“He should not speak to a gentleman in the street”

Yesterday I quoted John Malcolm’s complaint about how some Royal Navy officers had treated him in 1771, cutting buttons off his cloak.

In his newspaper advertisement about the conflict, Malcolm twice used the language of duelling. One navy officer named Davis reportedly “promis’d…Gentleman-like Satisfaction,” and the Customs officer “demanded Satisfaction of him.”

Davis instead proceeded to an action that was also part of the duelers’ code, but not for a genteel equal with whom one would duel. Instead, Malcolm complained, “he struck me with a Stick.”

Clubbing or caning an opponent was not just a physical assault. It also communicated that person was of a lower social class.

When James Otis, Jr., and Customs Commissioner John Robinson met in the British Coffee-House in September 1769, they were following that code. Otis had publicly claimed the right to break Robinson’s head, and Robinson tried to grab Otis’s nose before swinging his own cane.

Decades later, Rep. Preston Brooks’s assault on Sen. Charles Sumner in the U.S. Senate chamber carried the same symbolism. Brooks had considered challenging Sumner to a duel, as he had previously dueled with other men, but another member of Congress persuaded him that dueling was too good for the anti-slavery senator.

When John Malcolm advertised in 1771 that he had given Davis “a genteel Basting or Caneing,” he wasn’t just saying he’d resisted Davis’s strike and come out ahead in their fight. He was signaling that because he’d succeeded in inflicting that chastisement he was the more worthy gentleman.

Malcolm’s behavior toward George R. T. Hewes on 25 Jan 1774 had the same symbolic dimension. The incident started when a boy criticized Malcolm for having knocked his “chips” into the snow the day before. Malcolm didn’t like being pestered by a child and started waving his cane around. Hewes then remonstrated with the man about threatening the boy.

Malcolm again resented being called out by someone from a lower class—a poor shoemaker. According to the Massachusetts Spy, he told Hewes, “You are an impertinent rascal, it is none of your business,” eventually adding that “he should not speak to a gentleman in the street” like that.

The two men then argued over their “good credit” in town. Hewes didn’t claim to be a gentleman, but he found a way to imply that Malcolm wasn’t one, either: “Mr. Hewes retorted, be that as it will, I never was tarred nor feathered any how.”

At this time, before the actual war broke out, crowds almost always reserved tarring and feathering for working-class men connected with Customs enforcement as low-level officers, sailors, or (supposed) informants. Contrary to later popular images, mobs didn’t tar and feather upper-class Tories.

By bringing up the fact that a crowd in Maine had tarred and feathered John Malcolm, Hewes was insinuating that, despite his career as a ship’s captain, colonial army officer, and higher-level Customs officer, Malcolm was not really a gentleman.

Malcolm responded as the dueling code said a gentleman could when insulted by someone beneath his rank: he clubbed Hewes on the forehead and knocked him out.