Historian in Chief

How Presidents Interpret the Past to Shape the Future

Seth Cotlar, Richard J. Ellis, Seth Cotlar, Richard J. Ellis

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780813942537
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Legal History
• Index: Law

Presidents shape not only the course of history but also how Americans remember and retell that history. From the Oval Office they instruct us what to respect and what to reject in our past. They regale us with stories about who we are as a people, and tell us whom in the pantheon of greats we should revere and whom we should revile. The president of the United States, in short, is not just the nation's chief legislator, the head of a political party, or the commander in chief of the armed forces, but also, crucially, the nation's historian in chief.

In this engaging and insightful volume, Seth Cotlar and Richard Ellis bring together top historians and political scientists to explore how eleven American presidents deployed their power to shape the nation's collective memory and its political future. Contending that the nation's historians in chief should be evaluated not only on the basis of how effective they are in persuading others, Historian in Chief argues they should also be judged on the veracity of the history they tell.

I

SLAVERY, POLITICAL PARTIES, AND THE MAKING OF A NEW CONSTITUTION

1

George Washington

His Own Historian

EDWARD COUNTRYMAN

George Washington was no intellectual. Unlike his immediate successors, he lacked a degree from Harvard, William and Mary, or Princeton. He felt both that lack and his ignorance of French, the language of the eighteenth-century “Republic of Letters,” though his wide-ranging interests mark him as among that unbounded republic’s citizens, and the fame of his actions places him among its contributors.1 Perhaps, as with Lyndon Johnson surrounded by Ivy Leaguers, the absence rankled him. More likely, Washington accepted himself, valued having bright people around him, and made sure that he was in charge.

Washington did not have Benjamin Franklin’s playful spontaneity, John Adams’s introspection and self-doubt, Thomas Jefferson’s ability to dream big and to cloak his dreams in soaring rhetoric that often obscured their problems, Alexander Hamilton’s capacity for economic thought, or James Madison’s insights about human fallibility in public life. Nor could he approach the eloquence of Abraham Lincoln. To borrow a bit of Lincoln’s best prose, Washington did come to realize as he developed into a world figure that “the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present,” that “as our case is new, so we must think anew,” and that “we cannot escape history,” only deal with it and live within it. In one important historic way, the problem of slavery, he finished his life not far from his own time’s leading edge, though it took him his whole lifetime to get there.

Borrowing again, this time from the great Cornell historian Carl Becker’s 1932 American Historical Association presidential address, Washington became his own historian.2 Becker’s point was that people live in history of necessity and that they think historically too. So in suggesting that Becker’s idea helps us understand Washington’s life, I am not thinking just about what Washington learned from books, although he did read widely. He certainly understood that republics continually had failed to govern themselves, lurching into civil war and tyranny. He showed as much in his Farewell Address of 1796. He shaped both his mature self and his large role in history within a framework of “Whig” or “Atlantic Republican” language and ideas that placed the American Revolution’s leaders within a problem of historical understanding as a guide to action that stretched from Niccolo Machiavelli to James Madison. That problem was how republics could be founded and could thrive, and why they seemed doomed to fail.

How people lived within the flow of time was central to such thinking. Revolutionary intellectuals’ early colonial predecessors, whether in Puritan New England or in Counter Reformation New Spain and New France, had understood themselves as operating at the edge of Sacred Time, with the Millennium close at hand and their own actions perhaps helping to bring it about. Washington’s era understood instead that the Millennium was nowhere near; that they were living in contingent, secular time; and that their actions would have lasting worldly consequences.3 Washington took this republican language for granted, just as someone now who speaks in terms of social class, evolution, personality, and relativity is invoking Marx, Darwin, Freud, and Einstein, without, perhaps, even knowing it.

Republicanism’s secular-historical language helps explain Washington’s actions as his public career took shape: his earliest involvement in Virginia protests against British taxation, his not-so-subtle seeking command of the Continental army; his resignation as its general in 1783; his importance for the Federalist movement that led to the Constitution; his presidency; and his second great departure from public office in 1796. It helps explain much of his personal life, in which he demonstrated his lifelong belief that the ways of a liberty-loving English gentleman offered the best possible model for a good human existence. It pervades one of the two great documents in which he explained himself to his people and to the world. This was the Farewell Address of 1796. But the Farewell Address was just one of his two late-life statements that linked what he had done and learned during his life to the American Republic’s future. The other, only months prior to his death in 1799, was his will, in which he freed his slaves and set forth the idea of a national university. The Farewell Address is a statement about living in history as the thinkers of his time understood that project. The will drew on the course of his own development during a transformative, revolutionary time. It presented a statement about living in the future in a way that drew upon Washington’s personal life, rather than upon what the European thinkers had taught.

Looking backward, we can be dazzled by the glittering prose of Washington’s Virginia contemporaries Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Mason, Patrick Henry, and Richard Henry Lee. But, as with most people, including elite eighteenth-century Virginians, Washington’s inner life of thought and attitude displayed itself in what he did, as much in what he had to say.4 His flat day-to-day journal is nothing like the two great self-revealing eighteenth-century Virginia diaries by William Byrd II and by Landon Carter.5 He read books and pamphlets but published almost nothing; he voted for resolutions but did not propose them; he listened and pondered while others debated in the House of Burgesses, the Continental Congress, at councils of war with his staff officers, in the Federal Convention of 1787, or even when Jefferson and Hamilton went at it in his cabinet. And then he would decide what to do. Only at the very end of his life did he venture onto the ground of high statements.

Washington’s own books, now housed at Mount Vernon and the Boston Athenaeum, show the scope of his mental world. His shelves held very little of the antimonarchical “Whig history” that the historian H. Trevor Colbourn found in Revolutionary-era college and society libraries, in the catalogs of booksellers, and in individuals’ holdings.6 But many such writers did figure among the 500 volumes that his stepson Jacky Custis inherited from his grandfather. That collection was at Mount Vernon until Jacky left for schooling, college, and his short, unhappy adulthood.7 Washington bought books throughout his life, including many volumes on the American Revolution. He had a few on its French counterpart, including both Edmund Burke’s hostile Reflections and the British historian Catharine Macaulay’s defense of revolutionary France. Washington had books on the era of the Columbian encounter and on American Indians, on geography and biography. He bought two studies of Frederick the Great, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Adam Ferguson’s History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic. Probably realizing that he never would leave the United States, he purchased travel accounts that ranged around the globe. He also owned three copies of Don Quixote, including an elegant edition in Spanish given to him by the Spanish minister to the United States, as well as the Earl of Chesterfield’s letters to his son, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, and volumes by Jonathan Swift, Tobias Smollett, and now-obscure American novelists and poets. He bought books on scientific agriculture and on general science. He acquired a small collection on slavery, including pamphlets that he read with interest and had bound together, and others that he never opened, leaving their pages uncut.8

In his late-life fame, Washington welcomed historians to Mount Vernon. They included Catharine Macaulay, who had defended the American movement in 1775 and whose monumental history of England figured strongly in shaping Whiggish historical imagination.9 One can only wonder what they discussed. He opened the house to writers who wanted to use his enormous Revolutionary archive. But he declined invitations to write the Revolution’s history. He could compose vivid prose, but he was no latter-day Julius Caesar telling the story of the Gallic Wars in classic Latin. Nor did he prefigure Ulysses S. Grant, whose autobiography is one of the great narratives by any man of arms. Instead, until nearly the end of his life, Washington expressed his historical awareness in his possessions and his actions. These demonstrate his ever-growing sense that he was living within a developing and distinctively American context, and that his own actions would change his time’s course. Had Washington written incessantly, we could trace the development of his thoughts in his words. Instead, we have to assemble discrete deeds and objects, asking whether they display a developing pattern. But Thomas Jefferson did much the same when he built the Declaration of Independence around the historically based assertion that a set of separate “facts” fitted together into evidence of malign intent and conspiracy that justified deposing King George III.

First, consider Mount Vernon. The house is a statement, displaying its owner’s sense of how English country gentlemen lived. But built as it is of rusticated wood rather than stone or brick, Mount Vernon imitates rather than replicates an English gentleman’s manor house. This is not just a matter of building materials. The whole estate represented wealth accrued from the unpaid labor of slaves, not from rent paid by free tenant farmers, and accrued as well from Washington’s lifelong speculation in land that Native people had every right to believe was theirs. Its seeming Englishness is just a veneer, as deceptive as the imitation blocks of stone beveled into its exterior planks and coated with heavy sandy paint to complete the illusion. It is a colonial American wooden building set within a colonial American social landscape, as Washington came to realize.

That may connect with two major points in his own development. The first was abandoning the distinctively Virginia crop of tobacco in favor of the characteristically English and northern-colonial crop of wheat, early in the 1760s. The second was attempting in 1797 to bring in English tenant farmers who would work the estate and pay him rent.10 Getting out of tobacco was a practical gesture, because Mount Vernon’s soil could not produce a good crop. But it meant abandoning one of the prime signifiers of a man’s worth in Virginia’s all-defining tobacco culture. Bringing in English tenants would have meant freeing himself from the institution of slavery. Having that idea was a penultimate step on his long trudge to finally realizing that freeing his slaves was better. The house and the surrounding estate present a record of his historical thinking.11

Turn to his portraits. Taken one by one, they show the issues and situations that defined his life: overcoming supposed colonial inferiority and genuine Virginia provincialism, emerging to military heroism and world fame, creating the American Republic, and slavery’s emergence as a public problem. Artists created those portraits, most notably Charles Willson Peale, John Trumbull, Edward Savage, and Gilbert Stuart. But with one exception among the canvasses that I have in mind, Washington either commissioned the paintings or responded to requests that he pose, which meant that he had the ultimate say over how the artist represented him to the world. After fame came to him, engravers copied the originals and invented images of their own, turning the living man into an icon but also presenting capsule versions of his story, which came to stand for his people’s history.12 Washington could not control the engravers and copiers, but it is safe to assume that he did approve how Peale, Savage, and Stuart crafted his image. He would have approved what his former aide-de-camp John Trumbull painted in London in 1780 for European viewers, if he saw it. Almost certainly he did see it in print form, since Trumbull, who had preceded Hamilton as a member of his military “family,” returned to America and did another major Washington portrait sometime between 1792 and 1794.

Washington’s earliest portrait, done by Peale in 1772, is charming in its naïveté.13 It shows an untroubled man who had gone about as far as he could expect to go in Virginia provincial life and who could afford Peale’s commission. In it, he might be just one more prosperous colonial, of the sort that Pennsylvanians Peale and Benjamin West, Connecticut Yankee Trumbull, and Bostonian John Singleton Copley all traveled to England to transcend so they could turn to history painting, the premier genre of their day. Peale had just returned from West’s studio in London when he visited Mount Vernon, and he had to have seen West’s masterwork The Death of General Wolfe, completed in 1770 and shown t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I. Slavery, Political Parties, and the Making of a New Constitution
• II. Reimagining American Power and Responsibility
• III. Reckoning with Liberalism and the New Deal
• Notes on Contributors
• Index