Manners

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MANNERS

The story of manners in the new nation is one of increasing opportunities for social equality for some, but not all, Americans. Manners, like many revolutions that mark the era, underwent an unfinished or partial revolution. Trends in behavior codes were transatlantic, and American independence did not greatly influence the pace or substance of change. Yet changing expectations for face-to-face behavior do suggest how the larger political and economic revolutions reverberating through Western civilization were enacted in daily encounters.

Diaries and letters provide glimpses of early American manners, but we discover a broader picture of contemporary expectations in the advice literature written by elites to teach certain behaviors to the middling and lower classes. Conduct literature in colonial America consisted mostly of imported English translations and imitations of Renaissance courtesy works and, especially in New England, local sermons. The courtesy works were nearly all intended for elite men, whereas the sermons were elite efforts to teach the lower sort how to defer.

The mix of advice books, sermons, treatises on family government and other published discussions of proper behavior began to change in the Revolutionary era. New works, generally of British authorship, were written by and for the rising middling sort. In addition, whereas most of the earlier literature had been intended for gentlemen, after 1750, and especially at the end of the century, there was a great deal of discussion of proper behavior for women. Notions of proper behavior in youth also underwent change. In all three cases—the middling, women, and youth—these groups whose status was rising in Anglo-America were given advice similar to that previously reserved for elite adult men. This advice generally consisted of how and when to exercise bodily self-control. To a greater extent than ever before, the concern was with proper behavior in encounters with equals. The lower sort and children were still asked to defer to their superiors.

The era's most popular and influential book of manners was Lord Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. Widely castigated for the worldliness of some of his advice—he told his son that the best shortcut to polished behavior was to take up with Parisian ladies of fashion—his work was nevertheless a runaway best seller after its posthumous publication in 1776. Although he was an aristocrat, Lord Chesterfield wrote advice that reflected the rapidly changing social scene of mid-eighteenth-century Britain. He told his son not to make the mistake of looking down on the rising middling sort. More important, his advice revived for an English audience the continental tradition of exacting particulars for deportment— "Remember the Graces!" was his constant plea. The specifics of how to stand, sit, and enter a room provided a ticket of entry into the newly empowered but self-conscious bourgeoisie. His work and that of many imitators formed the core of Anglo-American etiquette for nearly a century.

Chesterfield began to compose advice to his son when the latter was in his mid-teens and entering society while making a tour of the Continent. He was entering the world of adults and was expected to behave like one. Chesterfield and other authors whose work circulated in Anglo-America between 1750 and 1820 adopted a new stance toward standards of behavior for youth. Previously, youth had been taught an only slightly watered-down version of the deference repertoires children were taught to perform in the presence of their elders (or an even stricter repertoire should they happen to be positioned as servants). After 1750 youths were treated more as young adults than as older children. Expectations for children's behavior remained the same except for the recommendations of the philosopher John Locke, who urged parents to rule a bit more gently than in the past. But even Locke made clear distinctions between the handling of youth and the handling of young children.

Much of the advice to women in the era was a simple extension of the bodily self-control taught to youth and the middling sort. As the culture began to grapple with the meaning of equality in the case of relations between men and women, arbiters of behavior were no longer comfortable lumping women with other inferiors. But nor were they comfortable with sameness in expectations for male and female behavior. Thus began their first tentative steps toward the "ladies first" system of etiquette that would flourish in the nineteenth century. Rather than continue to call women men's inferiors, the new system would turn the world upside down and call them men's superiors—in the social realm. Chesterfield's disparaging of women while urging his son to cater to their needs hints at the reality behind this new kind of deference. It was not the old deference to the strong, but a new compensatory form accorded women who were increasingly deprived of power in the political and economic realms. After 1820, however, these realities were increasingly disguised in such a way as to make "ladies first" an axiom of modern manners until the late twentieth century.

Because manners are first and foremost the stuff of urban culture, these new expectations appeared first in the cities of the eastern seaboard. The books that codified these expectations gradually made their way to the countryside and went west with the ambitious. Many dissenters from the new behavior codes sprang up. Southern planters, for example, clung to the older exclusive aristocratic code longer than did their Yankee and British counterparts; it bolstered their claims to all forms of leadership through the early national period. But the power and utility of the bourgeois code for creating and maintaining a fictional theater of equals served the American Republic at least until the late nineteenth century, when great fortunes and great inequality could no longer be denied.