| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

François Furstenberg. In the Name of the Father: Washington's Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation. (Penguin History of American Life.) New York: Penguin. 2006. Pp. 335. $27.95.

François Furstenberg argues that early American nationalism was generated by "civic texts," with George Washington the source or subject of many of the key documents that gave successive generations of Americans their collective identity. Beginning with a discussion of the drafting and dissemination of Washington's 1796 Farewell Address, Furstenberg shows how "these civic texts brought about the domestication of Washington's memory." By combining "the public political father" with "the private, paternal father," eulogists "transcended public and private spheres" (p. 42) and extended the boundaries of the national community to include "daughters, mothers, and wives" (p. 37). Washington worship blunted the radical edge of revolutionary republican ideology, promoting instead tacit "consent to the constituted political authorities and a sense of mutual political obligation." Most significantly, Furstenberg claims, "the Washington mythology opened a space for the incorporation of slaves into this national family, with slaves, like white Americans, united in bonds of affection and gratitude to Washington" (p. 21). Americans' confrontation with slavery—the antithesis of the liberties they sought to vindicate in the revolution—precipitated the "turn toward tacit consent" (p. 22). Nationalists depoliticized consent, jettisoning Jefferson's conception of an active, self-governing citizenry ("the earth belongs in usufruct to the living," as he wrote to James Madison on September 6, 1789) in favor of Madison's notion of tacit consent. If white patriots, risking everything, "had earned their liberty," slaves who did not resist "had chosen to live in slavery" (p. 192). "The valorization of individual autonomy," Furstenberg concludes, "grounded both citizenship and slavery in a tacit consent" (p. 220).

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