From Men of Property to Just Men: Deference, Masculinity, and the Evolution of Political Discourse in Early America

Early American historians have written about, argued over, and struggled with the concept of deference for over four decades. Since J. R. Pole initially suggested that the concept of deference might explain some of the paradoxes of early American political culture, many historians have employed the concept.¹ J. G. A. Pocock maintained that eighteenth-century British America was a deferential society, which he defined as a society "in which the nonelite regard the elite, without too much resentment, as being of a superior status and culture to their own, and consider elite leadership in political matters to be something normal and natural," even while admitting that deference possesses an "ambiguity which renders it both convenient and problematic."² Many historians qualified Pole's and Pocock's evaluations but generally followed their lead. Rhys Isaac described a Virginia (pretransformation) deeply invested in deferential attitudes and behaviors.³ Richard Beeman likewise found deference central to the operation of colonial politics, even as he emphasized the role negotiation played in shaping it.⁴ Alan Tully argued that while governance in Pennsylvania was free of political deference, some "social deference" was necessary for the political system's continued function.⁵ Brendan McConville recently assumed a different approach, emphasizing the role "ethnodeference"—the deference ordinary provincials showed to leaders from their own ethnoreligious groups—played in solidifying ethnic and political identities in colonial New Jersey.⁶ Even Gary Nash's account of political conflict in colonial American seaports makes some use of the concept: he suggests that an incomplete system of deference—punctuated by "much crossing of lines between social layers"—existed in seventeenth-century America before eighteenth-century "circumstances altered social consciousness, wore away at deferential behavior, and gave rise to feelings of solidarity that were based on occupation, economic position, and class standing."⁷ Judging by the weight of historiography, Robert Gross observed, early America must have been a deferential society; after all, he noted, "two generations of distinguished scholars" have seen it so. "How can so many historians—and so many Pulitzer Prize committees—be so wrong?"⁸

Of course, this paradigm has not been universally accepted. Some scholars attacked the notion that ordinary colonists were deferential to their "supposed" betters in any way. Michael Zuckerman, for example, argued that the evidence supporting the presence of deference in early America is so thin that only "forces at play beyond the impulsions of disinterested analysis" can explain why historians have been so attracted to this paradigm.⁹ Peter Thompson opened his discussion of taverns in colonial Philadelphia by asserting baldly that Pennsylvania was "profoundly undeferential," a fact that thoroughly influenced all aspects of provincial public culture and politics.¹⁰ Others offered more guarded critiques that nonetheless challenged this notion. Joy and Robert Gilsdorf, while not rejecting outright the possibility of deferential social and political relations, argued both that most historians' invocations of the term have been so imprecise as to be nearly meaningless and that a more focused analysis does not find significant evidence of deference, at least in colonial Connecticut.¹¹ In addition, Bernard Bailyn claimed that even if colonists aspired to recreate the supposedly deferential social order that lay behind the model of a "mixed government," they would have been unable to do so, since there was no class of "dignities" in America equivalent to what existed in Britain.¹²

This challenge of the deference paradigm has been extremely useful by calling attention to problems in the way in which scholars have understood and employed the concept. However, at the same time, the debate has been more polemical than penetrating, generating more heat than light. There are three reasons this debate appears to have stalled. One reason is that the historians have so often defined deference differently. Even while admitting that deference is ultimately grounded in social relations and other habitual patterns of interaction, most scholars invoking the term have relied on political behavior—particularly voting behavior—as evidence. Deference is thus located in its result.¹³ Others have examined social interactions in an...