George Washington’s Hair: How Early Americans Remembered the Founders by Keith Beutler

Abstract

Reviewed by: George Washington’s Hair: How Early Americans Remembered the Founders by Keith Beutler Matthew R. Costello George Washington’s Hair: How Early Americans Remembered the Founders. By Keith Beutler. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2021. 292 pages. Cloth, ebook. Though most of the colonial political elite traditionally referred to as the Founders or Founding Fathers did not envision women, African Americans, Native Americans, or other religiously or politically marginalized communities as equal members of the emerging United States, these groups and individuals lived through the crucible of war and experienced different degrees of revolutionary change in the war’s aftermath. In recent decades, as social historians have shifted focus away from military leaders, elites, and institutions, they have instead emphasized the agency of these marginalized peoples, as well as their impact on the Revolutionary War and wider contributions to independence. In turn, scholars of memory—among them Michael Kammen and Alfred F. Young—have explored how diverse individuals and groups remembered and commemorated the American Revolution differently, each with their own goals, which included political autonomy, economic gain, and cultural influence.1 In the years following the American Revolution, women, African Americans, and working-class whites in the new nation, who were marginalized and generally excluded from participating in formal politics, found other ways to connect with the birth of the country through public and private memory practices. Scholars such as David Waldstreicher and Len Travers have used key anniversaries, such as the Fourth of July, to show how people divided by race, class, and gender participated collectively in rituals of American republican political culture.2 Other scholars such as Robert Cray Jr. and Sarah Purcell have highlighted specific efforts made by local communities, state officials, and political parties to honor the deceased while claiming them as their own. Beyond public memory practices such as ceremonies, orations, parades, and processions, private practices were also democratized in the nineteenth century, as more people ventured to historic places in search of tangible pieces of the American past. George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate is but one of many examples, [End Page 161] as nineteenth-century visitors proclaimed Washington the “property of the nation” and absconded with all kinds of mementos and “relics.” These items provided a physical connection to Washington, imbued with the experience of visiting as well as the stories provided by enslaved African Americans and other workers who showed them the grounds and tomb.3 In George Washington’s Hair: How Early Americans Remembered the Founders, Keith Beutler builds upon these works with a fascinating discussion of the various intellectual, scientific, religious, and pseudoscientific ideas and movements that shaped the memory of the American Revolution in the first half of the nineteenth century. From 1790 to 1840, Beutler argues, transatlantic memory culture and ideas influenced how Americans understood memory, eventually turning them toward a physicalist perspective. As Americans began to use relics as “concrete memory aids” (2), historical societies, organizations, and individuals sought out physical pieces of the past such as objects, artifacts, and even people in the form of Revolutionary War veterans. Though historians have explored how democracy transformed American life and by extension patriotic memory, Beutler contends the opposite, arguing that the “popular redefinition of the faculty of memory itself causally contributed to the young nation’s democratization” (3). Beutler grounds his study in the best example of this phenomenon: strands of Washington’s hair. As he notes, “Scores of institutions hold locks from his mane. . . . To drive the ten-hour stretch from Richmond, Virginia, to Portland, Maine, is to pass within fifty miles of a lock of his hair nearly four dozen times—an average of about once every fourteen minutes” (x). The author’s accompanying website even features an interactive map identifying more than one hundred sites, museums, historical societies, and universities across the United States that purport to house a lock of Washington’s hair. Those that possessed these “sacred patriotic relics” (8) believed they were entitled to greater cultural authority and used the memory of the Founders and Washington to advance their causes. Beutler illustrates this contest over the memory of the revolution through the lives, experiences, and events surrounding five individuals...