I'd like to thank Dan Ernst and LHB for the opportunity to be a guest blogger this month. I'm excited to participate in this community of scholars. As Dan mentioned in his introduction, I recently published my first book, The Dreadful Word: Speech Crime and Polite Gentlemen in Massachusetts, 1690-1776, with the Studies in Legal History at CUP.
For the book, I looked at provincial statutes and General Sessions of the Peace (local courts) records to determine what kinds of verbal offenses were criminalized, prosecuted, and punished in eighteenth-century Massachusetts. I considered how contemporaries described these crimes and the offenders, and tracked who was most likely to be prosecuted and receive the harshest punishments.
Unlike the previous century, when colonists criminalized speech they deemed ungodly, now colonists criminalized speech they considered impolite. In many ways, the statutory scheme and enforcement practices of the 1700s regarding criminal speech reflected the ethos of conduct and courtesy literature.
Surprising patterns emerged. Even as Puritan influence waned, Massachusetts colonists remained deeply interested in criminalizing and punishing speech as part of preserving the King's peace. They enacted and renewed numerous statutes throughout the century outlawing acts such as profane cursing and swearing, defamation, lying, sedition, spreading false news (not yet a political catchphrase), threats, contempt, false swearing and perjury, and mumping (the eighteenth-century version of a confidence man). Additional common law crimes were also avidly prosecuted: noise, abuse, rudeness, and "ill manners."
Moreover, these crimes were not generally applicable, but were associated in legal records with particular sorts of people--the lower orders. Explicit references to soldiers, sailors, and servants, and language that bent the law's ear toward speech occurring in the work and social spaces of the meaner sort make clear whose speech provincial legislators believed was most threatening to good social order.
Meanwhile, patterns of prosecution and punishment also reveal strong associations between "vulgar" speech and "the vulgar." Notably, the participatory and highly discretionary nature of the General Sessions Courts meant that the law could not be employed as a blunt cudgel of power by the elite; the system had to look legitimate. Although historians usually stress the shift to property-related offenses in the caseload of eighteenth-century Massachusetts courts, the more than 1600 cases of speech crime that I uncovered suggest a broad community consensus that these crimes, too, posed significant threat to the King's peace.
In my next post, I'll discuss how the turmoil and chaos of protest and revolution splintered a speech economy premised upon politeness, and created opportunities to recalibrate the relationship between language and power.
