Manners are interesting because they tend to mirror the power ratios between the people concerned. And American manners are popularly supposed to re?ect the generally egalitarian character of American society. The truth is a little more complicated than that.
In the earliest days of English settlement in North America, society was relatively ?at. The settlers included very few members of the upper class of the parent society in England - no aristocrats or members of the gentry to speak of. The early elite consisted of university-educated clerics and lawyers, along with merchants - people who would have perhaps been considered prosperous middle-class at home. But equally, few members of the very poor-est strata made the journey across the Atlantic. In spite of that, the settlers did bring with them the acute status-consciousness of English society, and in the course of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a fairly considerable colonial gentry emerged, consciously modelling itself on the English gentry. After Independence, this gentry was largely eclipsed - except in the slave-owning South, of course. The agrarian republic that Alexis de Tocqueville visited in the early 1830s represented American society in its most egalitarian phase, the age of Jacksonian Democracy. Tocqueville pictured at length the relatively easy and informal manners to be seen in the relations between men and women, masters and servants, even of?cers and other ranks in the army.
In a telling comparison with Britain, he wrote:
‘In America, where the privileges of birth never existed and where riches confer no peculiar rights on their possessors, men unacquainted with each other are very ready to frequent the same places, and ?nd neither peril nor advan-tage in the free interchange of their thoughts. (...) their manner is therefore natural, frank and open' (Tocqueville 1961 [1835-40]: i, 202-30).In contrast, English people encountering each other by chance were typically reserved, from fear that a casual acquaintance - struck up when travelling abroad for instance - would prove an embarrassment when they returned to the rigidly demarcated social boundaries at home.