| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

In the Name of the Father: Washington's Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation. By François Furstenberg. (New York: Penguin, 2006. 335 pp. $27.95, ISBN 1-59420-092-0.)

In this complex, smartly conceived volume, François Furstenberg offers an engaging reading of the early American republic. He links together, in a single interpretive structure, the emergence of an American nationalism centered on the cult of George Washington as the symbolic father of the country and of individual American lives; an individualism grounded in a Revolution-inspired belief in consent as the basis of liberty and the notion that personal autonomy is realizable only through purposeful rebellion against oppression; a continuing justification of slavery based on the perceived acceptance by blacks of their enslavement; and the pervasive power of popular, especially print, culture in incul cating those notions in the belief system of the American people. Furstenberg weaves his themes together in five carefully sequenced chapters—"The Apotheosis of George Washington"; "Washington's Family: Slavery and the Nation"; "Mason Locke Weems: Spreading the American Gospel"; "Civic Texts for Slave and Free: Inventing the Autonomous American"; and "Slavery and the American Individual." The book's strength lies not so much in what Furstenberg has to say about those topics individually (he freely cites the literature on each of them), as in his success in weaving them into a novel and stimulating overview of the cultural politics of the early republic.

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