this phenomenon in the emergence of Washington as a figure. Washington, we should stress, did not simply arise as a replacement for George III; he was not the same kind of figure and was in fact defined in relation to—that is, in contrast with—George III’s qualities. Remember that the king had been called on to exercise royal prerogative—executive action—on behalf of the colonists and against the evil counsel of the Butites. He had failed to act vigorously on America’s behalf and had then pursued a number of aggressive actions—repressive financial measures, military expeditions, the incitement of blacks and Indians against good English colonists—in short, all the acts of aggression enumerated in the Declaration of Independence. When “Washington” finally emerged, then, it had to address and correct this characterization—it had to embody a reactive executive position, but with the very different inflection of restraint. This difference is evident in a number of key moments in Washington’s mythological construction: his humility and hesitation upon accepting his role; his visitation of so many homes (“George Washington Slept Here”), whereby he relied on the hospitality of his “subjects”; his endurance of hardship at Valley Forge; his often defensive, evasive, and stalling maneuvers as a general; his reluctant execution of Major John André (an agonizing act of duty against his personal inclinations); his endurance of criticism and cabals. . . . In all these instances, “Washington” acts, but at the behest of the people, reluctantly, not for his personal power but in service to others. Even the famous cherry-tree anecdote from Parson Weems, which later adhered to the mythic figure, confirms this: young George’s action (chopping down the tree) serves as something for which he must take responsibility and be humbled, and the crucial quality here is less simple honesty than the shameful admission of his infantile lapse into monarchical prerogative. We might thus translate “I cannot tell a lie” as “I actively chopped down a tree and will never act so aggressively again”—it is with this gesture that he is contrasted to George III, who remained silent about his actions.23
We must stress here that we are not showing how Washington gradually, biographically, historically, came to define and occupy his symbolic position. Rather, these details are selective emphases, fabrications, or distortions of the historical record, which reveal that a “Washington” position quickly took shape in contrast to the position of King George. For this reason, the insight often attributed to Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” obscures as much as it clarifies—the American George was not simply a blue-coated leader figure substituted for a red-coated one but a different figure generated in response. The problem with many readings of Irving’s story is that they see the Washington figure as positional—that is, they assume that Washington’s special standing had to do with institutional or political power, and specifically with a hierarchy of positions of charismatic, political, or deific leadership which, when vacated, must be reoccupied. By this view, it seems quite natural that the commander in chief of the Continental Army might eventually become the president of the United States, as he moved from wartime leader to leader in peace. This spatial-positional framework also implies that “Washington” is the central cultural site in which a host of cultural issues are mediated. There are two related errors that follow from this assumption. For one thing, such readings tend to understand history as cumulative and gradualist—Washington is appointed to his military command in 1775, becomes extremely popular with his open letter demanding humane treatment of American prisoners, then becomes still more popular with his refusal of General Howe’s informally addressed letters, and so on and so forth. It is as if each episode quantitatively adds to Washington’s fame through some kind of natural progression, or as if symbolic importance is something that grows incrementally, like manufacturing output. Relatedly, there is a suggestion that “Washington” is somehow homologous to other mythological Founders. A “Thomas Jefferson” will be another variant in the master pantheon, while a “John Jay” must be read as simply a diminutive version of Washington’s grand stature.24
In light of such assumptions, it is all the more important to insist that the significance of Washington is not positional but rather relational. That is, Washington’s significance makes sense only relative to other symbolic figures and has no necessary relationship to his political or military authority. It is therefore misleading to suggest that “Washington” designates a particular abstract space in which cultural concerns—for example, nationalism—are negotiated: as we will demonstrate, this processing of cultural concerns requires a larger relational field attuned, like fictional narratives, to more complex problems. To put this differently, the symbolic figures that emerge will not necessarily serve the same abstract function any more than the knights of the Round Table all represent “chivalry”: because they exist in a relational field, they may complement one another and may function differently from one another, as we shall see. What is more, because this symbolic field is relational, it is not subject to a steadily predictable, incremental dynamic. The configuration can undergo sudden shifts, and seemingly important figures may disappear, while obscure figures suddenly assume new significance.
Let us return for a moment to Nathanael Greene, who, as we mentioned before, experienced a similarly rapid and dramatic symbolic investment during the war. A nice summation of his signification is offered in Crèvecoeur’s mosaic of Revolutionary-era mythology, in which he includes this anecdote about Greene:
The history of the war in Carolina . . . is a eulogy for General Green more exact than anything one could say.—Among the many qualities that distinguished him, I will mention only this one.—All the dispatches announcing reversals were always addressed to Congress in his capacity as commander in chief of the southern department.—But every time he gained any advantage, it was to general Washington that he made his reports, as an officer under the Commander in chief.25
Greene’s outstanding qualities, then—the particular combination of military ability and humility, of taking on the burdens of the war while passing on the laurels to others—are precisely those qualities that underlay the symbolic development of Washington. And in Crèvecoeur’s anecdote, we see with great clarity how Greene is not a separate figure but a parallel one—an alternative Washington much as Washington was an alternative Greene. In a similar fashion, Crèvecoeur describes a number of Revolutionary generals reluctantly drawn to war and then happily retiring to their farms: all of these formulations of the Cincinnatus myth speak to the development of a symbolic designation that transcends George Washington and that George Washington finally filled decisively.26 In short, Greene was not a distinctive figure or even a homologous one—he was the very same position, a variant through which the Washington configuration, a necessary relational slot, was developed. One might imagine a counterfactual scenario whereby Washington, not Greene, had died in 1786: in that case, the symbolic work invested in Washington could easily have shifted to Greene.
Here we may turn to a different symbolic nexus, in fact the main configuration that was juxtaposed to the Washington figure—that of Benjamin Franklin. If we look ahead to the late 1780s and the ratification battles over the US Constitution, one finds that these two names—Franklin and Washington—are the two that have achieved and maintained a special status. What was the specific position of Franklin at this point? Here we must be careful not to confuse the “Franklin” of the 1770s with the “Franklin” that took shape in the 1790s and helped generate additional symbolic positions in the Founders’ pantheon. In the mid-1770s, Franklin’s significance was that of the intellectual or “philosopher”: he was Doctor Franklin, scientist of electricity, theorist of the Gulf Stream, inventor, genius, and so on. None of these qualities was enough to determine his symbolic importance, which did not become clear until the Hutchinson affair of the early 1770s. Gordon Wood is correct when he writes that “this affair was the most extraordinary and revealing incident in his political life . . . [and] effectively destroyed his position in England and ultimately made him a patriot.”27 But where Wood makes this a biographical claim about Franklin, we read this as a claim about the symbolic construction of the “Franklin” position. In 1772, Franklin had received some private correspondence which included a now infamous letter in which lieutenant governor Thomas Hutchinson advised British administrators to pursue “an abridgment of what are called English liberties” in order to avoid the growing
