'
Americans have always had a strong tendency to address people by former titles. A good example is from Mrs. Frances Trollope's amusing and informative 1832 book Domestic Manners of the Americans:
"The gentlemen in the cabin (we had no ladies) would certainly neither from their language, manners, nor appearance, have received that designation in Europe; but we soon found their claim to it rested on more substantial ground, for we heard them nearly all addressed by the titles of general, colonel, and major. On mentioning these military dignities to an English friend some time afterward, he told me that he too had made the voyage with the same description of company , but remarking that there was not a single captain among them; he made the observation to a fellow-passenger, and asked how he accounted for it. 'Oh, sir, the captains are all [sleeping] on deck,' was the reply.
Our honours, however, were not all military, for we had a judge among us. I know it is equally easy and invidious to ridicule the peculiarities of appearance and manner in people of a different nation from ourselves; we may, too, at the same moment, be undergoing the same ordeal in their estimation; and, moreover, I am by no means disposed to consider whatever is new to me as therefore objectionable; but, nevertheless, it was impossible not to feel repugnance to many of the novelties that now surrounded me.
The total want of all the usual courtesies of the table, the voracious rapidity with which the viands were seized and devoured; the strange uncouth phrases and pronunciation; the loathsome spitting, from the contamination of which it was absolutely impossible to protect our dresses; the frightful manner of feeding with their knives, till the whole blade seemed to enter into the mouth; and the still more frightful manner of cleaning the teeth afterward with a pocket knife, soon forced us to feel that we were not surrounded by the generals, colonels, and majors of the Old World; and that the dinner hour was to be any thing rather than an hour of enjoyment.
The little conversation that went forward, while we remained in the room was entirely political, and the respective claims of Adams and Jackson to the presidency were argued with more oaths and more vehemence than it had ever been my lot to hear. Once a colonel appeared on the verge of assaulting a major, when a huge seven-foot Kentuckian "gentleman" horse-dealer asked of the heavens to confound them both, and bade them sit still and be d--d."
