most basic objection one might raise to such explanations is their profoundly tautological nature. Is it not possible that we perceive the achievements of the Founders precisely to the degree to which they have already been elevated? That the gist of our explanations is already the fruit of their status, rather than the cause? One of the remarkable details about Washington is his symbolic elevation before he had really done anything—Washington Heights on Manhattan Island, for example, was named after the general in 1776, and he received an honorary LLD from Harvard the same year, as he arrived in Boston to command the Continental Army. Thus, by early 1777, John Adams (a perpetually baffled wannabe yet insightful reader of the Founders phenomenon) was addressing, in Congress, “the superstitious veneration which is paid to General Washington.”1 Or, to consider another example, in Richard Snowden’s popular post-Revolutionary history of the war, The American Revolution: Written in the Style of Ancient History (and later sometimes subtitled Written in the Scriptural, or Ancient Historical Style), we find the Declaration of Independence buried in chapter 14, between the British military landing at New York City and the battle for Long Island: “Then they consulted together concerning all things that appertained to the provinces, and they made a decree”—here a footnote explains this to be the “Declaration of Independence”—“and it was sealed with the signets of the princes of the provinces. And the writing of the decree was spread abroad into all lands; and when the host of Columbia heard thereof, they shouted with a great shout” (101).2 This scant attention—fifty-nine words in two volumes—not only registers the insignificance of the Declaration (at this moment a formal resolution of fleeting impact) but also anticipates how the Declaration achieved significance: through the elevation of Jefferson. We must resist, then, the natural-historical explanations for the Founders, as their status often preceded their so-called causes. We celebrate the Declaration not because it was significant but because Jefferson became important and secondarily elevated the Declaration. We know about Valley Forge because of Washington’s significance, not vice versa: he became important not because of his military or political exploits—the debate about his military achievements catches a glimmer of this—but the other way around.
And yet we should also be wary of the cultural-constructivist explanation for the Founders—that they are creations. We would mention here a revealing counterfactual—the remarkable elevation of Nathanael Greene, at one time a major general with a reputation as Washington’s most able officer. Histories of the Revolution written in the 1780s and ’90s stressed Greene’s achievements, a tremendous number of counties and towns were named after him, he was depicted in grand portraits by Trumbull and Peale, . . . and then his phenomenal status evaporated. The same is in fact true for many of the Revolutionary heroes or republican statesmen whose names we only vaguely, if at all, recognize today—Horatio Gates, John Stark, Benjamin Lincoln, William Heath, John Laurens, Henry Knox, Israel Putnam, Charles Thomson, and so on. Indeed, any survey of histories of the Revolution or early republican newspapers will reveal a constant, active attempt to construct iconic figures. Were the Founders culturally constructed? Of course, but the constructivist answer does not explain why some of these figures prevailed while others faded away. Indeed, the complementarity of these two explanations—naturalist-historical and constructivist—is essential to the gesture of “debunking” the Founders. One shows the “real” Benjamin Franklin (bawdy, manipulative, skeptical, or whatever) as if to reveal how “constructed” he is as a mythical Founder, but such debunking is in actuality the very constructivist process with updated historical content about sexuality, personality, private secrets, and the like.
Let us assert, then, at the outset that what we call the “Founding Fathers” was (and still is) primarily a literary and symbolic phenomenon—it entailed certain reading practices, narratives, relational logics, constellations, and genres. Given this textual formation, it is especially important to stress that the Founders emerged relationally, not as isolated instances of heroic figures. We discuss later the theoretical implications of the field in which the Founders arose but turn first to the unfolding, from the 1770s into the 1780s, of the first major Founders, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.
The Royal Field
In a recent study of colonial royalism, Brendan McConville has outlined almost a century of a growing North American celebration of the monarchy, culminating in the intense “monarchical love” of the eighteenth-century imperial crisis.3 In the aftermath of several decades of imperial neglect during the tumultuous years of the English Revolution, the restored Stuarts attempted, unsuccessfully, to transform colonial North American political administration. The Stuarts’ error lay in the focus on royalization and consolidation of colonial charters and governments, attempts at which largely collapsed with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, marked in North America by a series of colonial rebellions in 1689–90. In the aftermath, a very different attempt to assert royal authority followed, with centralizing institutional reforms giving way to a very different “reorganization of political society, public life, and print culture” (48). In other words, the inability to reform political institutions gave way to reforms of political culture, starting with the introduction of annual rites bolstering a “cult of the British Protestant prince” (48). Thus, at the very moment when “parliamentary supremacy became firmly established in England,” the colonies witnessed the emergence of a new political culture in which “the key imperial tie became the emotional one between the individual and the ruler” (50).
One sign of the effectiveness of this new political culture was the introduction of some twenty-six official holidays affirming this monarchical culture, and by 1740, McConville argues, “public spectacles celebrating monarch and empire, involving local elites and military display, occurred at least six times a year in the major population centers, while more modest activities occurred on twenty other days” (63–64). By the imperial crisis, colonial America evidenced a political culture grounded in an intense emotional investment in the king—what McConville at one point calls “the emotional structures” based on “the troika of love, fear, and desire” (106).
From our perspective, what is most notable about this symbolic formation is its relative isolation from other political and social institutions—this is the paradox emphasized by McConville again and again. Where royalist culture in Britain was integrated in “a political order dominated by extensive patronage ties, the state church, long established custom, and a tightly controlled land tenure system,” in the colonies the royalist ties were compartmentalized and passionately intensified in “rites and print culture” (106) and, later in the eighteenth century, in a series of royally marked commodities, from medicines and tableware to iconography in prints and medals.4 The result was a more intense royalism in British North America than in Britain itself, a point crucial to McConville’s account of the imperial crisis.
After the initial imperial conflicts of 1764, colonials responded with “a flight to the king’s love and justice” (251). Contrary to whiggish misinterpretations of the Revolution as the gradual repudiation of monarchical prerogative, colonials in the years before the rupture “completely abandoned the perception that strong kings tended to threaten liberty” (253), going so far as to articulate neoabsolutist arguments “relating the king’s person to the entire physical empire” as fundamental to their interpretation of colonial charter rights (256). Thomas Jefferson, for instance, called for a return to the royal veto on parliamentary legislation—a practice unused since Queen Anne’s reign (261). Thus again another paradox: “As counterintuitive as it may seem, the love of the king and country reached its zenith at the split second before imperial collapse” (251). That is, colonials amplified the symbolic position of the king until the monarch was the sole solution to the crisis into the 1770s. “By 1773, all that remained was faith in the king,” as political theory and rhetoric were channeled through this symbolic conduit (250). When King George did not come to the rescue, when the links between king and imperial practices could no longer be denied, the peripety was sudden and dramatic. In fact, the emotional and symbolic investment in the king explains the long and passionate litany of accusations against him in the Declaration of Independence, which is as much a Declaration of Heartbroken Betrayal. Thus, the British colonies
