1.1 The Cult of George Washington and 1776

Supplement to Endnotes

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George W. Cole’s life began amid the dying lights of 1776, a time when many Americans imagined they stood in shifting winds, huddling and cupping their hands to preserve the flame of a flickering candle. With the passing of Jefferson and Adams, the summer that George had been conceived, fifty-five of the fifty-six men who had signed the Declaration of Independence were dead.[1]​

      The death of Adams and Jefferson was only the most uncanny overlap of death and the Revolution’s sacred beginnings. James Monroe died on July 4th, too, exactly five year later, in 1831. In 1832, Americans celebrated the centennial of Washington’s birth and the death of Charles Carroll, the last remaining signer of the Declaration. The birth of the nation’s “father” was aligned with the passing of the last revolutionary brother.  That same year a divisive debate arose over whether to dig up Washington’s remains from Mount Vernon and bury them beneath the Rotunda of the Capitol. Richly symbolic of the times, the celebration of Washington’s birthday became tangled up with talk of grave digging and remains.[2]​

      Some turned to monument building. For decades after Independence, partisan debates and republican wariness of Caesarism discouraged the commissioning of grand monuments and paintings. But such fears had begun to give way to the adulation of heroes.[3] Americans had conceived of and sometimes erected monuments soon after the Revolution. But by the 1820s and 30s, the designs were made with increasing urgency. In 1825, artist John Trumbull completed his federally commissioned murals, which would hang in the Capitol Rotunda. And in 1832, for the first time, Congress approved a monument to Washington’s memory (though when it was finished nine years later, it, like Trumball’s murals, was widely lambasted for failing to capture the great general’s dignity).[4] In the 1830s, a private society secured a federal charter and public land for the eventual building of the Washington National Monument.[5] 

​      From the 1810s to the 1830s, writers, politicians and veterans increasingly churned out stories, narratives and speeches to preserve the memory of the Revolution. Old soldiers (often to secure a military pension) told their war stories, producing some 80,000 narratives in various forms. American authors, like James Fenimore Cooper and Lydia Maria Child, for the first time, crafted novels set in the American Revolution. Ralph Waldo Emerson collected soldiers’ stories about the Battle of Concord. Jared Sparks, chaplain of the House of Representatives, canvassed the nation to collect documents and stories pertaining to George Washington. By 1837, Sparks had published twelve popular volumes of Washington’s letters.[6] Many Americans were clearly afraid of losing hold of something. 

      A younger Abraham Lincoln had fretted over the loosening grip. He put to memory Oliver Wendell Holmes’ “The Last Leaf,” penned in 1831. In the poem, Holmes tells the story of a time-weathered Tea Party survivor who tottered about Boston looking in vain for his departed comrades. In 1838, before a lyceum for young men, Lincoln told why he was worried about last leafs. The sacrifices of the Revolution, he said, had purified its participants’ hearts of the basest passions and ambitions. But, it was an unsettling truth that the “state of feeling” that made such a virtuous generation, “must fade, is fading, has faded, with the circumstances that produced it.” He knew the legends of the American Revolution would never fully die out; but its vivid beauty would “grow more and more dim by the lapse of time.” Scarred flesh and “limbs mangled” had kept the amnesia at bay. “In the form of a husband, a father, a son or a brother,” young Lincoln claimed, “a living history was to be found in every family.” In this way, sacred national history “could be read and understood alike by all.” “But,” he added, “those histories are gone.”

      Or almost. Veterans -- the flesh and bone reminders of 1776 -- had once stood like “a forest of giant oaks.” But the storms of time had pulled their limbs to the earth, leaving “only, here and there, a lonely trunk, despoiled of its verdure, shorn of its foliage.” Lincoln’s lyceum speech was more than a sentimental tribute to graying patriots. It was a rumination about what a generation of young men, who lived in the shadows of a god-like cast of thinkers and Patriots, were called to do.

      The rising generation, Lincoln claimed, would need to embrace “cold, calculating” reason instead of the ambition and passion required for revolution. The days of stirring drama had passed. The rising generations were now called on to guard the accomplishments of those dying away. Though General Washington had long been asleep in his grave, Lincoln argued, the sons who adhered to the Constitution and the nation’s laws could testify to their descendants that they “permitted no hostile foot to pass over or desecrate his resting place.” They could affirm that they had “revered his name to the last.” That is, they could decree that they had safeguarded the works of their first American father, until the “last trump shall awaken our Washington.”[7]

      Washington. His name was shorthand for the virtue that subsequent men lacked.

In 1842 “Walter” Whitman, the young poet, published a vivid tale about “our Washington.” By then, it was anything but original. In “The Last of the Sacred Army,” Whitman knitted together what appear to have been his own boyhood memories from rural Long Island with commonplace images he knew his fellow Americans would recognize. He stuffed the short piece with convention.[8] He began the story in his own voice, claiming that every nation and civilization had their war heroes, but the “Soldiers of Liberty” stood alone. The patriots were rustic and manly. “Untainted with the effeminacy of voluptuous cities,” these farmers had endured disease and destitution for the nation, that “Great Treasure.” But knowledge of their sacrifices survived only thanks to the slipping “memory of a few score gray-haired men.”    

      Switching to narrative, Whitman recalled that on one of the “anniversaries of our national independence” he had taken board with an old farmer who lived about a mile from a thriving country town. In the early morning, “cracks” from an “ancient musket” jostled the young bard from his pillow. The aged farmer, a “thumping patriot,” had started firing his weapon to welcome in America’s day of birth. Though the harsh firing at first peeved Whitman, he confessed that he looked “upon the musket with reverence, for it had seen service in the war.” Later, folks from the town along with local villagers joined to celebrate the Fourth of July “with great fervor.” For much of the day, Whitman attended the village ceremonies and sat next to a “time-worn veteran” to hear “the usual patriotic address” and witness “evolutions of the uniform company.”

      Whitman -- or rather the fictional American whose loafing meditations remind one of the Whitman of legend  -- returned to the village, took a generous supper, and “ensconced” himself in an easy chair by a window, dozing off in the drowsy afternoon heat. In a state of half-sleep he could hear random shooting from the continuing celebrations and faint music from the band. With these sounds blending into the buzz and hum of bees and locusts, he slipped into a dream. He found himself in the same town, thirty years into the future, amid similar patriotic gaiety. Young men he had known now walked about with “shrivelled forms,” moving along in a crowd that pressed toward some great leader or spectacle. When he asked “a shape” of a man about the bustle, the gentleman incredulously asked, “Know ye not that the Last of the Sacred Army may be seen today?” Mothers clasping infants, girls carrying wreaths of flowers, and young boys with marked urgency, pushed aggressively toward what one girl called “the Last of His Witnesses.”

      The human current swept Whitman into a large square before a magnificent edifice and a marble platform where folks huddled around “an aged, very aged man, seated in a throne-like chair.” Pressing closer toward the center of attention, where noble men encircled the white-haired hero, Whitman heard them uttering the hallowed name “dearest to our memories as patriots.” One man longed to know more: “And you saw the Chief with your own eyes?,” he asked. “I did” affirmed the dying warrior. As the crowd hushed another gentleman begged the old man for “a relic which might be as a chain leading from our hearts to his.” With trembling fingers the bent man pulled a war medal from his bosom. “This the Chief gave me,” he reported. The eager crowd seemed to ask in one voice, “And has it been in his hands?” The veteran replied: “Himself hung it around my neck.” This brought silence. Eyes strained and cheeks blanched as it was revealed that upon the medal were engraved the letters “G.W.”

      The crowd begged to hear a personal story about the first American hero.  They listened to him ramble as if he were an oracle. When bystanders lifted him to his feet, the warrior shuffled through the parted masses while boys pushed toward his path to graze his hands or touch his garments. All removed their hats as women passed their babies to be held by the relic of 1776 -- the people’s one last living link to General Washington.

      If George Cole, a voracious reader, ever read Whitman’s “The Last of the Sacred Army,” he would have learned little beyond what he already knew from experience.

Ordinary Americans between the Revolution and the Civil War revered Washington in ways that are hard to take seriously today. They studied the life of “G.W.” through wildly popular, if not accurate, biographies that cast him as a Christ-fearing man of stainless character. As one eminent southerner argued before fellow congressmen, “Mount Vernon and Mount Calvary will descend to posterity with coextensive remembrance.”[9] American writers churned out more than four hundred books, articles and essays on Washington. In these pages he was regularly referred to as “Him” as if a God. His eulogists often compared him to Christ, or reminded admirers that both Christ and Washington had mothers named Mary. Already by 1815, a visitor from Russia noted that Americans kept images of Washington in their homes just as Russians kept images of saints in theirs. In the 1830s, the French philosopher Gustave de Beaumont noted the lack of monuments in America -- save the columns and busts of Washington. In America, he claimed, Washington “is not a man but a God.”[10]

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From 1799, the year of Washington’s death, to the 1850’s, hundreds of writers and orators told the story of the Revolution in much the same way: George Washington was the center of the Revolution. He was the “spirit of the age,” a self-controlled man who played well the role that Providence had assigned him.  In the schoolhouses and academies, pupils encountered a curriculum that instilled awe and reverence for Washington and the republic he created.  Washington had become a guide for countless boys on how to strive toward manhood. In 1837, one writer proclaimed in a ballad his hope that the nation’s “rising sons” would become like “A race of God-like Washingtons.” Mason Locke Weems’ The Life of Washington (which gave birth to the chopped-down cherry tree myth), went through nearly thirty editions by the time of George Cole’s birth. On the title page of later editions, the epigraph promised greatness to future children who learned of and emulated Washington:

Lisp! Lisp! his name, ye children yet unborn!

And with like deeds your own great names adorn

 

From the early days of the nation to the eve of the Civil War, many Americans took seriously the kind of advice once given in 1786 by a French philosopher when asked how to instill in children the love of liberty: “Begin with the infant in the cradle: Let the first word he lisps be WASHINGTON.”[11]

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[1] Only Charles Carroll of Maryland --  in his doddering nineties -- still tarried with the living. Merrill D. Peterson, Jefferson Image in the American Mind (Oxford University Press, 1960), pp. 12-13.

 

[2] Michael G. Kammen, A Season of Youth: The American Revolution and the Historical Imaginative (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 48-49; Barry Schwartz, George Washington: The Making of an American Symbol (Free Press, New York, 1987), pp. 1-2.

 

[3] In Michael Kammen’s exhaustive tome about how Americans became a “land of the past,” which he argues began in the 1870s, he supplies many examples of early Americans’ indifference toward their own history. That ambivalence about history was certainly part of the Revolution’s forward-looking ethos; but this purposeful amnesia began giving way to a sort of idolatry of the past much sooner than Kammen’s work suggests. Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991).      

      In the early nation, some Federalists had proposed erecting a mausoleum topped with a pyramid. Jeffersonian Democratic Republicans, though, were critical of plans to build shrines and monuments. Some of the resistance had to do with the claim that modest monuments would be toppled by mobs. But, more than anything, early Americans worried about the symbolic implications. Various monuments were erected in the early years of the republic, though usually made of simple stonework, like an obelisk, marking where martyrs fell in battle, or accompanying the reburial of fallen heroes. G. Kurt Piehler, Remembering War the American Way (Smithsonian Institution Press: 1995), pp. 12, 19-22; Alfred Young, Shoemaker, pp.138-39.

      Part of the impasse resulted from conservative versus radical assessments of the Revolution’s accomplishment. In the last decades of the eighteenth century two distinctive meanings or memories of the Revolution were cobbled together through rituals and celebrations laden with politics: those of the Federalist persuasion emphasized the completeness, or the full realization of the radical ideals of Independence; others of the Jeffersonian Republican stripe underscored the unfinished business of 1776 and its continuing, and exportable, radical legacy to subsequent Americans and overseas. Both Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans vied for Washington’s legacy and mantle. These competing visions of the meaning of the Revolution, negotiated through different celebrations emerged again between Whigs and Democrats, and capitalists and laborers. See: G. Kurt Piehler, Remembering War the American Way (Smithsonian Institution Press: 1995), pp. 19-20, 35. Kammen, A Season of Youth, pp. 39-40.

 

[4] Piehle, Remembering War the American Way, pp. 25-29

 

[5] Chronic politics, takeovers by nativist groups, the stealing of materials, and the Civil War thwarted the building of the monument. It was not finished until the 1880s.

 

[6] In his 1825 inauguration speech, President John Quincy Adams (son of John Adams) underscored the passing of the revolutionary generation, promising to uphold the Constitution that the fading generation, not his, had composed. He was the first president to frame himself as part of another generation. Adams had the first facsimiles made of the Declaration of Independence and then distributed them throughout the United States. Edward Tang, “Writing the American Revolution: War Veterans in the Nineteenth-Century Cultural Memory” in Journal of American Studies, 32 (1998), pp. 63-80; Alfred Young, Shoemaker, pp. 75-80; Kammen, Season of Youth, pp. 48-49; Lydia Maria Child, The Rebels, or, Boston Before the Revolution (1825); James Fenimore Cooper, The Spy (1821).

[7] Don E. Fehrenbacher, ed., Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1832-1858 (Library of America, 1989) pp. 28-36.

[8] Walter Whitman, “The Last of the Sacred Army,” in The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, 1 Volume  X (J & HG Langley: New York, 1842), pp. 259-264.

[9]William Alfred Bryan, George Washington in American Literature, 1775-1865 (Columbia University Press, 1952), pp. 15-17; Quote about Mount Vernon found in Barry Schwartz, George Washington: The Making of an American Symbol (Free Press, New York, 1987), p.2.

[10]Barry Schwartz, George Washington: The Making of an American Symbol (Free Press, New York, 1987), pp. 193-95.

[11] The philosopher and French revolutionary, Comte de Mirabeau, said this about Washington in his Reflection on the Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution (1786). In 1787, Noah Webster used the quote as an epigram for his An American Selection of Lessons in Reading and Speaking. On the eve of the American Civil War, the aged statesman, Rufus Choate used Mirabeau’s advice in a lecture to young Democrats. See: John P. Kaminski and Jill Adair McCaughan, eds., A Great and Good Man: George Washington in the Eyes of His Contemporaries (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), p. 116, footnote 1.  

The curriculum in antebellum schools has been described as “an abundance of hero worship,” with primers given to “exuberant Americanism.” Elmer Ellsworth Brown, The Making of our Middle Schools: An Account of the Development of Secondary Education in the United States (New York: Longman, Green, and Co., 1903), pp. 235-36; Thomas Dunn English quoted in, George Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age  (New York : Norton , 1979), p. 28. Also see pp. 22-23.

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