died, “as ever filled the human heart.”17 Such affections, Pinckney believed, needed to be actively encouraged and expressed. No one “stands higher in my affection,” she told a male friend in 1781, so much that a conventional greeting to his wife seemed too restrained: “Compliments is too cold a word,” she wrote, “pray give my love to Mrs Keate . . . ​and conclude me, Your affectionate and obliged friend.” Pinckney was in this respect like Pamela’s husband who, the novel noted, was “studious to shew, on every occasion, his generous affection.”18 Pinckney’s correspondence uses two related terms to characterize the proper uses of affection more specifically. Besides actively seeking the good of other people, affection also was attentive to their feelings and desires. Such “tenderness” required carefully calibrated interactions that took people’s limitations and sensitivities into account. When one of Pinckney’s correspondents failed to mention her sickness in a letter, Pinckney encouraged her cousin to send a message to their mutual friend, asking particularly that she “write very tenderly”—​­that is, avoid the topic of illness.19 As Pinckney tells a correspondent after the death of her own husband, only “the tenderness and condolence of friendship” can “soften and aleviate” the pain of loss. Once again, Charles epitomized this virtue. Not only did he perform “numberless acts of benevolence and tenderness to his fellow creatures,” but he was the “tenderest parent that Ever existed.”20 If tenderness showed particular concern for people’s weaknesses, “indulgence” highlighted a willingness to give up legitimate authority or prerogative in order to allow another to make a choice. The term was not always used positively. Pinckney and others often used the term in a negative way,

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referring to giving in to the temptation. Staying in bed in the morning was a “pernisious custome,” she suggested to Pinckney’s niece in 1742, and it grew stronger “the more we indulge it.”21 But a self-​­sacrificing refusal to hold friends and family members to the strictest standards of duty or obedience could show a particularly praiseworthy concern for their feelings. Eighteen-​­year-​­old Pinckney rejected her father’s suggestions for potential marriage matches, but softened the blow by suggesting that his willingness to listen to her concerns was a sign of “that paternal tenderness which I have always Experienced from the most Indulgent of Parents.” Pinckney similarly praised her mother for being “so tender and indulgent a mother.” She also thanked friends for their indulgence when she failed to provide a timely response or when her letters lingered too long on her personal grief.22 Yet even seeing these expressions as personal feelings or expressions of communion with other people does not go far enough. Pinckney drew on a set of terms and ideas that were used widely within the Anglo-​­American world—​­and that were used in ways that went far beyond particular families and friends. Affection and its related terms had long been commonplaces of eighteenth-​­century political interaction. Asserting affection between the king and his subjects, or even other leaders and their subordinates, was normal protocol. The House of Commons informed George I at the beginning of 1727 that it was made up of the king’s “Affectionate Subjects.” When his son George II took the throne a few months later, he similarly declared to Parliament his “fixed Resolution, by all possible Means, to merit the Love and Affection of My People.” The Commons replied that this attitude required the “highest Returns of . . . ​Affection.” Dissenting ministers congratulating the king on his coronation explained that their “hearts” were “full of Loyalty and Affection,” a statement that in turn called forth the king’s thanks for their “Affectionate Address.” London’s Church of England clergy also received thanks for recognizing the king’s “affectionate Concern for the Established Church.”23 Americans enthusiastically joined in these conventions. When Jonathan Belcher returned as governor in 1730, newspaper accounts described the addresses of both the Congregational ministers and the Church of England clergy as “affectionate.” Belcher’s opening speech to the province’s legislature in turn noted “the affectionate Regard I have to My Native Country” New England. He told the New Hampshire legislators soon after that the king was “an indulgent Father,” an adjective the House of Lords had applied to George I in 1725.24 It was therefore not surprising when Pinckney’s husband assured the



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princess’s household that his purpose in seeking a 1753 audience was not seeking personal benefits but expressing “the affection he had to his Majesty, and all his Royal House”—​­or that, despite this language of feelings, the meeting itself also had significant political implications. Charles Pinckney had earlier that year lost an expected appointment as chief justice of South Carolina because he lacked sufficient political pull in the metropolis. Pinckney had been promised the post by the governor and had even begun to hear cases when Peter Leigh arrived from England with a royal commission. As bailiff of high Westminster supervising a 1749 election, Leigh had certified the ministerial candidate after a contentious election that included rival gangs supporting the opposing parties. Outraged opponents of the ministry took their case to the House of Commons. The Carolina post provided a way for the government to reward Leigh for his loyalty while also extricating him from a problematic situation. A week after the appointment was announced in the colony’s newspaper, Pinckney left Carolina. His position representing his colony in London must have further highlighted his need for proper connections. Before seeing the princess, he had already received an audience with the king; the visit to Kew Palace could allow him to build ties with the prospective regent as well as the heir to the throne, just as Jonathan Belcher, who was in 1753 still serving as governor of New Jersey, had traveled a half century earlier to Germany to visit the Hanoverian royal family before they took over the British throne.25 The princess also may have had political motives. Her late husband, Frederick, prince of Wales, had boldly established a rival interest to his father, George II—​­a political contest that helped bring down longtime Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole in the early 1740s. The 1749 election that drove Peter Leigh to Carolina and helped push Pinckney out of office had been heavily contested by the prince’s faction.26 The German-​­born Augusta, although she barely knew any English on her marriage, had played a significant role in her husband’s political activities. Successive prime ministers, including Walpole himself, recognized this role and attempted to gain his favor by cultivating her. Even the king tried to use her to sway Frederick. Augusta was also an important part of the group’s public face. Attending numerous functions with Frederick, she won acclaim for her kindly manner (as well as for wearing only fabric made in Britain). At a meeting in Bristol, a newspaper account reported, she “entirely won the hearts” of the women. Her role as dedicated mother offered a clear contrast to George II’s open attention to his mistresses.27 When Frederick died in 1751, Augusta’s present standing and future hopes now rested on her son. She particularly feared losing control over his

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education. George I had earlier taken control of his grandchildren’s training, even gaining a legal opinion confirming his right to do so. Augusta, anxious to avoid this precedent, destroyed Frederick’s sensitive correspondence and refused to see his primary lieutenants. Such humility gained the king’s approval. He not only allowed the future George III to remain under her care, but named her regent. The language of affection that both Pinckney and Augusta used so well was also being applied by some of the central figures in Anglo-​­American culture. Theologian Jonathan Edwards argued in 1746 (the year Pinckney’s first son was born) that relationships with God depended on affection. “True religion, in great part,” he argues, “consists in holy affections,” a term he defines as “all vigorous lively actings of the will or inclination.”28 Adam Smith, before his landmark work on The Wealth of Nations, used similar terms to describe human society. In a work published in 1759 (while Pinckney was still prostrate from the death of her husband), Smith considers affections a particularly settled example of “fellow-​­feeling,” the “moral sentiments” that he believed helped hold together and refine human society.29 The clearest parallels, however, with Pinckney’s language can be seen in literary works. The emotional expressiveness seen in her letters would become a hallmark of late eighteenth-​­century discussions of “sensibility.” The term came to serve as both a description and a celebration of responsiveness to beauty and to the feelings of both other people and one’s self. Pinckney’s earliest letters came early in the development of these ideas, roughly contemporary with Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, the 1740–​­1741 novel that most clearly marked the beginning of these new attitudes. Pamela was a phenomenon, the first English novel to become a major public success. Told through a series of emotionally charged letters to and from the fictional Pamela Andrews, the book traces the young servant’s resistance to the frightening sexual advances of her master, and the ideal marriage that developed once he recognized her virtue.30 Americans found the work as irresistible as Britons, so much that Benjamin Franklin reprinted it in 1742, the first novel published in America. Jonathan Edwards, the Massachusetts minister and theologian, owned a copy. His daughter, married to the president of what became Princeton University, read it (with enthusiasm) less than a year before giving birth to their first child, the future vice president of the United States, Aaron Burr.31 But Pinckney, who finished reading the novel the same year Franklin



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started printing it, was arguably closer to Pamela than any of these figures—​­or at least closer to its eponymous heroine. Both were part of the same generation. Pamela Andrews was fifteen at the start of the book. Pinckney was seventeen when it appeared and still only nineteen when she finished the second volume. Just as important, the two were compelling writers, finding letters an essential means of making and keeping connections, whether for Pamela held at her master Mr. B.’s estates against her will, or Pinckney at work on the family’s plantations. Just as important, both Pamela’s author and Pinckney were fluent in language of sentiment. Richardson soon afterwards spoke of letters as linking “friendly and undesigning hearts.” Samuel Johnson, who knew Richardson, praised him for his “knowledge . . . ​of the human heart.” Pinckney’s and Richardson’s letters can helpfully be seen as contemporaries sharing a vocabulary and a set of ideas that would develop further later in the eighteenth century and beyond. Both authors used a language of affection that failed to include (or to value as highly) some of the words that became key terms in later works of or about sensibility. Pinckney uses “sentiment” only to mean opinion, rather than a moral reflection. And neither author uses “sentimental” at all. And virtually the only time that Pinckney speaks of “sympathy,” she holds close to the term’s more technical meaning, referring to her corresponding reaction to the experience of another person.32 Pinckney and her contemporaries used the term “sensibility” to mean not (as in today’s usage) prudent or careful, but the ability to respond to, beauty, other people, and one’s own situation. Pinckney regularly praised friends who sent condolences for having a “most sensible . . . ​mind” or a “tender sensibility.”33 Pinckney’s complaint about Pamela raised this issue. It might have been “excuseable,” she conceded, for Pamela to pass along other people’s praise for her while she was still a “young Country Girl,” and thus unaware of its impropriety. But doing so was unacceptable after she had more experience with people “of sence.”34 Pinckney made a similar point about her own sensibility two years later when her new husband passed along the praise he had heard from a number of women. “I am too sensible,” Pinckney replied, “of my own defects to be ignorant that tis the partiality of my friends that has procured me the great character they are pleased to say they have heard of me and not my own desert.” On the other hand, she carefully added, “it would be an unpardonable stupidity to be insensible of the good opinion of people of worth and judgement.”35 While lacking sensibility was almost always blameworthy in Pinckney’s

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correspondence, being sensible was not necessarily, as discussions later in the century often suggest, morally commendable. Pinckney wrote during Charles’s illness that her anxiety caused such “a tremor upon my nerves” that made it difficult to “hold my penn.” Later she noted that she had been “truely sensible” of the blessings of her marriage, which made her “truely feel the sad reverse.”36 Not surprisingly, such sensibility did not seem entirely helpful. Sensibility was valuable not in itself but when it encouraged moral behavior and respectful relationships. Affectionate and sympathetic connections themselves, however, were vital for Pinckney. After her husband’s death, she relied on letters not only to keep up with the Lucas family in the West Indies, but also to revive her husband’s businesses in Carolina and keep up her children’s affairs in England. Although she might offer to pay expenses, still her hope that an acquaintance would spend time with her sons required the good will, as she noted, of people who take “pleasure in doing friendly and humain” things. Her repeated expressions of friendship and gratitude when writing to British friends eased the difficulties of their relationships. Separated from her sons by an ocean, she even had to leave to others the question of when (or whether) to tell them about the death of their father.37 As her obituary noted, Pinckney’s “amiable and engaging qualities,” her “talent for conversation,” and her “refined manners” led both sexes to seek out her company.38 Although she lacked strong kinship networks, Pinckney had been able to move into new circles in both South Carolina and England. As an older woman, her granddaughter recalled, she was “Respected, admired, [and] at the head of society in Carolina.”39 Eighteenth-​­century authors often suggested that the refinement of women such as Pinckney was essential to politeness itself. “Rigid Teachers” with “rigid Rules” were poor teachers of “Musty morals,” suggested a 1699 English play. “But Woman—​­Charming Woman can true Converts make,” because they made virtue so appealing, “so bright.” “Virtue,” the previous line noted, “flows freer from Imitation, than Compulsion.”40 A selection in a collection of discussions of manner published soon afterwards similarly argued, “Good breeding is learnt from the conversation of the Ladys.”41 William Byrd II attributed his own “good-​­nature” particularly to “Female conversation.” Such interaction he declared, “softens the roughness, tames the wildness, & refines the indecency too common amongst the men.”42 These views about the importance of female conversation were not simply abstractions. The Scottish immigrant Alexander Hamilton, who traveled



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through the northeastern British colonies in 1744, used the role of women to assess the character of different localities. Boston, he declared, was superior to New York and Philadelphia in “politeness and urbanity” in part because the elite women were “for the most part free and affable.” These views also guided personal interactions. Lord Chesterfield admonished his sixteen-​­year-​­old son in 1747 to converse often with “women of fashion.” The “complaisance and politeness, which are so useful in men’s company,” he suggested, “can only be acquired in women’s.” Benjamin Franklin had been so impressed by the poem praising women for teaching virtue that he carefully copied and saved it in 1732. As he rose in society, he increasingly socialized with women. At the same time he was moving freely among Parisian salons and social circles often dominated by women in the 1780s, a young Jedediah Morse (later father of the telegraph inventor and a noted author himself) was attending college and studying theology in considerably less exalted circumstances in Connecticut. But, as his nineteenth-​­century biographer noted, Morse’s desire to cultivate “the social graces” led him to take advantage of “all legitimate opportunities for mingling in cultivated female society.”43 Pinckney’s own cultivation made her particularly compelling. She impressed significant figures throughout her life, from the English Lady Carew, a childhood friend who married a baronet to South Carolina governor William Lyttelton, who visited regularly when she returned from England.44 Pinckney’s correspondence with the British author George Keate lasted nearly thirty years. A friend of both Voltaire and Garrick, Keate, who she met while living in London with her husband, was a widely published author who wrote sentimental poetry as well as one of the period’s most popular South Seas travel narratives.45 Pinckney similarly impressed Peter Manigault, a young South Carolinian studying law in London. Normally, Manigault wrote his mother, he was happy being single and even mocked marriage, but seeing the Pinckneys together led him to “Raptures” about the “married State.” Pinckney was “a mighty good Sort of Lady,” he enthused, “an excellent woman.” Even the princess was impressed. Manigault wrote home in late 1753 that Augusta had recently sent Harriott “a very pretty Toy” and that the princess could be counted “among . . . ​the most considerable” of the Pinckneys’ “many Acquaintances.” “It was scarcely possible to behold her,” Pinckney’s obituary suggested, “without emotions of the highest veneration and respect.”46

Figure 17. A dress made for Eliza Lucas Pinckney during her 1750s residence in London with her husband and children. According to long-­standing lore, this was one of three made with silk she had grown on family plantations. Another of the dresses was given to the Princess Augusta. National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution



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Power The Pinckneys worked hard to shape their meeting with the princess, in part by emphasizing the participation of their five-​­year-​­old daughter. Besides stating their desire to express their affections, they also suggested to the household that they wanted to allow Harriott to give the princess several birds from Carolina (their two older boys were then attending boarding school). When the family initially failed to get in and it looked as if only Harriott might be admitted, the Pinckneys prepared a card for Harriott to carry with the animals, noting her desire to pay her “duty to her Highness.” When the attendant finally recommended either returning the next day or leaving the birds, the Pinckneys left not only the birds but the paper.47 The princess responded in kind. Not only did she suggest she would be happy to see “Miss Pinckney,” but she came to the door of her apartment herself with four of her children alongside her. The princess spoke to all the Pinckneys in the two hours that followed, but she paid particular attention to Harriott. As Pinckney stood in pain, the princess allowed Harriott to sit and got a china figurine for the girl, standing on a chair to get it. The princess then sent for the older princes and concluded the meeting with one of them showing the Pinckneys to the door. Pinckney was charmed: “We saw all nine children together, and the Princess in the midst,” she wrote, “and a most lovely family it is.”48 Placing children at the center of their meeting allowed both families to create a more relaxed, less formal encounter. Again this went beyond Pinckney’s personal experience. Affectionate parenting of the sort practiced by both families had over the previous generation become a means of experiencing—​ a­ nd then passing on—​­a vision of limited, benevolent power operating in relationships shaped as much by internal as external restraints. And the themes of watchful parenting, restrained power, and a disciplined self resonated not only in the lives of the individuals who met at the palace, but also in contemporary thinking about the nature of society. With the birth of her first son, Charles Cotesworth, in February 1746, Pinckney threw herself into motherhood. Three months later she sent to London for blocks “to teach him according to Mr. Lock’s method.” Her husband, Pinckney explained, had already prepared another “set of toys” designed for the same purpose: helping their son “play him self into learning.” Pinckney’s

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goal of having Charles Cotesworth learn “his letters by the time he can speak” was met ahead of schedule. Her intensive use of the alphabet blocks made her one of the earliest known users of what the nineteenth century called “Locke blocks.” Passing on stories told within the family, Charles Cotesworth’s daughter notes that “Every care and attention” was “bestowed on” the young boy and “unremitted pains taken with him.” The careful training inspired a lifelong love of learning. “Nothing in the shape of a book ever escaped him,” she recalled of her father as an adult: “he read from the moment he arose.”49 Although Charles Cotesworth came to dislike his parents’ ambitious attempt at infant education and Pinckney herself seems not to have used the toys again, her interest in her children continued unabated. “My attention to my dear little girl” Harriott is “one of the greatest Businesses of my life,” she declared after her husband’s death, adding that she actually counted it part of her “amusement” since it was such a “pleasure.” Staying in Carolina after 1758 fulfilled a commitment she had made when they were young to “spair no pains or trouble to do them good.”50 Princess Augusta showed similar concern for her children. Often pictured among her offspring in portraits, she devoted herself to the education of her sons and daughters upon the death of her own husband in 1751, helping her son, George III, become what is arguably still Britain’s most culturally aware and intellectually cultivated monarch. One student of Augusta’s life even suggests that she refused to refute gossip about her personal life rather than revealing the true reasons for the visits of the Scottish peer Lord Bute, an older man that, despite the royal family’s doubts, Augusta considered an ideal mentor for her son.51 The two mothers also shared a common approach to childrearing. As their encounter suggests, both rejected the harsh discipline previously considered necessary for success. Even in the presence of royalty, Pinckney responded calmly to Harriott’s tears. Rather than reprimanding her, the mother gently explained to the princess the discomfort Harriott was experiencing. Augusta proved just as gracious, gently kneeling to speak to her and then taking the child in her lap. Pinckney preferred reassuring her children to threatening them. She maintained a warm relationship with them throughout her life, writing extended letters whenever they were apart. One message to Charles Cotesworth, written when he was twenty-​­two and still in England, carefully raises an issue about his health by stating that she hoped her interest was not troubling to him. She could not bear, she wrote, “the hurting a child so truly dear to me,



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and deservedly so; who has lived to near twenty-​­three years of age without once offending me.” This affectionate style can be seen most clearly in her letters to Harriott’s eldest son in the 1780s. Daniel Horry, then in his teens, was unhappy at being forced to attend school in England. She wrote him in February 1787, two years after the death of his father, requesting that he send “as many particulars relating to your self ” as he could, before thinking better of the phrase and crossing it out, showing her desire to embody “her tenderest regard.” Less than two weeks later, having read another letter from him, Pinckney wrote her last surviving letter. Fittingly, it closed not only by apologizing for writing at such length (a result, she wrote of “my desire to [converse] with you”) but by subscribing it “Yr. truly affe[ctiona]te. Parent.”52 This ideal of thoughtful, restrained, and emotionally engaged parenting aroused widespread discussion among contemporary elite circles in Britain and America. A popular story from a 1730s London magazine warns against “Violence and Rigour” in the treatment of children. “Severity never should be made Use of,” it declares, “till all gentle Measures have been tried, and found unsuccessful.” Even then, the article suggested, harshness was still dangerous since the point of parenting was to make the child “happy.” The message seemed so compelling that another London magazine summarized the piece, a description reprinted in a Boston newspaper in the 1730s and then included in a New York almanac in the 1760s. Another story reprinted in the same Boston newspaper similarly warned against compelling a daughter to marry against her wishes, an act it declared proved the parent a monstrous “tyrant.” Peter Manigault, the London student who was so impressed by Pinckney, followed the same logic in suggesting that his mother’s request for some tea illustrated a great truth of parenting. Thanking her for not commanding him (as was her right), he commented: “When Parents treat their Children with so much Delicacy, it fixes the Affection firm against all Attacks.”53 As Manigault suggested, Pinckney’s children and grandchildren responded well to her similar treatment. Not only (as will be noted later) did her two sons serve as American ambassadors to major European countries, but they and their sister continued to write warm and generous letters to each other throughout their lives.54 When the plantations of both Pinckney and her son Thomas were looted by the British during the Revolutionary War (Pinckney characteristically told him it was “A severe blow! but I feel not for my self, but for you”), Charles Cotesworth immediately offered to split his estate equally among them.55 The death of Harriott’s husband in the mid-​­1780s led her to invite her mother to help her with the plantation and children;

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Figure 18. After Harriott Pinckney Horry’s husband died in the mid-­1780s, she invited her mother to live with her at Hampton Plantation. In 1791 the two women welcomed the visiting George Washington in 1791 at the mansion’s newly built portico. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, HABS SC,10-­McCLEL.V, 3–4.

Pinckney remained there the rest of her life. Charles Cotesworth sent his children to live with them for a time as well after his first wife died in 1784. His daughter recalled Pinckney with awe, declaring later that “All that she thought and said and did was right.”56 And the unhappy adolescent, Daniel Horry, went on not only to marry the niece of the Marquis de Lafayette but to call himself (for a time) Charles Lucas Pinckney—​­taking on both his grandmother’s family name and the name of her beloved husband.57 In her request for blocks to teach Charles Cotesworth, Pinckney explained to her correspondent that she had “carefully studied” John Locke’s discussion of education. That work’s appeal to the young mother is not difficult to explain.



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Locke began his 1693 Some Thoughts Concerning Education by suggesting that the training given to children deeply influenced their lives. In the famous metaphor proposed in his earlier and equally revolutionary work on epistemology (a work that Pinckney also read), the minds of infants were a blank slate. As a result, “The little, or almost insensible, Impressions on our tender Infancies, have very important and lasting Consequences,” his work on education declared, making the comparison to turning aside a small stream of water so that it eventually flows to a very different location. From this perspective, parenting was a task of immense consequences for both individuals and society—​­a project well worth the attention of an energetic and idealistic young woman.58 Locke’s thinking about parenting was closely connected to his more famous political views. He had laid the foundation for his discussion of the social contract in his Second Treatise on Government by using the first treatise to refute Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, a work that argued that the great authority of fathers justified the power of kings. In response Locke suggested not only that monarchs did not possess parental powers, but that Filmer had also misunderstood parenting itself. Fathers, Locke suggested, naturally restrained themselves for the good of the children (showing what Pinckney would call tenderness). And their power in any case was not “Absolute, Arbitrary, Unlimited, and Unlimitable”: it ended when their children were grown. Given these limits on the powers of monarchs and parents, Locke argued in his piece on education that the proper role of parents was to prepare children for ­adulthood—​­helping make them independent rather than merely obedient. As Pinckney had read as a young woman, the goal was to “make their Minds supple and pliant to what their Parents’ Reason advises them now, and so prepare them to obey, what their own Reason should advise hereafter.”59 The idea that proper education could create independent adults who would follow their reason rather than authority seemed so appealing because it seemed to offer a means of moving beyond the difficulties of the seventeenth century, when Britain had been threatened both by monarchs and by the mid-​ c­ entury revolution against monarchs. Since society was not, as Hobbes had memorably suggested, a “war of every man against every man,” his call for virtually unlimited government was unnecessary, even dangerous. What Locke called “the rod and the cudgel” should be rejected not just in families but in government. Instead, as Locke’s student the Earl of Shaftesbury argued, “Social love and common affection” were “natural to mankind.”60 A parallel set of discussions took place around the same time within the

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Anglican Church. While most late seventeenth-​­century churchmen adhered to the official doctrine that it was wrong to resist even tyrants, an influential group of ministers sought to avoid the extremes of absolutism, radical religion, and materialist deism by preaching a more affectionate deity. John Tillotson, who became the most widely read Anglican minister of the early eighteenth century, suggested that God was more compassionate than humans, noting that God spontaneously feels the “affection of . . . ​tenderness.” “Could there be,” asked a close colleague of Tillotson, “a more indulgent ­Master, . . . ​a more delightful Companion, . . . ​a sweeter Comforter than” Jesus?61 American elites found Tillotson deeply appealing. William Byrd, II, read him regularly, often instead of going to church. His wife read one of Tillotson’s sermons to him after the two had enjoyed a sexual encounter on the billiard table. Jonathan Edwards also studied Tillotson (although with more reservations and presumably not in a similar situation); the American minister also portrayed Jesus as “a person who was remarkably of a tender and affectionate heart.” Charles Pinckney endowed a biennial Charles Town lecture on “the greatness of God, and his goodness to all creatures,” ordering that the first South Carolina native chosen to give one of the sermons would receive a copy of Tillotson’s works. He suggested as a possible text a psalm praising God’s “tender mercies.”62 The language of familial tenderness remained central to thinking about society for much of the eighteenth century. Frances Hutcheson, perhaps the most significant social theorist of the 1720s and 1730s, explicitly used parental affection as the foundation for rejecting the Hobbesian view that humans were ruled only by self-​­love. Rather than highlighting parents’ power (as Filmer did), he argued that families and all human connections were ultimately rooted in “disinterested benevolence,” a “strong biass” toward ­“universal . . . ​Tenderness.” Hutcheson in turn made the family a model for all other social ties. Benevolence developed first and most strongly in the household. These bonds then extended outward—​­so strongly, Hutcheson suggested, that, if humans knew there were rational beings on “the most distant Planets” who were “capable of moral Affections,” they would “delight in their Happiness.” The centrality of families in these circles of benevolence led Hutcheson to redefine heroism as well. Traditionally heroes were almost exclusively warriors and rulers. But Hutcheson argued that invaluable acts “to Mankind” also occurred in smaller circles as well. His list of “Heroes in Virtue” included “the tender Husband and affectionate Parent.”63



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Adam Smith’s discussion of sympathy displaced rulers even further. His study of “moral sentiments” identifies the social affections as the “vicegerents of God within us,” subordinate rulers appointed to act in the place of the deity. The term had previously been claimed by popes, monarchs, and civic officials. Smith suggested that these affections could similarly (and, in more refined societies, more effectively) punish violations and reward “obedience with tranquility of mind, with contentment, and self-​­satisfaction.” Pinckney’s eulogist praised her for these same qualities, noting that she lived a life that was “regular, placid and uniform.” Within the larger context of contemporary thinking about society, her “regular uninterrupted habit and practice of virtue and benevolence” helped not only to raise children, but to hold together society itself.64 Of course, despite the claims of her eulogist, Pinckney’s life had been anything but tranquil or uniform. Her carefully composed self-​­presentation was the product of intense self-​­discipline. The prayers and meditations she wrote for her own use in the 1740s reveal her scrutiny of every part of her life. “I am resolved,” she wrote in one, “by [God’s] Grace . . . ​to endeavour constantly to subdue every vice; and improve in every virtue.” She resolved further to resist “the least emotions of pride, haughtiness, ambition, or ostentation, or contempt of others,” as well as “Envy, Ill will, . . . ​or uncharitableness, in word, in thought or in deed, . . . ​passion [and] peevishness.” She prompted herself to read the document every day “to assist my memory as to every particular contained in this paper.”65 By the time Pinckney wrote her last surviving letters in the 1780s, many of her contemporaries, particularly in Britain, criticized tender sensibility and sentiments as self-​­indulgent. The British author Henry Mackenzie, who had previously praised the “Man of Feeling,” now condemned a fictional “Mrs. Sensitive” who claimed that her sympathy allowed her to understand the facial expressions of her animals yet at the same time also lacked compassion for her domestic help and refused to see the poor because they were too troubling. Pinckney, with her carefully nurtured discipline and long experience in business, was hardly a Mrs. Sensitive. “I know by my own feelings how much firmness is necessary to support properly the absence of those we love,” she counseled the unhappy Daniel Horry, Jr., while he was stuck in England. “I should wish you here too,” she noted, “but alas! my child the emotions though natural must have bounds and not sufferd to soften us much as to distroy matters essential to all your future prospects.” “Consider,” she urged, “what you owe to your self your Country and family.”66

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Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments struggles more theoretically with reconciling discipline and emotions. Smith also is careful to note (and to emphasize even more strongly in later editions) that such “fellow-​­feeling” provided no excuse for self-​­indulgence. Sympathy is instead “the very principle” that underlay what he called “the manhood of self-​­command.” Only people fully aware of “the joys and sorrows of others,” he suggests, could control their own. The “austere virtue of self-​­command” was established by heeding the responses of both the “impartial spectator” within and the “real spectator” without. Smith’s description of this ideal figure, although expressed in masculine terms, comes close to the terms used about Pinckney herself: “The man of the most perfect virtue . . . ​is he who joins, to the most perfect command of his own original and selfish feelings, the most exquisite sensibility both to the original and sympathetic feelings of others.”67 Pinckney similarly held up her own sons as exemplars of such discipline. “When I contemplate with what philosophick firmness and calmness they both of them supported pain, sickness and evils of various sorts,” she wrote to Daniel Horry at the end of the war, “and see with what greatness of mind they now generously conduct themselves to all; my heart overflows with gratitude.” “Be assured, my dear Daniel,” she continued, “no pleasure can equal that which a mother feels when she knows her children have acted their part well through life.”68 Power itself was not the problem. But, as in the politics of politeness itself, Pinckney sought to control power, to purify it. This attitude can be seen first within Pinckney’s own household. As a young woman, she read Locke’s advice against thoughtless use of “Chatisement, and the Rod”—​­and perhaps noted his judgment that this “Sort of Slavish Discipline makes a Slavish Temper.”69 The term would have had specific meaning to a woman who, except for her years of schooling in England, had lived in places where slaves made up a majority of the population. This involvement with slavery continued throughout Pinckney’s life. She commanded enslaved people in their plantation tasks as a teenager; received them as her dowry as a young woman; had them run off or taken by the British (she was not sure which) during the Revolution; and owned them until she died. Pinckney’s letters say comparatively little about slaves (especially in comparison with her extensive writings to and about her children), but these discussions make it clear that she did not consider them beyond the boundaries of good manners. One of her prayers resolves “to treat them with humanity, and good nature” and not to be “tyrannical, pevish or impatient towards them.” As a teenager, she taught family slaves to read, even



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despite the colony’s legal prohibition. As an adult, she took sick slaves into the house and oversaw their care.70 At the same time, however, Pinckney shows no indication of opposing slavery itself—​­or objecting to her son, Charles Cotesworth, who determinedly opposed any attempt to limit the institution at the Constitutional Convention. For Pinckney, the problem seems to have been that power could be harsh, crude, and intrusive. Showing concern for the needs of other people helped her to discipline not only herself but her children and her slaves. A similar attitude toward power can be seen in British political culture. Both eighteenth-​­century Britons and Europeans celebrated the nation for its liberties, for the limitations on government power that so impressed both Voltaire and Montesquieu. Yet the British state grew dramatically in these years, vastly increasing its fiscal ability, military strength, and imperial reach. The Whig practice of increasing power seems at odds with the Whig principle of protecting liberty through limits on power. The case of Pinckney suggests the logic that linked the two. As she recognized, gaining willing authority required giving up pretensions to total power and sacrificing for the good of others. She might also have recommended the “air of benignity” she had noted in the princess.71 The princess herself had learned similar lessons, and hoped to pass them on to her son, the future George III. Augusta was particularly impressed by The Idea of a Patriot King, a work written in support of her late husband’s political group and addressed to his private secretary. The author, Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, called for a selfless monarch devoted not to self-​ i­nterest or partisanship but to the public good—​­a leader modeled on Queen Elizabeth. Elizabeth, Bolingbroke argued, was able to lead by “affection” because of her great “tenderness for her people.” Her public actions were animated (given “life and colour”) by “a warm concern for the interest and honour of the nation, a tenderness for her people, and a confidence in their affections.” As she properly recognized, a limited monarchy depended on “popularity” as “the sole true foundation of . . . ​sufficient authority and influence.” Her “private behaviour” followed similar principles, showing “great affability,” even “­ familiarity”—​­a kindness that, Bolingbroke suggests, was seen not as weakness but virtue.72 The glorification of Elizabeth, a female model of leadership, may have encouraged Augusta to take Bolingbroke’s work as a model not only for her son, but for herself. The ideal queen, she would have read, tied people to her “by affection,” in particular by recognizing that a free people were “at all times

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more easily led than driven.” Augusta stooping to help a crying child fulfilled (despite its masculine language) Bolingbroke’s advice: a “wise prince” should “dare to appear a private man.”73

Prospects Despite the domestic harmony celebrated in the 1753 audience at Kew Palace, the relationship between the Pinckneys and the princess did not last. Their connection continued for at least a time. The princess sent young Harriott a box of gifts. Pinckney gave the princess a dress made of silk from a family plantation. But the Pinckneys, who had earlier come to show their affection to the royal family, would later reject its authority—​­and the young man they met at the palace, now George III, would in turn order attacks on South Carolina. The Pinckneys suffered greatly from the resulting fighting. “My estate was shatter’d and ruin’d,” Pinckney informed her grandson in England at the end of the war, “nor had I in Country or Town a place to lay my head.” Her children experienced even greater difficulties. British soldiers plundered Harriott’s house, even taking the treasured miniature of a friend she wore around her neck. Thomas’s house was burned and he himself was wounded. Like his brother, he was also taken prisoner. Rather than the benignity Pinckney had felt in the princess, Carolina had felt, Pinckney told her grandson, “the insolence of power, and wanton cruelty.”74 After his service in the Carolina militia, however, Harriott’s husband returned to British-​­controlled Charleston, implicitly accepting the authority of George III. The move complicated the family’s position after the American victory. Harriott and her husband faced the prospect of having their estate confiscated. They avoided this result, partly through her brothers’ influence, but they were forced to pay a substantial fine. It may have been this ambiguous history that led someone, presumably a family member, to cut out the section of Pinckney’s letter about the meeting with the princess that described her and Harriott’s meeting with the future king.75 The 1753 audience occurred at an important moment in the history not only of the two families, but also of the linked ideals of refined self-​­presentation and limited government that made up the politics of politeness. What had been an insurgent, oppositional movement in the late seventeenth century



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had entered the palace by the mid-​­eighteenth, allowing a colonial born in the West Indies to find common ground with a member of the British royal family from Germany. Just as important, the terms that informed the meeting and the parenting of the two women would be used by some of the period’s deepest thinkers (including both Jonathan Edwards in New England and Adam Smith in Scotland) to consider the nature of human relationships with God and government. But the success of the politics of politeness also heralded later difficulties. Within the lifetime of the participants of the audience at Kew, the Anglo-​ ­American vision of a unity between a polite self and restrained power gave way to a series of separations. The later experience of the Pinckneys, particularly the next generation, reveals the widening differences between America and Britain, between political insiders and outsiders, and between public and private that shaped this new cultural configuration. Pinckney found living in Britain during the 1750s a heady experience. Not only were her children receiving an extraordinary education (following John Locke himself in attending both Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford), but she herself, as she wrote to a Carolina friend a few months after arrival, had made an “Extensive good acquaintance.” After spending “last Season” in the resort city of Bath and meeting the princess in the summer, they were about to rent a house in London, “in the Center of every thing.” Her enforced return to Carolina was a particularly difficult blow. Even after being back in Carolina for four years, Pinckney, describing herself as being in a “remote corner of the Globe,” quizzed a friend on the feasibility of moving to Geneva, a location she hoped would allow the family to be reunited while still providing first-​­rate educational opportunities for her boys. Benjamin Franklin felt the same way when he returned to America in 1762, after a stay that had overlapped with the Pinckneys’ final year in Britain. “Almost every Neighbourhood” there, he noted mournfully to his former London landlord, contained “more sensible, virtuous and elegant Minds, than we can collect in ranging 100 Leagues of our vast Forests.”76 But America’s less crowded world also provided opportunities for Pinckney’s sons. Charles Cotesworth almost immediately gained a seat in the assembly upon returning to Carolina in 1769, allowing him to take a major role in steering the body against crown power. During the war he served as a colonel in the Continental Army, eventually gaining temporary rank as a general. At the Constitutional Convention, where he was the only delegate with an English college degree, Charles Cotesworth was a reliable supporter of

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strengthening national power. Afterwards, he led the fight to create South Carolina’s ratifying convention. His younger brother, recently elected governor by an assembly vote of 173 to 7, presided over that body.77 As Jonathan Belcher, Jr., had learned in the 1730s, similarly placed young men in Britain found such opportunities scarcer where great magnates with immense wealth and influence clogged the path to power. James Boswell, the biographer of Samuel Johnson, came from a more distinguished Scottish family than the Pinckneys and, by the late 1780s, had already gained some fame for visiting the rebels in Corsica. Yet only a few months after Charles Cotesworth had finished up helping to write the Constitution and Thomas had gained the highest position in the state, Boswell found himself trapped in a gloomy castle with some members of Parliament and a possible patron who had hinted at the possibility of a seat for Boswell himself. He sat in “stupid silence” while their host, Lord Lowther, nearly fell asleep after dinner or spoke for nearly three hours straight. Lowther, dubbed a “domestic bashaw” by a contemporary, was no more generous to his dependents, to whom he was an “intolerable tyrant.” The humiliated Boswell finally packed his bags and tried to sneak out of the castle, only to return within hours as hopes for office overcame his embarrassment.78 American leaders, lacking the settled wealth and influence that flowed from entrenched privilege and immense landholdings, could seldom show such contempt either for other elites or to their constituents. American circumstances required greater responsiveness. During the colonial years, furthermore, they had to respond to an imperial power that could seem only slightly less distant and insensitive than Lonsdale. This enforced attention to popular and imperial concerns gave the values of moderation, restraint, and opposition to arbitrary power particular purchase, an experience that helped steer American leaders into a surprisingly moderate revolution. The two Pinckneys, having been involved with the Revolution since the beginning, became even more prominent in the 1790s, establishing themselves as leading members of the new Federalist party. Thomas Pinckney went from the governorship into Congress, left his seat to become ambassador to Great Britain, and then returned to Congress for another four years. The more diffident Charles Cotesworth Pinckney turned down offers to join the Supreme Court, to command the army, and to serve as secretary of state, but he still spent time as minister to France (heading there while his brother was sailing back from Europe), as a general in the army, and as a member of a peace delegation to France, where he helped set off the XYZ affair.79



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The Pinckneys, however, never achieved the highest national offices, although not for lack of trying. Thomas joined John Adams on the Federalist ticket in 1796, failing to achieve the vice presidency only because the party feared that the Electoral College as then established might pick him as president instead of the intended Adams. Charles Cotesworth ran with Adams in 1800, again going down to defeat. In 1804 and 1808, he headed the losing Federalist ticket. In each case but one, the Pinckneys were defeated by the same man, Thomas Jefferson. And in the last, Charles Cotesworth lost to Jefferson’s handpicked successor. Charles Pinckney had been pushed out from a promised post by powerful British leaders. His sons were defeated by democratic opposition. The politics of politeness had sought to purify power by making it moderate and responsive, by encouraging leaders to act in ways that inspired mutual trust and affection. Like the Pinckney children, Jefferson had come from an elite family and received an impressive education. But in attempting to build a democratic movement, he warned against “confidence” in leaders, calling it “ every where the parent of despotism.” “Free government,” he argued in 1798, “is founded in jealousy,” in mistrust of rulers, in suspicion.80 The growing emphasis on sensibility similarly offered new ways of thinking about refinement. The language of emotional sensitivity and expression could continue to celebrate America and to praise or condemn public figures. But it could also encourage new perspectives. Sensibility first focused attention on spontaneous, untutored feelings that seemingly did not require carefully trained self-​­presentation. Such responses promised a deeper understanding, a morality that went beyond mere rationality. At the same time, sensibility also encouraged interest in accounts of suffering. Young women like Pamela (or Pinckney) were the main characters in many early novels, often confronting the difficulties of unsympathetic parents and deceptive suitors, problems that Pinckney did not face but that ruined the eponymous heroine of Richardson’s next work, Clarissa. These shifts helped make questions of establishing public authority seem less central to thinking about refinement. Pamela’s experiences during most of the novel are restricted to Mr. B’s household. Her few ineffectual contacts beyond it could not help her. Similarly Richardson makes Mr. B’s private behavior much more important than his place as a magistrate and Member of Parliament.81 The effects of these changes on women were mixed. Women seemed to play an important role in encouraging politeness and sensibility. The growing focus on emotional response and expression made it possible to hold that women like Pinckney could be more refined than men. Yet politeness could

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also seem divorced from public power. Refinement could be seen as individual, perhaps even harmed by business or political action, limiting the impact of the new place of women and making it more unusual for someone like Pinckney to run plantations and encourage Harriott to do the same.82 Pinckney fit oddly into this new world where many of the key themes of an older vision of the politics of politeness were more important than ever, while the close connection between them that she took for granted now seemed less clear. Her granddaughter a half century after her death praised her virtues highly but also worried that some might see her as “not sufficiently bright enough for the illumination of the times.” The subsequent reaction against Victorian “true womanhood,” however, made Pinckney seem more relevant. A relative in the late nineteenth century compared her favorably to the “new woman” of her day.83 Even into the twenty-​­first century, she was held as an example of women’s involvement in business.84 Rather ironically, Elizabeth Pinckney became the most well-​­known member of the family. She would not have been happy at the disappearance of her husband from public memory, but perhaps she would be pleased that her agricultural activities led to her being the subject of several biographies for both children and college students.85 But the interest in Pinckney is also a sign of the power of eighteenth-​ ­century ideas and the continuing consequence of their separation. Even more than 250 years after entering the palace, she remains what, according to recent maxim, is rare, a well-​­behaved woman who made history—​­and someone who believed her usefulness, her power, required such good behavior.86

Epilogue

The Dissolution of the Politics of Politeness

Had George Washington lived in a less cultivated society, the artist Gilbert Stuart believed, he would have been the “fiercest man amongst the savage tribes.” Painting Washington a number of times and creating an image that remains standard today, Stuart decided that the face revealed “the strongest and most ungovernable passions.” Isaac Weld, an Irish traveler who spent time in the capital and discussed the matter with Stuart in the mid-​­1790s, decided he was right. Weld noted that the people closest to Washington similarly testified to his “fierce and irritable disposition.” Yet they also observed his “judgment and great self-​­command,” qualities that “always made him appear a man of a different cast in the eyes of the world.” As a result, Weld suggested, Washington had been “extolled” not only for his “calmness, during the very trying situations in which he has so often been placed,” but for his “great moderation.”1 Weld’s discussion, published in 1799, portrayed Washington as a model of the central values of the politics of politeness: the ideals of moderation and restraint on anger that were recommended to the truculent Nicholson and dramatized by Byrd’s alter ego Steddy; the polished self-​­presentation that Belcher’s fine clothing proclaimed in Boston and Bell attempted to model there and elsewhere; and the assured yet responsible public presence that Byrd practiced in the forests and that Belcher urged his son to develop in the imperial capital. At the same time, however, discussion of Washington’s “disposition” offers a glimpse into changes that went beyond the concern about hypocrisy that Bell helped to raise or Pinckney sought to avoid with her emotionally laden sincerity. Rather than the carefully polished surface Belcher recommended to his son, Stuart spoke of an inner self representing a person’s truest character, a view that became central to nineteenth-​­century thinking.

Figure 19. Gilbert Stuart’s iconic image of George Washington was made from uneasy sittings in the mid-­1790s. Washington’s enigmatic expression perhaps balances the placid self-­control he presented to the world with the ungovernable fierceness Stuart thought raged inside. Gilbert Stuart, American, 1755–1828, George Washington, 1796.
Oil on canvas, 121.28 x 93.98 cm (47 3/4 x 37 in.).
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
William Francis Warden Fund, John H. and Ernestine A. Payne Fund, Commonwealth Cultural Preservation Trust. Jointly owned by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C., 1980.1. Photograph ©2016.

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The discussion reveals the changing place of the politics of politeness. Although Americans never fully practiced its ideals, particularly in the deeply partisan 1790s, politeness was more influential than ever during the revolutionary era, a powerful means of understanding both political behavior and social relationships. Over the course of a century, the link between control over one’s self and controlled power over others had developed from an oppositional set of ideas that could be used to attack prevailing views and uses of power to a central part of the training and thinking of Anglo-​­American elites. At the same time, however, the growing acceptance and increasing significance of these ideals also made it harder to see them as a cohesive unit. Americans continued to be preoccupied with restraining both personal anger and public power, but they increasingly saw these concerns as belonging to separate categories. “I like not much the situation of affairs in France,” George Washington advised the Marquis de Lafayette in June 1788, almost exactly a year before the Tennis Court Oath that marked the beginnings of organized opposition to the crown that would create a full-​­scale revolution against the crown a month after that. Washington was particularly concerned about “the bold demands of the Parliaments and the decisive tone of the king,” a man who seemed “good-​­hearted,” but a bit “warm-​­spirited.” Washington warned Lafayette himself “against running into extremes and prejudicing your cause.” “If I were to advise,” Washington wrote, “I would say that great moderation should be used on both sides.”2 Washington’s prescriptions were less a carefully nuanced analysis of a particular situation than an expression of his broader views of politics and governance. His desire to see good-​­hearted leaders acting with great moderation (values that were key to the politics of politeness), shaped both his language and actions. Other leading Revolutionaries similarly drew on the ideals and implications of politeness in a wide range of discussions. Moderation remained a guiding principle throughout Washington’s career. Less than six months after assuming his first major command heading Virginia’s troops in 1755, he told a subordinate that, despite a deserter’s “villanous practices,” he was forced to “recommend moderation.” Only a few months before ending his last public office, Washington’s “Farewell Address” sought to calm the new nation’s raging disputes. After he had decided that neutrality in the British-​­French struggle of the 1790s was the best policy, he explained, he determined to follow it not just with “perseverance & firmness,”

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but also (the first in the list) “with moderation.” He recognized his views on neutrality could not bind later Americans, but he hoped stating them might help “to moderate the fury of party spirit.”3 Even by the end of the Revolution, this ideal had become clearly associated with Washington. His final crisis as commander-​­in-​­chief occurred when members of the Continental Army in 1783 attempted to take a stand against the seemingly empty promises made by Congress to pay the army. An anonymous letter to officers at Newburgh, the army’s headquarters, warned them to “suspect the man who would advise to more moderation and longer forbearance.” Washington clearly believed the phrase referred directly to him. When he spoke to the officers several days later, he singled out the words as the first specific point he criticized from the letter—​­and then quoted them again later in the address. His opening makes it clear that he understood the term “moderation” not as a general desire to avoid extremes, but in the specific meanings of the politics of politeness, rejecting harsh demands for conformity. The letter writer’s call to suspect moderation, Washington commented, simply meant condemning anyone “who should not think as he thinks, and act as he advises.”4 Alexander Hamilton made the same point less than a year later in opposing the severe measures taken by New York State against the defeated loyalists. Hamilton, who had worked closely with Washington during the war, returned to New York afterward to establish a law practice. Among his early clients were loyalists suffering from the new statutes. In early 1784 he raised the issue publicly, resting his case on the principle of moderation. Hamilton’s pamphlet, issued under the classical name “Phocion,” admitted that calling justice and moderation “the surest supports of every government” was “trite.” Yet, he insisted, it was “at all times true.” Harsh measures of “revenge, cruelty, [and] persecution” only betrayed the true spirit of the Revolution, which was “generous, humane, beneficent and just.” Neither Augustus Caesar nor Queen Elizabeth persecuted their enemies when they came to power, practicing the “moderation” that brought stability by “unit[ing] all parties.” Every “interest of the community,” he argued, “dictates moderation rather than violence.”5 A reply published soon after complained that Phocion’s arguments made the opposing case problematic. “It is easy,” the author admitted, to call these measures “vindictive.” Yet Phocion’s manner undermined his case. The attack revealed “that great disqualification for a statesman, an uncontroulable warmth of temper.” Hamilton was stung; he apologized in a further pamphlet

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for “the injudicious appearance of warmth.” Yet he continued to recommend “that moderation” that rejected “bigotry in politics, as well as in religions.”6 The ideals of the politics of politeness could be used to discuss social matters as well. In counseling his sixteen-​­year-​­old grandson living away from home for the first time, Thomas Jefferson warned in late 1808 that the grandson of the president could not afford to engage in political disputes. “Fiery zealots” who insisted on arguing about politics should be avoided like “an angry bull.” “Safety” in this and other situations, Jefferson suggested, depended on three qualities: moral virtue; “prudence”; and “good humor” supported by “politeness.” Jefferson carefully distinguishes between these two last terms. Whereas good humor is the true virtue, politeness is “artificial good humour,” created by human effort. It is, therefore, “an acquisition of first rate value.” Consideration for other people, sacrificing one’s own “conveniencies and preferences” to please others, and refraining from disputes in company would “win the good will” of other people. Benjamin Franklin was a powerful example of these virtues. His decision “never to contradict any body,” Jefferson noted, made him the “most amiable of men in society.”7 Jefferson used the same principles to condemn slavery in his 1780s “Notes on the State of Virginia,” arguing that it encouraged the very “broils & contentions” that he later warned his grandson against. Slavery created “a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions” on both sides—​­”the most unremitting despotism” by masters and “degrading submission” by slaves. Since masters found it difficult to restrain their anger, he noted, children saw these “storms” and were “nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny.” Rage damaged slaves as well, teaching them to hate their country. Any “statesman” deserved to be cursed, Jefferson declared, who allows half a nation to become its “enemies” because the other half consisted of “despots.”8 The themes of uncontrolled power, moderation, and sympathy that informed Hamilton’s views on loyalists and Jefferson on slavery also shaped Abigail Adams’s suggestion in March 1776 that the nation’s new law code should “Remember the Ladies.” The force of her suggestion has made her comments, and the two letters by John and Abigail respectively that continued the topic, the most famous discussion of women’s rights in the revolutionary period. The power of the exchange, however, rests not just on recognition of gender inequalities but also on sophisticated use of the ideas and practices of the politics of politeness. Abigail’s March 31 letter reminded John, then a leader in the Continental Congress, that the legal doctrine of coverture gave husbands what she called

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“unlimited power” over wives—​­an authority she later calls “arbit[r]ary” and “absolute.” With their legal standing merged into their husbands’, wives were only “vassals.” If the nation’s new laws did not curb the ability of men to become “tyrants,” she threatens, women would revolt, refusing to follow laws they had no voice in creating.9 Having playfully applied the language of “hard” power, the realm of force and unyielding universal principles, Abigail then shifts to considering the softer power of sympathy and responsive interactions. While men as a whole are “Naturally Tyrannical,” she suggests, those who “wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend.” It was true that “Men of Sense” had long abhorred the harsher “customs” of male domination. But such attitudes are not universally held; women still needed to be protected from the “vicious and the Lawless.” Just as God used his power to protect humanity, she urges, men should be concerned only for the “happiness” of women. Satisfaction for both sexes, Abigail insisted, required a willingness to limit power.10 John’s reply two weeks later refused to support Abigail’s suggestions, but it responded enthusiastically to her subject—​­and her style. He fills his high-​ s­ pirited and good-​­humored letter with long lists of specifics, including a half dozen forms of government culminating in the recondite term for mob rule, “Ochlocracy.” John also follows Abigail’s rhetorical pattern, alternating between the languages of more formal political science and emotionally charged social interactions. After initially classifying discontented women among the groups grown “turbulent” in the wake of resistance to the British, he shifts to a different view of social relationships, suggesting that men’s formal power was “little more than theory.” Men, he assures Abigail, were fully aware of the need to take women’s concerns into account and did not “dare” to use their legal authority: “in Practice you know We are the subjects.” Having noted the ethics of restrained leadership, he concludes by again linking women’s rights and revolutionary rhetoric. Washington and other revolutionaries, he claimed, would fight against women’s attempts to control men.11 In his exuberance John even goes so far as to call Abigail “saucy,” a dangerous move, even in jest. But Abigail clearly found the exchange invigorating. She described it at length to their mutual friend Mercy Otis Warren, in a letter that quotes and paraphrases long passages from both letters. John, she suggested, had himself been “Sausy” in response to her “List of Female Grievances,” again mixing the language of personal relationships with the practices of formal politics—​­and showing that John had not misread his wife’s tone.12

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These qualities of good humor and responsiveness to the demands of polite interchange pervade John and Abigail’s correspondence. Responding to her calls for further letters in the middle of the exchange, John offered a substantial “Character” of his barber, calling the description a “trifling” subject intended “for your amusement.” Abigail reveals in early May that she had delayed writing because, dismayed at the “lethargy” of Massachusetts patriots, she “had not felt in a humour to entertain you” and had worried about using “unbecomeing invective.” Their combination of free political discussion with affectionate consideration shaped not only the exchange about women’s rights but also their correspondence and their marriage.13 Similar awareness of the need for restraint and good humor affected the Revolution itself. Washington’s care in dealing with civilians and Congress during a long war helped build support for the cause, a significant contrast to the much less successful severity of British commanders. Washington’s “moderation and virtue,” Jefferson argued soon after the war ended, had “prevented this revolution from being closed as most others have been by a subversion of that liberty it was intended to establish.” Jefferson displayed similar restraint. Even while serving as governor of Virginia in 1781 during a British invasion that twice forced him into hasty and humiliating retreats, Jefferson refused to take on emergency powers. When the marquis de Lafayette had arrived with American troops to defend the state a few months before, Jefferson warned him that government orders there were “often ineffectual.” As a result they would need to operate “in the best way we can when we shall not be able to pursue the Way we would wish.” Lafayette responded by noting his willingness to adapt to the “temper of the people.”14 Neither noted the possibility of compelling obedience. This concern extended even beyond people who supported their cause. Even captive enemies, Jefferson argued, should be treated “with politeness.”15 Besides American success itself, this moderation may be the most astonishing characteristic of the Revolution. Continuing commitment to restraint and resistance to authoritarian leadership allowed an extraordinary continuity of leadership. Lafayette, who had become a virtual son to Washington during the war, returned to America for the first time in 1824 and 1825 to be met by crowds in every state of the new nation. By then, a biography of Washington calling him the “greatest and best of men” had become one of America’s most reprinted books. In the capital city named for Washington, the “nation’s guest” dined at the White House with the newly elected president-​­-​­John Adams’s son, who had taken the place previously held by Thomas Jefferson’s former law student.16

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In such a culture, it is not surprising that Abigail concludes her discussion of women’s rights by emphasizing that women themselves did not want complete power. Her May 7 letter chides John for not recognizing that his calls for liberty should extend to women, paralleling an argument already being made by opponents of slavery and religious restrictions. Although men’s power was now “absolute,” she warned, their “Arbitrary” authority could be defeated by women’s “power” to “free themselves” and “subdue [their] Masters.” “Submission” to restrained and respectful authority would allow women some ability to “sway.”17 Although Abigail’s concluding commitment to “obey” seems disappointing today, her point is less of a capitulation than it first appears. Her statement about women “submitting” comes from a poem in which Alexander Pope, rather than demanding female servility, instead commends his subject, in the couplet before the one Abigail quotes, for acting with moderation (she “n’er answers till her husband cools”) in order to establish restrained leadership (when she “rules him, never shows she rules”).18 Nabby Adams, John and Abigail’s eldest daughter, described her father acting in the same way in 1785 when they reunited in England after years without sustained contact. Expecting a “severe” man, she discovered that “he . . . ​left me to follow my own [wishes], in the most important concerns of life.” Since he did not, like many other parents, “usurp the power Nature” had given them by acting “as tyrants over their families,” he was “worthy of every token of my attention.”19 More than a half century later, and a century after Pope’s verse, the brilliant French social analyst Alexis de Tocqueville argued that the British ruling class of the late eighteenth century had succeeded because they had acted in a similar way—​­putting into practice lessons closely connected to the politics of politeness. The French aristocracy, Tocqueville argued, had become so powerful by then that it did not need to be concerned about common people. More constrained English leaders, by contrast, were forced to show their putative subordinates respect, even to pretend to treat them as equals. While the French nobility clung to their prerogatives and suffered disaster, its more successful English counterpart adapted, ready to do anything to retain its power. Tocqueville’s British translator put it more positively. In his resonant words, the English aristocracy “submitted that it might command.”20 In early 1809, several months after recommending politeness to his grandson, Thomas Jefferson told a French friend that he would soon be released from

Dissolution of the Politics of Politeness 225

“the shackles of power” to become “the hermit of Monticello.” Although the soon-​­to-​­be-​­ex-​­president had been forced on the “boisterous ocean of political passion,” he looked forward to arriving at the “harbor” of “my family, my books, & farms.”21 As Jefferson suggested, his prospective status as a hermit did not require rejecting other people. He was returning not only to his family but to virtually unlimited power over some two hundred slaves. But Jefferson’s longing for a hermitage (his original name for Monticello) reveals the divisions he felt between different parts of his activities, a contrast that distinguishes his 1809 description from the bold connection between household relationships and tyranny in his earlier critique of slavery. In these views, Jefferson was participating in, perhaps even pioneering, some central elements of nineteenth-​ c­ entury culture, developments that diverged from the politics of politeness even as they continued to draw on its ideals. Jefferson’s 1809 letter described the “ocean of political passions” he was leaving with the same adjective, “boisterous,” he had earlier applied to the relations between slaves and masters. Participation in the political world, like slavery itself, was troubling, exhausting, and emotionally fraught. It disrupted the moderation and good humor necessary for proper social interactions. The political world, Jefferson had complained a decade earlier, was a place “where envy, hatred, malice, revenge, & all the worst passions of men, are marshaled to make one another as miserable as possible.”22 But Jefferson also considered political activity a necessity. Liberty was constantly under attack. Even people who had fought bravely for independence could still be tempted by the allure of monarchy and aristocracy into becoming what Jefferson called “apostates.” The republican faithful needed to fight back. Preparing to run for the presidency in 1796, Jefferson urged a follower to shun the “Timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty”: “we are likely to preserve the liberty we have obtained only by unremitting labors & perils.”23 Participating in government itself was almost as dangerous, so hazardous that Jefferson feared its power even when he held it himself. “Th[o’] I shall sincerely endeavor to merit the confidence which my fellow citizens have been pleased to repose in me,” he wrote to a group of Kentucky citizens after assuming the presidency in 1801, “I shall deem it an injurious effect of that conduct were it to lull to rest that salutary jealousy and vigilance so effectual towards preserving integrity and attention in the public functionaries.”24 Since evil leaders always sought ways to destroy liberty, and government

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always tended in that direction anyway, the fight against despotism could not be left simply to well-​­to-​­do gentlemen. Despite a fear of political parties that he shared with many of his contemporaries and a personal distaste for contention (outside his correspondence), Jefferson consistently supported the right of people to organize and oppose the government. The newspapers and political parties that developed after the Revolution helped make political partisanship inescapable, both cause and effect of an enormous expansion in participation that went far beyond the narrow circles of elites that had previously dominated political life. Jefferson even came to view attitudes toward this development as the ultimate source of all political divisions. While aristocrats always sought to keep power in their own hands, he wrote in 1824, democrats had confidence in common people and believed them the best defenders of the public good.25 Despite celebrating political contention as a source of liberty, however, Jefferson did not reject politeness itself. Government and political battles might require official rudeness, as in his deliberate flouting of diplomatic protocol in seating people at official dinners. But social life followed different rules. “A difference in politics,” he argued, “should never be permitted to enter into social intercourse, or to disturb its friendships, its charities or justice.”26 Tom Paine had complained in 1776 at the start of his Common Sense that people too often “confounded society with government.” Government dealt with people’s “wickedness” and was at best a “necessary evil.” Society, helping to meet people’s “wants,” was always a “blessing.”27 Jefferson shared Paine’s belief that, although governments were needed to protect society, they too easily went beyond that function. But, rather than following Paine’s two-​­part division, Jefferson typically opposed the contentious political world to the family, not to society in general. The presidency, he wrote to a friend a year after taking office, was difficult because “it affords little exercise for social affections.” “The heart would be happier,” he noted, “enjoying the affections of a family fireside.” Jefferson considered domestic experiences essential to his emotional well-​­being. He had told one of his daughters the previous year: “I know no happiness but when we are all together.” The family, his letter to his grandson further suggests, served as a refuge not just from the turmoil of political life, but from the dangers of broader social life.28 These views of the family as a peaceful refuge soon became ubiquitous, perhaps encouraging Jefferson to drop his earlier argument about slavery injuring households. Jefferson’s social geography extended even further to other areas, most notably religion. Simply separating religion from government, however, was not

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enough. “Religious differences” were, like political distinctions, properly placed outside the realm of “social intercourse.”29 Many of Jefferson’s nineteenth-​­century contemporaries went even further, suggesting that people possessed a coherent internal self that operated across this range of settings. Ironically, one of the first major American figures to be defined this way was George Washington, an often inscrutable man proud of his careful composure. Mason Locke Weems’s wildly popular biography focused on what he sometimes called “the private life of George Washington.” “A public character is often an artificial one,” the author argued, but “private life is always real life.” Weems did not seek to unmask intimate secrets but to reveal (in a term used in the title of one-​­quarter of the book’s chapters) “Washington’s character,” his truest identity. As jurist and novelist Hugh Henry Brackenridge noted, Weems presented Washington “as independent of command or station.”30 Characterizing these changes has proved difficult for scholars. The distinction between public and private better describes relationships than categories. The application of the term “domestic” to both families and slavery, for example, distinguished them from the outside world by defining them as more private. Yet at the same time each became the subject of unprecedented levels of public discussion.31 As the new uses of public and private suggest, furthermore, postrevolutionary changes tended to reshape older vocabularies rather than create new ones. Even such quintessential nineteenth-​­century terms as “domestic” and “home” continued to have broader meanings; the department of state that Jefferson took over in Washington’s presidency followed recent British precedent in dealing with domestic matters through its “home office.”32 The most common contemporary metaphor for these changes also was closely tied to discussions of family relationships. As an alternative to increasingly problematic older views defining men and women as superior and subordinate, postrevolutionary Americans came to argue instead that the two occupied different “spheres.” Americans used the term for a variety of situations. The federal system established by the Constitution, James Madison suggested in the Federalist, placed state and central governments in “their respective spheres.” Chief Justice John Marshall’s landmark 1819 McCullough v. Maryland decision described the national government more strongly as “supreme in its sphere of action.” Tocqueville, who visited America in 1831 and 1832, used the term for a variety of cultural as well as political relationships. While Jefferson spoke of a “wall of separation,” Tocqueville described American religion as “a world apart,” “free and powerful in its own sphere.”33

228 Epilogue

The politics of politeness proved an inadequate guide for this new cultural world. It had developed almost a century and a half earlier in response to a major crisis of authority in both England and America. Rejecting the anger, harshness, and arbitrary actions that seemed to characterize relationships based on authoritarian hierarchies of command or narrower loyalties of family, religion, or locality, the politics of politeness instead recommended an ethic of disciplined moderation based on restraint, responsibility, and responsiveness to the concerns and sensibilities of other people, even subordinates. But polite values sought to reform rather than to replace elite power. As Americans came to condemn their opponents as aristocrats, encourage wider political participation, and warn against pretentious public display, the politics of politeness came to seem part of the older public order. Yet, while Americans rejected the politics of politeness as a coherent vision of the relationship between power and social relationships, they did not repudiate the specific ideas and attitudes it had nurtured. Opposition to arbitrary power and unresponsive leaders remained central to American political culture. Complaisance and affection became key ideals in thinking about family life. And self-​­control, moderation, and proper self-​­presentation lay at the heart of middle-​­class thinking about economic and political success. This simultaneous rejection of the whole and adoption of the parts can be seen in two of America’s greatest postrevolutionary publishing successes. Weems’s Washington biography, reprinted on average once a year for the first half of the nineteenth century, heralded a new vision of the importance of private life in presenting an emotionally expressive Washington. Yet it also recommended the tender, indulgent parenting, nonaggression, and affectionate friendship that had long been connected with politeness. Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son, offering instruction in what one version called “The Principles of Politeness,” were similarly popular, with more than forty American editions by 1820 along with imports of numerous British editions. When the full version of these letters was published posthumously in 1774, Chesterfield was widely criticized for recommending cynical manipulation of social conventions. But few readers saw all his letters. Whereas the original included some 400 letters, publishers on both sides of the Atlantic preferred versions shorn of any intimations of immorality. Almost two-​­thirds of American editions ran fewer than 150 pages. These carefully revised versions removed more than Chesterfield’s cynicism. They also tended to obscure the settings in which he—​­and the politeness he had anatomized—​­had operated. Marketed to a readership of schoolchildren and small-​­time strivers far

Dissolution of the Politics of Politeness 229

removed from Chesterfield’s cosmopolitan circles (where, he told his son, “there is no great credit in knowing Latin, for everybody knows it”), the new versions gave little attention to the older connection between self-​­control and political leadership. Chesterfield was not simply a participant in the beau monde. Although never a leader of the first rank, he had been a significant political figure who served as a diplomat, lord-​­lieutenant of Ireland, and even secretary of state. Despite their restricted view of Chesterfield, however, the new editions of his letters helped spread some of the principles and practices of polite behavior more widely than ever before.34 As the politics of politeness lost its power, many of its central terms became encrusted with new meanings that blunted their force. Politeness often came to seem a system of rules primarily taught to young people. The ideal of complaisance, courteous deference to the desires of other people, became complacence, smug self-​­satisfaction. And genteel came to imply fussiness about behavior and material goods, even, in George Santayana’s condemnation of the “genteel tradition,” a bland conformity. The genteel part of the American mind, he declared in the 1910s, “floated gently in the back-​­water,” even as the aggressive modern world “was leaping down a sort of Niagara Rapids.”35 In 1826, eight-​­year-​­old Frederick Douglass was sent to Baltimore to live with Hugh and Sophia Ault, the brother and sister-​­in-​­law of the young slave’s owner. It was Sophia’s first sustained contact with slavery. The experience soon soured. As Douglass wrote in the 1840s, in an account recalling some key lessons of the politics of politeness, Sophia’s “tender heart became stone.”36 According to Douglass’s account, Sophia had previously been “a model of affection and tenderness.” She had not regarded Douglass as a slave. Instead she acted “as she supposed one human being ought to treat another,” even beginning to instruct him in reading. Douglass grew used to the kind treatment, the “indulgence,” that Benjamin Franklin had expected (but not received) from his brother while serving as his apprentice. Sophia’s politeness made her particularly effective. Her “Frown,” Douglass recalled, was more effective than “hardest cuffs” of his previous mistress.37 But this kindness did not last. In a shift Douglass attributed to her husband’s stern warning about the dangers of teaching a slave to read, Sophia grew more harsh: “the lamblike disposition gave way to one of tiger-​­like fierceness.” Douglass dramatizes the change by tracing its effects in two contrasting ways. For the young boy himself, although Hugh’s lecture about slaves

230 Epilogue

reading blighted his growing happiness, it also offered “a new and special revelation” that learning provided “the pathway from slavery to freedom.” Douglass’s fortunate fall (an experience of sin that led to greater redemption), however, had no redeeming qualities for Sophia. She soon descended into “depravity,” “the natural sweetness of her temper” turning to “fretful bitterness.” In this “mighty struggle with all the noblest powers of her soul,” she became the victim of the “dehumanizing effects of slavery.”38 Douglass’s account of his experience with the Aults, while using the conventions of sentimentalism, was just as deeply rooted in discussions of politeness and power that linked personal relationships based on restraint and concern with effective leadership. Douglass described the damages to Sophia’s affection and tenderness by the influence of what Jefferson called the “boisterous passions” of slavery. Her descent into “bad humor” destroyed, as Jefferson suggested to his grandson, the possibility of true politeness.39 Douglass’s portrayal also recalls Benjamin Franklin’s earlier account of his apprenticeship. In both, an older man looks back at his boyhood experiences to reflect on power and its personal and political consequences. Franklin complained that his brother’s failure to show the “Indulgence” due a family member led him to feel “demean’d,” teaching him to detest “arbitrary power” in all its forms. Sophia started off more promisingly as a model of “good will,” but she too became, like James Franklin, a lesson in what Douglass called “the fatal poison of irresponsible power.”40

Notes

Introduction. Franklin’s Footnote 1. Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: A Genetic Text, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay and Paul M. Zall (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981), 18. 2. Ibid., 18–​­19. 3. Ibid., 18. 4. Jonathan Belcher, “Journal of my intended voyage and journey to Holland, Hannover etc.: beginning at London Saturday July 8th O.S. 1704, 1704,” Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS), 118. This document is transcribed in David Crockett, First American Born: The Life and Journal of Jonathan Belcher, the First-​­Known, American-​­Born Freemason (Bowie, Md.: Heritage Books, 1992), 23–​­135. Belcher’s “Some of the advantages & Disadvantages of Travelling” (108–​­21) is the final part of his journal before his lists of distances and expenses. 5. Belcher, “Journal of my intended voyage,” 118–​­21. 6. Isaac Newton, Opticks: or, a treatise of the reflexions, refractions, inflexions and colours of light (London: Sam. Smith, and Benj. Walford, Printers to the Royal Society, 1704), 51, 85; Newton, Opticks: or, a treatise of the reflections, refractions, inflections and colours of light. . . , 2nd ed. (London: W. and J. Innys, printers to the Royal Society, 1718), 329–​­30. 7. Lawrence E. Klein describes the application of the term “politeness” to human society as beginning from 1700 to 1715; Klein, “The Political Significance of ‘Politeness’ in Early Eighteenth-​ ­Century Britain,” in Gordon J. Schochet, ed., Politics, Politeness, and Patriotism: Papers Presented at the Folger Institute Seminar “Politics and Politeness: British Political Thought in the Age of Walpole,” Proceedings of the Center for the History of British Political Thought 5 (Washington, D.C.: Folger Institute, 1993), 75–​­76. 8. The English Theophrastus: or, the Manners of the Age. Being the Modern Characters of the Court, the Town, and the City (London: W. Turner, R. Basset, and J. Chantry, 1702), 50. This piece is from [Judith Drake], An essay in defence of the female sex in which are inserted the characters of a pedant, a squire, a beau, a vertuoso, a poetaster, a city-​­critick, &c. (London: A. Roper, E. Wilkinson, and R. Clavel, 1696), 135–​­36. 9. John Locke, “Some Thoughts Concerning Education,” in James L. Axtell, ed., The Educational Writings of John Locke: A Critical Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 191. 10. “On Conversation,” Pennsylvania Gazette, October 15, 1730 (in Benjamin Franklin Papers, vol. 1, at http://franklinpapers.org/), a piece reprinted from a British magazine, the Universal Spectator, October 11, 1729; Spectator, no. 169, September 13, 1711. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator: A New Edition, Reproducing the Original Text, ed. Henry Morley, 3 vols. (London: G. Routledge & Sons, 1891), 1: 575 (hereafter cited as Spectator).

232 Notes to Pages 3–8 11. “On Conversation”; J. A. Leo Lemay and Paul M. Zall, eds., Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism (New York: Norton, 1986), 11, 16, 15, 78. 12. Henry Fielding, “An Essay on Conversation,” in The Works of Henry Fielding, Esq., 10 vols., vol. 6, ed. Sir Leslie Stephen (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1882), 293–​­326; “Washington’s Copy of Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour In Company and Conversation,” Papers of George Washington, http://gwpapers.virginia.edu/documents/civility/index.html; Belcher, “Journal of my intended voyage,” 118; John Adams to Robert Treat Paine, December 6, 1759, in L. H. Butterfield, ed., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, vol. 1, 1755–1770 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), 31. 13. Locke, “Some Thoughts Concerning Education,” 191; James Forrester, The Polite Philosopher: or, an Essay on that Art, which Makes a Man happy in Himself, and agreeable to Others (Edinburgh: Robert Freebairn, 1734), 12. [Franklin], “Rules for Making Oneself a Disagreeable Companion,” Pennsylvania Gazette, November 15, 1750. 14. “On Conversation.” 15. Franklin, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, 13–​­14 (see also 10–​­11, 111). See Marc L. Harris, “What Politeness Demanded: Ethnic Omission in Franklin’s Autobiography,” Pennsylvania History 61 (1994): 288–​­317. 16. Warren Bennis, “The End of Leadership,” in Selected Proceedings, 1998 Annual Meeting: Leaders/Scholars Association, The James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership (College Park, Md.: Center for Advanced Study of Leadership, 1999), 6, 7. 17. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, ed. Wolfgang Leidhold (1726; Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004), 134. 18. See Chapter 3 for a full discussion of Byrd’s writings about the expedition. 19. Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 69–​­71, 92–​­99, 127–​­30, 147–​­49, and passim; Greene, “The Growth of Political Stability: An Interpretation of Political Development in the Anglo-​­American Colonies, 1660–​­1760,” in John Parker and Carol Urness, eds., The American Revolution: A Heritage of Change (Minneapolis: Associates of the James Ford Bell Library, 1975), 26–​­52, reprinted in Greene, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 131–​­62. Other historians noting these difficulties include James D. Rice, “Bacon’s Rebellion in Indian Country,” Journal of American History (JAH) 101, 3 (2014): 726–​­50; Rice, Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975), 215–​­92; T. H. Breen, “War, Taxes, and Political Brokers: The Ordeal of Massachusetts Bay, 1675–​­1692,” and “A Changing Labor Force and Race Relations in Virginia, 1660–​­1710,” in Puritans and Adventurers: Change and Persistence in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 68–​­80, 127–​­47; Thomas L. Purvis, Proprietors, Patronage, and Paper Money: Legislative Politics in New Jersey, 1703–​­1776 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 68, 95–​­96; David W. Jordan, “Political Stability and the Emergence of a Native Elite in Maryland,” in Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman, eds., The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-​­American Society (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 243–​­73; and Carole Shammas, “English-​­Born and Creole Elites in Turn-​­of-​­the-​­Century Virginia,” ibid., 274–​­96. John M. Murrin speaks of an eighteenth-​ c­ entury stabilization of regimes and “growth of oligarchy” in “Political Development,” in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, eds., Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early

Notes to Pages 8–11

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Modern Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 441–​­45; Gary J. Kornblith and John M. Murrin, “The Making and Unmaking of an American Ruling Class,” in Alfred F. Young, ed., Beyond the American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993), 27–​­79; and Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–​­1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), discuss the relative success (and eventual undoing) of this elite attempt to assert authority. 20. For more on the issues noted in this brief survey of British history, see the specific discussions in later chapters. Among the sources noted there, see especially the wide range of materials available at two sites from the Univerity of London Institute of Historical Research: British History Online (http://www.british-​­history.ac.uk/about) and The History of Parliament online (http://www.british-​­history.ac.uk/about). 21. Spectator, no. 10, March 12, 1711, 1: 41. 22. “A Memorial Concerning Sir Edmund Andros, Governor of Virginia, by Dr. Blair,” in William Stevens Perry, ed., Historical Collections Relating to the American Colonial Church, 5 vols. (Hartford, Conn., 1870–​­1878), 1: 24, 28. 23. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (1962; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). For attempts to apply this perspective to American developments, see John L. Brooke, Columbia Rising: Civil Life on the Upper Hudson from the Revolution to the Age of Jackson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); and Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-​­Century America (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1990). 24. Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Eighteenth-​­Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). See also Klein, “The Political Significance of ‘Politeness,” 73–​­108. For an argument that this development mostly occurred earlier, see Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), esp. 43–​­49, 71. 25. Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992), see xv, 496. David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill, 1997), xxvii. On conversation, see Peter Burke, The Art of Conversation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 89–​­122; and Bushman, Refinement of America, 83–​­89. 26. Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in South Carolina Low Country, 1740–​­1790 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 38–​­39 (“aping”); Richard Waterhouse, A New World Gentry (New York: Garland, 1989), 141 (“caricature”); Jack P. Greene, “Search for Identity,” in Jack P. Greene, Imperatives, Behaviours, and Identities: Essays in Early American Cultural History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 171 (“dependent psychologically,” “own identity”); Bushman, Refinement of America, 403–​­6 (“emulation”); Michal J. Rozbicki, The Complete Colonial Gentleman: Cultural Legitimacy in Plantation America (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 3–​­5 (“legitimation”). Rozbicki (1–​­28) provides the fullest account of scholarly discussions of American gentility. 27. Rozbicki, Complete Colonial Gentleman, 17 (“tool”), 38–​­39 (“iron curtain”). See also C. Dallett Hemphill, Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620–​­1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 16, for a similar suggestion based on elites failing to allow common people to learn genteel behavioral standards; Robert Blair St. George, “Artifacts of Regional Consciousness in the Connecticut River Valley, 1700–​­1780,” in St. George, ed., Material Life in America, 1600–​­1860 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 340 (“status markers”);

234 Notes to Pages 11–18 Cary Carson, “The Consumer Revolution in Colonial British America: Why Demand?” in Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, eds., Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 675. See also Ray Raphael, A People’s History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence (New York: Perennial, 2002), 9. 28. For examples from the early 1730s, see Jonathan Belcher to Jonathan Belcher, Jr., October 20, 1732, Belcher Papers, 6: 205 (“polite world”); Jonathan Belcher to Jonathan Belcher, Jr., April 28, 1732, Belcher Papers, 6: 128 (“polite company”); Jonathan Belcher to Colonel Samuel Shute, November 1, 1731, Jonathan Belcher, Letterbooks, 12 vols., MHS (hereafter cited as Belcher Letterbooks), 2: 56 (“polite judges of manners”). 29. Owen Stanwood, The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). On the British state, see John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–​­1783 (New York: Knopf, 1989); and Michael Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1500–​­1700 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For more scattered work on American developments, see Alvin Rabushka, Taxation in Colonial America: 1607–​­1775 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008); John M. Murrin, “Political Development,” in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, eds., Colonial British America; Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 408–​­56; Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–​­1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Richard R. Johnson, Adjustment to Empire: The New England Colonies, 1675–​­1715 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1981); J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–​­1830 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006); Jack P. Greene, “Negotiated Authorities: The Problem of Governance in the Extended Polities of the Early Modern Atlantic World,” in Greene, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 1–​­24. 30. For the origins of slavery in labor issues, see Simon P. Newman, A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), and Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom. 31. Thomas Paine, Common Sense; addressed to the inhabitants of America, on the following interesting subjects (Philadelphia: R. Bell, 1776), 1: 57 (“Royal Brute”). 32. J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 33. Paine, Common Sense, 1; Mason Locke Weems, The life of George Washington; with curious anecdotes, equally honourable to himself, and exemplary to his young countrymen, 9th ed. (Philadelphia: Matthew Carey, 1809), 5. For stimulating discussions of thinking about public and private, see Mary Beth Norton, Separated by Their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2011); and Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). On the continuities between eighteenth-​­century gentility and nineteenth-​­century culture, see the second half of Bushman, The Refinement of America; and part two of Hemphill, Bowing to Necessities. Hemphill links a number of the changes this study notes in the early eighteenth century to the American Revolution and the rise of the middle class. By contrast, G. J. Barker-​­Benfield, Abigail and John Adams: The Americanization of Sensibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), downplays the distinctions between the early and later eighteenth century.

Notes to Pages 19–25

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Chapter 1. The Rages of Francis Nicholson 1. Blair’s Memorial Against Governor Nicholson, in William Stevens Perry, ed., Historical Collections Relating to the American Colonial Church (Hartford, Conn.: privately printed, 1870–​ ­1878), 1: 76–​­77 (hereafter cited as Perry). 2. Ibid., 77–​­78. 3. “A Memorial Concerning the Maladministrations of His Excellency Francis Nicholson, Esq., Her Majesty’s Lieutenant and Governor-​­General of Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (VMHB) 3 (1895–​­1896): 373–​­82. See also Perry, 1: 102. 4. Blair to the Archb’p of Canterbury, July 13, 1702, in Perry, 1: 125. For a skeptical reading of these reports that sees them as the product of political conflict, see Kevin R. Hardwick, “Narratives of Villainy and Virtue: Governor Francis Nicholson and the Character of the Good Ruler in Early Virginia,” Journal of Southern History 72, 1 (2006): 39–​­74. 5. Blair uses “Huffing and Hectoring” in Perry, 1: 24, 28; Parke Rouse, James Blair of Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), 135. For the threats, see Affidavit of Stephen Fouace, Clerk, relating to the mal-​­administration of Col. Nicholson, April 25, 1704, in Perry, 1: 88–​­91. Nicholson later “waylaid” Fouace after he had visited the Burwell household (because of the father’s sickness), saying “I command you in the King’s name . . . ​not to go to that house.” See also Hardwick, “Narratives of Villainy and Virtue,” 53–​­55; Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 254–​­55; and Polly Cary Legg, “The Governor’s ‘Extacy of Trouble,’ ” William and Mary Quarterly (WMQ) 2nd ser. 22, 4 (1942): 389–​­98. For the English reaction, see Letter from Bishop of London, December 10, in Papers Relating to an Affidavit made by His Reverence James Blair, Clerk, pretended President of William and Mary College, and Supposed Commissary to the Bishop of London in Virginia, against Francis Nicholson, Esq.; Governour of the said Province (n.p., 1727), 8. The copy of the letter in this volume contains no year, but I believe it to be 1702 based on its similarity to Anonymous to Governor Nicholson, Chelsey, December 8, 1702, in Perry, 1: 69, although the implication that Nicholson’s “amours” continued may suggest a later date for the bishop’s letter, perhaps 1703. 6. Rutherford Goodwin, A Brief & True Report Concerning Williamsburg in Virginia: Being an Account of the most important Occurrences in that Place. . . , 3rd ed. (Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg, Inc., 1940), 172. 7. Anonymous to Governor Nicholson, Chelsey, December 8, 1702, in Perry, 1: 73. 8. Blair’s Memorial against Governor Nicholson, in Perry, 1: 77–​­78. 9. William H. Browne, ed., Archives of Maryland, 72 vols. (Baltimore, 1883–​­1972), 23: 447–​­53. On Coode and his circle, see David W. Jordan, “John Coode, Perennial Rebel,” Maryland Historical Magazine 70 (Spring 1975): 1–​­28. 10. Francis Nicholson to Lord Bridgewater, James City, February 4, 1699 (EL 9760) Ellesmere Collection—​­Americana, Henry E. Huntington Library (HL). 11. Goodwin, Brief & True Report, 172. 12. Deposition of Lieutenant Henry Cuyler, New York, June 10, 1689, in ­­­Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series: America and West Indies (London, 1880–​­1969), 1689–​­92, 65 (hereafter CSP). 13. Papers Relating to an Affidavit. 14. Message from the House of Delegates, November 7, 1698, in Archives of Maryland, 22: 178–​­80. See also The Humble address of the house of Delegates, March 25, 1698, in ibid, 22: 109.

236 Notes to Pages 25–28 15. H. R. McIlwaine, ed., Executive Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia, 6 vols. (Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1925–​­1966), 2: 451–​­53. 16. Blair’s Memorial against Governor Nicholson, 1702, in Perry, 1: 78. 17. Francis Nicholson to Lord Bridgewater, Annapolis, March 30, 1697, Ellesmere ­Collection—​­Americana (EL 9722), HL. 18. Francis Nicholson, to the Sherrifs of the Counties, Virginia, James City, March 1, 1699/1700, photocopy, Virginia Historical Society (VHS), in Archives of Maryland, 23: 358, 455–​ 5­ 6; see also 22: 110. When Queen Anne came to the throne two years later, Nicholson reportedly spent the extraordinary sum of £500 out of his own pocket (his annual salary was £2000) to celebrate the event with, an impressed observer noted, “all the grandeur and splendor that these parts of the world is capable of.” Robert Quary to William Blathwayt, Annapolis, September 2, 1702, copy from Kenneth W. Rendell, Manuscripts 17th & 18th Century America, Catalogue 45 (Somerville, Mass., 1970). 19. For Nicholson’s career, see Hardwick, “Narratives of Villainy and Virtue”; Kevin R. Hardwick, “Nicholson, Sir Francis (1655–1728),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Stephen Saunders Webb, “The Strange Career of Francis Nicholson,” WMQ 3rd ser. 23, 4 (1966): 513–​­48; and Bruce T. McCully, “From the North Riding to Morocco: The Early Years of Governor Francis Nicholson, 1655–​­1686,” WMQ 3rd ser. 19 (1962): 534–​­56. 20. Archives of Maryland, 22: 181. 21. Ibid., 23: 452. 22. Ibid. 23. Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia: A New Edition with an Introduction by Susan Scott Parrish (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 81. 24. Henry Hartwell, James Blair, and Edward Chilton, The Present State of Virginia and the College, ed. Hunter Dickinson Farish (Charlottesville, Va., 1964; repr. of 1940; originally 1727), 70. 25. For a full account of Nicholson’s cultural patronage, see Bruce T. McCully, “Governor Francis Nicholson, Patron ‘Par Excellence’ of Religion and Learning in Colonial America,” WMQ 3rd ser. 39 (1982): 310–​­33 (“nursing Father,” 315). Blair supposedly called Nicholson the college’s “kindly nursing father.” “The Severall Sources of the Odium and Discouragement which the College of Wm. & Mary in Virginia lyes under, and the Rosolucon of Head Master of the Grammar School thereupon, Anno Dom. 1704,” in “Papers Relating to the Administration of Governor Nicholson and to the Founding of William and Mary College,” VMHB 7 (July 1899–April 1900): 391. 26. James D. Kornwolf, ‘“Doing Good to Posterity’: Francis Nicholson, First Patron of Architecture, Landscape Design, and Town Planning in Virginia, Maryland, and South Carolina, 1688–​­1725,” VMHB 101 (July 1993): 333–​­74. On Annapolis, see Anne Elizabeth Yentsch, A Chesapeake Family and Their Slaves: A Study in Historical Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 19. On Williamsburg, see Goodwin, Brief & True Report, 19–​­20, 168–​­69; Francis Nicholson to Lord Bridgewater, Annapolis, May 26, 1698 (EL 9745), HL. 27. Archives of Maryland, 22: 185. 28. Ibid., 22: 184. 29. Mr. James Blair’s Affidavit relating to the Mal-​­administration of Co’l Nicholson, Governor of Virginia, April 25, 1704, in Perry, 106. 30. Francis Nicholson to Lords of Trade, March 1, 1704/5, Colonial Office Papers, The National Archives of the UK (TNA CO) 5/1361, 251–​­52.

Notes to Pages 28–32

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31. Nicholson to Board of Trade, March 6, 1704/5, TNA CO 5/1361, Entry Book, Commissions, Instructions, Board of Trade Correspondence, 536. 32. Mark Goldie, “John Locke and Anglican Royalism,” Political Studies 31, 1 (1983): 69–​­70. 33. “Basilicon Doron: Or His Majesties Instructions to his Dearest Sonne, Henry the Prince” (originally written 1598), in Johann P. Sommerville, ed., King James VI and I: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 47. The biblical passage is Proverbs 20: 2. 34. Nicolo Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. W. K. Marriott (London: Dent, 1948), 127, 131 35. Affidavit of Stephen Fouace, Clerk, relating to mal-​­administration of Col. Nicholson, April 25, 1704, in Perry, 1: 90. 36. Nicholson to Board of Trade, March 6, 1704/5 (329–​­53), 348, 346–​­47, TNA CO 5/1361, Entry Book, Commissions, Instructions, Board of Trade Correspondence (Virginia Colonial Records Project (VCRP), Survey Report (SR) 00730). 37. “A Memorial Concerning the Maladministrations of His Excellency Francis Nicholson, Esq., Her Majesty’s Lieutenant and Governor-​­General of Virginia,” VMHB 3 (1895–​­1896): 373–​­82. See H. R. McIlwaine, ed., Executive Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia, 6 vols. (Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1925–​­1966), 2: 370, for the governor ordering the clerk of the council to record letters from Benjamin Harrison “in her Majestys name.” 38. “A Memorial Concerning the Maladministrations,” 378. 39. Nicholson to Board of Trade, August 20, 1698, Archives of Maryland, 23: 492. See his later comment: “When your Lord’ps are satisfyed, I have no reason to be otherwise.” Francis Nicholson to Lords of Trade, May 31, 1704, TNA CO 5/720, 28 (VCRP, SR 1933). 40. Owen Stanwood, The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 41. CSP, 1699, 310–​­20; 1700, 307–​­28. 42. Draft of Letter from Lord Bridgewater to Francis Nicholson, April 14, [1700?], Ellesmere Collection—​­Americana (EL 9771), HL. 43. Quoted in Rouse, James Blair, 129. 44. Francis Nicholson to the Board of Trade, Annapolis, March 25, 1697, Archives of Maryland, 23: 82. 45. Nicholson to Board of Trade, March 2, 1704/5, TNA CO 5/1361, Entry Book, Commissions, Instructions, Board of Trade Correspondence, 259–​­60 (VCRP, SR 00730). 46. Nicholson to Board of Trade, March 2, 1704/5, 259. On expansion of taxation and government power in Massachusetts during these years, see Richard R. Johnson, Adjustment to Empire: The New England Colonies, 1675–​­1715 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1981), 279, 281. 47. Robert Noxon Toppan and Arthur Thomas Scrope Goodrick, eds., Edward Randolph; including his letters and official papers from the New England, middle and southern colonies in America, 7 vols. (Boston: Prince Society, 1898–​­1909), 7: 352. 48. Col. Robert Quary to the Commissioners for Trade, Virginia, October 15, 1703, TNA CO 323/5, p. 50 (VCRP, SR 805 (formerly 906)). 49. Perry, 1: 108–​­9. 50. Quary to the Commissioners for Trade, October 15, 1703, TNA CO 323/5, 51–​­52. 51. This is not to say that there were not real policy issues involved. Nicholson’s instructions led to some attempts to limit the wholesale granting of land and the multiple offices granted to Council members. Nicholson’s attempts to enroll white servants in the militia and to create a selective militia unit also raised fears. See Hardwick, “Narratives of Villainy and Virtue,” esp. 50–​­51.

238 Notes to Pages 33–36 52. On Andros, Commissary Blair to Governor Nicholson, London, December 3, 1691, in Perry, 1: 25. On Bermuda, “Randolph to Board of Trade, Bermuda, May 16, 1699,” Toppan and Goodrick, Edward Randolph, 7: 576. On the Leeward Islands, see CSP, 1698, 291–​­93, 316–​­17, 347–​ 4­ 8, 373–​­74; 1699, 11–​­12; and Carol Walter Ramagosa, “Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s Family in Antigua, 1668–​­1747,” South Carolina Historical Magazine (SCHM) 99 (July 1998): 238–​­58. 53. Beverley, History and Present State of Virginia, 72. Nicholson served as Howard’s deputy during his earlier posting in Virginia; Howard remained in England. 54. The difficulties of Bermuda are noted throughout CSP. For a summary of some of these events, see Randolph to Board of Trade, Bermuda, May 1, 1699, Toppan and Goodrick, Edward Randolph, 7: 563–​­69. 55. CSP, 1693, 198. 56. Emerson W. Baker and John G. Reid, The New England Knight: Sir William Phips, 1651–​ ­1695 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 211–​­17. 57. Randolph to Lords of Trade, Boston, September 29, 1692, Toppan and Goodrick, Edward Randolph, 7: 419. A Maryland governor’s attack on Randolph appears in Governor Lionel Copley to Lords of Trade, St. Mary’s City, July 29, 1692. CSP, 679. 58. Randolph Papers, 7: 593, 606. See Michael Garibaldi Hall, Edward Randolph and the American Colonies, 1676–​­1703 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), for a full biography. 59. “Council of Trade to Governor Day, July 18, 1699,” CSP, 350–​­51. 60. CSP, 1704–​­1705, 395, 406–​­11, 439–​­43. 61. Blair’s Memorial against Governor Nicholson, 1702, in Perry, 1: 78 (“dirt”); and Mr. James Blair’s Affidavit relating to the Mal-​­administration of Co’l Nicholson, Governor of Virginia, April 25, 1704, in Perry, 1: 98 (“dirt,” “cheating the people”), 107; Governor Nicholson to the Council of Trade and Plantations, Virginia, March 3, 1705, CSP, 1704–​­1705, 423. 62. “Nathaniel Bacon Esq’r His Manifesto Concerning The Present Troubles In Virginia,” in “Proclamations of Nathaniel Bacon,” VMHB 1 (July 1893): 56; James D. Rice, “Bacon’s Rebellion in Indian Country,” JAH 101, 3 (2014): 726–​­50; Rice, Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975), 250–​­71; Wilcomb E. Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1957). 63. T. H. Breen, “A Changing Labor Force and Race Relations in Virginia, 1660–​­1710,” in Puritans and Adventurers: Change and Persistence in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 127–​­47; Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 235–​­362; John C. Rainbolt, From Prescription to Persuasion: Manipulation of Eighteenth Century Virginia Economy (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1974); and Rainbolt, “A New Look at Stuart ‘Tyranny’: The Crown’s Attack on the Virginia Assembly, 1676–​­1689,” VMHB 75 (1967): 387–​­406. 64. See William G. Stanard and Mary Newton Stanard, The Colonial Virginia Register: A List of Governors, Councillors and Other Higher Officials, and Also of Members of the House of Burgesses (Albany, N.Y.: J. Munsell’s Sons, 1902). 65. John T. Kneebone et al., eds., Dictionary of Virginia Biography (Richmond: Library of Virginia, 1998), s.vv. “Robert Beverley (bap. 1635–1687)” and “Beverley, Robert (d. 1722)”; Beverley, History and Present State of Virginia. 66. Louis B. Wright, “William Byrd’s Opposition to Governor Francis Nicholson,” Journal of Southern History 11 (1945): 69.

Notes to Pages 38–42

239

67. “A Memorial Concerning the Maladministrations of His Excellency Francis Nicholson, Esq., Her Majesty’s Lieutenant and Governor-​­General of Virginia,” VMHB 111 (1895–​­1896): 379; Papers Relating to an Affidavit made by His Reverence James Blair, Clerk (n.p., 1727), 104. 68. Papers Relating to an Affidavit made by His Reverence James Blair, Clerk (n.p., 1727), 104. Thad W. Tate accepts this story as true in Dictionary of Virginia Biography, s.v. “Blair, James.” 69. ­­­Richard S. Dunn, “The Glorious Revolution in America,” in Nicholas Canny, ed., The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, Oxford History of the British Empire 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 445–​­67; Dunn, “Imperial Pressures on Massachusetts and Jamaica, 1675–​­1700,” in Alison Gilbert Olson and Richard Maxwell Brown, eds., Anglo-​­American Political Relations, 1675–​­1775 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1970), 52–​­75. See also Abigail L. Swingen, Competing Visions of Empire: Labor, Slavery, and the Origins of the British Atlantic Empire (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2015), 129–​­38; Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–​­1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972). 70. Robert C. Ritchie, The Duke’s Province: A Study of New York Politics and Society, 1664–​ ­1691 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), esp. 155–​­197. 71. Richard R. Johnson, Adjustment to Empire: The New England Colonies, 1675–​­1715 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1981), 379. Cotton Mather, A memorial of the present deplorable state of New-​­England, with the many disadvantages it lyes under, by the male-​ ­administration of their present governour, Joseph Dudley, Esq. (London: Benjamin Harris, 1707), 14. 72. Jonathan Belcher to Richard Waldron, September 17, 1733, Belcher Letterbooks, 6: 370. 73. Michael Hall, The Last Puritan: The Life of Increase Mather (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988); Robert Middlekauff, The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596–​­1728 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). 74. Besides Johnson, Adjustment to Empire, see Everett Kimball, The Public Life of Joseph Dudley: A Study of the Colonial Policy of the Stuarts in New England, 1660–​­1715 (New York: Longmans, Green, 1911); John Cutts and Robert C. Winthrop, Letters of John, Lord Cutts to Colonel Joseph Dudley: Then Lieutenant-​­Governor of the Isle of Wight, Afterwards Governor of Massachusetts, 1693–​­1700 (Cambridge, Mass.: John Wilson and Son, University Press, 1886). 75. John Chamberlayne to Joseph Dudley, December 25, 1703, “The Winthrop Papers,” pt. 5, Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 6th ser. (1889), 3: 542. 76. Johnson, Adjustment to Empire, 338. 77. Francis Nicholson to Board of Trade, March 2, 1704/5, TNA CO 5/1361, 265. 78. H. R. McIlwaine, ed., Executive Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia, vol. 2, August 3, 1699–April 27, 1705 (Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1927), 392. 79. Nicholson to Board of Trade, March 3, 1704/5, TNA CO 5/1361, 292. 80. [Solomon Whately], “Some Remarks upon the Minutes of Acc’ts of the proceedings at a meeting of the Clergy of Virginia at the Church at Williamsburgh, Aug 29, 1705,” in Perry, 1: 176, 154. 81. McIlwaine, Executive Journals of the Council, 3: 392. 82. Blair’s Memorial against Governor Nicholson, 1702, in Perry, 1: 79. 83. Dr. Francis Le Jau to the Secretary of the SPG, A Board the Greenwich, in James River, September 9, 1706, in Perry, 1: 184. 84. James Blair to Archbishop Tennison, Williamsburgh, September 2, 1706, in Perry, 1: 183 85. William Byrd, Another Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1739–​­1741: With Letters

240 Notes to Pages 42–46 and Literary Exercises, 1696–​­1726, ed. Maude H. Woodfin and Marion Tinling (Richmond, Va.: Dietz Press, 1942), 359–​­60, 359–​­60n (hereafter cited as Another Secret Diary). 86. “James Blair to Archbishop Tennison, Williamsburgh, September 2, 1706, in Perry, 1: 183. 87. Another Secret Diary, 359–​­60; see 359–​­60n for the inscription used and the history of the monument. 88. Anonymous to Governor Nicholson, Chelsey, December 8, 1702, in Perry, 1: 70; Mr. James Blair’s Affidavit, in Perry, 1: 109. 89. John Winthrop, “Arbitrary Government Described and the Government of the Massachusetts Vindicated from that Aspersion,” in Robert C. Winthrop, ed., Life and Letters of John Winthrop (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866), 448. 90. Beverley, History and Present State of Virginia, 75, 76. 91. Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 99–​­100, 132; John Locke, “Second Treatise,” in Two Treatises of Government: A Critical Edition with an Introduction and Apparatus Criticus, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 377–​­78. The history of the term “arbitrary” has not been traced fully. See, however, James Daly, “The Idea of Absolute Monarchy in Seventeenth-​ ­Century England,” Historical Journal 21 (1978): 227–​­50. 92. [Unknown] to Governor Nicholson, Chelsey, December 8, 1702, in Perry, 1: 74. 93. Dr. Francis Le Jau to the Secretary, A Board the Greenwich, in James River, September 9, 1706, in Perry, 1: 184. 94. Oxford English Dictionary (OED), s.v. “moderate.” 95. William Penn, The protestants remonstrance against Pope and presbyter: in an impartial essay upon the times, or plea for moderation (London: N.T. for Walter Davis, 1681); Penn, A perswasive to moderation to dissenting Christians: in prudence and conscience humbly submitted to the King and his great council (London: Andrew Sowle, 1685). 96. Daniel Defoe, Moderation maintain’d: in defence of a compassionate enquiry into the causes of the civil war, &c. in a sermon preached the thirty-​­first of January, at Aldgate-​­Church, by White Kennet . . . ​(London, 1704). I have not found references to Nicholson using the term “moderation.” 97. Francis Le Jau to the Secretary, July 14, 1710, in Frank J. Klingberg, ed., The Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Francis Le Jau, 1706–​­1717, University of California Publications in History 53 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 82. 98. Rouse, James Blair, 129. 99. Mark Goldie, “John Locke and Anglican Royalism,” Political Studies 31, 1 (1983): 61–​­85; and, more generally, J. P. Sommerville, “Absolutism and Royalism,” and Goldie, “The Reception of Hobbes,” in J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie, eds., The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–​­1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 347–​­73, 589–​­615. 100. See T. H. Breen, “Persistent Localism: English Social Change and the Shaping of New England Institutions,” in Puritans and Adventurers, 3–​­24, for discussion of this point from the perspective of the earlier seventeenth century. 101. Edward McCrady, The History of South Carolina Under the Proprietary Government, 1670–​­1719 (New York: Macmillan, 1901), 506–​­7. 102. BC to your Exc’cy & the Hon. Board, May 24, 1737, Benjamin Colman Papers, 1641–​­1763, MHS. 103. [John Harris], An Essay on Politeness; wherein the Benefits arising from and the Necessity of being Polite are clearly proved and demonstrated from Reason, Religion, and Philosophy.

Notes to Pages 46–49

241

(London: Printed for B. Law, 1776), 18; Club Minutes, September 24–December 7, 1722, Miscellaneous Bound, MHS; Beverley, History and Present State of Virginia, 247; James Blair, Our Saviour’s Divine Sermon on the Mount . . . ​Explained: And the Practice of it Recommended, 2nd ed., 4 vols. (London, 1740; original ed. 1722), 1: 149. 104. Blair, Our Saviour’s Divine Sermon on the Mount, 1: 144. On the moral psychology that informed Blair’s views, see Daniel Walker Howe, Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln, Studies in Cultural History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). 105. Perry, 1: 145–​­76; [Solomon Whately], “Some Remarks upon the Minutes of Acc’ts of the proceedings at a meeting of the Clergy of Virginia at the Church at Williamsburgh, Aug 29, 1705,” in Perry, 1: 154. 106. Cotton Mather, Febrifugium: An essay for the cure of ungoverned anger (Boston, 1717); Increase Mather, Sermons Wherein Those Eight Characters of the Blessed Commonly Called the Beatitudes, Are Opened & Applyed . . . ​(Boston, 1718). 107. Mather, Febrifugium, 12. 108. Blair, Our Saviour’s Divine Sermon on the Mount, 1: 148–​­49. 109. Richard Allestree, The Gentleman’s Calling (London, 1660), 140–​­41. 110. “Papers Relating to the Administration of Governor Nicholson and to the Founding of William and Mary College,” VMHB 7 (July 1899–April 1900): 153–​­72, 275–​­86, 386–​­401; 8 (1900–​ ­1901): 46–​­64, 126–​­46, 260–​­78, 366–​­85; 9 (1901–​­1902): 18–​­29, 152–​­62, 251–​­62 (quotation at 8: 56). 111. Perry, 1: 23, 26. 112. Helen Hill Miller, Colonel Parke of Virginia: “The Greatest Hector in the Town” (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin, 1989). 113. “Inamorato L’Oiseaux,” in Another Secret Diary, 279 (italics reversed). 114. Blair, Our Saviour’s Divine Sermon on the Mount, 1: 150–​­51, 155. 115. Ibid., 1: 109. 116. Virginia, Council, Affidavit, April 19, 1695, VHS, MSS4, V8193, ab; transcribed in “What, Am I Angry Now, Mr. Blair,” Virginia Historical Society Occasional Bulletin 59 (December 1987): 6–​­7. 117. Eugene R. Sheridan, ed., The Papers of Lewis Morris, vol. 1, 1698–​­1730, 1 vol. to date (Newark: New Jersey Historical Society, 1991–), 94–​­95, 60–​­61. 118. For classic descriptions of Virginia elites that stress similar themes, see Charles S. Sydnor, Gentlemen Freeholders: Political Practices in Washington’s Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952); Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom; and Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740‑1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). For the strongest case to be made for this picture, see Robert M. Weir, “ ‘The Harmony We Were Famous For’: An Interpretation of Pre-​­Revolutionary South Carolina Politics,” WMQ 3rd ser. 26 (1969): 473‑501. 119. See Jack P. Greene, “The Growth of Political Stability,” in Greene, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 131–​­62. Such an argument does not deny the continued political factionalism and infighting that characterized much eighteenth-​­century political life. 120. George Clarke to William Blathwayt, New York, September 6, 1705, Blathwayt Papers, BL 211, HL. 121. James Blair to Archbishop Tennison, Williamsburgh, September 2, 1706, in Perry, 1: 183.

242 Notes to Pages 50–56

Chapter 2. The Treasons of Thomas Nairne 1. A. S. Salley, ed., Journal of the Commons House of Assembly of South Carolina, October 22, 1707–February 12, 1707/8 (Columbia: Historical Commission of South Carolina, 1941), 48–​­49 (November 22, 1707). Sir Nathaniel Johnson to John Collins, Warrant of Commitment for Thomas Nairne, Contemporary Copy enclosed in Thomas Nairne to the Earl of Sunderland, Charleston, S.C., October 16, 1708, Charles Spencer (3d Earl of Sunderland) Papers, 1704–​­10, HL (hereafter cited as Sunderland Papers). 2. The Sunderland Papers at the Huntington Library contain a variety of materials on the case. For a narrative of the events, see the introduction to Alexander Moore, ed., Nairne’s Muskhogean Journals: The 1708 Expedition to the Mississippi River (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988), 3–​­31. 3. Thomas Nairne to [? the Earl of Sunderland], July 28, 1708, CSP, 1708–​­1709, 434; Gideon Johnston to Gilbert Burnet, November 11, 1709, in Frank J. Klingberg, ed., Carolina Chronicle: The Papers of Commissary Gideon Johnston, 1707–​­1716 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1946), 31; Francis Le Jau to the Secretary, June 30, 1707, in Frank J. Klingberg, ed., The Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Francis Le Jau, 1706–​­1717, University of California Publications in History 53 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 27. 4. Petition of Thomas Nairne to William, Lord Craven, Palatine. And the Right Hon’rble the true and absolute Lords Proprietors of Carolina, October 16, 1708, Sunderland Papers (“among the Indians”). Moore, Nairne’s Muskhogean Journals, 7. 5. Nairne to Sunderland, July 28, 1708, CSP, 1708–​­1709, 434. 6. Ibid., 435, 434. 7. Thomas Nairne to Rev. Edward Marston, St. Helens, S.C., August 20, 1705, enclosed with Robert Stevens to the Society, Goose Creek, S.C., n.d., in SPG, MSS (Library of Congress [LC] Transcripts), A 2, No. CLVI, 347–​­57, in Frank J. Klingberg, “Early Attempts at Indian Education in South Carolina: A Documentary,” SCHM 61 (1960): 3. 8. [Thomas Nairne], A Letter from South Carolina (London: A. Baldwin, 1710), 4. 9. Nairne to Marston, August 20, 1705, in Klingberg, “Early Attempts at Indian Education,” 3. 10. Nairne, Memorial to Charles Spencer, Earl of Sunderland, July 10, 1708, in Moore, Nairne’s Muskhogean Journals, 73–​­79 (hereafter cited as Memorial to Sunderland). Nairne’s map is now lost, but a version of it almost certainly was published as an insert in A Compleat Description of the Province of Carolina in 3 Parts (London: Edward Crisp, 1711). See Figures 5 and 6. 11. Memorial to Sunderland, in Moore, Nairne’s Muskhogean Journals, 73. 12. Petition to Sir Nathaniel Johnson by Inhabitants of Colleton County, South Carolina, September 7, 1708, Contemporary Copy enclosed in Nairne to Sunderland, October 16, 1708, Sunderland Papers. 13. Salley, Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, August 1701 (1926), 6 (August 15, 1701). 14. See Alexander Moore, “Nairne, Thomas,” American National Biography; Moore, Nairne’s Muskhogean Journals, 3–​­31. Nairne is a major character in Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–​­1717 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), esp. 164–​­76. 15. Salley, Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, 1702 (1932), 22 (January 26, 1701/2); W. P. Cumming, S. E. Hillier, D. B. Quinn, and G. Williams, The Exploration of North America, 1630–​­1776 (New York: Putnam, 1974), 94.

Notes to Pages 56–62

311.

243

16. Thomas Cooper, ed., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, vol. 2 (Columbia, S.C., 1837),

17. Memorial to Sunderland, in Moore, Nairne’s Muskhogean Journals, 74. 18. An Impartial Narrative of ye late Invasion of S. Carolina by ye French and Spaniards, Aug. 1706 inclosed in Governor Lord Cornbury to the Council of Trade and Plantations, October 3, 1706, CSP, 1706–​­1708, 248–​­54; Boston News-​­Letter, May 24, 1708. 19. Nairne to Marston, August 20, 1705, in Klingberg, “Early Attempts at Indian Education,” 3. CSP 1719–​­1720, 302. 20. Nairne to Marston, August 20, 1705, in Klingberg, “Early Attempts at Indian Education,” 3. The census is in CSP 1719–​­1720, 302; also printed in Richard L. Haan, “The ‘Trade Doe’s Not Flourish as Formerly’: The Ecological Origins of the Yamasee War of 1715,” Ethnohistory 28 (1981): 353n3. See the earlier numbers in Governor and Council of Carolina to the Council of Trade and Plantations, Carolina, September 17, 1709, in CSP, 1708–​­1709, 468. 21. Salley, Journal of the Commons House of Assembly of South Carolina, October 22, 1707– February 12, 1707/8 (Columbia, S.C., 1941), 18 (October 27, 1707). Nairne, Letter from South Carolina, 34–​­35. Salley, Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, August, 1701, 24. Indian allies were, the commissioners of the Indian trade suggested in 1713, “the Bulwark of this Settlement.” W. L. McDowell, ed., Journals of the Commissioners of the Indian Trade, September 20, 1710–August 29, 1718 (Columbia: South Carolina Archives Dept., 1955), 47. 22. Moore, Nairne’s Muskhogean Journals, 51–​­53; [Nairne], Letter from South Carolina, 55, 53; Memorial to Sunderland, in Moore, Nairne’s Muskhogean Journals, 74. 23. Moore, Nairne’s Muskhogean Journals, 32, 33. 24. Ibid., 34, 35. 25. Ibid., 38–​­39. 26. Edward Vallance, “Reborn John?: The Eighteenth-​­Century Afterlife of John Lilburne,” History Workshop Journal 74 (Autumn 2012): 1–​­26; [Nairne], Letter from South Carolina, 64–​­65 (but cf. 57 and 40–​­42). 27. Moore, Nairne’s Muskhogean Journals, 65–​­66. 28. Ibid., 60–​­62. 29. Ibid., 63–​­64, 61 (quotation); John Locke, “First Treatise,” in Two Treatises of Government: A Critical Edition with an Introduction and Apparatus Criticus, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966). Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government, ed. Thomas G. West (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1996). chap. 1, sec. 8 (p. 60 of online e-​­book PDF version). 30. Moore, Nairne’s Muskhogean Journals, 37–​­38, 50. 31. Ibid., 58, 36. 32. On Smith, see Salley, Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, October 22, 1707–­February 12, 1707/8, 3 (October 22, 1707), 48–​­49 (November 22, 1707); “An Abridgement of the Settlement of Carolina,” in [Daniel Defoe], Party-​­Tyranny, or an Occasional Bill in Miniature; as now Practiced in Carolina (London, 1705), reprinted in Alexander S. Salley, Jr., ed., Narratives of Early Carolina, 1650–​­1708: Original Narratives of Early American History (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1911), 242; Walter B. Edgar and N. Louise Bailey, Biographical Directory of the South Carolina House of Representatives (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1977–). 33. Thomas Nairne to Rev. Edward Marston, St. Helens, S.C., August 20, 1705, in Klingberg, “Early Attempts at Indian Education,” 2–​­4. 34. Moore, Nairne’s Muskhogean Journals, 56.

244 Notes to Pages 62–68 35. Thomas Nairne, “Petition of Thomas Nairne to William, Lord Craven, Palatine,” Sunderland Papers. For an estimate that more than 200 traders (presumably some from outside South Carolina) were killed in the Yamasee War, see Eirlys M. Barker, “Indian Traders, Charles Town and London’s Vital Link to the Interior of North America,” in Jack P. Greene, Rosemary Brana-​ S­ hute, and Randy J. Sparks, eds., Money, Trade, and Power: The Evolution of Colonial South Carolina’s Plantation Society, Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 142; Robbie Franklyn Ethridge, From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540–​­1715 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 200. See also Boston News-​­Letter, June 13, 1715; and Gallay, Indian Slave Trade, 280; McDowell, Journals of the Commissioners, 59 (August 31, 1714), 53 (May 4, 1714), 6 (March 9, 1710/11). For an attempt to defend the traders, see Steven J. Oatis, A Colonial Complex: South Carolina’s Frontiers in the Era of the Yamasee War, 1680–​­1730 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 96–​­105. 36. McDowell, Journals of the Commissioners, 4 (September 21, 1710), 13 (August 1, 1711). 37. Nairne to Sunderland, July 28, 1708, CSP 24: 434; Moore, Nairne’s Muskhogean Journals, 13–​­14. 38. Salley, Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, 1707/8 (1941), 56–​­57 (November 28, 1707); “Nairne to Sunderland, July 28, 1708,” CSP, 1708–​­1709, 434. 39. Nairne to Sunderland, Charleston, S.C., October 16, 1708, Sunderland Papers, HL; The Deposition of Francis Oldfield, Indian Trader, whome being duly Sworn, June 26, 1708, contemporary copy in Nairne to Sunderland, October 16, 1708, Sunderland Papers, HL; The Deposition of Jannet Tibbs widow in same; McDowell, Journals of the Commissioners 51 (November 18, 1713). 40. David Crawley to William Byrd II, July 30, 1715, quoted in Chapman James Milling, Red Carolinians (Columbia, S.C., University of South Carolina Press, 1969), 139 (see also 139n12 for another incident involving Wright); McDowell, Journals of the Commissioners of the Indian Trade 42 (March 25, 1713). 41. William L. Ramsey, The Yamasee War: A Study of Culture, Economy, and Conflict in the Colonial South (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 228 (quotations). McDowell, Journals of the Commissioners of the Indian Trade 49 (August 18, 1713). Gallay, Indian Slave Trade, admits that Wright was “narrow-​­minded, ornery, and cantankerous” (246–​­48), but sees the Carolinian opposition to him as the result of factional struggle between him and Nairne (and the traders connected to them); see esp. 279–​­83. 42. McDowell, Journals of the Commissioners of the Indian Trade 47 (July 17, 1713). 43. Nairne to Sunderland, July 28, 1708, CSP, 1708–​­1709, 433–​­35. 44. Nairne to Sunderland, October 16, 1708, Sunderland Papers. [Nairne], Letter from South Carolina, title page, 4. 45. Robert Stevens to the Society, n.d., in SPG, MSS (LC Transcripts), A 2, No. CLVI, 355. 46. [Nairne], Letter from South Carolina, 17–​­18. 47. Ibid., 25–​­27. 48. Nairne to Sunderland, July 28, 1708, CSP, 1708, 435. 49. [Nairne], Letter from South Carolina, 41–​­42, 45. 50. Petition of Thomas Nairne to Queen Anne, [1708], Sunderland Papers. 51. Robert Stevens to Society, n.d., in SPG, MSS (LC Transcripts), A 2, No. CLVI, 355–​­357. 52. “Mr. Samuel Thomas’s Remonstrance in justification of himself,” in “Documents Concerning Rev. Samuel Thomas, 1702–​­1707,” SCHM 5 (1904): 44–​­45.

Notes to Pages 68–72

245

53. Rev. Samuel Thomas to Rev. Dr. Woodward [minister of Poplar, new London] January 29, 1702[/3], in “Letters of Rev. Samuel Thomas, 1702–​­1706,” SCHM 4 (1903): 226; Alexander Moore, “Johnson, Nathaniel,” American National Biography; “Johnson, Nathaniel (c.1645–​­1713), of Newcastle-​­upon-​­Tyne, Northumb. and Kibblesworth, Lamesley, co. Dur.,” in B. D. Henning, ed., The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1660–​­1690 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1983), 2: s.v. 54. Thomas Nairne to Rev. Edward Marston, in Klingberg, “Early Attempts at Indian Education,” 2–​­4. 55. Moore, Nairne’s Muskhogean Journals, 38–​­39; Gallay, Indian Slave Trade, 231. Gallay argues that this distinction between Johnson’s Church party and Nairne involved not only English political ideals, but a disagreement about expansionistic “imperialism.” See, for example, the use of the term “Whig-​­imperialist” (219). 56. For the only contemporary description of this disastrous election, see Alexander Moore, “ ‘A Narrative . . . ​of an Assembly . . . ​January the 2d, 1705/6’: New Light on Early South Carolina Politics,” SCHM 85 (July 1984): 181–​­86. 57. Journal of the House of Commons, vol. 14 (London, 1803), 457–​­514 passim. An Act for the effectual securing the kingdom of England, from the apparent dangers that may arise from several Acts lately passed in the Parliament of Scotland (London: Charles Bill and the executrix of Thomas Newcomb, 1704), 165–​­66. 58. William Ferguson, Scotland’s Relations with England: A Survey to 1707 (1977; Edinburgh: Saltire Society, 1994), 180–​­277; Anne Somerset, Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (New York: Knopf, 2013), 211–​­16, 297–​­319. 59. Henry L. Snyder, “Spencer, Charles, third earl of Sunderland (1675–1722),” ODNB; “Spencer, Charles, Lord Spencer (1675–​­1722),” in David Hayton et al. The House of Commons 1690–​­1715 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for History of Parliament Trust, 2002), 5: s.v. 60. S. Charles Bolton, Southern Anglicanism: The Church of England in Colonial South Carolina, Contributions to the Study of Religion (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1982), 21, 24–​­25, 27; [John Granville, 1st Baron Granville of Potheridge], An Account of the Fair and Impartial Proceedings of the Lords Proprietors, Governour and Council of the Colony of South Carolina, in Answer to the Untrue Suggestions, Contained in the Petition of Jos. Boon and Others, and of a Paper Intituled, the Case of the Church of England in Carolina (London: printed by J. Brudenell, 1706); “Granville (Grenville), Hon. John (1665–​­1707), of Stowe, Cornwall,” in Basil Henning, ed., The House of Commons 1660–​­1690 (London: Secker and Warburg for History of Parliament Trust, 1983), 2: s.v. 61. Moore, “ ‘A Narrative . . . ​of an Assembly.’ ” 62. “Gideon Johnston to Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, Charleston, S.C., September 20, 1708,” in Klingberg, ed., Carolina Chronicle: The Papers of Commissary Gideon Johnston , 25. 63. Nairne to Sunderland, July 28, 1708, CSP, 1708–​­1709, 433; Cooper, Statutes, 2: 232. Robert M. Weir, Colonial South Carolina: A History (Millwood, N.Y.: KTO Press, 1983), 75–​­80, succinctly notes Johnson’s program. For England, see Brent S. Sirota, “The Occasional Conformity Controversy, Moderation, and the Anglican Critique of Modernity, 1700–1714,” Historical Journal 57, 1 (2014): 81–​­105. 64. M. Eugene Sirmans, Colonial South Carolina: A Political History, 1663–​­1673 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966), 89; [Daniel Defoe], Party-​­Tyranny, or an Occasional Bill in Miniature; as now Practiced in Carolina. Humbly offered to the Consideration of both Houses of Parliament (London, 1705), 236–​­59.

246 Notes to Pages 73–77 65. For Defoe’s 1706–​­1707 work in Scotland, see Paula Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: A Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 203–​­25; Defoe, Party-​­Tyranny: The Case of Protestant Dissenters in Carolina, Shewing How a Law to Prevent Occasional Conformity There, Has Ended in the Total Subversion of the Constitution in Church and State (London, 1706), is sometimes attributed to Defoe; but see Philip Nicholas Furbank, W. R. Owens, and John Robert Moore, Defoe De-​­Attributions: A Critique of J. R. Moore’s Checklist (London: Hambledon, 1994), 23–​­24. 66. “Documents Concerning Rev. Samuel Thomas, 1702–​­1707,” SCHM 5 (1904): 26–​­27; Journal of the House of Lords 18, 1705–​­1709 (London: HMSO, 1767–​­1830), 142–​­44 (March 9, 12, 1706); Order of the Queen in Council, June 10, 1706, CSP, 1706–​­1708, 150; Salley, Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, November 20, 1706–February 8, 1706/7 (1939), 4–​­5 (November 20, 1706). The repeal and revision of the offending laws is in ibid., 9–​­15. See the reference to Johnson’s past in [Granville], Account of the Fair and Impartial Proceedings of the Lords Proprietors, 4n. 67. Nairne to Sunderland, July 28, 1708, CSP, 1708–​­1709, 434 (“oppressions”); Nairne to Sunderland, October 16, 1708, Sunderland Papers (“shortest way”); Moore, Nairne’s Muskhogean Journals, 11. 68. Salley, Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, November 20, 1706–February 8, 1706/7 (1939), 4 (November 20, 1706); Salley, Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, March 6, 1705/6–April 9, 1706 (1937), 10 (March 7, 1705/6). 69. Salley, Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, March 6, 1705/6–April 9, 1706 (1937), 10 (March 7, 1705/6); Chief Justice Nicholas Trott to the Society, September 13, 1707, SPG MSS, LC Transcripts, A 3 CLII, 303, in Klingberg, ed., Carolina Chronicle: The Papers of Commissary Gideon Johnston, 17; Gideon Johnston to Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, Charleston, S.C., September 20, 1708, in ibid., 27. 70. Nairne to Sunderland, July 28, 1708, CSP, 1708–​­1709, 433. 71. James Owen, Moderation a Virtue, or, The Occasional Conformist Justify’d from the Imputation of Hypocrisy (London: A. Baldwin, 1703); Owen, Moderation Still a Virtue; in Answer to Several Bitter Pamphlets; Especially Two, Entituled, Occasional Conformity a Most Unjustifiable Practice and the Wolf Stripp’d of His Shepherd’s Cloathing Which Contain the Substance of the Rest (London: J. Taylor, 1704), 1; John Archdale, A New Description of That Fertile and Pleasant Province of Carolina (London: J. Wyat, 1707), 282. 72. Nairne’s account appears in Nairne to Sunderland, October 16, 1708, Sunderland Papers. The newspaper article was from Boston News-​­Letter, June 7, 1708. Nairne to Sunderland, July 28, 1708, CSP, 1708–​­1709, 434. 73. See Johnson’s November 20, 1706, speech to the Commons House, Salley, Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, November 20, 1706–February 8, 1706/7 (1939), 6. For Marston’s own view of his situation, see the several documents by him in The Case of Protestant Dissenters in Carolina, Shewing How a Law to Prevent Occasional Conformity There, Has Ended in the Total Subversion of the Constitution in Church and State (London, 1706), 57–​­66; “Mr. Samuel Thomas’s Remonstrance in justification of himself,” in “Documents Concerning Rev. Samuel Thomas, 1702–​­1707,” SCHM 5 (1904): 51–​­52. 74. Letter from Edward Marston, May 3, 1705, Appendix 12, in The Case of Protestant Dissenters in Carolina, Shewing How a Law to Prevent Occasional Conformity There, Has Ended in the Total Subversion of the Constitution in Church and State (London, 1706), 59. 75. Governor Sir Nathaniel Johnson to Lords of Trade, Antigua, May 24, 1689., in CSP, 1689–​­92, 43 (“doctrines”); [Granville], Account of the Fair and Impartial Proceedings of the Lords

Notes to Pages 77–80

247

Proprietors, 4n (“disaffected). On Johnson’s Caribbean governorship, see Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–​­1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 133–​­34, 134n31; Richard S. Dunn, “The Glorious Revolution in America,” in Nicholas Canny, ed., The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, Oxford History of the British Empire 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 445–​­67 (see esp. 455, 457). 76. See Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Eighteenth-​­Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). See also Klein, “The Political Significance of ‘Politeness’ in Early Eighteenth-​­Century Britain,” in Gordon J. Schochet, ed., Politics, Politeness, and Patriotism: Papers Presented at the Folger Institute Seminar, “Politics and Politeness, British Political Thought in the Age of Walpole,” Proceedings of the Center for the History of British Political Thought 5 (Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1993), 73–​­108. 77. Spectator, no. 125, July 24, 1711, 1: 441; no. 126, July 25, 1711, 1: 444, 446. [Nairne], Letter from South Carolina, 42. 78. See Memorial to Sunderland, in Nairne’s Muskhogean Journals, 73–​­78. 79. McDowell, Journals of the Commissioners 47 (July 17, 1713). The account of Nairne’s fate comes from Letter of Charles Rodd to His Employer in London, May 8, 1715, in CSP, 1714–​­1715, 166–​­68; Milling, Red Carolinians, 141–​­42; Moore, Nairne’s Muskhogean Journals, 20–​­21. For a different account of the night before the start of the war, see Robin Beck, Chiefdoms, Collapse, and Coalescence in the Early American South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 204–​­6, 212–​­13. I have seen no evidence that Nairne delivered an “eloquent speech” about “friendship” (204), although it would not have been out of character. Beck also follows Ramsey’s suggestion that Wright’s threatening comments to the Yamasee about killing their leaders and enslaving the rest were made that night (rather than at some other time—​­or on a number of occasions). William L. Ramsey, The Yamasee War: A Study of Culture, Economy, and Conflict in the Colonial South (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 95–​­97. 80. Steven J. Oatis, A Colonial Complex: South Carolina’s Frontiers in the Era of the Yamasee War, 1680–​­1730 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 126. See also Denise I. Bossy, “Indian Slavery in Southeastern Indian and British Societies, 1670–​­1730,” in Alan Gallay, ed., Indian Slavery in Colonial America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 246n105. 81. On the problems of the Southwest created by the encounter with Europeans and the European trading system, see Robbie Franklyn Ethridge and Sheri Marie Shuck-​­Hall, eds., Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009). 82. Compare Nairne’s Memorial to Sunderland with Carolina’s plans developed in the fall of 1707 noted in Salley, Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, October 22, 1707–February 12, 1707/8 (1941), 22–​­50 (October 31–November 22, 1707). 83. Memorial to Sunderland, Moore, in Nairne’s Muskhogean Journals, 77 (“full of Catle”), 74 (“quite to ruine”). 84. Nairne to Sunderland, July 28, 1708, CSP, 1708–​­1709, 433 (“merchandize”). For the number of Native peoples taken in the trade, see Gallay, Indian Slave Trade, 294–​­99. On Indian slavery more generally, see Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010). 85. Moore, Nairne’s Muskhogean Journals, 43. Compare the matter-​­of-​­fact discussion of “man hunting” in ibid., 47–​­48; Salley, Journal of the Commons House of Assembly of South

248 Notes to Pages 80–84 Carolina for 1703 (1934), 73 (April 28, 1703). Nairne is labeled a “slaver” in Matthew H. Jennings, “Violence in a Shattered World,” in Robbie Franklyn Ethridge and Sheri Marie Shuck-​­Hall, eds., Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 285. 86. For different explanations of causes of the Yamasee War, see Paul Kelton, Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492–​­1715 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 160–​­220; Ramsey, The Yamasee War, 75. Ramsey also argues (pp. 92–​­94) that Wright’s complaints and suits so preoccupied the Indian Commissioners from late 1707 to the spring of 1708 that Indians felt extremely anxious about the lack of Carolina diplomatic communications, an argument not borne out by the pattern of meetings of the commissioners during previous years. See McDowell, Journals of the Commissioners. 87. McDowell, Journals of the Commissioners, 27–​­28 (June 20, 1712); Ramsey, Yamasee War, 102. 88. [Nairne], Letter from South Carolina, 3–​­4. 89. Oatis, Colonial Complex, 178; Robin Beck, Chiefdoms, Collapse, and Coalescence in the Early American South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 220; Oatis, Colonial Complex, 167. 90. Peter C. Mancall, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, and Thomas Weiss, “Indians and the Economy of Eighteenth-​­Century Carolina,” in Peter A. Coclanis, ed., The Atlantic Economy During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation, Practice, and Personnel (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), 304. 91. John Alexander Moore, “Royalizing South Carolina: The Revolution of 1719 and the Evolution of Early South Carolina Government” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of South Carolina, 1991), notes the decline of the “idiosyncracies of the Proprietary province” during these years (3); Michael Guasco, “To ‘Doe Some Good upon Their Countrymen’: The Paradox of Indian Slavery in Early Anglo-​­America,” Journal of Social History 41, 2 (2007): 389–​­411. 92. Richter, Before the Revolution, 324; Robert M. Weir, “ ‘The Harmony We Were Famous For’: An Interpretation of Pre-​­Revolutionary South Carolina Politics,” WMQ 3rd ser. 26, 4 (October 1969): 473–​­501. 93. Thomas Cooper, ed., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, vol. 2 (Columbia, S.C., 1837), 309–​­16; Moore, Nairne’s Muskhogean Journals, 36; Minute Book of the Lords Proprietors, TNA CO 5/292, 1708–​­1727 (Microfilm at South Carolina Department of Archives and History), 44 (February 28, 1710/1). 94. Memorial to Sunderland, in Moore, Nairne’s Muskhogean Journals, 73. 95. Stuart Handley, “Spencer, Charles, Lord Spencer (1675–​­1722),” in D. W. Hayton, Eveline Cruickshanks, and Stuart Handley, eds., The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1690-​ 1­ 715 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for History of Parliament Trust, 2006), 5: s.v; Snyder, “Spencer, Charles, Tthird Earl of Sunderland (1675–1722),” ODNB; Nairne to Sunderland, July 28, 1708, CSP, 1708–​­1709, 434. 96. Steven Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009); John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–​­1783 (New York: Knopf, 1989). 97. Samuel Vetch to Earl of Sunderland, London, June 15, 1708, Charles Spencer, 3rd Earl of Sunderland Papers, British Library; Geoffrey Plank, An Unsettled Conquest: The British Campaign Against the Peoples of Acadia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 40–​­67; George Waller, Samuel Vetch, Colonial Enterpriser (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960).

Notes to Pages 84–94

249

98. Snyder, “Spencer, Charles, Third Earl of Sunderland.” 99. “Dedication of the Sixth Volume of The Spectator To The Right Honorable Charles, Earl of Sunderland,” Spectator 2: 666–​­67. “Candor” did not develop its current meaning of “frankness” or “outspokenness” until after the middle of the eighteenth century. 100. “The Little Whig,” Notes and Queries 2nd ser. 29 (July 19, 1856): 49–​­50. 101. Memorial to Sunderland, in Moore, Nairne’s Muskhogean Journals, 74; Nairne to Sunderland, July 28, 1708, CSP, 1708–​­1709, 434; Ramsey, The Yamasee War, 228.

Chapter 3. The Histories of the Line 1. Byrd’s accounts of these events are found in The Secret History of the Line and The History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina Run in the Year of Our Lord 1728, both in William Byrd II, The Dividing Line Histories of William Byrd II of Westover, ed. Kevin Berland (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 396–​­98, 135–​­36. These two texts are hereafter cited as as Secret History and History respectively. The earlier scholarly edition is Louis B. Wright, ed., The Prose Works of William Byrd of Westover: Narratives of a Colonial Virginian (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966). The Berland edition reverses the chronological order of the texts. 2. Secret History, 398–​­99 (October 5–​­6). 3. See the Introduction for scholars’ discussions of the development and meaning of “gentility.” 4. See Jack P. Greene, Political Life in Eighteenth-​­Century Virginia (Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1986), 43–​­46; Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 319–​­66; Kenneth A. Lockridge, On the Sources of Patriarchal Rage: The Commonplace Books of William Byrd and Thomas Jefferson and the Gendering of Power in the Eighteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 1–​­45. 5. Excerpts from the Secret History and the History appear in Paul Lauter, ed., The Heath Anthology of American Literature, 5th ed. (Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2013), http://www .cengage.com/search/productOverview.do?N=16&Ntk=P_EPI&Ntt=182681804011682109586962 84671809839219&Ntx=mode%2Bmatchallpartial, consulted August 12, 2015. Excerpts from the History appear in Carla Mulford, ed., Early American Writings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Excerpts from the Secret History appear in Nina Baym and Robert S. Levine, eds., The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th ed. (New York: Norton, 2011). 6. Berland, “Introduction” and “Introduction [to Secret History],” in Dividing Line Histories, 3–​­41, 343–​­48, discusses Byrd’s works and the scholarly discussions about them. For examples of the characterizations of the Secret History noted here, see Dividing Line Histories, 344–​­47 (“satirical”); Margaret Beck Pritchard and Virginia Lascara Sites, William Byrd II and His Lost History: Engravings of the Americas (Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1993), 25 (“gossipy”); Kenneth A. Lockridge, The Diary, and Life, of William Byrd II of Virginia, 1674–​­1744 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 134 (“gossipy”); Richard Beale Davis, Intellectual Life in the Colonial South, 1585–​­1763, 3 vols., paginated continuously (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978), 3: 1368 (“satirical”). 7. Secret History, 382 (April 9). 8. Ibid., 349; “Alexander Spotswood to Board of Trade, February 16, 1715/6,” in William L. Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, 10 vols. (Raleigh, N.C.: P.M. Hale State Printer, 1886–​­1890), 2: 221 (hereafter cited as CRNC).

250 Notes to Pages 94–102 9. For different stages of this lengthy process, see “Boundary Line Proceedings, 1710,” VMHB 4 (July 1896): 30–​­42; continued in 5 (July 1897): 1–​­21; Governor Hugh Drysdale to the Council of Trade, June 29, 1723, CSP, 1722–​­1723, 299; Alured Popple to Richard Shelton [secretary to the Lords Proprietors], November 12, 1723, CSP, 1722–​­1723, 361; Council Journal, January 23, 1723/4, CRNC, 2: 518; A Journal of the Proceedings of the Commiss’rs for Running the Line betwixt Carolina and Virginia, CRNC, 2: 732; Richard Everard, Instructions to Christopher Gale Chief Esq’r Justice John Lovick Esq’r Secretary Edward Moseley Esq’r Survey’r Gen’l and William Little Esq’r Attorney General Commissioners for settling the Bounds and Running the Line . . . ​, February 28, 1727/8, CRNC, 2: 742. 10. WB II to Baron Boyle of Broghill, May 20, 1729, in Marion Tinling, ed., The Correspondence of the Three William Byrds of Westover, Virginia, 1684–​­1776, 2 vols., paginated continuously (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977), 1: 393 (hereafter cited as Byrd Correspondence). 11. Pierre Marambaud, William Byrd of Westover, 1674–​­1744 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1971), 181n132. For a shorter, more interpretive, study of Byrd’s life see Lockridge, The Diary, and Life, of William Byrd II. 12. John Boyle, Baron Boyle of Broghill to WB II, Brittwell, September 1, 1727, Byrd Correspondence, 1: 365–​­67. See Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–​­1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 42–​­64. 13. To Vigilante (John Smith, father of Mary) [perhaps Feb. 18, 1718], Byrd Correspondence, 1: 322. 14. Richard Everard, Instructions to Christopher Gale Chief Esq’r Justice John Lovick Esq’r Secretary Edward Moseley Esq’r Survey’r Gen’l and William Little Esq’r Attorney General Commissioners for settling the Bounds and Running the Line . . . ​, February 28, 1727/8, CRNC, 2: 743. 15. Secret History, 349. 16. Gentlemen fitt to supply vacancies in Councell, inclosed in Lt. Governor Hugh Drysdale to the Council of Trade, June 29, 1726, CSP, 1726–​­1727, 92. 17. Council Journal, April 3, 1727, CRNC, 2: 673. Byrd comments on Fitzwilliam being placed “at the head of their Council” in History, 87. 18. Secret History, 381–​­82. 19. Ibid., 382–​­87. 20. WB II to Governor William Gooch, September 5, 1728, in Byrd Correspondence, 1: 388. 21. A Journal of the Proceedings of the Commiss’rs for Running the Line betwixt Carolina and Virginia, CRNC, 2: 749. 22. Governor William Gooch to Lords of Trade, June 8, 1728, CRNC, 2: 768–​­69. 23. WB II to Charles Boyle, Earl of Orrery, May 26, 1729, Byrd Correspondence, 1: 395–​­96. 24. Secret History, 367 (March 14); for another use of same metaphor, see Secret History, 372 (March 23). 25. Ibid., 366 (March 14). 26. Ibid., 366–​­67 (March 14, 15). 27. Ibid., 360 (March 6). 28. William Byrd, Another Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1739–​­1741: With Letters and Literary Exercises, 1696–​­1726, ed. Maude H. Woodfin and Marion Tinling (Richmond, Va.: Dietz Press, 1942), 359–​­60, 359–​­60n (hereafter cited as Another Secret Diary). 29. Louis B. Wright, “William Byrd’s Opposition to Governor Francis Nicholson,” Journal of Southern History 11, 1 (February 1945): 68–​­79.

Notes to Pages 103–108

251

30. William Byrd, The Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1709–​­1712, ed. Louis B. Wright and Marion Tinling (Richmond, Va.: Dietz Press, 1941), 394 (August 24, 1711) (hereafter cited as Secret Diary). 31. Marambaud, William Byrd, 192, identifies the February 6, 1711, entry as the longest in the surviving diaries. The entry is about 400 words long. Secret Diary, 297–​­98. 32. WB II to Sir Robert Southwell, July 26, 1701, Byrd Correspondence, 1: 211–​­12; see Mark R. Wenger, ed., The English Travels of Sir John Percival and William Byrd II: The Percival Diary of 1701 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989). 33. Secret History, 382. The second journal was enclosed in WB II to Commissioners of Trade and Plantations, June 27, 1729, Byrd Correspondence, 1: 414. 34. Secret History, 382. 35. CRNC, 2: 790; Secret History, 405; CRNC, 2: 791; Secret History, 405. For other borrowings compare the October 15 and 16 entries in CRNC, 2: 791–​­92, and Secret History, 409, 410. 36. History, 73–​­74. See also New York Weekly Journal, July 23, 1739. 37. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1766–​­1788), chap. 40, part 3. 38. The Secret History of the Reigns of K. Charles II, and K. James II (n.p., 1690), 22, 161–​­62; the work also retails the common myth that James II’s child was not his own (209). 39. Secret Diary, 277, 278, 279 (December 26, 29, 30, 1710). Kevin J. Hayes, The Library of William Byrd of Westover (Madison, Wis.: Madison House, 1997), 64, notes some other secret histories owned by Byrd, as well as (284) Mrs. Mary de la Rivière Manley, Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality from the New Atlantis, 2 vols. (London, 1709). On secret histories, see Rebecca Bullard, The Politics of Disclosure, 1674–1725, Political and Popular Culture in the Early Modern Period (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009). For other discussions of secret histories, see Melinda Alliker Rabb, Satire and Secrecy in English Literature from 1650 to 1750 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); and Annabel Patterson, Early Modern Liberalism, Ideas in Context 48 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 182–​­231. 40. Major William Gooch to Commissioners for Trade, Williamsburgh, July 23, 1730, TNA CO 5/1322, ff. 65–​­67 (VCRP, SR 00391) (“dissatisfied,” f. 66; “strange,” f. 65); H. R. McIlwaine, ed., Executive Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia 4, 213 (April 29, 1730). 41. Major William Gooch to Commissioners for Trade, Williamsburgh, March 26, 1729, TNA CO 5/1321, f. 111 (VCRP, SR00390). 42. H. R. McIlwaine, ed., Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1727–​­1734, 1736–​­1740 (Richmond, 1910), 83–​­99 (June 20–July 1, 1730); Major William Gooch to Commissioners for Trade, July 23, 1730, TNA CO 5/1322, ff. 64–65. 43. Governor Gooch to Bishop of London, Williamsburgh, May 28, 1731, in Rev. G. McLaren Brydon, ed., “The Virginia Clergy” (cont.), VMHB 32 (1924): 325; CSP, 1731, 57–​­58; Journal of the Board of Trade, TNA CO 391/40, 37, 101–​­2, 193–​­94, 198–​­99 (VCRP, SR 01684). 44. Journal of the Board of Trade, TNA CO 391/40, 301 (VCRP, SR 01684). 45. Secret History, 356 (March 1). 46. Ibid., 357 (March 2), 373 (March 25). On gentility’s focus on everyday activities, see Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992). 47. Secret History, 359 (March 4), 391 (September 24).

252 Notes to Pages 108–117 48. Ibid., 369 (March 20). 49. Ibid., 355 (“indifferent Opinion”) (February 28), 362 (“Our pilot”) (March 8), 373 (“the Men”) (March 24), 372 (“Person accus’d) (March 23). 50. Ibid., 365 (March 12). 51. bid., 373 (March 25). 52. Ibid., 374 (March 27), 375 (March 28), 389 (September 19). 53. Ibid., 375–​­76 (March 30). 54. Michael Craton, A History of the Bahamas, 2nd ed. (London, 1968), 133–​­35; see, among a number of complaints, Petition of Chaloner Jackson, Collector of Customs, Providence I., Bahamas, to the Council of Trade, London, October 7, 1736, The case of the inhabitants of the Bahama Islands[, 1736], CSP, 1735, 287–​­92, 389–​­92; Michael Craton and Gail Saunders, Islanders in the Stream: A History of the Bahamian People, 2 vols. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 1: 137–​­42. 55. William Byrd, [Secret History of the Dividing Line], Fragment, Brock Collection, HL, see, e.g., pp. 8, 9, 10. 56. Secret History, 376 (March 31). 57. Ibid., 374 (March 27), 363 (March 9); for other examples, see Ibid., 365 (March 13), 389 (September 19). 58. History, 92 (“better grace”) (March 14); Secret History, 366 (“3 Huzzas”) (October 14). 59. Secret History, 376 (March 30). 60. Ibid., 364 (March 12). 61. Ibid., 418 (“bruis’d”) (October 31), 423 (“Order”) (November 9). 62. Ibid., 373 (March 23). 63. Ibid., 389 (September 19). 64. “Cavaliero Sapiente Southwell,” in Another Secret Diary, 208. 65. WB II to Addressee unknown, July 22, 1736, Byrd Correspondence, 2: 497. 66. WB II to [Perry & Lane], 1737, Byrd Correspondence, 2: 522–​­23. 67. Secret History, 385. 68. WB II to Peter Collinson, July 18, 1736, Byrd Correspondence, 2: 494. 69. Ibid. 70. WB II to Peter Collinson, July 5, 1737, Byrd Correspondence, 2: 523. 71. Pritchard and Sites, William Byrd II and His Lost History, discuss plates that may have been prepared for a potential volume by Byrd. 72. “A Journey to the Land of Eden Anno 1733,” in Wright, Prose Works of William Byrd, 395 (September 27); see also 397 (September 29). 73. Byrd Correspondence, 1: 409. 74. Ibid., 2: 493, 494. 75. Ibid., 2: 491. 76. Ibid., 2: 484–​­85. 77. Ibid., 2: 485. 78. Secret History, 356–​­357 (March 1). 79. History, 78–​­80 (March 1). 80. Ibid., 82 (“Carolina Friends”) (March 5), 81 (“all Philosophers”) (March 4), 85 (“most impatient”) (March 8). 81. Ibid., 79 (“Industry”) (March 1), 80–​­81 (“Hovel”) (March 4). 82. Ibid., 88 (“Custard-​­Complexion”) (March 10), 105–​­106 (“little pains”) (March 25), 107 (“small and built”) (March 27), 108 (“Dining Room”) (March 27).

Notes to Pages 117–123

253

83. Secret History, 367 (“Pork upon Pork”) (March 14), 363 (“extremely hoggish”) (March 10); History, 88 (“Swine’s flesh”) (March 10), 97 (“Pagans”) (March 17), 108 (March 27). 84. Hugh Jones, The Present State of Virginia, ed. Richard L. Morton (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1956; originally pub. London, 1724), 104 (“vastly inferior”); Governor George Burrington, to the Lords of Trade, February 20, 1731/2, in Saunders, CRNC, 3: 338 (“the Inhabitants”); South-​­Carolina Gazette, June 15, 1765 (“people consider”). 85. WB II to Johann Rudolph Ochs, [1735?], Byrd Correspondence, 2: 451 (“Switzers”); History, 110 (“wild”) (March 30); William Byrd, Description of the Dismal Swamp and a Proposal to Drain the Swamp, ed. Earl Gregg Swem, Heartman’s Historical Series 38 (Metuchen, N.J.: C.F. Heartman, 1922). WB II to Johann Rudolph Ochs, July 15, 1736, Byrd Correspondence, 2: 490–​­492. 86. History, 149 (“our honest”) (October 14); 209 (“wretchedest Scene”) (November 16). On laziness, see History, 88 (March 10). On intermarriage, see History, 120 (April 7). 87. The lightning is noted in History, 180 (November 2), and is also mentioned earlier, 113 (April 2). The Swedes and Siberians are noted in History, 204 (November 14). 88. History, 152–​­54 (October 16, 17). 89. WB II to [Sir Charles Wager?], July 2, 1736, Byrd Correspondence, 2: 485 (“every one of the colonys”); On the ginseng, see WB II To Peter Collinson, July 5, 1737, Byrd Correspondence, 2: 523–​­524. 90. History, 112 (“Loose”) (April 1); Secret History, 370 (“new Scandal”) (March 21); For further hints of the Carolina situation in the Secret History, see 389 (September 19) and 390 (September 20). 91. For a general account of these years, see Hugh T. Lefler and William S. Powell, Colonial North Carolina: A History (New York: Scribner, 1973); see also John Paden, “ ‘Several & Many Grievances of Very Great Consequences’: North Carolina’s Political Factionalism in the 1720s,” North Carolina Historical Review, 71, 3 (July 1994): 285–​­305; Bradford J. Wood, This Remote Part of the World: Regional Formation in Lower Cape Fear, North Carolina, 1725–​­1775 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004); A. Roger Ekirch, “Poor Carolina”: Politics and Society in Colonial North Carolina, 1729–​­1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981). See also William S. Powell, ed., Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, 6 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979–​­1996). 92. Records of the General Court, General Court of Oyer and Terminer and General Gaole Delivery, July 13–August 6, 1728, CRNC, 2: 828–​­29, 825. 93. Records of the General Court, General Court of Oyer and Terminer and General Gaole Delivery, October 29–November 5, 1728, CRNC, 2: 832–​­33. 94. Declaration by Lt. Governor Sir Richard Everard, January 6, 1729, CRNC, 3: 5–​­6 (“enemies”); Governor Sir R. Everard to the Duke of Newcastle, June 18, 1729, CRNC, 3: 19 (flagrant Villains”). 95. Records of the General Court, General Court of Oyer and Terminer and General Gaole Delivery, October 29–November 5, 1728, CRNC, 2: 832–​­33. 96. WB II to Johann Rudolph Ochs, July 15, 1736, Byrd Correspondence, 2: 491. 97. WB II to Charles Boyle, Earl of Orrery, July 5, 1726, Byrd Correspondence, 1: 353. 98. Another Secret Diary, 359; WB II to [Sir Charles Wager?], July 2, 1736, Byrd Correspondence, 2: 485; WB II to John Perceval, Earl of Egmont, July 12, 1736, Byrd Correspondence, 2: 487. 99. Secret History, 367 (“Astrolabe’s Negro”) (March 15); Secret History, 434–​­35 (“Men employed”); also in History, 241–​­242; Secret History, 353–​­54 (“two Servants”), 358 (“my Man Tom”) (March 2), 359 (“Tipperary”) (March 4), 388 (“Mulatto Wench”) (September 19), 426 (“three

254 Notes to Pages 123–131 women”) (November 15); History, 122 (“all the Servants”) (September 19); Secret History 388 (“Mulatto Wench”) (September 19). For other “servants,” see, for example, Secret History, 409 (October 15), which notes “Meanwell’s Servant” as well as the servant of one of the Virginia surveyors. On this topic, see also Berland, Dividing Line Histories, 474. 100. See Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs. 101. Wenger, The English Travels of Sir John Percival, 1–​­8. 102. WB II to John Perceval, Earl of Egmont, July 12, 1736, Byrd Correspondence, 2: 487–​­89. Egmont’s letter does not survive. For a harsher view of Byrd’s relationship to slavery, see Anthony S. Parent, Jr., Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660–1740 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). Parent takes his title from the letter to Egmont discussed here. 103. WB II to Egmont, July 12, 1736, Byrd Correspondence, 2: 487–​­89. Thomas Jefferson makes similar points in his discussion of slavery in Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1955), 162–​­63. 104. See Manuscripts of the Earl of Egmont: Diary of Viscount Percival, Afterwards First Earl of Egmont, Historical Manuscripts Commission (London, 1920), 3: viii–ix. 105. WB II to Gov. William Gooch, September 1, 1728, Byrd Correspondence, 1: 387. 106. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1955), 162; “Inamorato L’Oiseaux,” Another Secret Diary, 281–​­82 (all italicized in the original). 107. WB II to Peter Collinson, July 18, 1736, Byrd Correspondence, 2: 494.

Chapter 4. The Affair of My Picture 1. Jonathan Belcher to Jonathan Belcher, Jr., August 7, 1734, Belcher Papers, 7: 96–​­97. The two men, father and son, are hereafter noted, respectively, as “JB” and “JB Jr.” A selection from the some 6,000 pages in the Belcher Letterbooks at MHS appears in Belcher Papers. I have cited the published version when possible. On Faber, see John Chaloner Smith, British Mezzotinto Portraits; Being a Descriptive Catalogue of These Engravings from the Introduction of the Art to the Early Part of the Present Century, 4 vols. (London: Henry Sotheran, 1884), 1: 299–​­460. On British America’s earliest portrait prints (all from Boston), see Andrew Oliver, “Peter Pelham (c. 1697–​ 1­ 751): Sometime Printmaker of Boston,” in Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Boston Prints and Printmakers, 1670–​­1775 (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1973), 132–​­73. 2. Jonathan Belcher to Jonathan Belcher, Jr., August 7, 1734, Belcher Papers, 7: 96–​­97; JB to JB Jr., October 1, 1734, Belcher Papers, 7: 121. 3. JB to Richard Partridge, Belcher Letterbooks, November 26, 1734, IV, 387. 4. JB to Francis Harrison, July 23, 1733, Belcher Papers, 6: 340; Boston Gazette, February 22, 1731; Aaron Burr, A servant of God dismissed from labour to rest (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1757), 14; JB to Jonathan Law [deputy-​­governor of Connecticut], December 23, 1734, Belcher Papers, 7: 178. 5. Michael C. Batinski, Jonathan Belcher: Colonial Governor (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), xiv. 6. JB to JB Jr., August 7, 1734, Belcher Papers, 7: 96–​­97. 7. Ibid., 97. 8. For Belcher’s family and career, see Batinski, Jonathan Belcher; see also “Jonathan Belcher (1699),” in Clifford K. Shipton, New England Life in the Eighteenth Century: Representative Biographies from Sibley’s Harvard Graduates (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), 44–​­60. 9. JB to JB Jr., May 8, 1740, Belcher Papers, 7: 291.

Notes to Pages 132–138

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10. Ebenezer Pemberton, Advice to a Son. A Discourse At the Request of a Gentleman in New England, upon his Son’s going to Europe. Recommended to the Persual of all Young Gentlemen, and especially those that Travel (London, 1705), 11, 2, 20. 11. Pemberton, Advice to a Son, 1. 12. Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-​­Bay, ed. Lawrence Shaw Mayo, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936), 2: 280. 13. Jonathan Belcher, “Journal of my intended voyage and journey to Holland, Hannover etc.: beginning at London Saturday July 8th O.S. 1704, 1704,” Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS), 117 (quotation), 115. This document is transcribed in David Crockett, First American Born: The Life and Journal of Jonathan Belcher, the First-​­Known, American-​­Born Freemason (Bowie, Md.: Heritage Books, 1992), 23–​­135. 14. Hutchinson, The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-​­Bay, 2: 280. 15. JB to John White, December 27, 1704, quoted in Shipton, New England Life, 46; Batinski, Jonathan Belcher, 18. 16. Milton Halsey Thomas, ed., The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674–​­1729, 2 vols., paginated continuously (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 1: 541 (January 23, 1705/6); see also 1: 538 (January 9, 1705/6), on Boston’s cannons. 17. Isaac Watts, Horae lyricae: Poems chiefly of the lyric kind. In three books (Philadelphia: R. Aitken, 1781), 231–​­32. 18. Hutchinson, History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-​­Bay, 2: 280. 19. New-​­England Weekly Journal, August 11, 17, 1730. 20. Pemberton, Advice to a Son, 10, 12–​­13. Pemberton’s metaphors of butter and oil come from Job 29:6. 21. Smith, British Mezzotinto Portraits, 1: 299–​­460, lists Faber’s engravings; Charles E. Russell, English Mezzotint Portraits and Their States, 2 vols. (London: Halton & T. Smith, 1926), 2: 79–​­100, notes some additional prints. 22. Leonard W. Cowie, Henry Newman: An American in London, 1708–​­1743 (London: SPCK for Church Historical Society, 1956). 23. On the mine at Simsbury, see JB to Richard Partridge, January 10, 1734/5, Belcher Letterbooks, IV, 464. 24. JB to Rev. Ebenezer Williams, February 2, 1733/4, Belcher Letterbooks, IV, 14. 25. JB to JB Jr., December 6, 1731, Belcher Papers, 6: 78. 26. JB to JB Jr., September 18, 1732, Belcher Papers, 6: 170–​­71; JB to JB Jr., April 23, 1733, Belcher Papers, 6: 264–​­65; JB to JB Jr., October 20, 1732, Belcher Papers, 6: 205; JB to JB Jr., November 1, 1731, Belcher Papers, 6: 28. 27. JB to JB Jr., April 28, 1732, Belcher Papers, 6: 125. 28. JB to JB Jr., September 18, 1732, Belcher Papers, 6: 180. 29. JB to JB Jr., November 11, 1734, Belcher Papers, 7: 154–​­55. 30. JB to JB Jr., November 1, 1731, Belcher Papers, 6: 35; JB to Richard Partridge, May 28, 1733, Belcher Papers, 6: 299 (Jonathan, Jr., was able to give the squirrels to Prince William instead); JB to Richard Partridge, September 6, 1733, Belcher Letterbooks, III, 374. 31. JB to JB Jr., August 14, 1732, Belcher Papers, 6: 168. 32. JB to JB Jr., April 29, 1732, Belcher Letterbooks, II, 293–​­94; JB to JB Jr., December 6, 1731, Belcher Papers, 6: 78; JB to JB Jr., November 11, 1731, Belcher Papers, 6: 52. 33. “B to JB Jr., April 23, 1733, Belcher Papers, 6: 264. 34. JB to JB Jr., November 25, 1731, Belcher Papers, 6: 65.

256 Notes to Pages 138–143 35. JB to JB Jr., September 18, 1732, Belcher Papers, 6: 182–​­83; JB to JB Jr., October 20, 1732, Belcher Papers, 6: 203. 36. JB to JB Jr., April 29, 1732, Belcher Letterbooks, II, 294; JB to JB Jr., September 19, 1732, Belcher Letterbooks, II, 474; JB to William Partridge, November 1, 1731, Belcher Letterbooks, XI, 38; JB to JB Jr., April 28, 1733, Belcher Letterbooks, III, 184. 37. JB Jr. to Benjamin Colman, July 3, 1740, John Davis Papers, 1681–​­1747, Box 2, folder 6 (1740–​­1741), MHS (“compliment”); JB to JB Jr., Belcher Papers, 7: 352. Colman’s piece on Pope is presumably “The transport, To Mr. Pope, on looking again into his Essay on Man. February 14, 1739/40,” Benjamin Colman Papers, 1641–​­1763, MHS. 38. Benjamin Colman to JB Jr., May 30, 1734, Benjamin Colman Papers, 1641–​­1763, MHS. 39. JB to JB Jr., July 2, 1733, Belcher Papers, 6: 314; JB to Richard Partridge, February 6, 1733/4, Belcher Letterbooks, IV, 24. 40. “Dudley, Joseph (1647–​­1720), of Cowes, I.o.W. and Roxbury, Massachusetts,” in D. W. Hayton, Eveline Cruickshanks, and Stuart Handley, eds., The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1690–1​­ 715 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 3: s.v. See also “Cutts, John, 1st Baron Cutts [I] (c.1661–​­1707), of Childerley, Cambs,” ibid., 3: s.v.; Everett Kimball, The Public Life of Joseph Dudley; A Study of the Colonial Policy of the Stuarts in New England, 1660–​­1715 (New York: Longmans, Green, 1911). 41. JB to Richard Partridge, April 27, 1732, Belcher Papers, 6: 120. 42. JB to JB Jr., November 25, 1731, Belcher Papers, 6: 64. 43. JB to JB Jr., April 29, 1732, Belcher Letterbooks, II, 293; JB to the Bishop of Lincoln, June 20, 1732, Belcher Letterbooks, II, 367. 44. JB to Mr. Crosland, February 4, 1733/4, Belcher Papers, 7: 9; JB to the Right Worshipfull The Baliffs & Capital Burgesses for the Borough of Tamworth, February 4, 1733/4, Belcher Letterbooks, IV, 21–​­22. 45. JB to JB Jr., July 8, 1734, Belcher Papers, 7: 91–​­92 (“no further favor”; “respect center’d”); JB to the Bishop of Lincoln, June 20, 1732, Belcher Letterbooks, II, 367 (“low birth”); JB to Bishop of Lincoln, February 4, 1733/4, Belcher Papers, 7: 6–​­7. JB to JB Jr., November 4, 1734, Belcher Papers, 7: 146–​­147 46. JB to JB Jr., May 15, 1734, Belcher Papers, 7: 72; JB to JB Jr., October 27, 1732, Belcher Letterbooks, II, 529 (the quotation also appears in Belcher Papers, 6: 203n). 47. JB to Richard Partridge, April 20, 1734, Belcher Papers, 7: 34. Belcher had earlier spoken of “Mr. Belcher of the Temple” in a letter to the Duke of Newcastle, February 18, 1733/4, CSP, 1734, 40. He uses the same formulation in JB to Thomas Hollis, May 4, 1734, Belcher Papers, 7: 56; JB to JB, Jr., November 4, 1734, Belcher Papers, 7: 144. 48. JB to James Belcher, August 25, 1732, Belcher Papers, 6: 175–​­76. 49. JB to Brian Fairfax, October 30, 1731, Belcher Papers, 6: 24; JB to Samuel Shute, November 1, 1731, Belcher Papers, 6: 36; JB to Richard Partridge, April 27, 1732, Belcher Papers, 6: 124. For a similar description of Andrew Oliver as coming from New England’s “uncouth Desart” when he went to London, see JB to Mrs. Dawson, May 23, 1733, Belcher Papers, 6: 502. 50. JB to Francis Wilkes, November 1, 1731, Belcher Papers, 6: 44; see JB to JB Jr., November 1, 1731, Belcher Papers, 6: 34, for discussion of the issue with his son. 51. JB to Richard Partridge, December 1, 1736, Belcher Letterbooks, V, 77–​­78; JB to JB Jr., January 24, 1739/40, Belcher Papers, 7: 273. 52. JB to JB Jr., July 21, 1740, Belcher Papers, 7: 512; JB to JB Jr., May 9, 1741, Belcher Papers, 7: 386; JB to JB Jr., January 8, 1740/1, Belcher Papers, 7: 529.

Notes to Pages 143–150

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53. Pemberton, Advice to a Son, 12; Isaac Watts to Benjamin Colman, March 4–​­5, 1729/30, in Charles C. Smith, “Letters of Dr. Watts,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 2nd ser. 9 (1894–​­1895): 333; JB to Richard Partridge & Jonathan Belcher, Jr., March 3, 1736/7, Belcher Letterbooks, V, 167. 54. JB to JB Jr., June 10, 1734, Belcher Letterbooks, IV, 162; JB to JB Jr., May 8, 1740, Belcher Papers, 7: 292. The letter does not reveal the precise nature of this connection between Jonathan, Jr., and Checkley. 55. JB to JB Jr., June 17, 1741, Belcher Letterbooks, VII, 311–​­12. 56. Henry Newman to Jonathan Belcher, Jr., Dublin, October 30, 1742, Henry Newman, Private Letters, November 28, 1734–November 22, 1736, Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge Papers, Cambridge University Library. 57. JB to JB Jr., December 1, 1741, Belcher Letterbooks, VII, 417, responds to the September letter; JB to JB Jr., June 13, 1743, Belcher Letterbooks, VII, 561, notes the son’s lack of replies. Unfortunately, Belcher’s surviving letter books end in July 1743 and only pick up in 1747, so the resumption of correspondence is not recorded. 58. JB to Richard Partridge, June 14, 1743, Belcher Letterbooks, VII, 561–​­62. 59. JB to James Belcher, December 24, 1753, Belcher Letterbooks, X, 306. 60. Susan Buggey, “Jonathan Belcher,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), vol. 4. 61. JB to Richard Partridge, August 7, 1734, Belcher Papers, 7: 104 (“possitive order”; “imprudent”); JB to JB Jr., August 7, 1734, Belcher Papers, 7: 97 (“foolish affair”). 62. JB to Richard Waldron, November 16, 1733, Belcher Papers, 6: 415. 63. Col. David Dunbar to Alured Popple, August 19, 1730, CSP, 1730, 243. 64. Col. David Dunbar to Alured Popple, June 5, 1730, CSP, 1730, 132. 65. Josiah Smith to [Rev. Thomas Prince?], Cainhay, February 8, 1730/1, Miscellaneous Bound Collection, MHS. 66. The title appears in the nineteenth-​­century transcription of the play copied from the papers of Governeur Morris now in the Bancroft Collection, Box 158, New York Public Library. 67. Robert E. Moody, ed., “Boston’s First Play,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 92 (1980): 117–​­39, transcribes the manuscript of the play at the Massachusetts Historical Society. 68. John Boydell to John Yeamans, April 8, 1731, D. S. Greenough Collection, MHS; Extract from the Political State of Great-​­Britain for the Month of December, 1730 [Boston, 1731], 14, 16. For Belcher’s reaction, see JB to Council of Trade, Boston, April 5, 1731, CSP, 1731, 84. 69. See Richard L. Bushman, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985). 70. JB to JB Jr., May 18, 1733, Belcher Papers, 6: 288. 71. John Boydell to John Yeamans, December 20, 1733, D. S. Greenough Collection, MHS. 72. Col. David Dunbar to Alured Popple, Boston, January 12, 1731, CSP, 1731, 7; Lt. Governor David Dunbar to Charles Delafaye, Portsmouth, August 18, 1731, CSP, 1731, 227. 73. Lt. Governor David Dunbar to Alured Popple, Portsmouth, July 15, 1731, in James Phinney Baxter, ed., Documentary History of the State of Maine, vol. 11, Containing the Baxter Manuscripts, Collections of the Maine Historical Society 2nd ser. (Portland, 1908), 96–​­97; Col. David Dunbar to Council of Trade, Boston, October 9, 1729, CSP, 1728–​­1729, 498, 499; Col. David Dunbar, Surveyor of the Woods, to Alured Popple, September 15, 1730, CSP, 1730, 279. 74. Col. David Dunbar to the Duke of Newcastle, February 4, 1730, CSP, 1730, 25; Col. David

258 Notes to Pages 150–154 Dunbar, Surveyor of the Woods, to Alured Popple, September 15, 1730, CSP, 1730, 278; Col. Dunbar to Alured Popple, Portsmouth, July 11, 1731, CSP, 1731, 175. 75. JB to Bishop of Lincoln, February 4, 1733/4, Belcher Papers, 7: 6; Joseph J. Malone, Pine Trees and Politics: The Naval Stores and Forest Policy in Colonial New England, 1691–​­1775 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964), 91–​­123. 76. JB to Richard Waldron, August 8, 1734, Belcher Letterbooks, IV, 232. For the Maine settlement, see Malone, Pine Trees and Politics, 97–​­110. 77. See John Boydell to John Yeamans, December 20, 1733; same to same, December 31, 1733, D. S. Greenough Collection, MHS. 78. JB to Richard Waldron, June 11, 1733, Belcher Papers, 6: 301; JB to Richard Waldron, March 4, 1733/4, Belcher Papers, 7: 23. The relationship between Belcher and Cooke, Jr., is discussed in Batinski, Jonathan Belcher. See, e.g., 35–​­41, 85, 102–​­3; John Boydell to John Yeamans, December 31, 1733. 79. JB to Richard Partridge, December 25, 1733, Belcher Papers, 6: 442–​­43. 80. JB to JB Jr., May 18, 1733, Belcher Letterbooks, VI, 289; JB to Richard Partridge, November 28, 1733, Belcher Letterbooks, VI, 434. 81. JB to Richard Waldron, November 16, 1733, Belcher Papers, 6: 414. 82. JB to Richard Partridge, November 28, 1733, Belcher Papers, 6: 434–​­35. 83. JB to JB Jr., August 7, 1734, Belcher Papers, 7: 99. 84. Batinski, Jonathan Belcher, 16. 85. John Boydell to John Yeamans, March 1, 1730/1, D. S. Greenough Collection, MHS. 86. Shipton, New England Life in the Eighteenth Century, 46. 87. JB to Dr. John Guyse, July 30, 1737, Belcher Letterbooks, V, 315; Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1968), 217–​­51; JB to Francis Wilks, October 25, 1740, Belcher Letterbooks, VII, 27. 88. Hutchinson, History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-​­Bay, 2: 281; Aaron Burr, A servant of God, 13. 89. JB to David Dunbar, July 23, 1733, Belcher Papers, 6: 336; JB to the Lords of Trade, July 1, 1734, Belcher Papers, 7: 84; JB to David Dunbar, September 9, 1734, Belcher Papers, 7: 116. 90. JB to JB Jr., October 20, 1739, Belcher Papers, 7: 216; JB to Richard Waldron, April 18, 1734, Belcher Letterbooks, IV, 88. 91. Boston Weekly News-​­Letter, January 14, 1705/6; Hamilton Andrews Hill, History of the Old South Church (Third Church), Boston, 1669–​­1884, 2 vols. (Boston, 1890), 1: 504. See also Belcher’s September 1731 request that his New Hampshire supporters “meet” the judge of the Vice Admiralty Court “on the Road,” JB to Richard Waldron, September 6, 1731, Belcher Letterbooks, II, 5; JB to Richard Waldron, September 16, 1734, Belcher Papers, 7: 120; JB to Richard Waldron, September 19, 1734, Belcher Letterbooks, IV, 267–​­68; JB to Coll. Henry Sherburne, September 19, 1734, Belcher Letterbooks, IV, 268. For earlier planning of cavalcades, see JB to Richard Waldron, September 6, 1731, Belcher Papers, 6: 4; JB to Richard Waldron, November 8, 1733, Belcher Letterbooks, III, 464; JB to Richard Waldron, December 3, 1733, Belcher Letterbooks, III, 522; JB to Henry Sherburne, December 3, 1733, Belcher Papers, 6: 517–​­18; JB to Richard Waldron, December 6, 1733, Belcher Papers, 6: 439. 92. JB to Sir John Gonson, November 18, 1740, Belcher Letterbooks, VII, 91; William Shirley to the Duke of Newcastle, January 23, [1749/50], in Charles Henry Lincoln, ed., Correspondence

Notes to Pages 154–163

259

of William Shirley: Governor of Massachusetts and Military Commander in America, 1731–​­1760, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 1: 495. 93. Hutchinson, History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-​­Bay, 2: 281; Emerson W. Baker and John G. Reid, The New England Knight: Sir William Phips, 1651–​­1695 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998). On Dudley and treason, see Thomas James Holmes, Cotton Mather: A Bibliography of His Works, 3 vols. (Newton, Mass.: Crofton, 1974), 249–​­52; George M. Waller, Samuel Vetch, Colonial Enterpriser (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), 79–​­99. 94. Batinski, Jonathan Belcher, 93–​­101. 95. Bushman, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts, 103–​­22. 96. Hutchinson, History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-​­Bay, 2: 302–​­3. In 1738, Shirley had responded to the Duke of Newcastle’s complaint about a letter opposing Belcher and calling for Shirley to receive the post by suggesting (implausibly) that Belcher himself must have written the letter. William Shirley to the Duke of Newcastle, March 3, 1738, in Lincoln, ed., Correspondence of William Shirley, 1: 13–​­15; John A. Schutz, William Shirley, King’s Governor of Massachusetts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 23–​­43. 97. JB to Richard Waldron, November 3, 1740, Belcher Letterbooks, VII, 344. 98. Bushman, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts, 141–​­42; Malone, Pine Trees and Politics, suggests that Wentworth’s position as surveyor general of the woods in North America in the place of Dunbar “made a travesty of the forest policy” (123); Jere R. Daniell, Colonial New Hampshire: A History (Lebanon, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2015; orig. pub. 1981), 207–​­15; Daniell, Experiment in Republicanism: New Hampshire Politics and the American Revolution, 1741–​­1794 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 4–​­34. 99. William Shirley to the British Crown, [c. 1758], in Lincoln, Correspondence of William Shirley, 2: 591; JB to Mr. Oliver, December 28, 1747, Belcher Letterbooks, VIII, 185; Schutz, William Shirley, 129. 100. Hudson Ralph Janisch, comp., Extracts from the St. Helena Records, 2nd ed. (St. Helena, 1908), 182–​­86. 101. JB to Jonathan Belcher [of St. Paul’s church yard, London], September 17, 1747, Belcher Letterbooks, VIII, 43, notes his desire for a college, calling the people of New Jersey “unlearn’d and unpolite.” Belcher uses the same terms in a number of letters upon his arrival. See JB to Mr. Gray, September 18, 1747, Belcher Letterbooks, VIII, 46: “The Inhabitants are unlearn’d and unpolite yet Courteous sober and honest.” 102. JB to JB Jr., October 1, 1734, Belcher Papers, 7: 121; JB to JB, Jr., November 26, 1734, Belcher Papers, 7: 161. 103. JB to Richard Partridge, March 4, 1734/5, Belcher Letterbooks, IV, 520; JB to JB Jr., August 2, 1737, Belcher Letterbooks, V, 329. 104. Hutchinson, History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-​­Bay, 2: 280–​­81. 105. JB to JB Jr., November 25, 1731, Belcher Papers, 6: 65.

Chapter 5. A Mumper Among the Gentle 1. On the episode discussed here and the subsequent paragraph see, besides the general accounts of Bell noted below, [Elias Boudinot], “Life of the Rev. William Tennent,” Evangelical Intelligencer 2 (1806): 156–​­61; Richard S. Field, “Review of the Trial of the Rev. Wm. Tennent for Perjury, in 1742,” Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society 6 (1853): 30–​­40; Henry W. Green,

260 Notes to Pages 163–165 “The Trial of the Rev. William Tennent,” Princeton Review 40 (1868): 321–​­44; and Trenton Historical Society, A History of Trenton, 1679–​­1929, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1929), 2: 626–​­29. For the symbolic importance of Rowland in the New Side-​­Old Side Presbyterian split see Marilyn J. Westerkamp, Triumph of the Laity: Scots-​­Irish Piety and the Great Awakening, 1625–​­1760 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 170–​­71, 180–​­81, 192–​­93. 2. Rowland’s nickname is noted in Field, “Review of the Trial of the Rev. Wm. Tennent,” 35. For a discussion of the real Rowland by a contemporary see Gilbert Tennent, A Funeral Sermon, Occasion’d by the Death of the Reverend Mr. John Rowland, Who departed this Life, April the 12th, 1745. Preach’d at Charles-​­Town, in Chester County, April the 14th, 1745 (Philadelphia: William Bradford, 1745), 40–​­48. Rowland’s own account of his career, which omits the Bell incident, is printed ibid., 49–​­72, as A Narrative of the Revival and Progress of Religion, in the Towns of Hopewell, Amwell, and Maiden-​­Head, in New-​­Jersey, and New-​­Providence in Pennsylvania. In a Letter to the Rev. Mr. Prince, Author of the Christian History. By the Rev. Mr. John Rowland; John Gillies, Memoirs of Rev. George Whitefield, ed. C. E. Stowe (Philadelphia: Leary, Getz & Co., 1859), 53n, presents a perhaps apocryphal anecdote that portrays people “in a state of insensibility” because of the power of Rowland’s preaching. The town where Bell acted as Rowland cannot be located precisely. George H. Ingram, “The Two Hundred and Twenty-​­Fifth Anniversary of the Beginning of Lawrenceville Presbyterian Church,” Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society 12 (1924–​­1926): 95, suggests that it may have been Hopewell (now Pennington) or Amwell. 3. Pennsylvania Gazette, February 10, 1743. Newspaper reports place Bell in New York City alone during 1738, 1743, 1744, 1746, 1747, and 1749. 4. Carl Bridenbaugh, “ ‘The Famous Infamous Vagrant’ Tom Bell,” in Bridenbaugh, Early Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 148; A Serious-​­Comical Dialogue Between the Famous Dr. Seth Hudson, and the Noted Joshua How (Boston: Benjamin Mecom, 1762)—​­the title page of the Serious-C ​­ omical Dialogue also promises “A Touch on Tom Bell”; “Story of Thomas Bell, a Native of America,” Christian’s, Scholar’s, and Farmer’s Magazine (Elizabethtown, N.J.) 2 (1790): 364–​­65; also in The Norwich Packet or, The Chronicle of Freedom (Norwich, Conn.), July 8, 1784. For examples of English newspaper coverage of Bell, see Daily Gazetteer (London Edition), May 11, 1744; Penny London Morning Advertiser, May 14, 1744. 5. Carl Bridenbaugh, “The Notorious Tom Bell—​­A Successful Harvard Man,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 69 (1947–​­1950), 494–​­95, and “ ‘Famous Infamous Vagrant’ Tom Bell,” 121–​­49 (quotation on 139). Bridenbaugh also helped prepare the piece on Bell in Clifford K. Shipton, Biographical Sketches of Those Who Attended Harvard College in the Classes 1731–​­1735 . . . ​, vol. 9 of Sibley’s Harvard Graduates (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1956), 375–​ 8­ 6. See also Brooks E. Kleber, “Notorious Tom Bell,” PMHB 75 (1951): 416–​­23. Their research in the sources provide the foundation for this work. 6. See Sarah Maza, “Stories in History: Cultural Narratives in Recent Works in European History,” American Historical Review (AHR) 101 (1996): 1493–​­1515; and Rhys Isaac, “Stories and Constructions of Identity: Folk Tellings and Diary Inscriptions in Revolutionary Virginia,” in Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and Fredrika J. Teute, eds., Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 106–​­37. 7. “Story of Thomas Bell, a Native of America,” 364–​­65; New-​­York Evening-​­Post, September 4, 1749. For an example of someone else pretending to be the famous imposter, see “Cadwallader Colden to Governor George Clark [undated and unaddressed, 1742?],” in The Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden, vol. 7, 1765–​­1775, Collections of the New-​­York Historical Society for the Year 1923 (New York: New-​­York Historical Society, 1923), 338–​­39.

Notes to Pages 166–170

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8. For the various descriptions of Bell, see Boston Gazette, November 20, 1738; Boston Evening-​­Post, December 10, 1739; and Pennsylvania Gazette, July 12, 1744. The Life and Adventures of Mr. Bampfylde-​­Moore Carew, Commonly Called The King of the Beggars (London: T. Forster, 1779), 142, 143, 150, uses “mumper” and “mumping” extensively. 9. Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall (New York: Norton, 1986), 33 (see also 196 for a brief biography of William Vanhaesdonck Riddlesden). 10. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 14; Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), xiii, ix; Sahlins, Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History As Culture and Vice Versa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). See also Aletta Biersack, “Local Knowledge, Local History: Geertz and Beyond,” in Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History: Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 72–​­96; and Sherry B. Ortner, “Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties,” in Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Ortner, eds., Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 372–​­411. 11. South-​­Carolina Gazette (Charleston), July 18, 1754. 12. Pennsylvania Gazette, August 14, 1746; capitalization in original. The term “dinghy” was not used for a European rowboat until the nineteenth century: OED, s.v. “dinghy.” 13. Boston Evening-​­Post, December 10, 1739; South-​­Carolina Gazette, September 12, 1743; Karin Calvert, “The Function of Fashion in Eighteenth-​­Century America,” in Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, eds., Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 252–​­83. 14. For Bell’s early life see Bridenbaugh, “ ‘Famous Infamous Vagrant’ Tom Bell.” Capt. Tom Bell’s will is Will # 5845, Suffolk County, Massachusetts, Probate Records, 27:319–​­22 (Boston Public Library microfilm). For Bell’s Harvard career see Shipton, Biographical Sketches of Those Who Attended Harvard College, 9: 375–​­76; and Bridenbaugh, “ ‘Famous Infamous Vagrant’ Tom Bell,” 126–​­27. 15. Josiah Quincy, The History of Harvard University, 2 vols. (Boston: J. Owen, 1840), 1: 388–​ ­94 (“great disorder,” 388). For the disciplinary records of Bell and his classmates see Shipton, Biographical Sketches, 9: 389, 410, 438 (tutor’s horse); 393, 412, 449 (glass); 386, 393, 412, 438, 448 (cards and dice). 16. Bridenbaugh, “ ‘Famous Infamous Vagrant’ Tom Bell,” 126. 17. Ibid.; “Boston Selectmen’s Records, 1716–​­1736,” in A Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston . . . ​, 13th Report (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1885), 208–​­9. On tavern licenses, see David W. Conroy, In Public Houses: Drink and the Revolution of Authority in Colonial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 99–​­147. 18. Virginia Gazette (Williamsburg), July 21, 1738 (hereafter cited as Va. Gaz.); Boston Gazette, November 20, 1738; Boston Evening-​­Post, September 10, 1739. Francis Hutchinson, not of the prominent family, graduated from Harvard in 1736; Sibley, Biographical Sketches, 10: 34–​­35. The Boston Evening-​­Post, December 10, 1739, prints a letter from a Barbados merchant claiming that Bell had earlier drawn “Bills of Exchange in my Brother Fairfax’s Name.” 19. Bell’s letter is in New-​­York Evening-​­Post, September 4, 1749. The New-​­York Weekly Post-​ ­Boy, September 11, 1746, notes a rumor that Bell had enlisted in a New Jersey company as a soldier. The Boston Weekly News Letter, April 10, 1755, reprints a piece originally published in the Antigua Gazette. On Bell as minister see South-​­Carolina Gazette, November 7, 1743.

262 Notes to Pages 170–171 20. Franklin, Autobiography, ed. Lemay and Zall, 84–​­85; Aubrey C. Land, “Economic Base and Social Structure: The Northern Chesapeake in the Eighteenth Century,” in Stanley N. Katz, ed., Colonial America: Essays in Politics and Social Development, 2nd ed. (Boston: Little Brown, 1976), 345–​­59; W. T. Baxter, The House of Hancock: Business in Boston, 1724–​­1775 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1945), 197–​­216; Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–​­1860 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 110 and passim; Daniel Vickers, Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630–​­1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 198–​­99, 247–​­58; John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607–​­1789: With Supplementary Bibliography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 93–​­94, 99, 105, 206, 295, 310, 312, 314, 318, 325–​­26. For women’s work see Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Martha Ballard and Her Girls: Women’s Work in Eighteenth-​­Century Maine,” in Stephen Innes, ed., Work and Labor in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 70–​­105. 21. Dumas Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, vol. 1 of Jefferson and His Time (Boston: Little Brown, 1948), 98–​­101, 201. On mobility see Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (New York: Knopf, 1986); and Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1986). For studies suggesting that the eighteenth-​­century poor moved often, but not very far, see Douglas Lamar Jones, “The Strolling Poor: Transiency in Eighteenth-​­Century Massachusetts,” Journal of Social History 8 54; and Jones, “Poverty and Vagabondage: The Process of Survival in (Spring 1975): 28–​­ E ­ ighteenth-​­Century Massachusetts,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register 133 (1979): 243–​­54. 22. Alexander Hamilton, Gentleman’s Progress: The Itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton, 1744, ed. Carl Bridenbaugh (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992; orig. pub. 1948), 95, 104 (see also 160). Dr. Hamilton provides a vivid picture of the difficulties of traveling in the 1740s. Pennsylvania Gazette, July 12, 1744. On later peddlers see David Jaffee, “Peddlers of Progress and the Transformation of the Rural North, 1760–​­1860,” JAH 78 (1991): 511–​­35. 23. Pennsylvania Gazette, August 11, 1757, quoted in Kenneth Scott, Counterfeiting in Colonial Pennsylvania (New York: American Numismatic Society, 1955), 92. 24. George H. Ingram, “History of the Presbytery of New Brunswick,” Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society 6 (1911–​­1912): 346, 333–​­34; Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 36–​­38; Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 189. For studies of Whitefield that stress his desire for publicity see Frank Lambert, “Pedlar in Divinity”: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1737–​­1770 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994); Harry S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1991); and Timothy D. Hall, Contested Boundaries: Itinerancy and the Reshaping of the Colonial American Religious World (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1994). 25. Joseph-​­Bill Packer, “A Journal of the Life and Travels of Joseph-​­Bill Packer” (Albany, 1773), in Daniel E. Williams, ed., Pillars of Salt: An Anthology of Early American Criminal Narratives (Madison, Wis.: Madison House, 1993), 207–​­16; Kenneth Scott, Counterfeiting in Colonial New York (New York: American Numismatic Society, 1953), 77; see also Kenneth Scott, Counterfeiting in Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957), 179–​­81 (Dunston) and passim. On criminals in colonial America, see Daniel A. Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674–​­1860

Notes to Pages 171–174

263

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 117–​­42; see also Douglas Greenberg, Crime and Law Enforcement in the Colony of New York, 1691–​­1776 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976). 26. Packer, “Journal of the Life and Travels,” 213; Maryland Gazette, December 13, 1749 (Wilson); Scott, Counterfeiting in Colonial Pennsylvania, 55 (Castle). Scott’s extensive studies of counterfeiting, which include Counterfeiting in Colonial America and Counterfeiting in Colonial New York, provide the fullest discussions of that subject. See also Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2007); John L. Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644–​­1844 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 105–​­28. 27. Calculated from biographies in Shipton, Biographical Sketches, vol. 9. On teaching see James Axtell, The School upon a Hill: Education and Society in Colonial New England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974), 187–​­94, 211–​­12. Bell’s classmates may actually have taught less than the average Harvard class; Axtell suggests that about 40 percent of all colonial Harvard graduates taught school after graduation (187–​­88, 212–​­13n18). See also the post-​­Harvard experiences of Robert Treat Paine and John Adams in Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–​­1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 85–​­87. 28. On artisanal skill as capital, see Ronald Schultz, The Republic of Labor: Philadelphia Artisans and the Politics of Class, 1720–​­1830 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 5–​­6. Franklin wrote, “He that hath a Trade hath an Estate,” “Poor Richard Improved, 1758,” in Leonard W. Labaree, William B. Willcox, and Barbara Oberg, eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959), 7: 342 (hereafter Franklin Papers). The aphorism first appeared in Poor Richard (1742), ibid., 2: 333. 29. Pennsylvania Gazette, August 14, 1746. 30. Va. Gaz., October 31, 1745. 31. Shipton, Biographical Sketches, 8:120–​­21 (Burnet), 9:419; Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1974), 11. On colonial elites and their control of information see Brown, Knowledge Is Power, 16–​­41. On the movement of information see Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675 to 1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 32. Stephen Burroughs, Memoirs of the Notorious Stephen Burroughs of New Hampshire (1798), ed. Philip F. Gura (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988). For insightful discussions of Burroughs see Robert A. Gross, “The Confidence Man and the Preacher: The Cultural Politics of Shays’s Rebellion,” in Gross, ed., In Debt to Shays: The Bicentennial of an Agrarian Rebellion (Charlottesville, 1993), 297–​­320; Cohen, Pillars of Salt, 155–​­62; and Daniel E. Williams, “In Defense of Self: Author and Authority in the Memoirs of Stephen Burroughs,” Early American Literature 25 (1990): 96–​­122. 33. Burroughs, Memoirs of Stephen Burroughs, 67. 34. New-​­York Weekly Post-​­Boy, September 11, 1749. 35. For Franklin as confidence man see Gary H. Lindberg, The Confidence Man in American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 73–​­89; and Richard Boyd Hauck, A Cheerful Nihilism: Confidence and “The Absurd” in American Humorous Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971). 36. Franklin, Autobiography, ed. Lemay and Zall, 54, 66. This argument does not deny Franklin’s role playing, a characteristic discussed tellingly in Ormond Seavey, Becoming Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography and the Life (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,

264 Notes to Pages 174–179 1988). Mitchell Robert Breitwieser, Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin: The Price of Representative Personality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), makes a powerful argument for a deeper consistency at the core of Franklin’s identity. For the genre of the “character” see J. W. Smeed, The Theophrastan “Character”: The History of a Literary Genre (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985). See also Nian-​­Sheng Huang, Benjamin Franklin in American Thought and Culture, 1790–​ ­1990 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1994), 4–​­8. 37. Pennsylvania Gazette, February 22, 1739; the Dingee incident appears in ibid., August 14, 1746. For another Lloyd, perhaps a separate individual or a combination of the person or persons mentioned in other stories, see ibid., July 8, 1742. This Lloyd, then going by the name of Ebenezer Wilson, also was a schoolteacher, preacher, and thief. 38. Accounts of the case discussed here and in the subsequent paragraph appear in Boston Evening-​­Post, September 10, 1739; Pennsylvania Gazette, September 27, 1739, April 10, 1740; Va. Gaz., November 16, 1739; Boston Evening-​­Post, December 10, 1739; Boston Weekly News-​­Letter, March 13, 1740; and New-​­York Gazette, March 31, 1740. The Pennsylvania Gazette, February 10, 1743, gives the name “Thomas” Burnet. See also David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 275–​­76. 39. Boston Evening-​­Post, December 10, 1739. 40. New-​­England Courant, January 14, 1723. 41. Ibid. 42. Boston Weekly Post-​­Boy, August 22, 1743; Boston Evening-​­Post, December 12, 1743; New-​ ­York Evening-​­Post, March 25, 1745. 43. Hamilton, Gentleman’s Progress, 83, 186. 44. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984; orig. pub. 1979), 1–​­19. Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 478, notes Baldassare Castiglione’s related idea of sprezzatura, the ability to perform difficult actions with seeming effortlessness. Franklin significantly entitled his “Society for Virtue,” a proposed association of moral men attempting to enlighten the world, “the Society of the Free and Easy,” rather than a name expressing strenuous activity. Franklin, Autobiography, ed. Lemay and Zall, 77–​­78. Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-​­Class Culture in America, 1830–​­1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 93; “Politeness,” Poor Richard Improved, . . . ​1763 (Philadelphia: B. Franklin, and D. Hall, [1762]), September. 45. OED, s.vv. “gentle,” “genteel”; Norbert Elias, The History of Manners, vol. 1 of The Civilizing Process (1939), trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1979); vol. 2: The Court Society (1969), trans. Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1983). 46. Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–​­1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 50–​­82. 47. Boston Weekly News-​­Letter, April 10, 1755. 48. Serious-​­Comical Dialogue, 20; Thomas L. Haskell “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility,”2 pts.,, in Thomas Bender, ed., The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 107–​­60; Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–​­1905), trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Allen & Unwin, 1930). On gentility as a response to mobility see Carson, “Consumer Revolution in Colonial British America,” 522–​­49. 49. Life and Adventures of Mr. Bampfylde-​­Moore Carew, 138; Franklin, Autobiography, ed.

Notes to Pages 179–182

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Lemay and Zall, 45; Boston Weekly News-​­Letter, March 10, 1743. For a provocative theoretical discussion of the authority of polished self-​­presentation see James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990). 50. For the theatricality of eighteenth-​­century elite activities see E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (New York: New Press, 1991). Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–​­1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982) also notes the significance of gentry culture in establishing power. For the technical details of eighteenth-​­century exchange see John J. McCusker, Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1600–​­1775: A Handbook (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978); and Baxter, House of Hancock, 11–​­38. 51. Pennsylvania Gazette, June 23, July 14, 1743. 52. New-​­York Evening-​­Post, September 4, 1749; South-​­Carolina Gazette, September 12, 1743. Compare Pennsylvania Gazette, June 16, 1743. For earlier reports see Boston Weekly News-​­Letter, March 13, 1740; and New-​­York Gazette, March 31, 1740. 53. New-​­York Evening-​­Post, September 4, 1749. 54. Pennsylvania Gazette, January 11, 1732, August 6, 1741; the latter is reprinted in Labaree, Willcox, and Oberg, Franklin Papers, 2: 328. 55. Pennsylvania Gazette, August 11, 1757. Humanitarianism has been traced more fully in the post-​­Revolutionary period. See Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-​­American Culture,” AHR 100 (1995): 303–​­34; Elizabeth B. Clark, “ ‘The Sacred Rights of the Weak’: Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America,” JAH 82 (1995): 463–​­93; and Louis P. Masur, Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776–​­1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 50–​­70. For discussions of the earlier period see Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Eighteenth-​­Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 193n109, 247–​­60; Fiering, “Irresistible Compassion: An Aspect of Eighteenth-​­Century Sympathy and Humanitarianism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 37 (1976): 195–​­218; and Bender, Antislavery Debate, 107–​­60. For broader perspectives, see Thomas Laqueur, “Mourning, Pity, and the Work of Narrative in the Making of ‘Humanity,’ ” in Richard Ashby Wilson and Richard D. Brown, eds., Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 31–​­57; Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007). Michel Foucault considers humanitarianism as a new means of asserting power in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977; orig. pub. 1975). For the debates about paternalism in the slave South and elsewhere see Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 322–​­24, 462–​­63nn8–​­9. For perceptive discussions of justifications of power in colonial and revolutionary America see Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: Norton, 1988); and Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992). 56. Pennsylvania Gazette, April 29, 1736; David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York: Knopf, 1989), 71, 77, 116. For ways in which rulers’ attempts to solidify their power can be used by the ruled see Edward P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York: Pantheon, 1978). 57. New-​­York Evening-​­Post, September 4, 1749. 58. Thomas Shepard, The Parable of the Ten Virgins Opened & Applied (London, 1660), 121;

266 Notes to Pages 182–184 John Flavel, The Touchstone of Sincerity: or, The Signs of Grace and Symptoms of Hypocrisy (1679, Boston: John Rothwell, 1731), 27; Tennent, Funeral Sermon, Occasion’d by the Death of the Reverend Mr. John Rowland, 40–​­41; Leonard J. Trinterud, The Forming of an American Tradition: A Re-​­Examination of Colonial Presbyterianism (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1949), 58–​­60. Jonathan Edwards used the concept of hypocrisy to distinguish his stance from both radical New Lights and liberal Arminians who fooled themselves through (respectively) false experience and false deeds. Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections (1746), ed. John E. Smith (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959), 173. See also Ava Chamberlain, “Self-​­Deception as a Theological Problem in Jonathan Edwards’s ‘Treatise Concerning Religious Affections,’ ” Church History 63 (1994): 541–​­56; and William Breitenbach, “Religious Affections and Religious Affectations: Antinomianism and Hypocrisy in the Writings of Edwards and Franklin,” in Barbara B. Oberg and Harry S. Stout, eds., Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, and the Representation of American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 15–​­16n. 59. On the reshaping of views of human psychology see James Hoopes, Consciousness in New England: From Puritanism and Ideas to Psychoanalysis and Semiotic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 1–​­64. On late eighteenth-​­century fears of deception see Gross, “Confidence Man and the Preacher”; Gordon S. Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century,” WMQ 3rd ser. 39 (1982): 401–​­41; Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and Larzer Ziff, Writing in the New Nation: Prose, Print, and Politics in the Early United States (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), 54–​­82. 60. Charles E. Clark, The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-​­American Culture, 1665–​­1740 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). See also Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-​­Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990). 61. Boston Evening-​­Post, December 10, 1739. 62. For a few examples see Boston Weekly Post-​­Boy, November 14 and December 26, 1743, March 19, 1744. 63. Boston Weekly Post-​­Boy, August 22, 1743; New-​­York Weekly Post-​­Boy, April 14, 1746 (reprinted, Pennsylvania Journal or Weekly Advertiser [Philadelphia], April 17, 1746; Va. Gaz., May 15, 1746); New-​­York Weekly Post-​­Boy, August 28, 1749 (reprinted, Pennsylvania Gazette, August 31, 1749). 64. Pennsylvania Gazette, October 12, 1752; Daniel Dulany to ?, December 9, 1755, in “Maryland Gossip in 1755,” PMHB, 3 (1879): 145. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-​ ­ vents in America (New York: Vintage, 1992; orig. pub. 1961), esp. 45–​­74, suggests an important E conceptual distinction between fame and celebrity, but Braudy, Frenzy of Renown, traces a more complex history that makes a simple dichotomy difficult. 65. South-​­Carolina Gazette, April 18, 25, 1743. 66. Abraham Bishop, Oration Delivered in Wallingford, On the 11th of March 1801 (New Haven, Conn.: William W. Morse, 1801), v. The last sentence quotes Psalm 39:6. 67. Bell’s letter, New-​­York Evening-​­Post, September 4, 1749; Va. Gaz., August 14, 1752; “Story of Thomas Bell, a Native of America,” 365. According to the heading, this story came “from an Irish Publication, in 1782” (364). Bell’s advertisements follow increasingly popular pedagogical theory about the significance of experience. See Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–​­1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

Notes to Pages 184–191

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68. Boston Weekly News-​­Letter, March 10, 1743. 69. New-​­York Weekly Post-​­Boy, September 11, 1749. See a similar report about Bell in Charleston (South-​­Carolina Gazette, February 18, 1744/5), where “a great Concourse of People daily flock[ed] to see him” in the workhouse. 70. Boston Weekly News-​­Letter, April 10, 1755. 71. New-​­York Evening-​­Post, September 4, 1749. 72. South-​­Carolina Gazette, July 18, 1754; New-​­York Weekly Post-​­Boy, September 11, 1749; Serious-​­Comical Dialogue, 19. 73. Boston Weekly News-​­Letter, April 10, 1755. 74. Boston Evening-​­Post, December 10, 1739 (map); Field, “Review of the Trial of the Rev. Wm. Tennent,” 32 (judge). One of the merits of Erving Goffman’s classic but underexploited work is its insistence on seeing not just players but also setting and audience as part of a dramaturgic situation, in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), esp. 12–​­14. 75. OED, s.vv. “mum,” “mump”; Va. Gaz., October 31, 1745

Chapter 6. The Princess and the Pinckneys 1. Eliza Lucas Pinckney to unidentified person, [1753], in Harriott Horry Ravenel, Eliza Pinckney (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1896), 144–​­53. This volume is hereafter cited as Ravenel. Pinckney is hereafter cited in the notes as ELP. The letter does not seem to have survived, but a draft is held by The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of South Carolina. It appears (partly reconstructed from the Ravenel version) in The Papers of Eliza Lucas Pinckney and Harriott Pinckney Horry, digital edition, ed. Constance Schulz (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012). Although all the Pinckney letters discussed appear in this new scholarly edition, I have cited the printed versions of documents when available and (often) manuscript sources. Many of these letters appear in Eliza Lucas Pinckney, The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, 1739–​­1762 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), hereafter ELP Letterbook. 2. ELP to unidentified person, [1753], Ravenel, 147. Although Pinckney’s given name was Elizabeth, she signed her letters “Eliza Pinckney” and nineteenth-​­century family tradition referred to her as Eliza. See the works by her great-​­grandson and granddaughter (respectively): Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Life of General Thomas Pinckney (Boson, 1895); and [Maria Henrietta Pinckney], “A Memoir of the Pinckney Family of South Carolina, Drawn From The Family Records, And Communicated By William Gilmore Simms, LLD, Of South Carolina,” Historical Magazine 2nd ser. 2 (September 1867): 134–​­39. The second is particularly significant because Maria Pinckney lived with Eliza Pinckney for a time. 3. ELP to unidentified person, [1753], Ravenel, 149. 4. Ibid., 145–​­46. 5. The fullest studies of Pinckney’s life are Ravenel and Frances Leigh Williams, A Founding Family: The Pinckneys of South Carolina (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978). For later studies, see Carol Walter Ramagosa, “Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s Family in Antigua, 1668–​­1747,” SCHM 99 (July 1998): 238–​­58; Harriet Simons Williams, “Eliza Pinckney and Her Family: Before the Letterbook,” SCHM 99 (July 1998): 259–​­79; Constance B. Schulz, “Eliza Lucas Pinckney” in G. J. Barker-​­Benfield and Catherine Clinton, Portraits of American Women from Settlement to the Present (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 65–​­81; Jeannette Frances Bowers, “ ‘How uncommon a life I have mett with’: the life of Eliza Lucas Pinckney” (MA thesis, San Diego State University, 1990).

268 Notes to Pages 192–196 6. ELP to Mrs. Boddicott, May 2, [1740], ELP Letterbook, 7; ELP, [Notes on letter to George Lucas], January 1741/2, ELP Letterbook, 25. On indigo, a project that also involved Pinckney’s father and husband as well as ELP herself, see “Letter from Mrs. Charles Pinckney to Harriott Horry,” September 10, 1785, Annotated by Joseph W. Barnwell, SCHM 17 (July 1916): 101–​­2. See also David L. Coon, “Eliza Lucas Pinckney and the Reintroduction of Indigo Culture in South Carolina,” Journal of Southern History 42 (February 1976): 61–​­76. 7. ELP to Mrs. [Elizabeth Lamb] Pinckney, [ca. July 1741], ELP Letterbook, 19. 8. ELP to Mary Bartlett, [ca. June 1742], ELP Letterbook, 47–​­48. 9. ELP to George Lucas, May 2, 1744, Ravenel, 69–​­70. 10. ELP to Mrs. King, May [1759], ELP Letterbook, 117; [Maria Pinckney], “Memoir of the Pinckney Family,” 135. The often repeated story that Charles Pinckney left South Carolina because he was not appointed chief justice seems not to fit the evidence that the Pinckneys were planning to leave. For this older view, see Williams, A Founding Family, 13–​­14; Marvin R. Zahniser, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney: Founding Father (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), 9; Ravenel, 134–​­36. See South Carolina Gazette, January 22, February 19, 1753, for advertisements by Charles Pinckney about his plans. Leigh’s appointment was requested by the Board of Trade in London on January 11 and made by the crown on February 6. See H. Hale Bellot, “Presidential Address: The Leighs in South Carolina,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th ser. 6 (1956): 161–​­87. 11. ELP to George Morly, Esqr. [ELP’s business agent in England], August 1758, ELP Letterbook, 97, notes that Pinckney had been ill before he left. For earlier questions by another wealthy South Carolinian about the Pinckneys’ ability to afford living in England, see Andrew Rutledge to Peter Manigault, [1753], Papers of Eliza Lucas Pinckney and Harriott Pinckney Horry. 12. ELP to Mrs. Boddicott, May 2[, 1740], ELP Letterbook, 7; ELP to Charles and Thomas Pinckney, August 1758, ELP Letterbook, 95; ELP to Mrs. Evance, August 1758, ELP Letterbook, 99; ELP to [Mrs. Lucas], September 25, 1758, ELP Letterbook, 102, 101. 13. ELP to Vigerous Edwards, London, [February 1759], ELP Letterbook, 107. 14. ELP to Mrs. Pocklington, [c. May 1759], ELP Letterbook, 114. 15. ELP to Lady Carew of Beddington, May 1759, ELP Letterbook, 115. 16. ELP to Mrs. Pocklington, [c. May 1759], ELP Letterbook, 115; ELP to George Morly, [February 1759], ELP Letterbook, 108. 17. ELP Letterbook, 123, 143, 185, 107, 100, 117; Ravenel, 90; ELP Letterbook, 132. 18. ELP to [George Keate], [ca. 1781] Draft, Ravenel, 314–​­15. Papers of ELP dates this latter as 2 April 1786 and notes Pinckney crossed out “Comp’ts is too cold a word therefore” in her draft. Richardson, Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded (New York: Norton, 1958), 375. 19. ELP to Cousen Glover, [September–November] 1741, ELP Letterbook, 24. 20. ELP to George Keate, [November–December 1759?], ELP Letterbook, 129, 128–​­29; ELP to [Mrs. Lucas], September 25, 1758, ELP Letterbook, 100. 21. ELP to Mary Bartlett, [ca. March–April 1742], ELP Letterbook, 32. 22. ELP to Colonel Lucas, n.d. [ca. March–May] 1740, ELP Letterbook, 5–​­6; ELP to Mrs. Chardon, n.d. [before September 15, 1743], ELP Letterbook, 68. Pinckney never uses the term “indulgent” of herself. 23. American Weekly Mercury, April 20, 1727; New England Weekly Journal, September 19, 1727; American Weekly Mercury, October 12, 1727. 24. Boston Gazette, August 17, 1730; New England Weekly Journal, August 17, 1730; Boston News-L ​­ etter, September 10, 1730. See Nicole Eustace, Passion Is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the

Notes to Pages 196–199

269

Coming of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 109–​­18. 25. Ravenel, 145; Bellot, “Presidential Address”; Michael C. Batinski, Jonathan Belcher: Colonial Governor (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 13, 18. 26. M. C. Battestin and R. R. Battestin, “Fielding, Bedford, and the Westminster Election of 1749,” Eighteenth-​­Century Studies 11, 2 (Winter 1977–​­1978): 143–​­85; Nicholas Rogers, “Aristocratic Clientage, Trade and Independency: Popular Politics in Pre-​­Radical Westminster,” Past & Present 61 (1973): 70–​­106; Thomas Wright, England Under the House of Hanover: Its History and Condition During the Reigns of the Three Georges, 2 vols. (London: R. Bentley, 1848), 1: 237–​­40. 27. John Bullion, “Augusta [Princess Augusta of Saxe-​­Gotha], princess of Wales (1719–1772),” ODNB; Bullion, “ ‘To play what game she pleased without observation’: Princess Augusta and the Political Drama of Succession, 1736–1756,” in Clarissa Campbell Orr, ed., Queenship in Britain, 1660–1837: Royal Patronage, Court Culture, and Dynastic Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 207–35; Christine Gerrard, “Queens-​­in-​­Waiting: Caroline of Anspach and Augusta of Saxe-​­Gotha as Princesses of Wales,” in Orr, Queenship in Britain, 143–61. 28. Jonathan Edwards, Treatise Concerning the Religious Affections, ed. John E. Smith (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959), 95, 98. 29. Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie, The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith 1 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 233. 30. “Sensibility” has become the subject of a large literature. For general works on Britain, see Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society in Britain, 1660–​­1800 (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2001); John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1997); G. J. Barker-​­Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); and Janet M. Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (New York: Methuen, 1986). For America, see G. J. Barker-​­Benfield, Abigail and John Adams: The Americanization of Sensibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Sarah Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Eustace, Passion Is the Gale; Andrew Burstein, Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America’s Romantic Self-​­Image (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999). 31. Samuel Richardson, Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded, 5th ed., 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Franklin, 1742–​­1743); George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), 300, 419; Carol F. Karlsen and Laurie Crumpacker, eds., The Journal of Esther Edwards Burr, 1754–​­1757 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984), 98–​­108 (March 10–April 11, 1755). 32. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, ed., The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, Author of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison: Selected from the Original Manuscripts (London: Richard Phillips, 1804), 3: 244; Frances Reynolds, “Recollections of Dr. Johnson,” in Robina Napier, Johnsoniana; Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1889), 329; ELP to Colonel Lucas, February 10, 1742/3, ELP Letterbook, 59 (“sentiment”); ELP to Betsey Pinckney [Elizabeth Motte Pinckney], September 1780, Transcript in “Letters of ELP, . . . ​vol. 2, from 1745–​ 1­ 783 [1787], by Caroline Pinckney Seabrook, Pinckney Family Papers, South Carolina Historical Society (SCHS), 38-​­23 (“simpathy”). 33. ELP to Mrs. King, May [1759], ELP Letterbook, 117; ELP to Lady Carew, July 1760/[February 1762], ELP Letterbook, 178.

270 Notes to Pages 199–203 34. ELP to Mary Bartlett, [ca. June 1742], ELP Letterbook, 47–​­48. 35. ELP to Charles Pinckney, [ca. June–July], 1744, Ravenel, before p. 1 (facsimile). 36. ELP to Lady Mary Drayton, [ca. June–July 1758], ELP Letterbook, 93; ELP to Mrs. Pocklington, [ca. May 1759], ELP Letterbook, 114. 37. ELP to Mrs. Evance [Rebecca Raven Evance], n.d. [ca. August 1758–February 1759], ELP Letterbook, 105. On letters in the eighteenth century as a means of building networks, see Lindsay O’Neill, The Opened Letter: Networking in the Early Modern British World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). O’Neill (pp. 7–​­8) offers an overview of recent studies of correspondence. On letters as means of shaping and expressing feelings, see Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 38. Charleston City Gazette, July 17, 1793. 39. [Maria Pinckney], “ Memoir of the Pinckney Family,” 135. 40. George Farquhar, The Constant Couple, or, A Trip to the Jubilee a Comedy (London: Ralph Smith and Bennet Banbury, 1700), 56. 41. The English Theophrastus: or, The Manners of the Age. Being the Modern Characters of the Court, the Town, and the City (London: W. Turner, R. Basset, and J. Chantry, 1702), 103. 42. “Inamorato L’Oiseaux,” in William Byrd, Another Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1739–​­1741: With Letters and Literary Exercises, 1696–​­1726, ed. Maude H. Woodfin and Marion Tinling (Richmond, Va.: Dietz Press, 1942), 281; for female friendship and both Richardson and Johnson, see Frances Reynolds, “Recollections of Dr. Johnson,” in Napier, Johnsoniana, 329; Barker-​­Benfield stresses issues of gender in both Culture of Sensibility and Americanization of Sensibility; Rosemarie Zagarri, “Morals, Manners, and the Republican Mother,” American Quarterly 44 (1992): 192–​­215; Jan Lewis, “The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic,” WMQ 44, 4 (1987): 689–​­721. 43. Chesterfield, Letters Written by the late Right Honorable Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, to his son, Philip Stanhope, Esq., 2 vols. (Boston, 1779), 1: 195 (December 29, O.S. 1747); William Buell Sprague, The Life of Jedidiah Morse, D.D. (New York: Anson D.F. Randolph, 1874), xiv; Jan Lewis, “Sex and the Married Man: Benjamin Franklin’s Families,” in Larry E. Tise, ed., Benjamin Franklin and Women (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 67–​­82. 44. See William Henry Lyttelton to Mrs. Pinckney, October 24, [1759]; and same to same, March 6, [1760?], South Caroliniana Library, P 2042; also William Henry Lyttelton to Eliza Lucas Pinckney, 10 January [1760], Charles Cotesworth Pinckney Family Papers, LC. 45. Haydn Mason, “Keate, George (1729–1797),” ODNB; “Keate, George (1729–​­1797),” Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, Dictionary of National Biography (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1885–​ ­1900). On Keate and sympathy, see Jonathan Lamb, Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680–​ ­1840 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 250–​­81. 46. Peter Manigault to Ann Manigault, March 29, 1754, in Mabel L. Webber, ed., “Peter Manigault’s Letters,” SCHM 33 (1932): 57 (“mighty good”); Peter Manigault to Ann Manigault, June 24, 1753, SCHM 32 (1931): 179 (excellent woman and “Raptures”); Peter Manigault to Ann Manigault, December 8, 1753, SCHM 32 (1931): 270 (“pretty toy”); Charleston City Gazette, July 17, 1793. 47. ELP to unidentified person, [1753], Ravenel, 146. On the uses of birds and nature in the Pinckneys’ visit, see Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 201–​­9.

Notes to Pages 203–207

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48. ELP to unidentified person, [1753], Ravenel, 146, 153. 49. ELP to Mrs. Bartlett (London), May 20, 1746, Ravenel, 113 (Papers of ELP identifies the recipient as Mrs. Boddicott, Mary Steer [Mrs. Richard] Boddicott). On John Locke’s suggestions, see Locke, “Some Thoughts Concerning Education,” in James L. Axtell, ed., The Educational Writings of John Locke: A Critical Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 255–​­58. Pinckney’s phrase about having her son “play him self into learning” follows Locke’s account of a boy who “play’d himself into Spelling” (258). John Brewer, “Childhood Revisited: The Genesis of the Modern Toy,” History Today 30 (1980): 32–​­39; [Maria Pinckney], “Memoir of the Pinckney Family,” 135–​­36. The spunky young orphan hero of The History of little Goody Two-​­Shoes, first published in 1765, similarly used handmade blocks to teach other children. The History of little Goody Two-​­Shoes; otherwise called, Mrs. Margery Two-​­Shoes (New York: H. Gaine, 1775), 23–​­37; Margaret R. Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680–​­1780 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 79. 50. [Maria Pinckney], “Memoir of the Pinckney Family,” 135–​­36; ELP to George Keate, February 1762, ELP Letterbook, 181; Ravenel, 117, quoting Pinckney, Private Prayers, 1742–​­1758, Pinckney-​­Lowndes Papers, SCHS. 51. J. L. Bullion, “The Origins and Significance of Gossip About Princess Augusta and Lord Bute, 1755–1756,” Studies in Eighteenth-​­Century Culture 21 (1991): 245–65. 52. ELP to Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, no date [1768?], quoted in Ravenel, 246; ELP to Daniel Horry, Hampton, February 6, 1787, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney Family Papers, LC; ELP to Daniel Horry, February 18, 1787, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney Family Papers, LC. 53. New-​­England Weekly Journal, July 23, 1733, March 25, 1734. Both pieces come from London magazines. The first appeared as “Prudent Lenity of Parents,” London Magazine, Or, Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer 1 (November 1732): 391–​­92, and was noted as coming from the “Universal Spectator, November 11, No. 214.” It was reprinted in Poor Thomas improved: being More’s country almanack for the year of Christian account, 1767 (New York: W. Weyman, 1766), n.p.; Peter Manigault to Ann Manigault, February 26, 1754, in Mabel L. Webber, ed., “Peter Manigault’s Letters,” SCHM 32 (1931): 278. 54. See, for example, [Maria Pinckney], “Memoir of the Pinckney Family,” 138; Charles Cotesworth Pinckney to Thomas Pinckney, Charleston, July 17, 1793, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney Family Papers, LC. 55. ELP to Thomas Pinckney, May 17, 1779, Ravenel, 275–​­76. 56. [Maria Pinckney], “Memoir of the Pinckney Family,” 135. 57. G. Melvin Herndon, “Pinckney Horry, 1769–​­1828: Rebel Without a Cause,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 70 (Summer 1986): 232–​­53. 58. ELP to Mrs. Bartlett (London), May 20, 1746, Ravenel, 113 (the digital edition of the Papers identifies the recipient as Mrs. Boddicott); Locke, “Some Thoughts Concerning Education,” in Axtell, Educational Writings, 114–​­15. On this importance of work, see Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority 1750–​­1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 59. John Locke, “First Treatise,” in Locke, Two Treatises of Government: A Critical Edition with an Introduction and Apparatus Criticus, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 166; Locke, “Some Thoughts Concerning Education,” in Axtell, Educational Writings, 216. 60. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 13; Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Douglas den Uyl, 3 vols. (Indianapolis, Ind.:

272 Notes to Pages 207–213 Liberty Fund, 2001), 1: 114. For a more politically oriented discussion of this view from Pinckney’s time, see the sermon by Jonathan Mayhew, A Discourse concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-​­Resistance to the Higher Powers (Boston: D. Fowle, 1750). 61. John Tillotson, “The Mercy of God,” in Works of Dr. John Tillotson, Late Archbishop of Canterbury, 10 vols. (London: R. Priestley, 1820), 8: 52; Isaac Barrow, “Of the Gift of the Holy Spirit,” in The works of the learned Isaac Barrow, ... Published by ... Dr. John Tillotson, 4th ed., 4 vols. (London: James Round, Jacob Tonson, and William Taylor, 1716), 3: 371–​­72. 62. Louis B. Wright and Marion Tinling, eds., The Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1709–​­1712 (Richmond, Va.: Dietz Press, 1941), 210–​­11; Edwards, Religious Affections, 111; “South Carolina Gleanings in England,” SCHM 8 (1907): 218. On Edwards, see also Jonathan Edwards, Catalogues of Books, ed. Peter J. Thuesen, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 26 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 58–​­61. 63. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue [1726], ed. Wolfgang Leidhold (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004), 112–​­15, 152, 134. Samuel Clarke made similar arguments earlier in the century, although admitting that self-​­love was necessary; see, for example, Samuel Clarke, A Discourse Concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion (1706) in Lewis Amherst Selby-​­Bigge, British Moralists, Being Selections from Writers Principally of the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1897), 2: 26. 64. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 166; Charleston City Gazette, July 17, 1793. 65. Eliza Lucas Pinckney, Resolutions, [1748–​­1758], Pinckney-​­Lowndes Papers, SCHS; Ravenel, 116, 118. 66. Henry Mackenzie, “The Lounger,” No. 90, October 21, 1786, in The Miscellaneous Works of Henry Mackenzie, 3 vols. (Glasgow: Robert Chapman, 1820), 1: 254–​­61; ELP to Daniel Horry, April 16, 1782, SCHS, 38-​­5-​­2. 67. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 177. 68. ELP to Daniel Horry, August 7, 1783, SCHS 38-​­5-​­9 (this section is also transcribed in Ravenel, 309). 69. Locke, “Some Thoughts Concerning Education,” in Axtell, Educational Writings, 148, 150. 70. Private Prayers, 1742–​­1758, transcribed in Ravenel, 118; ELP to Mary Bartlett, [c. March– April 1742], ELP Letterbook, 34; Eliza Lucas Pinckney to Harriott Pinckney Horry, June 8, 1778, Harriott Horry Ravenel family papers, 1694–ca. 1935 (1086.00) SCHS, 38-3-2. 71. ELP to unidentified person, [1753], Ravenel, 147; Michael Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1500–​­1700 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Lawrence Stone, ed., An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London: Routledge, 1994); John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–​­1783 (New York: Knopf, 1989). 72. Viscount Henry St. John Bolingbroke, Political Writings, ed. David Armitage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 287–​­88. 73. Bolingbroke, Political Writings, 287, 290. 74. ELP to Daniel Horry, [Jr.], August 7, 1783, SCHS 38-5-9 (section transcribed in Ravenel, 309–​­10). 75. Ravenel, 153–​­54. 76. ELP to Mrs. Gabriel Manigault, [ca. December–January 1753–​­1754], ELP Letterbook, 80–​ ­81 (The Papers dates this letter [February/March] [1754]); ELP to George Keate, February 1762, ELP Letterbook, 181. Pinckney later crossed out the quoted phrase. Franklin to Mary Stevenson, Philadelphia, March 25, 1763, Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 10: 231–​­35.

Notes to Pages 214–217

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77. Marvin R. Zahniser, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Founding Father (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967). 78. “Letter LXVII: To His Grace the Duke of Grafton; 27 November 1771,” The letters of the celebrated Junius: A more complete edition than any yet published, 2 vols. (London: n.p., 1783), 2: 257; see Adam Sisman, Boswell’s Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 171–​­92. 79. For the later histories of the Pinckney children, see Zahniser, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney; Williams, Founding Family; Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Life of General Thomas Pinckney (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895). 80. Kentucky Resolutions, 1798, Jefferson’s Fair Copy [before 4 October 1798], in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Main Series (1 January 1798–31 January 1799), 30: 548. 81. On the political uses of sensibility, see Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution, 163–​­264; Burstein, Sentimental Democracy. This view of sensibility as an extension of politeness draws on Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society. For different views of the movement, see Barker-B ​­ enfield, Abigail and John Adams; and Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution, which (respectively) see sensibility as a continuation of older concerns or something quite new. 82. On women, see Barker-​­Benfield, Abigail and John Adams; Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Rosemarie Zagarri, “The Rights of Man and Woman,” WMQ 55 (1998): 203–​­30; Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 83. [Maria Pinckney], “A Memoir of the Pinckney Family,” 135; Ravenel, 107. 84. See the 2002 Exhibit, “Enterprising Women: 250 Years of American History,” Schlesinger Library of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. 85. Accounts of Pinckney for children: June Edelstein, Eliza Lucas Pinckney: Indigo Planter, California Vistas, Leveled Biography (New York: Macmillan/McGraw-​­Hill School Division, 2007); Laurie Krebs, A Day in the Life of a Colonial Indigo Planter, Library of Living and Working in Colonial Times (New York: PowerKids Press, 2003). Novelized lives of Pinckney: Pamela Bauer Mueller, Water to My Soul: The Story of Eliza Lucas Pinckney (Jekyll Island, Ga.: Pinata Pub, 2012); Frances Leigh Williams, Plantation Patriot: A Biography of Eliza Lucas Pinckney (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967); and Nell S. Graydon, Eliza of Wappoo (Columbia, S.C.: R.L. Bryan, 1967). Essays in textbooks for undergraduates: Constance Schulz, “Eliza Lucas Pinckney,” in G. J. Barker-​­Benfield and Catherine Clinton, Portraits of American Women (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 65–​­81; Gary L. Hewitt, “Eliza Lucas Pinckney: Vegetables and Virtue,” in Charles W. Calhoun, ed., The Human Tradition in America from the Colonial Era Through Reconstruction (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources Books, 2002), 73–​­94. 86. See Laurel Thacher Ulrich, Well-​­Behaved Women Seldom Make History (New York: Knopf, 2007).

Epilogue. The Dissolution of the Politics of Politeness 1. Isaac Weld, Travels Through the States of North America and the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, During the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London: Printed for John Stockdale, Piccadilly, 1799), 1: 105–​­6n. See a report of a similar comment from Stuart noted in John Neal, “Randoph, a Novel” (1823) in Observations on American Art: Selections from the Writings of John Neal (1793–​­1876), ed. Harrold Edward Dickson (State College: Pennsylvania State College, 1943), 2.

274 Notes to Pages 219–225 2. George Washington to the marquis de Lafayette, June 18, 1788 (unless otherwise noted, letters and other writings of Founders used here can be found at “Founders Online, National Archives,’ http://founders.archives.gov/). 3. George Washington to Peter Hog, January 10, 1756; Victor Hugo Paltsits, ed., Washington’s Farewell Address, in Facsimile, with Transliterations of All the Drafts of Washington, Madison, & Hamilton, Together with Their Correspondence and Other Supporting Documents (New York: New York Public Library, 1935), 157. 4. George Washington to Officers of the Army, Head Quarters Newburgh, March 15, 1783; the letter to the officers was enclosed in George Washington to Elias Boudinot, Head Quarters, March 12, 1783. 5. Alexander Hamilton, A Letter from Phocion to the Considerate Citizens of New York. 6. Mentor’s Reply to Phocion’s Letter; With Some Observations on Trade. Addressed to the Citizens of New-​­York (New York: Shepard Kollock, 1784), 17–​­18 (“it is easy”), 5 (“great disqualification”); Hamilton, Second Letter from Phocion [New York, April 1784]. 7. Jefferson to Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Washington, November 24, 1808. 8. Jefferson to Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Washington, November 24, 1808 (“broils”); Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 162–​­63. 9. Abigail Adams to John Adams, Braintree, March 31, 1776; Abigail Adams to John Adams, May 7, 1776 (“absolute,” “arbitary”). 10. Abigail Adams to John Adams, Braintree, March 31, 1776. The term “soft power” comes from Joseph S. Nye; see Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004). 11. John Adams to Abigail Adams, April 14, 1776. 12. Ibid. (“Saucy”); Abigail Adams to Mercy Otis Warren, April 27, 1776. 13. John Adams to Abigail Adams, April 23, 1776; Abigail Adams to John Adams, May 7, 1776. 14. Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, April 16, 1784; Jefferson to Lafayette, Richmond, March 10th, 1781; Lafayette to Thomas Jefferson, Williams Burg, March 16, 1781. 15. Thomas Jefferson to Patrick Henry, Albemarle, March 27, 1779. 16. Mason Locke Weems, The Life of George Washington: with Curious Anecdotes, Equally Honourable to Himself, and Exemplary to His Young Caountrymen, 9th ed. (Philadelphia: Matthew Carey, 1809), 194; Auguste Levasseur, Lafayette in America in 1824 and 1825: Or, Journal of a Voyage to the United States, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1829). 17. Abigail Adams to John Adams, May 7, 1776. 18. Alexander Pope, “Epistle II. To a Lady,” in The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, ed. R. Carruthers 4 vols. (London, 1854), 4: 30–​­31 (ll. 262–​­64). 19. Abigail Adams Smith, Journal and Correspondence of Miss Adams, Daughter of John Adams, Second President of the United States: Written in France and England, in 1785 (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1841), 1: ix–x. 20. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution, trans. John Bonner (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1856), 124–​­25; Alexis de Tocqueville, On the State of Society in France Before the Revolution of 1789: And on the Causes Which Led to That Event, trans. Henry Reeve (London, 1856), 180 (“it submitted”). See the original wording in Alexis de Tocqueville, L’Ancien régime et la révolution, 7th ed. (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1866), 145. 21. Thomas Jefferson to Pierre S. du Pont de Nemours, March 2, 1809. 22. Thomas Jefferson to Martha Jefferson Randolph, February 8, 1798.

Notes to Pages 225–229

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23. Thomas Jefferson to Phillip Mazzei, April 24, 1796. 24. Thomas Jefferson to Fayetteville Republican Citizens, March 17, 1801. 25. Not surprisingly, nineteenth-​­century partisans found Jefferson’s description of despotism as “calm” more congenial than his association of contention with tyranny. See National Advocate (New York), September 6, 1824; James Buchanan to G. Leiper, July 3, 1833, in James Buchanan, The Works of James Buchanan: Comprising His Speeches, State Papers and Private Correspondence, ed. John Bassett Moore (Philadelphia, 1908), 2: 366. 26. Thomas Jefferson to Henry Lee, August 10, 1824. 27. Thomas Paine, Common sense; addressed to the inhabitants of America, on the following interesting subjects (Philadelphia: R. Bell, 1776), 1. 28. Thomas Jefferson to Catherine Church, 27 March 1801 (“social affections”); Thomas Jefferson to Mary Jefferson Eppes, Philadelphia, February 12, 1800 (“I know no happiness”). See also Jan Lewis, “The Blessings of Domestic Society: Thomas Jefferson’s Family and the Transformation of American Politics,” in Peter S. Onuf, ed., Jeffersonian Legacies (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 109–​­46; Jan Lewis, “ ‘Those Scenes for Which Alone My Heart Was Made’: Affection and Politics in the Age of Jefferson and Hamilton,” in Peter N. Stearns and Jan Lewis, eds., An Emotional History of the United States (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 52–​­65. 29. Thomas Jefferson to Henry Lee, August 10, 1824. 30. Weems, Life of George Washington, 5 (“private life”), chaps. 13–​­16 (“Washington’s character,” 174–​­227), n.p. (“as independent”). 31. Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Barker-​ ­Benfield, The Americanization of Sensibility, 13–​­15. See, more generally, Foucault’s argument that the growth of a sense of interior life involved more intensive discipline. 32. OED, s.v. “domestic.” See the editorial notes at Thomas Jefferson to William Barton, 12 August 1790, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-​­17-​­02-​­0099-​­0002; and George Washington from Charles Thomson, 23 July 1789, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-​­03-​­02-​­0162. 33. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, The Federalist (Gideon Edition), ed. George W. Carey and James McClellan (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), no. 39; McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), at Legal Information Institute, http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/17/316#writing-​­USSC_CR_0017_0316_ZO; Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve, rev. ed., 2 vols. (New York: Colonial Press, 1899), http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HY PER/DETOC/toc_indx.html, Book I, chap. 5. See the similar argument in Book I, Chapter 2, about New England towns. For a further contemporary discussion of this metaphor, see John Taylor [of Caroline], Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated (Richmond, Va.: Shepherd and Pollard, 1820), 99–​­149. Linda K. Kerber considers Tocqueville the central figure in establishing the ideas of separate spheres for women. Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” JAH 75, 1 (June 1988): 9–​­39. 34. Letters written by the late Right Honorable Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, to his son, Philip Stanhope, Esq., 2 vols. (Boston, 1779), 1: 80 (letter 37). American editions of Chesterfield were calculated from Readex’s online America’s Historical Imprints. See also Sidney L. Gulick, A Chesterfield Bibliography to 1800, 2nd ed. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979). For recent discussions of Chesterfield in the American context, see Christopher J.

276 Notes to Pages 229–230 Lukasik, Discerning Characters: The Culture of Appearance in Early America, Early American Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 59–​­72; C. Dallett Hemphill, Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620–​­1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 70–​­81; Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992), 36–​­38. I see Chesterfield’s writing as the culmination of a tradition that had developed earlier, not, as Hemphill suggests, the expression of a new “middle-​­class” morality that emerged in the middle of the eighteenth century (Hemphill, Bowing to Necessities, 62–​­126). 35. George Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy” (1911), http://www. monadnock.net/santayana/genteel.html. 36. Douglass tells this story in all three versions of his autobiography. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself (Boston: Published at the anti-​­slavery office, 1845), 27–​­38, esp. 37 (“tender heart”); Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, with an Introduction by James M’Cune Smith (New York: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855), 142–​­55; Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself (Boston: De Wolfe & Fiske, 1892), 89–​­101. 37. Douglass, My Bondage, 153 (“model of affection”); Douglass, Narrative, 37 (“as she supposed”); Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: A Genetic Text, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay and Paul M. Zall (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981), 18; Douglass, Life and Times, 93 (“Frown,” “hardest cuffs”). 38. Douglass, Narrative, 37 (“lamblike”), 33 (“new and special,” “pathway”), 36 (“depravity”); Douglass, My Bondage, 144–​­45 (“natural sweetness”), 153 (“mighty struggle”); Douglass, Narrative, 32 (“dehumanizing”). 39. Douglass, My Bondage, 142. 40. Franklin, Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: A Genetic Text, 18–​­19; Douglass, My Bondage, 143; Douglass, Narrative, 32.

Index

Absolute power, 43, 45, 181, 207, 208, 222, 224 Act of Union, 70–71 Adams, Abigail, 221–24 Adams, John, 5, 170, 183, 215, 221–24 Adams, John Quincy, 223 Adams, Nabby (Abigail Adams Smith), 224 Addison, Joseph, 3, 10, 77–78, 84, 85, 136. See also The Spectator Affection, 195, 208; as political language, 196–97 Alien Act (1705), 70 Allestree, Richard, 47 American Revolutionary War, 212, 213, 220, 223 Andrews, Pamela. See Samuel Richardson, Pamela Andros, Edmund, 32, 36, 39, 48, 102, 131 Anger, 110; James Blair on, 46–47; James I on, 28–29; Cotton and Increase Mather on, 46–47 Anglican Church. See Church of England Annapolis, Maryland, 27, 28 Anne, queen of England, Great Britain, 9, 50, 70, 71 Antigua, 184, 190–91 Arbitrary, 43–44 Archdale, John, 74 Augusta, princess of Wales, 187–88, 189, 190, 197, 201–4, 211–12 Augustus Caesar, 220 Ault, Hugh, 229–30 Ault, Sophia, 229–30 Authoritarian rule, 12–13, 23, 43, 45, 77, 83, 101 Bacon’s Rebellion, 8, 35, 38 Bahamas, 97, 107, 108–9, 157 Barbados, 34, 176. See also Tom Bell Bartlett, Mary, 191, 196 Bath, Somerset, 189, 213

Bedlam, 21 Belcher, Andrew, 131–34 Belcher, Andrew (son of Jonathan), 136 Belcher, Jonathan: Chapter 4 passim, 5, 12; early life, 131–34; trip to Germany, 2–3, 133, 152, 197; governor of New Hampshire, 147, 150–51, 153–54, 155, 156, 196; governor of New Jersey, 157–58; on Belcher name, 142; paintings, 130, 152–53; paper money, 153, 155–56; permanent salary, 134, 147–49, 151, 155; portrait print, 127, 128, 135–36, 140, 145, 152–53, 158; religious loyalties, 143–44, 150; removal as governor, 129, 144, 150 Belcher, Jonathan, Jr., 137–45, 146 “Belcher the Apostate,” 147–48 Bell, Tom (Jr.): Chapter 5 passim; in Barbados, 164, 168, 170, 175–76, 177, 186; early life, 168; at Harvard, 168–69; learning, 172, 174; other occupations, 170; physical description, 177; preaching, 170; pseudonyms, 164; plans for publication, 184; Rowland incident, 163, 164, 171, 177; school teaching, 169–70 Benevolence, 9–10, 181, 195, 208–9 Benjamin, Walter, 152 Bermuda, 32, 33, 34, 181 Bestiality, 63 Beverley, Robert, II, 33, 36, 41, 43, 45 Bishop, Abraham, 183 Bladen, Martin, 140, 151 Blair, James: Chapter 1 passim; early life, 36; relationship with Francis Nicholson, 19–21, 27, 36, 44; See also College of William and Mary Blair, Sarah Harrison, 36, 37; wedding ceremony rumors, 38 Bodin, Jean, 45 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, viscount, 211–12 Boston Latin School, 168, 171, 172, 174

278 Index Boston, politeness of, 201 Boswell, James, 214 Bourdieu, Pierre, 178 Boyer, Abel, 148 Brackenridge, Hugh Henry, 227 Brenton, Jahleel, 33 Bridenbaugh, Carl, 164 Bristol, 197 Burgess, Elizeus, 133 Burnet, Bishop Gilbert, 175 Burnet, Gilbert (Tom Bell pseudonym), 175–76 Burnet, William, 134, 148, 149, 154, 164, 175–76, 186 Burr, Aaron, Jr., 153, 198 Burr, Aaron, Sr., 153, 198 Burr, Esther Edwards, 198 Burroughs (Francis Nicholson’s servant and cook), 26 Burroughs, Stephen, 166, 173 Bushman, Richard L., 11 Bute, third earl of, 204 Butler, Nathaniel (Tom Bell pseudonym) 164 Byrd, William I, 95, 124 Byrd, William II: Chapter 3 passim, 6, 13, 36, 200, 208; Diary, 103; Dividing Line Journal, 93, 98, 99, 112, 113; early life, 95, 96; History of the Dividing Line, 111–19, 119–23; “A Journey to the Land of Eden Anno 1733,” 113, 114; on Edward Nott, 41–42, 102; “A Progress to the Mines in the year 1732,” 113; other publications, 103; Royal Society, 95, 103; Secret History of the Line, 90, 100–111, 119–23; self– description, 48, 125–26, 200; and slavery, 123–26; Swiss immigrants, 114, 118, 122; See also Dividing Line Expedition; Leadership, William Byrd II on Campbell, John (Tom Bell pseudonym), 164 Carew, Bampfylde-Moore, 179 Carew, Lady, 201 Carolina Lords Proprietors, 50, 68, 71, 72, 82–83; Bermuda, 107, 108; North Carolina, 99, 120, 122 Carson, Cary, 11 Carter, Robert (“King”), 47 Cary’s Rebellion (North Carolina), 120 Castle, Elizabeth, 171 Catesby, Mark, 27 Cavalcade, 154 Character (literary genre), 174, 223

Charles II, king, 12, 30, 38, 104 Charles Town, South Carolina, 62, 75, 76, 192, 212 Checkley, John, 144 Chester County, Virginia, 179, 183 Chesterfield, Lord, 201, 228, 229 Chickasaw, 59, 60, 62, 67, 68, 80 Child, James, 62 Chocolate, Theft of, 168 Choctaw, 54 Church Act (South Carolina), 72, 76 Church of England, 45, 71–77, 150, 196, 208. See also Joseph Dudley; Nathaniel Johnson; Thomas Nairne; Francis Nicholson; Nonjurors; Occasional conformity; Benning Wentworth Civil War, English, 8, 45, 59 Codrington, Christopher, 33 Colleton County, South Carolina, 55, 56, 71 Collinson, Peter, 111–14, 126 Colman, Benjamin, 45, 139, 144 Commons House, South Carolina, 50, 56, 61, 71–73 Compassion, 77–78, 126, 176, 180–82, 208 Complaisance, 3, 110, 125, 183, 201, 228, 229 Condescension, 13, 84, 138, 159 Confidence men, 166, 171–72, 173 Constitutional Convention, 211, 213–14 Coode, John, 23, 24, 26 Cooke, Elisha, Jr., 151–52 Cornbury, Lord, 48, 49 Counterfeiting, 170, 171, 173 Craven, Charles, 45 Criminals, 171 Custis, Daniel Parke, 96 Cutts, Lord, 40, 139 Dandridge, William, 89–90, 96, 97, 98, 100, 107, 116 Day, Samuel, 32, 34 Deerskins, 61, 80 Defoe, Daniel, 44, 73, 76 Democracy, 13–14, 214–15, 225–26 Dingee, Captain, 167, 172, 174 Dissenters, 8, 133, 143, 144, 150, 196; and politics, 9, 71; South Carolina, 72–74. See also Occasional conformity Dissenters’ Party (South Carolina), 74 Dividing Line Expedition: origins, 93–94; personnel, 94–97, 123; results, 99. See also William Byrd II

Index 279 Dixon, John, 63 Dominion of New England, 12, 25, 30, 38–39, 155 Douglass, Frederick, 229–30 Dudley, Joseph, 39–40, 139, 155 Dulany, Daniel, 183 Dummer, Jeremiah, 133 Dunbar, David, 149–52, 153, 156, 157 Eden, Charles, 120 Edenton, North Carolina, 117, 184 Edwards, Jonathan, 143, 189, 198, 208 Egmont, Earl of, 123, 124–25 Elites, Colonial, 34–41 Elizabeth, queen, 211, 220–21 Emotions, 10, 205, 210, 225; Elizabeth Lucas Pinckney and, 194–95, 198, 201, 209, 217; emotional intelligence, 6, 158–59, 222–23; expressiveness, 189, 194–95, 198, 215, 228; restraint, 42, 46, 210; William Byrd, II, and, 6, 109. See also Anger Empire, 6–7, 12, 30–34, 38, 83–84 Evangelical Christianity, 16 Everard, Richard, 94, 96, 120, 122 Everglades, 51, 56 Exclusion Act (South Carolina), 72–73 Exclusion Crisis, 8 Faber, John, Jr., 127, 135–36, 146 Fairfax Family (Virginia), 170 Fairfax, Lord, 114 Fielding, Henry, 5 Filmer, Robert, 43, 45, 207, 208 “Firebrand.” See Richard Fitzwilliam Fitzwilliam, Richard, 89–90, 96–97, 105–9 Fletcher, Benjamin, 33 Florida, 51, 56, 57, 80–81 Forest policy, 149, 156 Franklin, Benjamin, 166, 170, 172, 181, 198, 213; conversation, 3–6, 201, 221; relationship with brother James, 1, 179, 229, 230; and science, 95, 114 Franklin, James, 1, 177, 179 Frazer, John, 62 Frederick, prince of Wales, 188, 197–98 Freemasonry, 133, 179 French Revolution, 219, 224 Gale, Christopher, 106, 107, 120, 121 Garrick, David, 192, 201 Geneva, Switzerland, 213

Gentility, 10–11, 91, 178–79 George I, king of Great Britain, 133, 187, 196, 198 George II, king of Great Britain, 95, 196, 197 George III, king of Great Britain, 187, 198, 204, 211, 212 Georgia, 124 Gibbon, Edward, 104 Glorious Revolution, 8, 12, 30, 38, 131; Whigs and Tories on, 70–71, 74, 76 Gooch, William, 97–99, 105–7 Great Awakening, 170, 171, 182 Great Dismal Swamp, 6, 97, 100, 108, 110, 116, 118 Greene, Jack P., 8 Grenville, Lord John, 71, 77 Guild, John, 172 Guyse, John, 152 Habermas, Jürgen, 10 Hamilton, Andrew, 181 Hamilton, Alexander, 220–21 Hamilton, Dr. Alexander, 170, 177–78, 200–201 Hampton Plantation, 205–6 Hanover County, Virginia, 184 Hanoverian Succession, 9, 70, 76, 133, 197 Harrison Family (Virginia), 35–36 Harrison, Nathaniel, 96 Harvard College, 45, 131–32, 137, 164, 168–69, 171 Haskell, Thomas, 179 Hobbes, Thomas, 45, 181, 207, 208 Horry, Daniel, Jr., 205, 206, 209, 210 Horry, Daniel (Sr.), 212 Horry, Harriott Pinckney, 187–88, 190, 192, 203–6, 212, 216 House of Commons, 139–41, 155, 196, 197 House of Lords, 71, 73, 74, 76, 196 Huguenots, 66–67 Hutcheson, Frances, 6, 208 Hutchinson, Elisha, 168, 172 Hutchinson, Francis Partridge (pseudonym of Tom Bell), 169–70 Hutchinson, Col. Thomas, 172 Hutchinson, Thomas (governor of Massachusetts), 132, 132, 135, 153, 155, 158, 168 Hypocrisy, 177, 182, 189, 217 Indentured servants, 34–35 Indians: Byrd on, 118; Clans, 60; Friendship rituals, 59; Southeastern, 53, 54–64, 67–68, 78–83. See also Chickasaw; Choctaw; Tallapoosa; Tuscarora; Yamasee

280 Index Indian trade, 62–64, 95 Indian traders: South Carolina, 56, 60–63, 81; Virginia, 95, 124 Indulgence, 1, 195–96, 208 Inns of Court, 95, 137–38 Io (slave), 133 Irvine, Professor Alexander, 97–98, 101(cap.) Jamaica, 38, 39, 176 James I, king of England (James VI of Scotland), 28–29 James II, king of England, 8, 9, 12, 25, 76; governing in America, 30, 38–39 Jefferson, Thomas, 2, 125, 126, 170, 215, 224–27; on politeness, 221; on slavery, 221, 225, 226, 230 Jews, 175–76 Johnson, Nathaniel: Chapter 2 passim, 102, 122; early life, 68; Glorious Revolution, 77; support for Church of England, 67–68, 72–74, 77 Johnson, Samuel, 199, 214 Jones, Hugh, 117 Journals, 103–4 Keate, George, 195, 201 Keimer, Samuel, 179 King Philip’s War, 38, 81, 131 Kit-Cat Club, 85, 136 Klein, Lawrence E., 10 Lafayette, Marquis de, 206, 219, 223 Land Bank (Massachusetts), 156 Leadership, 5, 6, 125, 158–59; William Byrd II on, 90–91, 109–11, 112; ideal of moderation, 42–46, 48–49 Leeward Islands, 33, 39, 47, 77 Leigh, Peter, 197 Leisler, Jacob, 8 Lilburne, John, 59 Lincoln, bishop of, 139–41 Little, William, 120 Livingston, ___ (Tom Bell pseudonym), 183 Livingston family (New York), 170 Livingston, Robert (Albany), 183 Lloyd, ___ (Tom Bell pseudonym), 167 Lloyd, William (Tom Bell pseudonym), 174 Locke blocks, 204 Locke, John, 36, 191, 213; on education, 3, 5, 203–4, 206–7, 210; on government, 2, 9, 43, 60, 207

London, bishop of, 21, 27, 36 Lopez family (Barbados), 175–76 Louisiana (French colony), 51, 54, 57, 78, 79, 80 Lovelace, Lord (governor of New York), 48 Lovick, John, 120, 121(cap.), 122 Lowther, James, earl of Lonsdale, 214 Loyalists (American Revolution), 220, 221 Lucas, George, 190–92 Lyttelton, William, 201 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 29 Mackenzie, Henry, 209 Madison, James, 227 Magna Carta, 43 Maine, 150, 180 Manigault, Peter, 201, 205 Marshall, John, 227 Marston, Edward, 76–77 Maryland, 33, 39. See also Annapolis; Francis Nicholson, governor of Maryland Massachusetts Charter, 39, 132, 134, 151, 154–55 Material culture, 5, 53, 54, 91, 179 Mather, Cotton, 39–40, 46–47, 95, 152, 155 Mather, Increase, 39–40, 46–47, 155 Mathers, ___ (Chester) (Tom Bell pseudo­ nym), 183 Mayo, William, 98, 101(cap.) McCullough v. Maryland (Supreme Court case), 227 McGraw, James, 178 Meekness, 46–48 Mezzotint prints, 127, 135–36, 152–53 Middleton, Robert (Tom Bell pseudonym), 164 Mobile. See Louisiana (French Colony) Moderation, 19, 40, 42, 44–45, 48, 221, 223; George Washington and 219–20; and early Whigs, 74, 77. See also Leadership, ideal of moderation Monroe, Jonathan, 25 Monster, sea, 181 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de, 211 More, Nathaniel (Tom Bell pseudonym), 164 Morris, Lewis, 48–49 Morse, Jedediah, 201 Moseley, Edward, 120, 121(cap.) Nairne, Thomas: Chapter 2 passim; Church of England, 67–68, 74–75; death, 78–79; Dissenters, connection with, 74–75; early life, 56; as

Index 281 Indian agent, 51, 54, 61, 63–64, 79, 80, 83; A Letter from South Carolina, 65–67; map, 54, 55(cap.); military plans, 78–80; and slavery, 79–80; treason accusation, 50–51, 74–77; war with Spanish Florida, 56, 57, 79–80 Newburgh, New York, 220 Newcastle, duke of, 137 Newcastle, Pennsylvania, 167 Newfoundland, 34 New Hampshire: See Jonathan Belcher; Benning Wentworth New Jersey, College of (later Princeton University), 153, 158, 198 Newman, Henry, 127, 136, 140, 144, 158 Newspapers, 74, 105, 164, 171, 182–83 Newton, Isaac, 3, 95 New York, 35, 39, 48, 49, 156–57, 188; Dominion of New England, 25, 30, 38–39, 139; Glorious Revolution, 8, 38; treatment of Loyalists, 220–21 New York City, 178, 183, 201; Tom Bell in, 170, 180, 184 Nicholson, Francis: Chapter 1 passim; 7, 102, 122, 189; support for Church of England, 27, 31–32, 72; city planning, 27, 28; governor of Maryland, 19, 23–24, 25, 27–28, 31; governor of South Carolina, 82; Nova Scotia campaign, 84; Virginia courtship, 7, 21 Nonjurors, 76–77 Norfolk, Virginia, 114, 115–16 North Carolina, 57, 96, 116–17, 186; political difficulties, 120–12 Nott, Edward, 41–42, 49, 102, 122 Nova Scotia, 84, 145 Occasional conformity, 72, 74, 84 Orrery, earl of, 122 Pachelbel, Charles Theodore, 191 Packer, Joseph-Bill, 171 Paine, Thomas, 15, 226 Paintings, 123, 130, 152–53, 217 Pamela. See Samuel Richardson, Pamela Parke, Daniel, 47, 96 Partridge, Richard (Jonathan Belcher’s London agent), 129, 138, 141, 143, 145, 152, 158 Peddlers, 130, 170–71 Pemberton, Ebenezer, 132, 135 Pennsylvania, 32, 96, 104, 166; Tom Bell in, 167, 170, 179

Penn, William, 44, 104 Perceval, John. See Egmont, earl of Philadelphia, College of, 181 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 5, 171, 181, 183, 201; Tom Bell in, 167, 168, 170, 174, 184 Philips, Richard, 130 Phips, William, 33–34, 40, 131, 154–55 Pinckney, Charles, 191–92, 193, 208 Pinckney, Charles Cotesworth, 192, 203–6, 211, 212, 213–15 Pinckney, Elizabeth Lamb, 191 Pinckney, Elizabeth [Eliza] Lucas: Chapter 6 passim; early life, 190–91; London residence, 192, 201, 213; marriage, 191–92; parenting, 203–6, 210; self-discipline, 191, 209–10; and slavery, 13, 210–11; later accounts of, 216 Pinckney, Harriott. See Harriott Pinckney Horry Pinckney, Thomas, 192, 205, 212, 213–15 Plymouth County, Massachusetts, 170 Pocklington, Mrs., 194 Politeness, 84–85, 125, 138, 189, 212–13, 221, 228; earlier meaning of term, 2–3; historical accounts of, 10–12 Pope, Alexander, 139, 224 Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 134, 177, 183 Prerogative, Royal, 12, 42, 43, 129, 147, 151 Pretender, The (son of James II), 9, 76 Public Sphere, 10 Public and Private, 227 Quary, Robert, 32 Queen Ann’s War (War of the Spanish Succession), 54, 57 Randall, Captain, from Havana (Tom Bell pseudonym), 164 Randolph, Edward, 33, 34 Refinement, 2, 10–11, 215–16 Religion, 219, 220. See also Jonathan Belcher, religious loyalties; Church of England; Dissenters; Nonjurors Restoration (1660), 8, 28, 44 Revere, Paul, 170 Reynolds, Anthony, 140–41 Richardson, Samuel, 199; Pamela, 191, 198–99, 215; Clarissa, 215 Richier, Isaac, 33 Richmond, Virginia, 95

282 Index Rowland, John, 163, 165, 171, 172, 177, 182 Royal Society, The, 95, 103, 133 Sahlins, Marshall, 167 Santayana, George, 229 Scotland, 36, 56, 70–71, 203 Secret history genre, 104–5 Seduction novels, 182, 215 Sensibility, 198–200, 209, 210, 215–16, 273n81 Seven Years’ War, 157 Sewall, Samuel, 134 Shaftesbury, third earl of, 9, 10, 207 Shields, David S., 11 Shirley, William, 137, 154, 156–57, 259n96 Short, Richard, 33 Shute, Samuel, 133, 134, 142, 148, 151 Sidney, Algernon, 9, 60 Slavery, 12–13, 82, 133, 211, 229; of Indians 35, 61–63, 80, 82; in Virginia, 35, 124. See also William Byrd II; Dividing Line Expedition; Thomas Nairne; Elizabeth Lucas Pinckney Sloane, Hans, 119 Slye, Gerard, 23–24, 26, 27 Smibert, John, 152 Smith, Adam, 198, 209, 210 Smith, Thomas, 61 Smith, William, 181 Snowden, Captain, 26 Society of Friends (Quakers), 44, 143 Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 127, 136, 144 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 67–68, 73 Soft power, 222 Sophia, princess, of Hanover, 133, 152 South Carolina, 38, 44, 45, 50–53, 82–83, 208, 214 Southwell, Robert, 103, 111 Spectator, The, 3, 10, 77–78, 84–85, 109 Spheres (metaphor), 227 Spotswood, Alexander, 96, 113 St. Augustine, Florida, 56, 80 Steele, Richard, 84, 85, 136. See also The Spectator Stockton, John, 163, 170–71 Stuart, Gilbert, 217, 218 Sunderland, Charles Spencer, third earl of, 54, 64–65, 72; political life, 61, 71, 73, 74–76, 83–85

Sunderland, countess of (Anne Churchill Spencer), 85 Sympathy, 125–26, 181–82, 199, 209, 210, 222 Tallapoosa, 59, 60, 67, 83 Tamworth, Staffordshire, 139–40 Teaching, school, 169, 171–72, 173 Tenderness, 126, 129, 140, 197, 229; defined, 195–96; of Queen Elizabeth, 211; in family and religion, 196, 207–8 Tennent, Gilbert, 182 Tennent, William, Jr., 163, 177, 182 Thomas, Samuel, 67–70 Tillotson, John, 9–10, 208 “Tipperary” (Firebrand’s servant in William Byrd II, Secret History), 107, 108, 123 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 224, 227 Tories, 9, 10, 28, 70–71, 76, 84 Torture, 51, 78–79 Townshend, Lord, 152 Treason, 155. See also Thomas Nairne Trott, Nicholas, 74 Tuscarora, 57 Tuscarora War, 85, 94 Tynte, Edward, 44 Tyranny, 1, 73, 221, 222 Vermont, 156 Vetch, Samuel, 84 Victoria, queen of Great Britain, 189 Virginia: Tom Bell in, 169–70, 171, 184; rise of native-born elite, 34–38 Voltaire, 201, 211 Wager, Charles, 114–15, 117–18, 119, 123 Waldron, Richard, 153–54 Walpole, Massachusetts, 170 Walpole, Robert, 119, 197 Walrond, Edward, 33 War of the Austrian Succession, 157 War of the Spanish Succession. See Queen Anne’s War Warren, Mercy Otis, 222 Wars, British, with France, 9, 12, 84 Washington, George, 5, 16, 217, 218, 219–20, 222, 223, 227, 228 Washington, Martha Dandridge Custis, 96 Watts, Isaac, 134–35, 143, 144, 152, 158 Weber, Max, 179 Weems, Mason Locke, 16, 223, 227, 228

Index 283 Welch, Thomas, 62 Weld, Isaac, 217 Wentworth, Benning, 156–57, 259n98 Whigs: and government, 83–84, 211; ideas, 9, 59, 68, 83, 85, 148; party, 9, 10, 61, 70–71, 74, 76, 104; and politeness, 77. See also Moderation, and early Whigs Whitefield, George, 154, 164, 171, 182 Wilks, Francis, 142 William and Mary, College of, 19, 21, 22, 27, 36, 98 William, King and Queen Mary, 8, 9, 27, 31, 44, 77, 84 William III, king of England, 27, 133

Williamsburg, Virginia, 21, 27, 184 Wilson, Joseph, 171 Winthrop, John, 43 Women, 7, 21, 59, 64, 80, 227; Byrd and, 103, 108, 117, 123; legal rights, 221–24; and politeness, 180, 189, 200–201 Wright, John, 63–64, 78, 81, 85 XYZ Affair, 214 Yamasee, 56, 58, 64, 65, 67–68, 78–82 Yamasee War, 51, 78–82, 85 York, duke of. See James II

Acknowledgments

Having received crucial aid from so many institutions and individuals in researching and writing this work, I am pleased to have the opportunity to thank them. But I am also well aware these acknowledgments are i­ nadequate—​ ­not only because they offer poor repayment but because they leave out so many who offered valued help. I want first to express my gratitude to the various libraries I have used—​ ­and the librarians who made their materials available. These include the South Carolina Historical Society, the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, the Huntington Library, the Virginia Historical Society, the Library of Congress (particularly the Manuscript Division), the New York Public Library, and (with special thanks to Peter Drummey and Conrad E. Wright) the Massachusetts Historical Society. I am grateful as well to the institutions that supported this work financially: most notably the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, the Huntington Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Virginia Historical Society. An earlier version of Chapter 5 appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly. I am grateful for their permission to include that material here and to the Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth Century for awarding the article its Percy G. Adams Prize. At Worcester Polytechnic Institute, successive chairs of the Humanities & Arts Department have helped me sustain my research: JoAnn Manfra, Lee Fontanella, Patrick Quinn, James P. Hanlan, and Kristen Boudreau. I would

286 Acknowledgments

like to thank my colleagues in the Humanities & Arts Department, especially my fellow historians. For particular advice and encouragement, I also need to note William A. Baller, Joel J. Brattin, Constance Clark, Joseph F. Cullon, Peter H. Hansen, Wesley T. Mott, and David M. Samson. Bob Lockhart welcomed this project to the University of Pennsylvania Press—​­and nurtured it with generous attention and good counsel. As manuscript readers for the press (and as valued colleagues over the years), Andrew Burstein and Rosemary Zagarri offered perceptive advice. As series editor, David Waldstreicher provided thoughtful readings. As longtime friend and colleague, he helped shape my thinking on the subject from its start. The American Antiquarian Society continues to be my scholarly home—​ ­as welcoming and as exciting as it was when I first began work under its generous dome some three decades ago. Among the many staff members I have had the pleasure to work with, I want to single out especially: John Hench and his successor Paul Erickson for their support and many kindnesses over the years; Joanne D. Chaison for her good company; Gigi Barnhill for her good cheer and wise advice; and the many members of the Reader Services department who have been so helpful. One of the great joys of working at the American Antiquarian Society has been the many readers and fellows I have been privileged to meet over the years. They make up a large proportion of the other scholars I am indebted to (and of the many others I am unable to note). Among the people whose help I feel particularly grateful for are Fred Anderson, Thomas Augst, John L. Brooke, Kathleen Brown, Richard D. Brown, Richard L. Bushman, Scott E. Casper, Robert A. Gross, Woody Holton, Reeve Huston, Margaret C. Jacob, T. Cole Jones, Christopher J. Lukasik, Martha McNamara, James H. Merrell, Marina Moskowitz, Simon Newman, James Sidbury, Alan Taylor, Mark Valeri, Lisa H. Wilson, and Walter W. Woodward. Paul A. Gilje and Mary C. Kelley have my thanks for pushing me to finish the project. The late Jay Fliegelman offered particularly helpful advice and encouragement. I am also glad to have the opportunity to thank the various mentors and editors (official and unofficial) who helped me develop my craft. Among my teachers, I need to note Gordon S. Wood, Peter S. Onuf, the late John L. Thomas, Donald M. Scott, David Howard, William H. Brackney, and Katherine Lindley. Among my editors, I owe particular debts to Michael McGiffert, Frederika J. Teute, Gil Kelly, Nancy Toff, Philip D. Morgan, and Christopher Grasso. Though he is thanked elsewhere, I am pleased to be able to add Bob Lockhart to this distinguished list.

Acknowledgments 287

Finally, I want to express my particular gratitude to members of my family. The book is dedicated in memory of my late mother, who died as the book went into press. I also wish to thank my brothers, Todd and Neil, my sister-​ i­ n-​­law Cindy, and the members of their immediate families, including Conor, Kevin, Alaya, and Annika. My son, Christopher, was a child when I began this work and is now a man, a process that surely delayed its completion, but also made it (and me) better. And, as always, my greatest debt is to Sylvia.