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.