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A Class Act: Redefining Deference in Early American History

No matter how much we approach ‘‘history from the bottom up,’’ we always have to come to terms with those at the top. No less than common people in the past, historians in the present have had to consider how—and, in most cases, how successfully—powerful men exerted economic and political authority over the rest of society, and how the rest of society responded to their assertions of power. Quite often, the explanation has come down to one term: deference, the process by which, as Gordon Wood has put it, prominent men ‘‘relied on their own social respectability and private influence to compel the obedience of ordinary people.’’ Indeed, Wood observes, ‘‘We will never comprehend the distinctiveness of that premodern world until we appreciate the extent to which many ordinary people still accepted their own lowliness.’’1 This argument for the acceptance of deference reflects only a more general historical explanation that has over the years gained its own intellectual re-