The Dreadful Word: Speech Crime and Polite Gentlemen in Massachusetts, 1690–1776 by Kristin A. Olbertson (review)

Abstract

Since at least the 1990s, historians have linked the development of gentry class consciousness in the eighteenth-century Anglo-American colonies with a cultural ideal of genteel refinement that had developed earlier in England.1 Most men with property and power in the colonies lacked the genteel or aristocratic birth that had anchored upper-class status in England a century earlier. Instead, elite colonial men based their claims to gentry status on their adoption of upper-class British ideals of behavior, education, and speech. The boundaries between “polite” colonial gentlemen and the “vulgar” (2) lower sorts came to be marked largely by language and culture. In general, historians have treated gentility in eighteenth-century British America as the expression of a particular upper-class culture. Members of the political and social elite acted like gentlemen, presumably impressing one another with their dignity and authority. But what happened when people outside of the elite scoffed or thumbed their noses at the new ideals of politeness? Kristin A. Olbertson, in this deeply researched, provocative, and often brilliant book, The Dreadful Word, argues that in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, genteel codes of behavior were not merely informal norms but were imposed through the law on those who refused to defer to the polite elite. Specifically, politeness was enforced and enacted through the regulation of “impolite” (2) speech and the prosecution of speech crimes such as swearing, cursing, contempt of authority, defamation, and lying. Speech crime prosecutions were not new in the eighteenth-century. The Puritans who first settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 made vigorous efforts to regulate ungodly speech and prosecute behavior that was by then tolerated in the English legal system. Criminal prosecutions for swearing, cursing, railing (insulting or mocking someone), singing, making noise in public, lying, and defaming were ubiquitous in the seventeenth century. But scholars have long assumed that after Massachusetts agreed to adhere to the English common law under the Charter of Massachusetts Bay in 1691—the Second Charter—its courts became less concerned with victimless morals offenses and more concerned with crimes of property.2 With