Deference and Class: A Comment on Michael Zuckerman, Gregory Nobles, and John Smolenski

A proper understanding of the character of deference and its meaning in different historical contexts is indispensable to our understanding of what John Smolenski calls the "culture of authority" in early America. Moreover, and speaking as an English observer of last year's election, if President Bush's penchant for dressing up (as a naval aviator, fireman, or what have you) and Senator Kerry's efforts to look comfortable in a flannel shirt are any indication, some notion of deference remains just as essential to our understanding of contemporary American politics. Clearly, the deference displayed by colonial and modern Americans and by their respective ruling elites of wealthy men (and latterly some women) is not the same thing. As Greg Nobles reminds us, deference has assumed various cultural and linguistic forms in different times and places. Although they differ in other respects, the contributors concur that the long-held view of colonial American deferential attitudes and behavior stands in need of revision. While agreeing that the debate concerning early America has become a little stale, with the kind of fresh thinking on display at the conference from which these papers were drawn it is arguable that a reworked conception of deference can continue to inform our understanding of early American social relations in the future.

Michael Zuckerman's essay revisits an argument first presented in a Journal of American History forum in which he challenged the impressionistic view of colonial acquiescence by ordinary provincial settlers to their so-called social superiors—a mischaracterization of early American society he ascribed to scholars whose focus lay in the revolutionary and early national periods.¹ Criticizing these historians for failing to appreciate the simmering discontent felt towards the arriviste colonial gentry, Zuckerman avers that for every display of deference there were many more of defiance. Critics chided Zuckerman's earlier formulation of his argument for failing to differentiate across time and place and for its focus on the attitudes and behavior of white males. Perhaps this latter critique accounts for the selection of Elizabeth Ashbridge's narrative in this version of his argument. Ashbridge serves as an additional illustration for, rather than modification of, Zuckerman's assertion regarding the propensity for social conflict in early America that brings into question the continued usefulness of a notion of deference which depends on a "hegemonically hierarchical" view of authority.

Colonial historians will doubtless share Zuckerman's exasperation with the misreading of earlier American history by those who are intent upon locating the fulcrum around which the national story turns in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, if the colonial period has been mischaracterized as unduly deferential and lacking in the kind of social and political antagonism that troubled subsequent eras, we early Americanists must bear some of the blame. The foundations for the view of colonial harmony were laid by the "Consensus" historians' stress on the lack of overt social conflict, which they attributed to the availability of land and the openness of social and political opportunities—the same factors, it is worth noting, that Zuckerman maintains provided for colonial antiauthoritarianism and defiance.² However, since the late 1960s the superstructure for this view has been provided by a widely accepted account of the decline of "traditional" society and a transition to capitalism in which popular resistance to elite governance is tied to the development of a consciousness of a shared structural subject position that many consider the defining characteristics of an emerging working-class identity. Scholarly fascination with the formation or "making" of this working class has had unfortunate consequences for our understanding of earlier, popular defiance of elite rule. For when compared to later class struggles—which most agreed figured in the seismic social and political changes in the two generations after the American Revolution—colonial struggles have been considered too limited by local and conservative aims or bound up with the politics of race and ethnicity to threaten the assumptions or social order that underpinned imperial and gentry rule. As historians fanned out across the early American landscape, they found no shortage...