Contempt, cursing, and defamation all actively caused harm to others and threatened to destabilize social hierarchies of gentility. As politeness became the political language that enabled the exercise of power by elites and allowed them to recognize each other as the rightful possessors of public authority, criminal prosecutions of uncivil speech helped define political roles and relationships. Contempt prosecutions punished impolite speech from the lower orders, but the law also rewarded appropriately submissive speech (such as apologies) from them. The fact that these negotiations occurred exclusively among men reflects how both the politeness regime and the king’s peace itself were increasingly marginalizing women. The vast majority of those prosecuted for cursing were men of relatively low social status; this offense was understood to threaten the polite ethos and the civil order. Defamation became in the eighteenth century a crime of the lower orders, while polite gentlemen channeled their own defamatory impulses into a highly specific and legally protected written form: satire.

Courtrooms constituted public forums for structuring the speech economy, the social identity of individuals, and the social order as a whole, according to the criteria of gentility. The amorphousness and subjectivity of “noise,” “railing,” and “abuse” made them the ideal vehicles into which to import prevailing conceptions of impolite speech and persons. Prosecutions for these offenses helped clarify distinctions between polite and vulgar, civilized and unrefined, the empire and the wilderness. Threats and menaces constituted a type of insensible speech that was located just at the boundary between language and violence. The criminal law – the most public and formal institution for policing profane speech – became directed primarily against the non-elite; the elite, meanwhile, were generally subject only to private and extralegal sanctions for swearing. For them, their prosecutions became vehicles for demonstrating their facility with legal procedure, possession of genteel qualities such as sensibility, and relative lack of legal accountability for otherwise transgressive speech.

In the eighteenth century, the Massachusetts House criminalized speech, and the general sessions courts prosecuted it, for being impolite as well as ungodly. Politeness became a core element of social order and elite white masculine identity. This study identified more than 1,600 criminal speech prosecutions in the records of justices and courts. These include any document that specified verbal threats or abuse; profane cursing or swearing; verbal noise; lying; false reports; defamatory speech; or perjury. Criminal procedure was simple and discretionary, and required widespread community participation in order to effectively prosecute impolite speech. Such prosecutions helped to define elite identity and status around matrices of sensibility, civility, and credibility. Sensibility was a moral and genteel quality not manifested by those prosecuted for noisy or abusive speech. Civility connoted pleasurable sociability that was undermined by contempt, cursing, and defamation. Credibility was the gentlemanly reputation for truthfulness, destroyed by lying, perjury, false news, and mumpers (pretended gentlemen). The Revolution replaced this regime with one based on respectability.

A polite social order emerged out of significant demographic, economic, and political changes in the early to mid-eighteenth century, and was established according to novel ideas about personal virtue, piety, and white masculinity. Members of an exclusive merchant elite embraced new models of personal deportment and constructed physical spaces, both public and domestic, in which to practice and display their gentility. Shared values, including an ethos of polite speech, united this elite and linked them with their English counterparts. Polite speech was explicated in conduct and courtesy books, in popular periodicals, in personal conversation with fellow gentlemen – and as distinct from vulgar speech, increasingly associated with particular types of people. Linguistic and social hierarchies proved to be mutually reinforcing, and, for the genteel, it was increasingly impolite (not ungodly or sinful) speech that posed the greater threat to good social order or “the peace.” That new social order would be enforced and enacted through law, the statutes, and procedures by which impolite speech was criminalized, prosecuted, and punished.

In Massachusetts, the elite solidified their identity and legitimated their claims to rule by linking veracity, and all the social perquisites that entailed, to gentlemanliness and whiteness. Laws against deceptive speech practices, and prosecutions of them, concretized and reinforced cultural associations between gentility and credibility. These prosecutions also had larger political significance. In naming defendants as false speakers, presentments and prosecutions formally defined them as ineligible for participation in a community of shared civil discourse. In perjury prosecutions, this process meant that certain men were much more likely to be believed in institutional and legal contexts, thus endowing them with greater power in those contexts. In false news prosecutions, the process enabled a small coterie to control sanctioned versions of public information. The outrage manifested over mumpers reveals elite anxieties about the strength and resilience of these still-emerging ideologies of truth-telling. But these tricksters and their interventions in polite society nevertheless managed to expose the inherent deceptiveness of the polite ethos itself.

Throughout the war and beyond, lawmakers largely abandoned their previous efforts to legislate polite speech, and instead crafted statutes designed to criminalize politically disloyal speech and reward loyal speech. General sessions courts, too, seem to have concentrated their efforts on subversive speech, while at the same time adopting a more expansive definition of impolite speakers and a more casual attitude toward impolite speech in general. Meanwhile, some evidence suggests that elite attempts to maintain a monopoly over their roles as credible purveyors of news about publicly significant events were undermined, as Americans questioned and reformulated the bonds between information and personal identity. Amid all this uncertainty about speech and status, a new ethos of respectability emerged as a set of values and a guide to behavior for those wishing to distinguish themselves from the lower orders. Indeed, cultural concerns about speech, its relationship to social order, and how best to regulate it have never totally vanished; they merely transformed and emerged in different incarnations that tend to reflect and reinforce existing structures of power and status in society.

The “vulgar,” as political actors, would play important roles in the resistance to imperial policies, and the “vulgar,” as political speech, would inform the eraʼs confrontational political dialogue. The language of protest in the 1760s and 1770s expressed political critique not only of imperial policies but also of the legal institutions and practices that promoted them. In fact, genteel cultural and political authority, which had been drawn from conduct and courtesy books and the polite coffeehouses of the metropole and extended through statutes and courtrooms, was severely tested by protest and rebellion. Under the previous regime, as politeness joined piety as a core cultural value for the Massachusetts elite, the language of statutes, prosecutions, and depositions had shifted to the rhetoric of gentility in addition to godliness. General sessions courts had imagined the portion of good social order, “the king’s peace,” that had to do with speech as a nearly exclusively masculine space governed by the metropolitan code of refinement. Prosecutions for vulgar speech had constructed a social hierarchy based in politeness, but it would not survive the Revolution intact.