Deference in Early America: Introduction

Deference. At times, modern academia is full of it, while contemporary American politics rest squarely upon it. When graduate students feel too intimidated to express their views in conferences, or when the comments of younger faculty are too facilely dismissed, or when mature scholars enjoy a false sense of confidence when pontificating about topics with which they have only a passing acquaintance, all are engaged in a form of deferential behavior. When politicians who belong to the excessively wealthy class pretend to live like ordinary Americans yet vote against the interests of common people, or when poorer citizens believe that they are intellectually incapable of making policy decisions about the good of the society or their own welfare, both groups dance the ballet of deference. At other times, of course, modern Americans pride themselves on being egalitarian and entirely antideferential. In the academic world, young scholars directly challenge the views of their professors and mentors (as, admirably, John Smolenski confronts Michael Zuckerman in this volume). In politics, voters sometimes demand that their representatives must carry out their precise wishes.

This complicated concept of deference has greatly influenced the way in which early American historians have conceived of the past. To help scholars both to clarify their thinking about this issue and to evaluate the current state of the historiography, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies hosted a one-day conference (also generously supported by the Library Company of Philadelphia) in December 2004 about "Deference in Early America: The Life and/or Death of an Historiographical Concept." This edition of Early American Studies includes the essays—all written either by well-known, respected historians or by those whose academic star is on the ascendancy (a compliment meant as no empty deferential bow)—that the conference discussed, dissected, and debated, and that authors subsequently modified in light of those deliberations. One of the unusual, beneficial aspects of this volume is that it contains its own critique in the form of the revised and extended remarks offered by Simon Middleton and John K. Alexander, the two commentators at the conference. Middleton and I decided to organize this miniconference in part because a panel focusing on deference drew spirited, even vitriolic arguments at a previous conference about class in early America in Big Sky, Montana, in 2003. The nature and passion of those disagreements about deference clearly reflected fundamental differences in the ways in which scholars have and continue to understand early America. The McNeil Center miniconference likewise generated strong debate, but in the more courteous yet still enlightening environment that fortunately has been associated with the Center's invaluable seminars during the last quarter century.

For the past half century, as Richard Beeman skillfully traces, many historians have characterized early America as a "deferential society," one in which ordinary folk willingly embraced both their own inferiority and the supposed superiority of the elite in social and, especially, political affairs, and where powerful Americans felt confident in exercising their authority. The concept of deference has been particularly crucial to "Consensus" scholars since it helps explain why poorer citizens often cooperated rather than confronted wealthier, more powerful people. (In this sense, as John Murrin insightfully observed at the conference, deference contains an explanatory power for neo-Whig scholars similar to the concept that "hegemony" holds for some Marxist historians.) Beeman moves far beyond the simple definition of voluntary deference too often employed by an earlier generation of historians. Defending J. G. A. Pocock, Bernard Bailyn, and Gordon Wood as having been unfairly attacked and misunderstood, Beeman contends that those scholars "have been consistently sensitive to the shadings of voluntary submission, subtle persuasion, and, occasionally, outright coercion" in their analyses of deference in colonial and Revolutionary America. Beeman argues that "varieties of deference" best explain political relationships in eighteenth-century America. Still, he concludes, the term "deference" may simply have become too "slippery," thereby outliving its scholarly usefulness.

If Beeman finds value in the "varieties of deference" model, Michael Zuckerman detects very little evidence of inferiors yielding to superiors. In his usual eloquently provocative fashion, he enriches his earlier opposition, initially delivered in the...