A social code, like a garment on the human body, outlives its usefulness when it no longer fits the form for which it was designed. Its acceptability at any given time rests upon the willingness of the well-mannered to adhere to it and of most other people to look up to it. If class relations change, so also must the canons of breeding or else forfeit every vestige of authority; and it follows that the more violent the change, the more imperative is the need for compromise and adjustment.

Such a challenge confronted American manners in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Many things conspired to undermine ancient attitudes and upset hallowed landmarks. The War of 1812, misinterpreted as a glorious victory, exalted the self-confidence of the postwar generation. The extension of the nation's authority to the Rio Grande and the Pacific, the expanding web of canals and railroads, the outflow of humanity into untenanted areas, the springing up of new cities in the older regions, the rapid technological progress and notable growth of industry—all these bred in Americans the sense of a mighty people marching toward a goal such as mankind had never known. And with these developments went others more subtle in character: the steady rise of countless humble folk to higher living standards, and the admission of all white men to the ballot and the right to hold office. These altered conditions could not fail to leave their mark on social usages, particularly in the North where their principal impact was felt.

Andrew Jackson's elevation to the White House in 1828 was a political outcropping of deeper human stirrings. The son of a destitute Scotch-Irish immigrant, he had by dint of pluck and native capacity arrived at the seat of power hitherto reserved for the Harvard-educated Adamses and great Virginia landholders. Protagonists of the old order, alarmed by the “millennium of minnows” at Washington, misunderstood the nature of the upsurge that Jackson's election betokened.¹ The dreaded minnows, whether agitating the turbid pool at the federal capital or disturbing the broader waters throughout the land, had no intention of remaining small fry, or even of always swimming with their kind. To them the country's new political and economic situation meant the opportunity for little fish to grow into big ones. “True republicanism,” agreed a contemporary, “requires that every man shall have an equal chance—that every man shall be free to become as unequal as he can.”²

Unlike former times, ordinary folk now felt they could make of themselves what they would. As Catharine Sedgwick reminded them, “It is not here as in the old world, where one man is born with a silver spoon, and another with a pewter one, in his mouth. You may all handle silver spoons, if you will. That is, you may all rise to places of respectability.”³ Though devoting their chief energies to bettering their material lot, they never lost sight of the fact that self-respect also demanded they climb toward higher social levels. The passion for equality, in other words, found expression in the view that all could become gentlemen, not that gentlemen should cease to be. President Jackson himself, despite his lowly origins and the hoary Whig legend in history books of his uncouthness, excited the admiration of both friend and foe by his urbane and courtly demeanor.⁴ To be sure, a shirtsleeve approach to good manners naturally outraged the Southern planter's conception of a properly regulated world. Little wonder that a Georgia aristocrat, writing in the mid-century, found the North “devoid of society fitted for well-bred gentlemen” because so many of the persons he encountered were “mechanics struggling to be genteel.”⁵

One of the arguments for sowing the North with little red schoolhouses was that “the first indispensable requisite for good society is education”; and though other reasons proved more influential in bringing about public schools, the colonial precedent of using the classroom for instructing the young in civility received the fullest possible application.⁶ The states now generally required the teaching of such basic qualities as truthfulness, sobriety, temperance, industry, piety and chastity.⁷ Educational leaders further proclaimed it the duty of schoolmasters to make up for any other deficiencies of home training,⁸ and textbook writers quickly obliged with sections on “Politeness,” “Manners at Table” and “Manners in the Street and on the Road.”⁹

Older persons received a certain amount of help from the magazines, especially from Godey's Lady's Book and similar women's journals, whose sentimental stories featured heroes and heroines of immaculate gentility, and whose editors sometimes offered specific recipes for social deportment and affairs of the heart. Mrs. James Parton, known to her numerous readers as Fanny Fern, took occasion in her discursive essays—which generally reached a wider public in book form—to include tart comments on ill breeding. Two of her “Rules for Ladies” were: “Always keep callers waiting, till they have had time to notice the outlay of money in your parlors”; and “Always whisper and laugh at concerts, by way of compliment to the performers, and to show your neighbors a sovereign contempt for their comfort.”¹⁰

Such incidental references, however, did not replace the manuals devoted wholly to social decorum, a type of publication which, given the new circumstances of American life, now attained an importance never before known. Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale, who presided over Godey's, considered it one of her bounden duties to recommend these writings as they issued from the press, and in time she produced her own treatise on Manners; or, Happy Homes and Good Society (1866).¹¹ From the late 1820's on, this literature poured forth in a never-ending stream. An incomplete enumeration shows that, aside from frequent revisions and new editions, twenty-eight different manuals appeared in the 1830's, thirty-six in the 1840's and thirty-eight more in the 1850's—an average of over three new ones annually in the pre-Civil War decades.

They not only greatly exceeded the number published at any earlier time, but they were also mostly of American authorship. The writers embraced such persons as Lydia H. Sigourney and Catharine M. Sedgwick, the novelists; Eliza W. Farrar, biographer of Lafayette and wife of a Harvard professor; William A. Alcott, cousin of Bronson Alcott and an educational reformer; T. S. Arthur, best known today as the author of Ten Nights in a Bar-room; and Eliza Leslie, a successful writer of juvenile fiction. Lola Montez, the Irish-Spanish actress who dazzled America in the mid-century, discoursed appropriately enough on The Arts of Beauty (1858), graciously including “hints to gentlemen on the art of fascinating.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, though not himself a contributor to the genre, lent a certain elevation to the theme by devoting two of his essays to “Manners” and “Behavior.” He could even commend his friend Walter Savage Landor for saying, “I have suffered more from my bad dancing than from all the miseries and misfortunes of my life put together.”¹²

The conduct books were of two general kinds, one upholding the time-honored conception of manners as “character in action,” the other elaborating the view, already rendered familiar by the American adaptations of Chesterfield, that manners are a set of rules to be learned. With the nation passing through a period of unsettling social change, moralists feared lest the ancient pillars of individual integrity and family virtues be destroyed, and they publicized their concern in treatises ascribing true courtesy to “the source of all purity and goodness, the Christian religion.”¹³ In this spirit William A. Alcott ambitiously attempted to canvass every aspect of personal and domestic relations in The Young Man's Guide (1832), The Young Woman's Guide (1836), The Young Mother (1836), The Young Wife (1837), The Young Husband (1838) and The Boy's Guide (1844).

Yet neither he nor his less fecund fellow scribes wholly ignored conduct in the more restricted sense of etiquette. George W. Hervey in The Principles of Courtesy excused himself for touching on such trivia by the need to counteract the many handbooks that “appealed to unworthy motives, and taught a heartless and selfish system of politeness.”¹⁴ Taking somewhat different ground, Alcott argued that a practice like wearing one's hat in the house “tends to vice and immorality.”¹⁵ T. S. Arthur, on the other hand, though warning against drawing-room usages based on self-seeking and vanity, frankly urged his readers to study etiquette manuals for their own sake.¹⁶

Arthur by this advice showed himself far more in accord with the times than were most purveyors of what Fanny Fern called “moral molasses.”¹⁷ The rising classes, reasonably confident of their grip on Christian principles but timorous about the proprieties of taste and behavior, thirsted to know “the little things, the graceful finishing touches,” which they associated with persons to the manner born. “‘The power of littles!’” wrote Mrs. Hale approvingly. “How often has the expression been quoted, how much it contains!”¹⁸

Those who set their hands to the task of meeting the demand did so with a clear understanding of the audience they were addressing. “I have seen it gravely stated by some writer on manners, that ‘it takes three generations to make a gentleman,’” said the wellborn Miss Sedgwick, and she emphatically rejoined, “This is too slow a process in these days of accelerated movement.” As encouragement to the faint-hearted she added, “You have it in your power to fit yourselves by the cultivation of your minds, and the refinement of your manners for intercourse, on equal terms, with the best society in our land.”¹⁹

In the nature of the case, these treatises played pretty much the same tune in pretty much the same way. Some continued to appeal to English or French usages as authority, but the greater number scorned the “stiff and stately pomp of fashion as it comes out of the atmosphere of monarchical courts” and espoused a “truly American and republican school of politeness.” Nathaniel P. Willis, a widely read arbiter elegantiarum, conferred his approval in the columns of the Home Journal, declaring, “We should be glad to see a distinctively American school of good manners, in which all useless etiquettes were thrown aside, but every politeness adopted or invented which could promote sensible and easy exchanges of good will and sensibility. … To get rid of imported superfluities of etiquette is the first thing to do.”²⁰

The flag-wavers not only reflected more faithfully the national mood, but they derived a further advantage from the fact that on certain matters of good form the English and the French were at variance, thus forcing Americans at the very least to choose between them.²¹ Nevertheless, reprints of certain imported manuals enjoyed an appreciable vogue, especially those tailored to the comparable needs of the rising classes in the homelands.²² Nearly all the works, whether of foreign or native origin, carefully avoided the old-time references to the etiquette of inferiors toward superiors, one author even deeming it necessary to argue that republican sensitivity did not forbid closing a letter with the formula: “I have the honour to be your very obedient servant.”²³

The handbooks to which the uninitiated turned were generally crisp and to the point, shunning the leisurely epistolary approach of the eighteenth century. The matter was neatly arranged, nothing was taken for granted, and the precepts were so simply phrased as to be easily remembered, or even memorized. The prices charged for the volumes proved a further attraction. Some sold for as little as twenty-five cents, and just before the Civil War the hustling New York firm headed by Irwin P. Beadle published a vastly popular Dime Book of Practical Etiquette (1859). To deepen the impression on readers, the writers often spoke as though their advice possessed a quasi-legal sanction. “Politeness and etiquette,” said one author, “form a sort of supplement to the law, which enables society to protect itself against offences which the law cannot touch.”²⁴ Another entitled his book The Laws of Etiquette, while still another observed in Benthamite phrase, “The Laws of Convention, like all wise laws, are instituted to promote ‘the greatest good of the greatest number.’”²⁵

Since these missionaries of manners were preaching principally to the social heathen, they did not flinch from expounding first principles. Thus one admonished, “Never sleep in any garment worn during the day.” A second inveighed against so-called “genteel people who never use the bath, or only once or twice a year wash themselves all over, though they change their linen daily.” A third explained, “A gentleman never sits in the house with his hat on in the presence of ladies for a single moment.”²⁶ By the same token, he should never smoke in their presence, or where they might come, even on the street, and clothing tainted with the fumes must be changed before going into company. The mania of spitting, everywhere and on all occasions, fell under a similar ban. The female reader, for her part, was told it was an offense against decorum to let her overnight hostess “know that you have found or felt insects in your bed.”²⁷ A typical catalogue of bad company manners included the following:

to balance yourself upon your chair; … to extend your feet on the andirons; to admire yourself with complacency in a glass; … to laugh immoderately; to place your hand upon the person with whom you are conversing; to take him by the buttons, the collar of his cloak, the cuffs, the waist, &c.; to seize ladies by the waist, or to touch their person; … to beat time with the feet and hands; to whirl round a chair on one leg.²⁸

The ordeal of dining involved many further traps for the unwary, to which etiquette authorities devoted loving attention. Among the inviolable injunctions were to remove one's gloves before eating; to unfold the napkin and, in the case of a woman, pin it to one's belt; to chew noiselessly; to sop up juices with pieces of bread; and to avoid watching fellow guests dispatch their food. If the lady at your side “should raise an unmanageable portion to her mouth, you should cease all conversation with her, and look steadfastly into the opposite part of the room.”²⁹

The question of knife versus fork gained fresh urgency from the recent introduction of the French or silver fork in place of the steel variety. According to the social arbiters, both refinement and safety recommended the primacy of the fork, Mrs. Farrar alone dissenting. This Harvard professor's wife, insisting patriotically that “Americans have as good a right to their own fashions as the inhabitants of any other country,” defended the practice of eating with a knife “provided you do it neatly, and do not put in large mouthfuls, or close your lips tight over the blade.”³⁰ From the frequency of mention it was evidently not unusual for guests to break dishes, or even “to throw down a waiter loaded with splendid cut-glass.” If such a mishap occurred, “you should not make an apology, or appear the least mortified, or indeed, take any notice whatever of the calamity.” Otherwise the impression might arise that the host could ill afford the loss.³¹

When conversing, whether at the table or elsewhere, pains should be taken not to remind one's companions of their plebeian origins—that “you remember their living in a small house, or in a remote street.” On the other hand, you mustn't yourself put on airs by boasting of “the fine things you have at home,” for that might make people suspect “you were, not long ago, somebody's washerwoman, and cannot forget to be reminding everybody that you are not so now.”³² Another mark of the newly arrived was inconsiderate treatment of domestics. Though etiquette manuals granted that the yeasty republican spirit, fortified by the many other opportunities for employment, often rendered the servants themselves intractable, they placed the chief onus upon the mistresses who, unaccustomed to authority, used it tyrannically.³³

In many respects women were conceded a larger measure of freedom than the older dispensation had allowed. Since parents might unexpectedly lose their means, girls were urged to master some branch of knowledge or skill by which they could become self-supporting. The reading of fiction was no longer taboo, though the utmost discrimination was recommended. Ladies, if modestly attired, might also with full propriety take long journeys alone and even converse at times with respectful strangers.

Courtship, on the other hand, continued to be the only proper basis of companionship with the other sex. It was well for the man to take the initiative because custom so decreed, and in any event, “where there is a fair chance of every woman's being married, who wishes it, the more things are left to their natural course the better.” Under the circumstances a girl was cautioned: “Accept not unnecessary assistance in putting on cloaks, shawls, over-shoes, or anything of the sort. … Read not out of the same book; let not your eagerness to see anything induce you to place your head close to another person's.” Moreover, “the waltz is a dance of too loose a character, and unmarried ladies should refrain from it altogether.”³⁴

Wedlock, a visiting Frenchman thought, condemned a wife to “the life of a nun” except that it was “not taken ill that she have children, and even many of them.” Though he somewhat embroidered the reality, the fact of woman's continuing submergence as a yokemate and mother sheds light on the unvarying advice of the manual writers not to contract a loveless union, even if the maiden's parents should insist. But seemingly only one mentor went so far as to suggest that a girl might sometimes be justified in marrying in defiance of her parents' desires.³⁵

The unprecedented demand for dissertations on decorum in the generation before the Civil War shows how thoroughly the rising classes rejected the view: “I don't know what etiquette is, but I know what I like.” Out of their need and wish came the behavior book in the modern sense of a code of arbitrary conventions framed for polite society. The regulations were avowedly designed for urban dwellers, with the drawing-rooms of Washington providing the model.³⁶ (New York's turn would come later.) How far the canons penetrated the countryside, and how far they affected all classes even in the cities, it would be difficult to say.

The important thing is that the preachments set up standards of deportment of which nearly everybody in one way or another became conscious. It was also significant that these standards were tacitly accepted as desirable not merely for the rich and the wellborn, but also for the rank and file.

Nor were the results inconsiderable. In the 1830's Tocqueville, judging from the vantage ground of French aristocracy, found American manners “neither so tutored nor so uniform” as in his own country, but “frequently more sincere.”³⁷ Twenty years later, in 1857, Gurowski, a Polish nobleman's son, noted that the people still tended to neglect the “most minute details and rites of courtesy,” but added, “good-breeding prevails, and hearty, intentional politeness marks their address and intercourse.” The moral he drew was: “Democracy teaches self-respect to everybody, in respecting others.”³⁸

Notes

1. The scornful phrase is quoted in a letter of Salmon P. Chase, April 20, 1829, in the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly, XXVIII (1919), 152.

2. Anon., How to Behave (New York, 1856), 124.

3. Catharine M. Sedgwick, Morals of Manners (New York, 1846), 61.

4. A. M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston, 1945), 38n., 99.

5. Quoted in Wecter, Saga of American Society, 35, from an article originally appearing in the Muscogee Herald in 1856.

6. The quotation is from Sarah J. Hale, Manners; or, Happy Homes and Good Society (Boston, 1866), 142.

7. [Bessie L.] Pierce, Public Opinion and the Teaching of History, 4-5n., 6-7.

8. Alonzo Potter and G. B. Emerson, The School and the Schoolmaster (New York, 1842), 176-177, 343-357; Charles Northend, The Teacher and the Parents (2d ed., Boston, 1853), 32-35, 55-57, 303-305.

9. See, for example, Albert Picket, The Juvenile Expositor (New York, 1827), 191-196; William Sullivan, The Political Class Book (new ed., Boston, 1831), 143-148; S. G. Goodrich, The Third Reader (6th ed., Boston, 1841), 59-64, 117.

10. Sara P. Willis [Parton], The Life and Beauties of Fanny Fern (New York, 1855), 284. See also her similar “Advice to Ladies” in Fern Leaves from Fanny's Port Folio (Auburn, 1853), 317-319, a work which sold 80,000 copies.

11. For some reviews and notices of these works, see Godey's Lady's Book, XIV (1837), 47, 285; XVI (1838), 167-169, 225-228, 245-248; XVIII (1839), 192, 239, 285-286; XX (1840), 95; XXI (1841), 94; XXII (1841), 48; XXVI (1843), 59, 295-296; XXVIII (1844), 55, 200; XXX (1845), 143; XXXI (1845), 130; XXXV (1847), 156, 332; XL (1850), 356; XLIV (1852), 165, 167, 230; L (1855), 277; LII (1856), 182, 563; LIII (1856), 85, 564; LIV (1857), 280, 470; LX (1860), 471; LXII (1861), 179, 190; LXIX (1864), 176.

12. R. W. Emerson, “Culture,” in Works (Boston, 1883-1887), VI, 138.

13. Review of Margaret Coxe, The Young Lady's Companion (Columbus, 1839), in Godey's Lady's Book, XIX (1839), 286.

14. G. W. Hervey, The Principles of Courtesy (New York, 1852), p. iii. This indictment was quite too severe, though Godey's Lady's Book, XVIII (1839), 286, accused a recently published manual of reflecting the influence of “the old and heartless philosophy of Chesterfield.”

15. W. A. Alcott, The Young Man's Guide (rev. ed., Boston, 1844), 367-368. Miss Sedgwick in Morals of Manners, 43, said, “We hardly know whether it belongs to morals or manners, to offer the best seats at table to your elders, and to the females of your family.”

16. T. S. Arthur, Advice to Young Men (Boston, 1847), 70-71, and Advice to Young Women (Boston, 1847), 5-6.

17. “The most thorough emetic I know of,” Fanny wrote, “is in the shape of ‘Guide to Young Wives,’ and kindred books.” Sara P. Willis [Parton], Fresh Leaves (New York, 1857), 210.

18. Hale, Manners, 80.

19. Catharine M. Sedgwick, Means and Ends (Boston, 1839), 15-16, 150.

20. The quotations are from anon., The Perfect Gentleman (New York, 1860), 7-8; the preface of anon., How to Behave; and N. P. Willis, Hurry-graphs (Auburn, 1851), 300, 326. Margaret C. Conkling (“Henry Lunettes”), The American Gentleman's Guide to Politeness and Fashion (New York, 1857), 330, cautioned that “Rudeness and Republicanism” should not be considered “synonymous terms.”

21. The author of The Perfect Gentleman, 6-7, makes much of this point.

22. For the rising-class phenomenon in England, consult C. W. Day (“Count Alfred D'Orsay”), Etiquette (New York, 1843), 3-4, and anon., The Habits of Good Society (New York, 1865), 24-26. For a brief recent discussion, see Lytton Strachey, Portraits in Miniature and Other Essays (New York, 1931), 118-119.

23. Anon. (“A Gentleman”), The Laws of Etiquette (Philadelphia, 1836), 89.

24. Anon., Perfect Gentleman, 200.

25. Conkling, American Gentleman's Guide, 26.

26. Anon., How to Behave, 18; Emily Thornwell, The Lady's Guide to Perfect Gentility (New York, 1856), 14; anon., Perfect Gentleman, 208.

27. Eliza Leslie, The Behaviour Book (Philadelphia, 1859), 15.

28. Elizabeth F. Bayle-Mouillard (“Mme. Celnart”), The Gentleman and Lady's Book of Politeness and Propriety of Deportment (Philadelphia, 1852), 83. This translation of a French work was reprinted many times.

29. Anon., Laws of Etiquette, 151.

30. Eliza W. Farrar (who used the pseudonym “A Lady” in the first printing), The Young Lady's Friend (Boston, 1836), 346-347. The revised edition (New York, 1873) by Clara J. Moore (“Mrs. H. O. Ward”) deleted this heretical advice. A letter from Mrs. Farrar to her publisher, dated June 4, 1837, and preserved in the Boston Public Library, notes that certain passages in the original edition of her book offended the “fastidiousness of Boston readers,” but the only one she specifies concerned instructions to nurses on how to treat the “evacuations” of patients (page 69). This she asked him to omit in future printings.

31. Anon., Laws of Etiquette, 204-205.

32. Leslie, Behaviour Book, 188; anon., Perfect Gentleman, 204, 205-206.

33. The substitution of Irish and German servants for the older native “help” was another factor in the situation. On the “servile war,” see Lydia H. Sigourney, Letters to Young Ladies (Hartford, 1833), 30-31; Conkling, American Gentleman's Guide, 102-103; Farrar, Young Lady's Friend, chap. xi; and Harriet Beecher Stowe's “House and Home” (1864), pieces in the Atlantic Monthly, reprinted in Household Papers and Stories (Boston, 1896), 43, 99, 141-145. W. A. Alcott, pointing out in The Young Wife (Boston, 1837), 153-157, 166, that, unlike former times, people “in middling and even low circumstances” employed domestics, added, “The system of keeping servants in our families seems to me highly anti-republica.”

34. Farrar, Young Lady's Friend, 288-289, 293; Bayle-Mouillard, Gentleman and Lady's Book, 187.

35. G. W. Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (New York, 1938), 144; anon., How to Behave, 114.

36. See, for example, the anonymous Etiquette at Washington, together with the Customs Adopted by Polite Society in the Other Cities of the United States (Baltimore, 1849; 3d ed., 1857). Of Washington, A. G. de Gurowski, America and Europe (New York, 1857), 406, said, “Men coming from all parts of the republic, independent and equal to each other in their public character, give and preserve to society the broad republican features and space wherein every one moves freely and finds his absolute or at least his relative appreciation.”

37. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Henry Reeve, tr., New York, 1900), II, 229.

38. Gurowski, America and Europe, 375-376.