Reviewed by Scott E. Casper | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.4

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the WMQ online. About 570 words from this article are provided below; about 766 words remain.

If you are a individual subscriber to the William and Mary Quarterly, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a subscriber to the William and Mary Quarterly, you can:: • subscribe here.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the William and Mary Quarterly (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the William and Mary Quarterly.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

Reviewed by Scott E. Casper | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Scott E. Casper, University of Nevada, Reno

In the Name of the Father: Washington's Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation. By François Furstenberg. New York: Penguin, 2006. 352 pages. $27.95 (cloth), $16.00 (paper).
"Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed," Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence. Born of revolution and divided by geography and nascent partisanship, how could a nation forge the consent of the governed necessary to its survival? François Furstenberg suggests that securing that consent posed the preeminent challenge to the postrevolutionary United States and that the solution lay in the "civic texts" that blanketed America from the 1790s to the 1850s. "Canonical texts," especially the Declaration, the Constitution, and George Washington's Farewell Address, and "popularizing texts" (233), especially schoolbooks, cemented iconic figures, events, and meanings in Americans' consciousness. But this consent was achieved at the cost of enduring paradox. Like many cultural analysts since Louis Hartz and David Potter, Furstenberg is concerned with the contradictory development of American liberalism. Drawing from recent scholarship on the history of the book and on nationalism, his analysis of "civic texts" (34) offers several new twists on the old debate about the relationship between liberalism and slavery in a nation ostensibly dedicated to individual autonomy.	1
Three years after Washington's Farewell Address warned about the dangers of partisanship, his death plunged an already-anxious nation into mourning. A range of civic texts addressed "pervasive fears about the nation's future" (30) by immortalizing Washington, his character, and his legacy. Emphasizing the Lockean, affective bonds of a national family with Washington as the father, they "helped transform audiences into Americans" (36). It is impossible to know how people interpreted these texts, Furstenberg admits. But the texts themselves supplied fairly clear instructions for their use: read and reread them; teach them in orations, homes, and schools; and obey Washington's wishes and example. Didactic and paternalistic, civic texts thus aimed to convert "revolutionary tradition into a force to suppress change" (46). Washington himself became a national text and quasi-religious icon, his "apotheosis" a popular illustration.	2
At once national father and plantation master, Washington embodied America's contradictions. His widely published last will fostered some northerners' interpretation of Washington as emancipator and of slavery as doomed to extinction. Yet an alternate explanation took hold as well, especially in the South. This father of his country, slaves weeping at his deathbed, embodied planter benevolence. Verbal and visual images suggested that his slaves revered their so-called father, much as citizens who venerated Washington gave tacit consent to the nation's continued existence. More than any other writer, the itinerant preacher and bookseller Mason Locke Weems produced civic texts that sold. His early pamphlets The Philanthropist and The True Patriot extolled the obligation of national obedience "by deploying a depoliticized Washington" (121). From these it was a short step to his Washington biography, the nineteenth century's most durable civic text.¹ Self-made, hardworking, protoevangelically pious, Weems's Washington looked like his rural, mostly southern and western readers, and "one might even reverse the formulation and say that in certain respects the audience had created the text" (135). Weems's and kindred works also mediated European political philosophy for far-flung, provincial citizens, supplying an answer, Furstenberg suggests, to the old question of how high political theory reached the American masses.	. . .

There are about 766 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.