Francois Furstenberg: The Founders' Founders
[François Furstenberg, an assistant professor of history at the University of Montreal, is the author of "In the Name of the Father: Washington's Legacy, Slavery and the Making of a Nation."]
EACH year, dozens of new books feed an insatiable public appetite for stories about the men who made the American nation. While some writers and scholars denounce the elitism, racism and most of all the slaveholding of the nation's founders, others defend them and deplore the debunking to which they are subject. But lost amid these quarrels is a more subtle and in many ways more interesting question — one worth pondering on this July 4.
How exactly did a group of lawyers and politicians become founding fathers in the first place, heroes to be venerated by generations of Americans? Answering that question draws our attention beyond the small, famous band of founding brothers to other, unsung founders — men who, if they did not create the American nation, did create American nationalism.
Consider Mason Locke Weems: author, clergyman, book peddler. Not a great man, perhaps, but a maker of great men; not counted among the popular sages, but certainly among those who made them popular. Born in 1759 on Maryland's Eastern Shore, Weems studied medicine and then became a clergyman before abandoning his religious calling in favor of a nationalist one. Armed with little more than his wit and charm, Parson Weems traversed the country selling schoolbooks, almanacs, biographies and other popular literature in towns and villages from New York to Georgia.
Traveling along Virginia's dusty, dilapidated roads in 1799, Weems was composing a brief pamphlet on George Washington — enumerating his virtues and encouraging Americans to emulate them — when he heard that the great man had just died.
"I have something to whisper in your lug," he wrote Mathew Carey, a Philadelphia publisher and Weems's partner in the Southern book trade. "Washington, you know, is gone! Millions are gaping to read something about him. I am very nearly primed and cocked for 'em."
Weems went on to write one of the most important works of American history: a popularizing, largely fictionalized account of Washington's life that turned him into a down-home, evangelical hero for a rural and increasingly religious nation. Ever hear of Washington and the cherry tree — of Washington who could not tell a lie? Weems's biography gave birth to this popular image.
In the process, Weems helped make Washington into the nation's common father. "Our children," he predicted, "and our children's children, hearing the great name of Washington re-echoed from every lip with such veneration and delight, shall ask their fathers, 'What was it that raised Washington to this godlike height of glory?' " His writings would provide the answer.
Indeed, in many respects, the national symbols Americans revere today — the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the founding fathers — entered our canon not through the work of men like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison or Washington, but through the work of far less celebrated figures like Weems. ...
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EACH year, dozens of new books feed an insatiable public appetite for stories about the men who made the American nation. While some writers and scholars denounce the elitism, racism and most of all the slaveholding of the nation's founders, others defend them and deplore the debunking to which they are subject. But lost amid these quarrels is a more subtle and in many ways more interesting question — one worth pondering on this July 4.
How exactly did a group of lawyers and politicians become founding fathers in the first place, heroes to be venerated by generations of Americans? Answering that question draws our attention beyond the small, famous band of founding brothers to other, unsung founders — men who, if they did not create the American nation, did create American nationalism.
Consider Mason Locke Weems: author, clergyman, book peddler. Not a great man, perhaps, but a maker of great men; not counted among the popular sages, but certainly among those who made them popular. Born in 1759 on Maryland's Eastern Shore, Weems studied medicine and then became a clergyman before abandoning his religious calling in favor of a nationalist one. Armed with little more than his wit and charm, Parson Weems traversed the country selling schoolbooks, almanacs, biographies and other popular literature in towns and villages from New York to Georgia.
Traveling along Virginia's dusty, dilapidated roads in 1799, Weems was composing a brief pamphlet on George Washington — enumerating his virtues and encouraging Americans to emulate them — when he heard that the great man had just died.
"I have something to whisper in your lug," he wrote Mathew Carey, a Philadelphia publisher and Weems's partner in the Southern book trade. "Washington, you know, is gone! Millions are gaping to read something about him. I am very nearly primed and cocked for 'em."
Weems went on to write one of the most important works of American history: a popularizing, largely fictionalized account of Washington's life that turned him into a down-home, evangelical hero for a rural and increasingly religious nation. Ever hear of Washington and the cherry tree — of Washington who could not tell a lie? Weems's biography gave birth to this popular image.
In the process, Weems helped make Washington into the nation's common father. "Our children," he predicted, "and our children's children, hearing the great name of Washington re-echoed from every lip with such veneration and delight, shall ask their fathers, 'What was it that raised Washington to this godlike height of glory?' " His writings would provide the answer.
Indeed, in many respects, the national symbols Americans revere today — the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the founding fathers — entered our canon not through the work of men like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison or Washington, but through the work of far less celebrated figures like Weems. ...