Early Modern Virginia: Reconsidering the Old Dominion

Deference, Defiance, and the Language of Office in Seventeenth-Century Virginia

Deference, Defiance, and the Language of Office in Seventeenth-Century Virginia Alexander B. Haskell In 1794, the Reverend Devereux Jarratt looked back nostalgically on his childhood in New Kent County, Virginia, recalling the “regard and reverence ” that people then “paid to magistrates and persons in public office .” Unlike the “high republican times” of the 1790s, when Jarratt believed there was “more leveling than [was] . . . consistent with good government,” settlers in the 1730s and 1740s knew their places better and were more apt to give respect where respect was due, especially when an office was held by a recognized gentleman. “We were accustomed to look upon what were called gentle folks as being of a superior order,” Jarratt said. “For my part, I was quite shy of them, and kept off at a humble distance.” Indeed, because gentlemen were most easily distinguishable by the periwigs that they commonly wore, Jarratt recalled responding viscerally any time he saw “a man riding the road, near our house, with a wig on.” The sight “would so alarm my fears, and give me such a disagreeable feeling, that, I dare say, I would run off, as for my life.”¹ Jarratt’s bashful flight from bewigged gentlemen has come to serve in many histories of early America as the example par excellence of deferential behavior. Jarratt’s unhesitating belief that a vast social gulf lay between gentlemen and more ordinary settlers, his assumption that “simple” folk (like his carpenter father) had a duty to defer to gentlemen in the exercise of their offices, and his view that “magistrates and [other] persons in public office”deserved not just respect but even something approaching reverence for the contributions they were making to the polity, all have made Jarratt’s autobiographical musings particularly useful for historians who Deference, Defiance, and the Language of Office / 159 want to stress the persistence of traditional valuations of order, authority, and hierarchy among settlers, thereby highlighting the novelty of the more democratic and egalitarian world that began crystallizing in the wake of the American Revolution.² But precisely the aspect of Jarratt’s narrative that makes it so useful in this regard—his self-conscious sense of humility, even obeisance, in the mere presence of gentlemen—has also made him something of a lightning rod for another group of historians with a rather different, though equally valuable, scholarly agenda. These historians, whose aim has been primarily to recover ordinary settlers’ political behaviors in all their rich complexity and to describe the colonial political order in a way that pays equal attention to the will of the governed and the ideals of governors, have tended to discount Jarratt’s memory as romantic and grossly unrepresentative of the bold and often defiant attitude that settlers often displayed in the face of governing authority. Several distinguished scholars, including Michael Zuckerman and Greg Nobles, have gone so far as to propose discarding the concept of deference entirely because of its failure to accommodate fully the “unruliness of the rabble.” Zuckerman says flatly that Jarratt was “indisputably wrong” in believing that his own “ideas about the difference between gentle and simple” folk were “universal among all of my rank and age.”“So far from fearing the gentry or even from being intimidated by constituted authority,” Zuckerman says, “commoners all over the Virginia of Jarratt’s youth boldly imposed themselves on their self-styled betters.” Indeed, settler defiance (the “unruliness of the rabble”) was so pronounced in Zuckerman’s view that he proposes that we replace the prevailing assumption of widespread colonial deference with a depiction of early America as filled with the “bumptious egalitarianism and antiauthoritarianism” that Alexis de Tocqueville and Frederick Jackson Turner once regarded as the colonies’ defining political characteristics. Nobles does not go quite so far as Zuckerman in proposing a return to a view of early America as egalitarian, but his treatment of Jarratt’s account similarly downplays the significance of deference. For Nobles, deference functioned mainly as a facade. It was a form of role-playing, an act of “artful misdirection, deception, or display, a personal performance that puts on the appearance of acceptance and submission but masks another, more resistant pose altogether.” Some persons, like Jarratt, might have internalized this act of resistance to the extent that they “accepted their own lowliness ”(to use Gordon Wood’s phrase), but Nobles proposes that most people 160 / Alexander B. Haskell simply donned this...