Give me liberty, and give me slaves

Abstract

IN FATHERING THE NATION, RUSS CASTRONOVO BRINGS TO OUR ATTENTION A group of counter memories that existed in the period 1789-1865. These counter memories contradict the dominant memory in which the Founding Fathers, when they created the nation, endowed it with an unambiguous legacy of liberty. It has been possible to sustain this dominant memory, according to Castronovo, only by interpreting slavery as a temporary aberration from this legacy of liberty. This has been done by separating the Southern Founding Fathers-Washington, Jefferson, and Madison-from their identities as slaveholders. Indeed for Northerners such as Emerson, these Founding Fathers were not even Southerners. When antislavery Northerners captured control of national identity during the Civil War, they read the 1830-1860 generation of white Southerners out of the nation. Washington, Jefferson, and Madison were republicans and authors of liberty, while the Southerners of 1830 were unAmerican, neo-medieval tyrants. But, for Castronovo, these white Southerners of 1830 were the sons and grandsons of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. Influenced by Benedict Anderson's study of the construction of modern nationalism, Imagined Communities, Castronovo is aware that modern historical writing played a major artistic role in that construction.' This writing imagined nations as bounded, autonomous spaces, each with unified and organic peoples. David Levin pointed out in his 1959 book History as Romantic Art that the