Social Standing and the Right to Bear Arms

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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Joseph McMillan
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16 November 2015 09:16
 

Keen’s second metric in his identi-kit of gentility is source of livelihood, with a preference for freehold ownership of land, and ideally land with judicial or political rights attached to it.

1. Land with judicial/political rights attached. This concept, called a heritable jurisdiction, which derived from the English manorial system, existed only in New York, Maryland, and briefly the Carolinas. In this system, owning land that had been formally designated as a manor (or, in Carolina, a seignory or barony) theoretically carried the right to govern one’s tenants through formally established manorial courts, known as courts baron and courts leet. In some cases the lord of the manor also had an automatic seat in the provincial legislature.

 

In practice, the manorial system only had enduring practical importance or even serious existence in New York. In Maryland, there is no record of a court baron ever being held, or of a court leet except on two of the 80 or so manors that were created. In both places the court leet had ceased operation by 1700. No manorial courts appear to have operated in Carolina. A handful of manor lords had the right to be represented in the New York provincial assembly. In Carolina, landgraves and cassiques theoretically constituted an upper house of the legislature during the proprietary period, but never actually functioned as such.

 

Other than the manor system, the closest colonial approximation to control over people deriving from ownership of land was slavery. Slaves were legally deemed to be real property like land and heritable jurisdiction, and normally conveyed with the land when it was sold or inherited. Interestingly, in Carolina being a landgrave or cassique legally required ownership of a certain number of slaves.

 

2. Land ownership generally. It is obvious that opportunities to own land itself were far greater in America than in England. For one thing, the people-to-acreage ratio was diametrically opposite on the two sides of the Atlantic: in England, there were lots of people and all the land was spoken for; in the colonies, people were few and land was literally boundless. In eighteenth-century Virginia, a man could buy 50 acres of unsettled land from the colonial land office for five shillings. Ownership of that 50 acres, without the least bit of improvement (or 25 acres if he&#8217;d built a small cabin on it) qualified the owner to vote in elections for the House of Burgesses. The poorest of farmers, without any slaves, hired help, or adult family to help work the fields, could expect to grow enough tobacco to gross at least <strike>£12</strike> £8 /year (<strike>six</strike> four [SEE BELOW] times the 40 shilling income minimum to be considered a yeoman farmer in England). A few hundred acres was more than enough to generate a net income of £150/year or more, roughly what a rural English landowner would require in the mid-1700s to afford the &#8220;port, countenance, and maintenance of a gentleman,&#8221; although not enough to &#8220;live idly&#8221; in the ideal style of an English gentleman.

 

Thus, at least in the middle and southern colonies, freeholders constituted a much larger proportion of the population than in England. In Virginia, by the time of the Revolution, something over half of all white households owned enough land to qualify the head of household for the vote. Although the details would have varied quite a bit, I think it&#8217;s reasonable to say that the same pattern of relatively greater freehold ownership of land, vis-à-vis the situation in England, applied throughout the 13 colonies.

 

Obviously not every landowner was a &#8220;gentleman,&#8221; but even so, to the extent that gentility depended on land ownership, the gentle class in the colonies would have comprised a significantly larger share of the population than in England. Modern historians of Virginia typically define the colonial-era gentry as the wealthiest 5% of the population (a suspiciously arbitrary figure, I think). Even if only 5% were considered gentlemen, Virginia would contrast sharply with the situation in England, where 5% would have embraced not only the gentry but the yeomanry as well—this is the estimate of the adult male population was qualified to vote in Parliamentary elections, which included everyone down to the 40 shilling freeholder.

 

In fact, a lot of people in Virginia who fell well below the top 5% were considered gentle, as can be seen by looking at the landholdings among members of two quintessentially &#8220;gentry&#8221; institutions—county courts and parish vestries. Around 1700, a time when the top 5% of landowners in most counties held at least 1,200-1,500 acres, half or more of the county justices in every part of the colony owned less than 1,000.

 

3. Other sources of livelihood. As noted above, the gentleman-as-large-landowner paradigm did not pertain at all in the New England colonies. Of some 320 Massachusetts men known to have borne arms in the colonial period:


<ul class=“bbcode_list”>
<li>Fewer than 10% gained their principal livelihoods from large landholdings. Half of that 10% built their fortunes in land development and speculation, while of those that followed the traditional planter model, almost all the land owned was outside New England, either on Long Island or the West Indies.</li>
<li>Another 10% were small farmers on what we think of as the classic New England model.</li>
<li>Fully half were merchants, most of them in wholesale and particularly international trade.</li>
<li>A quarter worked in the professions (ministers, doctors, lawyers, administrators, and military officers).</li>
<li>The remaining 5% were artisans, such as the silversmith Paul Revere, the engraver Nathaniel Hurd, and the printer John Franklin.</li>
</ul>


The vast majority of the 320 were deemed by their contemporaries to be gentlemen and many of them esquires.

 

For comparison, of the 398 coats of arms in my Virginia database, only 26 belonged to men who worked in the colony as merchants, most of those in the tobacco export business. Many more, of course, belonged to planters who descended from 16th-17th century English merchants in places like London and Bristol, including many of the well-known historic names.

 

In my next post, I&#8217;ll turn to Keen&#8217;s more explicitly politics-related indicators.

 

[EDITED:  My data was wrong on how much money a low-end farmer could make.  At the average yield (1,000 lbs/acre) and farm price (1 d per pound of tobacco) in the 18th century, one farmer working alone with at least 20 acres to allow for crop rotation would gross £8 6s 8d, a bit more than quadruple the minimum income for 40-shilling freeholder.]

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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Joseph McMillan
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20 November 2015 09:59
 

Picking this up again, let us now turn to the next two metrics in Maurice Keen&#8217;s &#8220;identi-kit&#8221; of early modern gentility as they applied in the American colonies.

3 & 5. Office-Holding and Service in the military, law courts, government administration, or a royal or noble household.

 

In the colonies, as in England, serving in a governmental or judicial position was deemed to imply gentility in the office-holder. In most of the colonies, by 1700 or so if not before:
<ul class=“bbcode_list”>
<li>Members of the governor&#8217;s council or equivalent, judges of the colonial/provincial court, county lieutenants, king&#8217;s attorneys, and in some cases sheriffs were typically accorded at least the style of esquire if not the even more exalted &#8220;honorable.&#8221;</li>
<li>Members of the lower house of the legislature, judges/justices of county courts, and militia officers were mostly accorded the style of &#8220;gentleman,&#8221; or at least the somewhat overlapping &#8220;mister.&#8221;</li>
<li>Other lesser government officials (surveyors, customs collectors, inspectors of manufactured products, etc.) typically were at least &#8220;mister&#8221; if not a higher designation.</li>
</ul>
This would have been familiar enough in England, but there were two dynamics at work in the colonies that led to a different result in the kinds of people who were officially regarded as gentlemen by virtue of holding office.

 

The first is that the ratio of offices to population was far greater in the colonies than in England. For example:
<ul class=“bbcode_list”>
<li>In 1660, with a population of about 80,000, the English county of Warwickshire had some 30 justices of the peace. In 1700, Virginia had 275 justices in 23 counties serving a population of less than 60,000, 12 times as many per person, or 17 times if we take into account that the colony&#8217;s black inhabitants weren&#8217;t in a position to bring much business before a J.P.</li>
<li>On the military side, the continuing presence of hostile Indians along with the French and Spanish presence to the north, west, and south caused the colonists to take the militia system much more seriously than was the case in England during most of the period from 1607-1776. I found a study showing that in the years leading up to the Civil War, about 100,000 Englishmen were actively enrolled in &#8220;trained bands,&#8221; or about 4% of the male population. In Massachusetts during this same period, the comparable figure was 21%. This is relevant for our purposes because more soldiers meant more officers, each of whom had a plausible claim to gentility by virtue of office. In Worcestershire in 1621 (population about 100,000), there were about 30 officers of militia in charge of nine companies totaling 800 men. A few years later, in Massachusetts (population 15,000), there were more than 65 officers in charge of 20 companies totaling 1,500 men. This was not just the case in New England, and not just in the early period; a very similar ratio presents itself 100 years later in mid-18th century Virginia, where an organized militia force of some 16,000 was led by 1,000 officers, more or less, each with a commission describing him as &#8220;gentleman&#8221; or &#8220;esquire,&#8221; depending on rank. Once again, the ratio of militia officers to total population is slightly more than 1:200, compared with Worcestershire&#8217;s 1:3,300.</li>
<li>In England, of course, there was no direct counterpart to the 13 colonial legislatures, which the colonists saw as the equivalent of Parliament and the Crown saw as the equivalent of borough councils. If we take the British view, the 1,500 or so colonial legislators as of the mid-1700s were 2 ½ times greater as a share of the population than the all the mayors and aldermen in England put together. (That doesn&#8217;t even take into account the 12 or so selectmen&#8212;directly equivalent to English aldermen&#8212;in each of the scores of New England towns, not to mention a similar number of aldermen in cities and boroughs from New York southward.) If, on the other hand, we take the colonial view, equating the provincial legislatures to Parliament, the disproportion is even greater. The lower houses of the 13 colonial assemblies collectively contained almost 15 times as many representatives per person represented as the House of Commons. The ratio of appointed members in colonial upper houses was modest by comparison, only four times as many per inhabitant as the House of Lords.</li>
</ul>


The second dynamic is the distinction between being a gentleman by virtue of holding office and holding office by virtue of being a gentleman. In England, the statutory property qualification for holding a county seat in Parliament was so high that being a gentleman was effectively a prerequisite for election. And justices of the peace in rural areas were by definition chosen from the largest landowners, usually lords of manors.

 

In the colonies, I hypothesized based largely on my own family research that it was far more likely than in England for a man to be designated &#8220;gentleman&#8221; for the first time after attaining office than before. To test this hypothesis, I collected data from volume 1 (letters A-H) of A Biographical Dictionary of the Maryland Legislature, 1635-1789, published as part of the official Archives of Maryland series. This yielded data on 433 men who served in the lower house of the provincial assembly up to its dissolution in 1774. I suppose it&#8217;s possible that including delegates with names beginning with I through Z would alter the following results, but I&#8217;ll take my chances on that.

 

Of the 433 members, 177 are described in their respective &#8220;social profiles&#8221; as having been accorded the designation of esquire (19), gentleman (120), or mister (38 ) before serving in the assembly. Of these 177, 134 (75%) were accorded such designations only after appointment to some other local or provincial office, such as J.P., county surveyor, vestryman, etc. Of course, it is possible that more members than these were also known as &#8220;Mr.,&#8221; &#8220;Gent.,&#8221; or &#8220;Esq.&#8221; prior to election or appointment; absence of evidence to this effect is not evidence of absence. Be that as it may, it is striking that for nearly 60% of the men who served in the elected house of the assembly during the colonial period, the first time their names appear in any surviving record with the title &#8220;Mr.&#8221; appended to it is in the list of delegates at the beginning of the first session they attended.

 

As with the sheer numbers discussed above, this pattern of men being gentlemen because they held office rather than holding office because they were gentlemen is undoubtedly a function of colonial demographics and geography. For instance, in accordance with English practice, the rule of thumb was that no inhabitant should have to travel more than a half-day to reach the nearest judicial officer (a half-day so that he could then get back home after transacting his business). In Virginia, this meant that governors had no choice but to appoint relatively modest yeoman farmers to judicial office in counties on the frontier and south of the James River, where there were relatively fewer huge landholdings. Once appointed, the new J.P. was entitled to be and was thereafter described as &#8220;gent.&#8221; in the early decades, later as &#8220;esq.&#8221; Similarly, in an era when all voting had to be done in person at the county courthouse (in the southern colonies, at least), the size of counties was also constrained by travel time, meaning that the average county held far fewer people than a county in England. Yet each county (in Virginia) and each town (in Massachusetts) was entitled to two representatives in the legislature, just as each far more populous county in England was entitled to two MPs.

 

Next up will be Keen’s final metric, habitual association with gentlemen.

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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Joseph McMillan
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25 November 2015 12:31
 

Sorry for several days delay with the forums being off for longer than they should have been, then Thanksgiving preparation responsibilities.  On to the final criterion in Maurice Keen’s identi-kit of gentility.

5. Kinship or habitual association with gentlemen and people of noble blood.

 

Keen deals at some length with how, in early modern England, one mark of a gentleman was whether he engaged on level terms with other gentlemen.  Part of the reason that holding office, serving in a noble or royal household, going to university, or becoming a barrister tended to raise “plebeians” in the social pecking order was that all these things put a man in a position to interact regularly with his “betters.”  Intermarriage with the gentry was the best way to “habitually associate,” but even who ate with whom was significant.  For example, Keen cites a late medieval document to the effect that “worshipful merchants, rich artificers, and bailiffs of a city” could appropriately dine with “good squyers.”

 

Not having time to construct marriage and kinship charts to evaluate the degree of intermarriage between different layers of colonial society, I decided to approach this from the perspective of other forms of habitual association, namely membership in private voluntary organizations.  Specifically, I looked at the backgrounds of the original founding membership of six social organizations founded in the 18th century.  Four of the six still exist, and membership in them has long been taken by sociologists as a marker of upper class status.  The six are:
<ul class=“bbcode_list”>
<li>Fishing Company of the Colony [now State] in Schuylkill, otherwise known as the Fish House (Philadelphia, 1732)</li>
<li>Tuesday Club (Annapolis, 1745)</li>
<li>Redwood Library (Newport, 1747)</li>
<li>Dancing Assembly (Philadelphia, 1748)</li>
<li>Homony Club (Annapolis, 1766)</li>
<li>St. Cecilia Society (Charleston, 1766)</li>
</ul>
The purposes of these bodies were quite diverse.  Three of them were originally created to raise money for specific undertakings: the Redwood to set up and operate a lending library, the Assembly to hold a series of monthly balls, and the St. Cecilia to support musical performances.  By contrast, the other three groups were purely social.  The Fish House was (and is) expressly about dining together, the food being prepared and served by the members themselves.  Each of the two Annapolis clubs met regularly in a local tavern to dine, drink, play cards, share satirical skits, talk, and so on.

 

The composition of the membership matched this division of purpose.  You go hunting where the ducks are; if you want to raise money, you ask people who have it.  Thus the Redwood “investors” and the Assembly and St. Cecilia “subscribers” were almost all planters, wholesale merchants, and members of the learned professions (physicians, lawyers, clergymen), the proportion of planters vs. merchants varying by geography.  The principal exceptions were four professional musicians in the St. Cecilia, a reasonable addition given the group’s musical purposes.  On the other hand, the three purely social bodies embraced a much broader social spectrum.  At the upper end, all three were just as upper class as the Redwood, the Assembly, and St. Cecilia, with a sizable component of planters, merchants, and professionals; in fact, there was considerable overlap inthe membership of the Fish House and the Dancing Assembly.  But the lower end of the spectrum for the Fish House and the two Annapolis clubs was much further down the socio-economic scale.  Among its 17 founding members, the Tuesday Club included a brewer and a cordwainer (shoemaker).  The 22 original members of the Homony Club included a carpenter, a clerk in a counting house, and a struggling young portrait painter named Charles Willson Peale.  The distribution of the Fish House membership was even more striking.  Among its 27 founders were eight high-income merchants, three planters or prosperous farmers, several lawyers and physicians, and the headmaster of Philadelphia’s leading school.  But eleven of them (40%) were working craftsmen:  three silversmiths, three clockmakers, a distiller, a baker, two coopers, and a button-maker.  These were presumably successful artisans—the 18th century counterparts of Keen’s “rich artificers”—but artisans nevertheless.

 

To the extent that a gentleman is defined by who he associates with, I think it’s reasonable to posit that the America’s 18th century elite had a far more inclusive interpretation of who was a gentleman than our perception of that highly stratified society might imply.  That this isn’t reflected in the three organizations created specifically to raise money isn’t startling, but I, at least, was surprised to find that the groups designed for the purpose of eating, drinking, playing cards, and generally enjoying each other’s company were not more socio-economically exclusive, and I suspect it says something significant about the society at the time.

 

Somewhat later, shortly after the Revolution, we find even greater representation from the “lower” levels of society among the 114 original members of George Washington’s Masonic lodge in Alexandria, Virginia.  As with the Fish House, between half and two-thirds came from what might be labelled the elite (planters, import-export merchants, bankers, etc.), but the remainder were middle class or below:  retail shopkeepers, proprietors of taverns and coffeehouses, carpenters and stonemasons, a printer, a livestock trader, and even the manager of an itinerant theatrical troupe.  Now I recognize that comparing the Freemasons with a social club may be apples and oranges, but it’s one more data point.

 

Finally, to make sure that what I was seeing in the colonies wasn’t purely a provincial replication of what was going on at the same time back in the Mother Country, I looked at two English organizations with apparently similar functions as the Fish House, Tuesday, and Homony clubs, namely White’s and Brooks’s in London, both among England’s most elite social groups then and now. (I couldn’t find an 18th century membership roll of the third of the big three clubs, Boodle’s.) Of course, given that there was only one peer permanently resident in America at the time, the upper tier of members at both White’s and Brooks’s naturally reached further up the social scale than could possibly have been the case in the colonies.  But for what it’s worth, peers comprised fully a quarter of the members of White’s when it was formally organized as a club in 1736.  If we add the sons of peers, baronets, and knights, to that number, the proportion of the titled vs. untitled class comes to 55%-45%.  Of the untitled, almost all were members of the county gentry, mostly MPs.  There were a very, very few London merchants, a couple of barristers, and the court physician.  The dregs of the group were the poet laureate, Colley Cibber, and London’s most prominent theatrical impresario of the time.  Brooks’s members were not quite so exalted, but even so, of the 27 founding members in 1764, four were peers, and the titled vs untitled ratio was 44%-56%, with the untitled once again being mostly MPs from the county gentry.  Neither, emphatically, included anyone who earned his living with his hands.

 

Next up, probably after the holiday:  what I think this says about “gentry” in the colonies at the time of Independence, and how that is relevant to the question of who ought to bear heraldic arms in the United States.

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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Joseph McMillan
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12 December 2015 11:21
 

Returning to this after a couple of weeks (I was out of the country on business and didn’t have my notes to work from):

What can we conclude from all of this about the meaning of "gentry" in America immediately before and after independence?

 

First, I think examining colonial society through the prism of Keen’s identikit strongly suggests that Americans by the mid-1700s considered a larger proportion of their population to be, in some sense, “gentlemen,” than in contemporary England, and far, far larger than had been the case when heraldic theorists propounded the idea of an iron link between armory and gentry two centuries before.  Social mobility in England itself was greater in the 17th century than in the 16th, greater still in the 18th, and greater yet in the colonies during these same periods.

 

Secondly, the social and economic gap between the average colonial farmer (at least in the Chesapeake colonies) and the planter grandees, although enormous, was still much narrower than between the average English farmer and the upper gentry, let alone the nobility, back in the mother country. This is not to say that there were no tensions and no social gap between the very rich and the middling farmer, or that the grandees couldn’t be just as haughty as their English counterparts, but the slope of the wealth distribution curve wasn’t nearly as steep as back home, and the social barriers not nearly as high.  Yes, they were high by modern standards, but not by the standards of the time.

 

Finally, reverting to my suggestion several posts back that the decision to bear heraldic arms has something to do with an assertion of political standing, this relatively greater socio-economic parity among free, white, male Americans than among free, white, male Englishmen was reflected in political terms, as we have seen when considering the far larger proportion of men who held office in the colonies than in England and the similarly larger proportion of those entitled to the legislative franchise.

 

Contemporary observers commented on this blurring of class distinctions both satirically and seriously.  A Charleston newspaper wryly observed in 1773, that in those days “Every Tradesman is a Merchant, every Merchant is a Gentleman, and every Gentleman one of the Noblesse.”  On the more serious side, we have the remarks of Pinckney and Madison in the context of the Constitutional debates of 1787 to the effect that the citizens of the new republic consisted of a single estate, that of "commons" or "freemen."  As I quoted Pinckney in the earlier thread:


Quote:

The people of the United States are perhaps the most singular of any we are acquainted with. Among them there are fewer distinctions of fortune, and less of rank, than among the inhabitants of any other nation. Every freeman has a right to the same protection and security; and a very moderate share of property entitles them to the possession of all the honors and privileges the public can bestow. Hence arises a greater equality than is to be found among the people of any other country; and an equality which is more likely to continue.


One may note the irony that Pinckney would certainly have fallen into the category of men who, according to the Charleston editorialist, considered themselves to be "noblesse," but I don’t think there’s a shred of irony in Pinckney’s description of the society as he saw it.

 

The founders rejected the concept of nobility.  They accepted the concept of gentility.  And they believed that this category of gentility was accessible by virtue of effort and merit.

 

Next up (finally), I will try to connect these observations to the bearing of heraldic arms.

 
David Pope
 
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12 December 2015 14:05
 

Joe, thanks.  Can’t wait to read the next installment.  Inquiring minds want to know: is the bearing of arms in America an assertion of gentility? smile

 
Michael F. McCartney
 
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12 December 2015 22:58
 

Is it too late to place a bet in the office pool?  wink

Also looking forward to the final installment; and to what follows…

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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14 December 2015 11:06
 

I know my meandering in this series of essays may have contributed to a general loss of the thread (including by myself), so David&#8217;s reply to the last post reminds me of the need to clarify: the central issue at hand is why heraldry itself is acceptable in our republic if the trappings of nobility are not. Does the use of arms itself make a class statement? And if so, is the statement it makes inconsistent with classic American republicanism?

So returning to the narrative&#8230;

 

Did you have to bear a coat of arms to be considered a &#8220;gentleman&#8221; (whatever that meant) on the eve of American Independence?

 

The English Court of Chivalry once stated that a man with no heraldic arms was by definition not a gentleman (although it then blithely ignored this dictum in case after case for the next several centuries). Lord Coke embedded this perspective in his statement that a gentleman was one who bore coat armor. In logical terms, having arms was said to be a necessary condition of gentility.

 

Certainly a very large proportion of colonial America&#8217;s ruling elite did in fact use heraldic arms. This included eight out of the nine governors of Massachusetts Bay under its original charter (revoked in 1684). Surprisingly, however, it seems to have been true for only two or three of the eight original members of the colony&#8217;s council. If bearing arms were a necessary condition of gentility, this would imply that the councilors were "no gentlemen." Yet in no way other than the use of arms is it possible to find any indication that those who served as governor were of any more elevated social origins than the others.

 

Meanwhile, in putatively aristocratic Virginia, five of the seven governors under the Virginia Company bore arms, and probably all of them after its transfer to the Crown, including the lieutenant or deputy governors who ruled de facto for absentee governors in the 18th century. Of the 100 men appointed to the Council of State (also known as the King&#8217;s or Governor&#8217;s Council) between the Stuart Restoration in 1660 and Independence, 80 either used and/or were entitled to a coat of arms. There is direct evidence that 70 actually used one.

 

Thus, while most members of the highest level of the Virginia elite used arms, 20% to 30% did not. If arms were a necessary condition of elite status, these men would not be gentlemen. Yet, as in Massachusetts, there is no evidence that their colleagues actually regarded them as being of lower status. The Harrisons of Berkeley, who used no coat of arms, were not deemed any less &#8220;gentle&#8221; than the arms-bearing Burwells, Ludwells, and Fairfaxes alongside whom they sat in Council and with whom they regularly intermarried. There were many visible signs by which the gentility of one&#8217;s lifestyle was assessed: the elegance of one&#8217;s house and equipage, possession of ancestral portraits, quantity and style of silver, and lavishness of hospitality. The possession of arms seems to have been decidedly secondary, if relevant at all. This judgment is further reinforced by the fact that while several colonial residents of Virginia made inquiries at the College of Arms as to their pedigrees and armorial entitlements, there is no record that even a single Virginian in the 169-year history of the colony ever applied for a grant. If one had to have arms to be accepted as a gentleman, surely there would have been at least one.

 

Harry Wright Newman observed the same pattern in Maryland: &#8220;One peculiar fact, revealed in the examination of [seals on] wills, was that several of the Maryland families which boast of their aristocracy and achievements in present-day circles contain no heraldic symbols on their documents.&#8221; (Heraldic Marylandia, (1968 ). These included such prominent names as Dorsey, Goldsborough, Jenifer, and Francis. In the upper-class social organizations in other colonies that we examined earlier (Redwood Library, Fish House, St. Cecilia, etc.), in no case can I find records of arms being borne by more than half of the original members, and in most cases fewer.

 

Curiously, the only elite group I could identify in which the bearing of arms was almost universal was the ten families that the sociologist Digby Baltzell identified as the core of Philadelphia&#8217;s late 17th century Quaker oligarchy. This use of heraldry among Quakers surprised at least a few contemporary observers who apparently shared the assumption that heraldic display is by its nature an expression of pride in elevated social rank&#8212;something members of the Society of Friends were supposed to eschew.

 

We&#8217;ll come back to that later. For now, I think it&#8217;s fair to conclude that bearing heraldic arms was not a necessary condition of being considered a gentleman in colonial America.

 

Next up will be the corollary question: was it a sufficient condition?

 
Wilfred Leblanc
 
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14 December 2015 14:22
 

For what it’s worth, I haven’t lost interest. In the end, I may, for really mundane reasons, be unable to reply symmetrically, but I’m really enjoying reflecting on what Joe has to say and would certainly invest in a bound, analog edition of it.

 
David Pope
 
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15 December 2015 18:45
 

Joseph McMillan;105278 wrote:

For now, I think it&#8217;s fair to conclude that bearing heraldic arms was not a necessary condition of being considered a gentleman in colonial America.

Next up will be the corollary question: was it a sufficient condition?


Joe, again, thanks.  For me this is the crucial issue.  I recognize that American colonial society was more porous than that of Britain.  As a result, there were quite a number of "new men" who entered the gentry but sprang from quite humble roots.  In this setting, one expects to find some gentry families that exhibit the outward trappings (property, substantial houses, plate, etc.) of colonial gentility without the use of arms.  The telling bit, though, is whether the assumption of arms (even in cases of usurpation of arms of another with the same surname) was, in itself, a personal assertion of having entered the gentry class.

 

Here is a thoughtful post from Charles Drake from 2011:
Charles E. Drake;85055 wrote:

As to American heraldry, I think it has to be "whosoever will may come." As to fulfilling some criterion to qualify for arms, I believe the criterion is self-fulfulling. That is, when someone wants to bear arms, he meets the criterion. I have never known of a "base and unworthy person"* wishing to have a coat of arms.

As I have said before, it is similar to buying a tuxedo. No one does this unless he needs one.

 

It is different in the United Kingdom, of course, where arms are for gentlemen and there are people appointed to decide who qualifies. But since we have a different system here, we must allow everyone who aspires to be an armiger to become one.

 

* By this I am quoting traditional language, but I mean social criteria, not morality.


I think Charles’ reasoning probably holds true for the colonial period:  Whoever had the money and desire to have a coat of arms painted on their carriage, engraved on a signet ring, chiseled on a tombstone, or etched onto a bookplate probably already met the demands of Keen’s identikit.

 

What’s more difficult in the present age is that certain colonial barriers (the financial cost of *using* such heraldry and having to face your gentry neighbors) no longer exist.

 

If you have a tuxedo hanging in your closet right now you likely meet the modern-day analog of the identikit requirements that Keen suggests.  But what if you rented a tuxedo?  Modern, internet heraldry seems to me to be analogous to *wearing* a tuxedo, not *owning* a tuxedo- the outward appearance without the practical restraints.

 

In a digital age where heraldry seems almost "notional", there are few practical barriers to assumption of arms.  One might think that’s a wonderful thing and very small-r republican, but I doubt that is consistent with the tradition of arms in this country.

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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Joseph McMillan
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15 December 2015 19:36
 

Thanks to David for the thoughtful and thought-provoking post.  I’m struggling over the same questions, although the couple of days delay in the next installment is equally the result of extraneous distractions.

 
Michael F. McCartney
 
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Michael F. McCartney
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16 December 2015 04:30
 

David sees Charles Drake’s 2011 comments as applying to the colonial period, but questions whether it applies today.  I don’t recall the 2011 context, but on their face his comments don’t appear to address the colonial period exclusively.  Curious to see how Joe treats them, if he chooses to address them.

One of, if not the, most difficult things for those of us waiting breathlessly for each succeeding installment (and maybe for Joe in researching and writing them wink ) is suspending our personal beliefs and prejudices until the historical background and Joe’s conclusions are laid out for consideration and debate.

 

That being said, I’m off to bed…

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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16 December 2015 08:32
 

Actually, I’m not sure Charles’s observation is exactly correct, but it is even more germane for being incorrect.

Not everyone who buys a dinner jacket needs one, or will ever wear it.  Some people buy one because they read in an etiquette book or a magazine article or on a website that you can’t be a gentleman if you don’t have one in the closet.

 
David Pope
 
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16 December 2015 12:29
 

Joseph McMillan;105289 wrote:

Actually, I’m not sure Charles’s observation is exactly correct, but it is even more germane for being incorrect.

Not everyone who buys a dinner jacket needs one, or will ever wear it.  Some people buy one because they read in an etiquette book or a magazine article or on a website that you can’t be a gentleman if you don’t have one in the closet.


Good point.  This is the inverse of renting.  I guess the analogy breaks down, though, in that there is little practical need of heraldry in the modern world.  If I have two or three black tie events I’m expected to attend each year, it’s a good move to own a tuxedo.  I can’t think of any setting where arms are required.  As I understand it, it’s even optional for most knighthoods.  Perhaps Order of the Garter?

 

Perhaps the analogy would work better if it was a Barbour jacket? smile

 
Michael F. McCartney
 
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Michael F. McCartney
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16 December 2015 20:19
 

I’m guessing that a Barbour jacket isn’t the white coat worn by the fellow (or woman, nowadays) who cuts my hair? wink

I’m not happy with the tuxedo analogy, which to me presupposes that arms are something special for specialoccasions—arms as indicators of rank or social status.  To me, a better analogy would be team jerseys, indicating group identity regardless of whether the wearer is the Heisman Trophy winner, the nameless walk-on third-string defensive tackle, or the kid who carries the team water bucket.  Or in terms Joe has used in the past, tokens of kinship rather than gentility (tesserae gentilitatus or some such Latin terms).

 

Also rereading the 2011 quote from Brother Drake, I notice that it is all in the present tense - not a ‘was’ or ‘were’ to be seen.

 

Enough heckling from the cheap seats during the intermission - I’ll sit down and await the curtain rising on the next Act.

 
David Pope
 
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20 December 2015 14:31
 

Mike,

You make an interesting point.  I wonder if they are any colonial-era examples of arms being used by persons who would not qualify as gentry.  Perhaps a situation where one member of the family was of the gentry class and started using arms,  and other distant relatives who were not members of the gentry took up arms as a sign of family connection.

 

I’m reminded of a passage in William Byrd’s Diary where he refers (in what seems to be a perjorative way) of a man using arms without precedent as "by the courtesy of Ireland".  I’ll see if I can find the quote.