Endangered Deference, Imperiled Patriarchy: Tales from the Marchlands

There was a time when historians took for granted the Tocquevillian dictum that America and Americans were born equal.

And in the Tocquevillian sense they were. In the British colonies of the New World, in the two centuries before the Declaration of Independence, most families owned property, most men could vote, unprecedented proportions of the population owned guns, virtually no one was of noble birth, and no one's privilege was protected by law. None of this was true in England or in any of the other countries of Europe from which the colonists came.

But in the last half-century a new notion of early American society emerged, and in recent years it has come to dominate historical writing about the character of that society.

This new notion can be dated from its first appearance, in 1954. In an investigation of political practices in Virginia, in the generation before the Revolution, Charles Sydnor posed an intriguing question. Why, he wondered, when most white men could vote, did so many of them vote for rich planters rather than for common farmers like themselves?

The answer that Sydnor suggested was a clever one. They voted for their betters, rather than for their own kind, because they were accustomed to defer to gentlemen, whom they took to be more worthy of political office than they themselves or any like them were.

This answer was, for Sydnor, a minor element of a much larger account of early Virginia political life. It was offset by his far richer depiction of the ways in which the rich planters deferred to the small farmers: providing them drinks on election days, thanking them for their votes in elaborate rituals of gratitude, and more.¹

Increasingly, however, historians abandoned the richness of Sydnor's rendition. Forgetting that, on his analysis, deference from the lesser to the lofty was an interpretive hypothesis while deference from the lofty to the lowly was a demonstrable fact, they fixated on the hypothesis and, over time, elevated it to orthodoxy. In its extravagant apotheosis, in Gordon Wood's Pulitzer Prize-winning Radicalism of the American Revolution, early America appears, literally as well as metaphorically, as a monarchical society.²

Deference is the essential term in this new scholarly consensus. It is a slippery term with a multitude of meanings, and its slipperiness is surely ingredient in its centrality, but in almost every usage it has a political dimension that manifests itself in elections and a social dimension that appears in ordinary interpersonal relations. Explicitly or implicitly, the idea of deference posits the willing acquiescence of inferiors in the authority of their superiors.

I do not want to treat here the emergence of this consensus, and I do not want to dwell here on my conceptual quarrels with it. I have done that in an essay I published a few years ago.³ I want only to insist that I am not quarreling with a straw man. This deferential understanding of colonial America is—and has been for more than a decade—the dominant understanding among scholars of repute. And it now bids fair to become the dominant public understanding besides.

Recently, I worked as a consultant on a series of videos for kids on the American Revolution. I had worked with the people who did these videos on a couple of other series. I like working with them. They are sharp and they are conscientious. They cut corners, but there is no help for that. They are not historians. They are video producers. If they were historians, they would not need to pay a historian to help them get the history right.

For the first video of the series, on the origins of the rebellion, the writer set forth his sense of the tenor of pre-Revolutionary life. "In colonial America, as in England," he wrote, "social rank and status were very defined." Men and women of the period "believed that people had different natures and make-ups" and that "all men were created 'unequal.'" The "common folk were referred to as 'the common herd,' 'yahoos,' or 'grazing multitude.' Aristocrats...