In the Name of the Father: Washington's Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation (review)

Abstract

In the Name of the Father: Washington's Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation. By Francois Furstenberg. (New York: Penguin Press, 2006. Pp. 352. Cloth, $27.95.)Reviewed Lorena WalshIn the Name of the Father is an eminently readable and important book linking George Washington's political philosophy in the early republic (and what others made of it), justifications for slavery, and the power of popular print culture in fashioning American nationalism. The initial chapters make for entertaining reading as Furstenberg, after briefly outlining the central messages of Washington's Farewell Address, surveys what politicians and especially popular authors made of it, and out of it. He characterizes the Farewell Address as the last and most influential Federalist paper, a document to which Washington, Madison, Hamilton, and Jay all contributed. Widely distributed in newspaper broadsides, pamphlet editions, and almanacs, the address was fundamentally a nationalist text emphasizing the critical importance of Union. It was frequendy republished, along with the Declaration of Independence, in times of national crisis. In addressing fears about geographical division, political faction, and meddling foreign powers, the address confronted one of the greatest conceptual problems of U.S. nationalism, refraining the idea of consent, turning it into a concept not of revolution, but of political obligation (10).Consent was such a critical issue, Furstenberg explains, because even as the new government legitimated itself in the consent of the governed, the presence of slavery undermined the meaning of consent and threatened the unity that postrevolutionary nationals sought to create. An outpouring of popular civic texts appeared that consent to the constituted political authorities and a sense of mutual political obligation canonizing the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and Washington's Farewell Address, and creating a powerful mythology of the Founding Fathers centered around George Washington as the 'Father of the Nation' (21). Fears for the nation's future after Washington's death produced an outpouring of texts aimed especially at molding young people into better citizens, using Washington as a vehicle. These texts, by making Washington into the father of each family . . . made the household a metaphorical incubator of national virtues (42). Veneration of Washington was promoted not just in families and in schoolrooms but also churches, which widely disseminated his words converted into hymns, odes, and eulogies and even bound into Bibles. These sacred texts of American nationalism were to be read with the same mix of belief and obedience as the Bible. The fusing of nationalism with evangelical Protestantism helped to promote a civic religion.By focusing intently on Washington's private life and private virtues, civic texts made his family a matter of great political significance, including his slaves. Early republican anxieties about slave insurrection produced two enduring contradictory narratives about Washington and slavery. The abolitionist posited Washington as a protoabolitionist, portrayed slavery as a barbarous legacy of the British, conceived of the Revolution as a struggle against slavery, and stressed the inevitability of future emancipation. The alternative interpretation presented slavery as a benign institution grounded in the tacit consent of the enslaved. Washington's fatherhood of his slaves-widely presented in sentimental texts and images-was understood to rest on affection rather than coercion. Given the wide circulation of both interpretations, in 1861 Washington could be invoked the North to sustain the cause of national unity and in the South to support secession and defend slavery.These serious arguments are then leavened an entertaining chapter on Mason Locke Weems as an indefatigable peddler of cheap, sentimental books; evangelist of nationalism; and premier popular biographer of Washington. …