First in the Hearts of His Countrymen

By Robert J. Allison

Ataturk International Airport, like the rest of Istanbul, is crowded, noisy, and full of smoke. By nine o'clock on the morning of November 10, 1998 it was packed with travelers from all nations bound for all lands. In a monotone voice the loudspeaker announcements of departures and arrivals were just more bits of noise in the constant din. Just after nine the woman's voice rose above all else and the mobs of travelers grew quiet until all we could hear were her words: "as we stand in silence at the exact moment when he closed his eyes to the world." At 9:05 on the morning of November 10, every person in Turkey, and every traveler, baggage handler, ticket agent, and vendor at Ataturk International Airport stood silently honoring the memory of Kemal Ataturk.

Ataturk, the father of the Turkish republic, the founder of modern Turkey, died in 1938. Sixty years later, his face is everywhere in Turkey. He is worthy of remembrance. Building a republican state from the wreckage of the Ottoman empire, protecting its territory from the avarice of European nations, and rejecting the temptations of Fascism or Communism, Ataturk was a rare man, and worthy to live in the hearts of his countrymen. When Time asked its readers to name the most important person of this century, nearly 1.7 million of five million respondents named Ataturk. [1] This veneration of Ataturk makes a visiting American wonder. Will we pause on December 14 to remember Washington, particularly this year, as we mark the two hundredth anniversary of the moment he closed his eyes to the world?

In our lifetime, Washington's memory has been both trivialized and erased. His birthday has been melded into a generic "President's Day," its main purpose to sell cars. In Louisiana, a law forbidding the naming of places for slaveholders forced Washington's name removed from an elementary school, and a New Orleans community activist said: "To African Americans, George Washington has about as much meaning as David Duke." [2] Could this be true? What does George Washington mean to us as we begin the third century since his death?

For biographer Willard Sterne Randall, Washington was "the first modern American corporate executive," and a disciplined and demanding one (Randall, p. 399). Randall pays little attention to Washington's public career (we are on page 292 of this 502-page book before Washington takes command of the Continental Army) but instead focuses on how young Washington mastered his conflicting passions to strive for military advancement and land ownership. Washington became a demanding, disciplined, and well-organized manager of armies, slaves, and public affairs. But he was more than a bureaucratic technician. Washington also had a zest for theater, especially public theater, and Randall makes the most of Washington's flair for the dramatic, opening the book with Washington's triumphant return to New York City in November 1783.

As the last remaining British troops evacuated lower Manhattan, Washington crossed the Hudson from New Jersey near today's George Washington Bridge. Washington was consciously retracing in reverse the route he had ridden in disgrace seven years earlier. In November 1776 the British had scattered his poorly-organized, undisciplined men and driven them into New Jersey. The British mocked Washington then with fox-hunting tunes played on their bugles. His triumphant return to New York was part of a procession which had begun in March, a few days before word of peace arrived, when he faced down his rebellious officers (who threatened a military coup). In June his Circular Letter to the state governors urged a stronger federal union. The final act opened at Princeton in November as he gathered his soldiers to send them home, bidding them farewell. He entered New York as the British were leaving, and he and his officers had a final, emotional dinner together. Then, alone, Washington traveled to Annapolis, Maryland, where Congress was meeting. In a crowning closing ceremony, directed by that other master of political theater, Thomas Jefferson, who drafted Washington's brief but masterful speech, Washington returned his military commission into the hands of civilian authority and then retired "from the great theatre of Action." [3] And then, alone, he rode off for Mount Vernon.

A stirring and dramatic scene. For Washington and Jefferson, as for Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King, this sort of political spectacle was an important part of governing. King George III reportedly asked American artist Benjamin West what Washington would do when Britain acknowledged independence. Would he and his army create a government? No, West said, Washington would probably go back to his farm. The king scoffed. If Washington did that, the monarch said, he would be the greatest man in the world (Rhodehamel, p. 86). Washington knew that ceding power would be the most dramatic, and unexpected, action he could take.

When he was called back to power as the nation's first president, Washington remained silent while John Adams brought great ridicule upon himself by trying unsuccessfully to get people to call Washington by an elaborate title. Washington had more dignity as simply "the President of the United States" than Adams or any successor would as "His Highness, the President of the United States of America, and Protector of their Liberties." [4] As chief executive, rather than as a highness or lord protector, Washington used skills drawn from a career organizing armies and running plantations to administer a government. Washington's managerial skill, Randall says, won the war, as Washington the "frontier post commander, the innovative Virginia farmer, the master land speculator, the breakneck rider--all had combined and metamorphosed" into a corporate manager. Washington understood, Randall says, what the British did not--that winning the war would not take a military genius, "which Washington was not; it . . . would take a creative, patient, micromanaging logistical genius, which George Washington certainly was" (Randall, p. 399). The British did learn this lesson in time for Lord Cornwallis to govern India and for other British generals to defeat Napoleon.

Washington the micro-manager was not an easy man to work for. Up every morning at four, he inspected his farms before dawn, when he expected all workers to be at their posts. He carried this same diligence into his military and political careers. Away from his farms for months on end, he still controlled his affairs, requiring detailed weekly written accounts from the managers of his five farms, reports he studied with the same attention he paid his public duties. He was, one visitor said, "a man of minute calculation," and knew how much each slave cost him "to a fraction" (Hirschfeld, p. 58). When he learned that the sewing women at Mount Vernon who produced nine shirts each week "with shoulder straps, and good sewing" when Martha supervised them, while in her absence only produced six, President Washington had his manager tell them "that what has been done, shall be done by fair or foul means" or he would send them off to be common laborers on his outlying farms (Hirschfeld, p. 63).

Visitors to Mount Vernon in Washington's day disagreed about whether he was a good master or a bad one. Richard Parkinson said Washington "treated them with more severity than any other man" (Hirschfeld, p. 58). But Brissot de Warville wrote that Washington's slaves "continually bless the master God gave them" (Hirschfeld, p. 55). The slaves wept when George and Martha left, rejoiced when they returned. But when Washington prepared to return to Mount Vernon for a final time in 1797, Hercules, the cook, decided to stay in Philadelphia. He never returned. A French visitor to Mount Vernon asked Hercules's eight-year-old daughter if she missed her father. The little girl replied, "Oh! Sir, I am very glad, because he is free now" (Hirschfeld, p. 71).

Visitors to Mount Vernon today see two stone monuments to Washington's slave property which document the twentieth-century shift in our memory of slavery (Hirschfeld, pp. 218, 221). Not far from George and Martha Washington's tomb stands a grove of trees thought to be the final resting place of the Mount Vernon slaves. The area was unmarked until 1929, when a stone tablet honoring "the Many Faithful Colored Servants of the Washington Family" was placed here in their memory. In 1983, a new marker was placed nearby "In Memory of the Afro Americans Who Served As Slaves at Mount Vernon." The first tablet honors these men and women for being faithful servants to the Washingtons. The second honors them as men and women who served as slaves--a linguistic distinction which recognizes their humanity but cannot mask the brutal fact of their enslavement.

Was Washington an eighteenth-century David Duke? On reaching Cambridge in July 1775, he forbid the enlistment of black soldiers. But by the end of the year he reversed this policy, and by 1783 he encouraged his aide John Laurens to raise a black regiment in South Carolina, and aide David Humphreys to take nominal command of Connecticut's all-black Second Company of the Fourth regiment. These were acts of military necessity. Yet Washington the planter also decided not to buy any more slaves "unless some particular circumstances should compel me to it" (Rhodehamel, p. 95). Though he hoped in 1786 that the legislature would find some way to abolish slavery "by slow, sure, & imperceptable degrees," he would never publicly attack, or even seriously question, the institution.

This evidence that Washington was troubled by the institution of slavery, though he was unwilling to take a public stand against it, is enough for Thomas G. West, professor of politics at the University of Dallas, to clear Washington and the other founders of the charge of racism. Vindicating the Founders is both a defense of the founders and an attack on historians. West believes that historians show their own presentist perversity when we charge the founding generation with racism, sexism, and other twentieth-century sins. Twice West berates the late Justice Thurgood Marshall for saying that "the prevailing opinion of the framers" was that blacks "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect . . . and that the Negroe might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his [the white man's] benefit" (West, pp. xi, 1). As an example of a contemporary misunderstanding of the founders, this fails miserably. The author of these words was not Thurgood Marshall, but Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, a fact West acknowledges only in a footnote. West misses an opportunity here to think about historical change. Marshall, he argues, was all wrong about the founders. This may be true, but what about Taney? How could Taney, born in 1777, be so wrong about the founders and slavery? What had changed by 1857 in the way Americans thought about race, slavery, and the nation's founding? West points out that virtually every public man of Washington's time knew slavery to be a crime against humanity. How come we know this two hundred years later, but Taney, twenty two years old when Washington died, did not?

West is so keen to tell us that the founders were right about a lot of things--property rights, taxes, women's issues--that he cannot suggest that they might have been wrong about anything. He has some interesting ideas on property rights and whether the founders were elitist snobs, but little here has not been raked over before by other scholars.

Richard Brookhiser, an editor at National Review, also laments the current generation's falling away from the Washington standard. To get us back on the track, he offers a moral biography, in the spirit of Plutarch. Plutarch under-stood that these kinds of character studies work best in pairs; parallel lives reveal differences or similarities. Brookhiser implicitly contrasts Washington with us. We see how Washington acted and believed, and our own thoughts and acts seem vulgar and embarrassing. We must get to know him better, Brookhiser says, so we can strive to be more like him.

We fail to take Washington into our hearts and internalize the values he strove after for all his days because, Brookhiser says, no poet like Whitman, no sculptor like St. Gaudens (or does he mean Daniel Chester French?) immortalized him in verse or stone. One wonders if he means that Americans with Whitman's words in their hearts and St. Gaudens's (or French's) images in their minds are acting like Lincoln. Second, is it fair to compare David Humphreys with Walt Whitman? Better to compare Humphreys, author of the longest poetic tribute to Washington, with one of the many bad poets who wrote about Lincoln, lest we think that merely writing about Lincoln made every versifier into a Whitman. And Houdon can hold his own any day with either St. Gaudens or Daniel Chester French.

Some pretty good poets did write about Washington. Phillis Wheatley and Robert Burns celebrated Washington while he lived, and Mary Antin, a Jewish girl recently arrived from Russia, celebrated him a century after his death. This childhood poem embarrassed Antin in later years, as Humphreys's poetry embarrasses us. It resembles the verses of Emmeline Grangerford more than the poetry of Whitman. Part of the fault was her school-girl sensibility, part the unavoidable fact that "Nothing but 'Washington' rhymed with 'Washington.'" [5]

Still, Mary Antin's tribute is worth taking seriously. She wrote it for her native-born classmates, wondering if they appreciated what Washington truly meant. She praised him for creating of a haven for the "Hebrew children," driven by pogroms and terror from Europe to a safe refuge in the new world. Antin knew in the 1890s that Washington stood for something. Robert Burns, in the 1790s, knew this, too. His "Ode on General Washington's Birthday" condemned England for betraying liberty in the pursuit of power and empire. Now "in thunder" England "calls, 'The Tyrant's Cause is mine!'" [6]

Brookhiser misidentifies Phillis Wheatley as a Rhode Islander, and does not quote her tribute to Washington, written as he organized the American forces outside Boston in October 1775. Wheatley saw "the eyes of nations" fixed on Washington and "freedom's heaven-defended race":

Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side,
Thy ev'ry action let the goddess guide.
A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine
With gold unfading, WASHINGTON! be thine. [7]

Wheatley sent this poem to Washington in October 1775. He had yet to win his first battle, and independence had not been declared. He was embarrassed [End Page 354] to read her accolades. Wheatley was already an international celebrity; she and her first book of poems had been enthusiastically received in London. If Washington showed off Wheatley's tribute, he would appear vain. He sent the poem, with some other papers, to former aide Joseph Reed, who showed it to Thomas Paine, editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine. Paine recognized good propaganda when he saw it and immediately published the poem. Washington wrote to "Mrs. Phillis" to explain this circuitous path: his only reason for wanting the poem in print was to "give the World this new instance of your genius," and not to puff himself (Hirschfeld, p. 92). He invited Wheatley to visit him at headquarters. She may have done so, perhaps during the hectic early weeks of March 1776, as he planned the campaign which forced the British to evacuate Boston.

What do we make of these two women, an African-born former slave in Boston, and a Russian-born Jewish refugee, fixing their gaze on this manliest of men? Recent scholarship on gender might change our perceptions of these encounters, and Mark Kann's A Republic of Men would seem to promise answers. But Kann, a professor of political science at the University of Southern California, does not really probe the nature of gender and power in the early republic. Rather he announces that he has discovered the founders' "original intent," a claim which will make all students of the founding sit up and grab their highlighters. "Their original intent was to create a republic based on male governance and female subordination" (Kann, p. 1). To make good on this intention, the founders used a "grammar of manhood" to define three types of men: dangerous and unstable bachelors, a threat to order and liberty; the "better sort," stable family men who behaved themselves (and thus earn the disdain of twentieth-century sophisticates); and the heroic man who rises above law and custom to "procreate a new order for the ages" (Kann, p. 143).

It is a promising thesis, but the book becomes more a survey of historians and social scientists than an exploration of the founder's world or their language. Kann might have focused more closely on a few contemporary texts, less on what our contemporaries think. When he discusses Royall Tyler's play The Contrast (Kann, p. 13) he might have spent some time looking at the different men in the play, examining how Jonathan, Dimple, Van Rough, and Colonel Manly fit in with the bachelor/family man/hero paradigm. What are we to make of Colonel Manly (whose name at least is worth some reflection) whose wooden speeches about virtue and duty echo the words of Washington (who reportedly saw the play performed)? Or Van Rough, the self-made man constantly reminding his daughter to "mind the main chance"? How does the "grammar of manhood" work in this play? Kann will not tell us. His paragraph opens with The Contrast, but before the paragraph closes he has already changed the subject to Judith Sargent Murray.

Matthew Spalding and Patrick Garrity focus closely on the rhetoric of Washington's 1796 Farewell Address, and they seem to have read carefully every other document of the era. Confident of Washington's place in our hearts, they wonder why we do not pay more attention to his Farewell Address. Owing a great and acknowledged debt to Victor Hugo Paltsits and Felix Gilbert, Spalding and Garrity analyze the text's genesis and speculate about its historical legacy. [8]

First published in the National Advertiser on September 19, 1796, the Farewell Address was the first presidential message aimed directly at the American people. No presidential communication until Roosevelt's "Fireside Chats" would have such a profound impact. But the impact at the time, and the impact since, have been different. In his final message, Washington called on his countrymen to unite, to avoid partisanship, and to stay away from the entanglements of European politics. Washington had long experience with his countrymen listening respectfully to and then ignoring his admonitions. In 1783 he had tried to rally support for a stronger union with his Circular Letter to the State Governors, but Edmund Randolph reported in Congress a "free and general" murmur against "what is called the unsolicited obtrusion of his advice" (Spalding and Garrity, p. 191, n. 22). The Republicans of 1796 perceived his attack on the spirit of faction as an attack on them, and found the Address difficult to embrace. Republican leader James Madison (author of a 1792 draft of Washington's Address, his work still visible in the final version, which Hamilton and Washington revised and extended) had come to see political factions as inevitable in a free society.

Thomas Jefferson best expressed the Republican view in his 1801 inaugural address. Jefferson claimed no "pretensions to that high confidence you reposed in our first and greatest revolutionary character, whose pre-eminent services had entitled him to the first place in his country's love," but disagreed on the nature of political conflict: "every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principles. We are all republicans, we are all federalists." [9] For Jefferson, political conflict could be carried out with respect and harmony, and it would be a mistake to treat every chief executive with the same veneration due Washington.

Republicans and Federalists could unite, as Jefferson and Washington both wanted, with one heart and one mind. But other divisions arose as the founding generation exited the political stage. In 1850, former Jeffersonian Republican Henry Clay moved in the Senate that the U.S. purchase a manuscript copy of Washington's Farewell Address. Former Federalist Daniel Webster rose to second the motion. Who would oppose such a clear national responsibility? Jefferson Davis would. There already were plenty of copies of the Address available, Davis said, the government did not need to own one. Davis's objections failed. Behind his motion lurked John C. Calhoun, who had argued that Washington's Address was all wrong. Washington had wanted to create a single national character and secure liberty through national unity. There were many different national characters, Calhoun argued, and their liberty was best protected by preserving their diverse interests. Citizens united in a single sacred band would not be free.

Washington knew that slavery, which both Calhoun and Davis were protecting, prevented the kind of sacred union he desired. He told a traveling English actor in 1798 that "nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our union, by consolidating it in a common bond of principle" (Hirschfeld, p. 73). Rooting out slavery permitted Lincoln to reframe national identity in his Gettysburg Address, replacing Washington's message as the "supreme and authoritative expression of American political community" (Spalding and Garrity, p. 151).

Washington's words may no longer define us, but his deed should still inspire. Brookhiser examines John Trumbull's paintings of Washington's deeds, canvasses which now hang in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. Trumbull takes the viewer from the defeats at Bunker Hill and Quebec, to the Declaration of Independence, and then to Trenton, where Washington appears on canvas for the first time, on horseback helping a fallen Hessian prisoner. In the final painting Washington resigns his commission to Congress, turning military power over to the civil authority. Washington, says Brookhiser, won the "battles, the war, the peace, and the paintings" (Brookhiser, p. 3).

How much more compelling this visual story would have been if Brookhiser had reproduced the paintings. John Rhodehamel's elegant and insightful The Great Experiment makes this point. The catalogue of an exhibit opening at the Huntington Library and concluding at the Pierpont Morgan gallery, marking the two hundredth anniversary of Washington's death, Rhodehamel's book chronicles Washington's life, bringing in maps, portraits, and objects. In brief but extraordinary text, Rhodehamel, editor of the Library of America's edition of Washington's writings, provides a definitive account of Washington's life, masterfully exploring Washington's many competing interests: western development, agricultural improvement, military glory, republican liberty. The maps, portraits, surveying tools, and military accroutments bring us closer to Washington, who is brought to life without diminishing his larger-than-life character.

Washington had spent a lifetime amassing a fortune and these personal objects, but according to Robert and Lee Baldwin Dalzell, he "mandated . . . that after he died his personal fortune, his wealth, would cease to exist" (Dalzell and Dalzell, p. 220). He freed the 124 slaves he personally owned (not the 153 slaves who belonged to the Custis estate). The sale of his property would endow Alexandria Academy, Liberty Hall Academy (now Washington and Lee University), and a National University he hoped would be built in the nation's capital. What was left, worth more than half a million dollars, he divided equally among twenty-three heirs. He divided his legacy into shares the Dalzells call "large enough to be significant" but "too small to make anyone rich" (Dalzell and Dalzell, p. 220). His legacy would help, but not support, his nieces and nephews.

By dividing his property, Washington hoped to free his heirs to make their own fortunes. The property largely passed out of the family, and it is through the fortunes of others that Rhodehamel's exhibit, which brings us closer to Washington, came into being. Mounted jointly by the Henry E. Huntington Library and the Pierpont Morgan Library, the Washington artifacts are now largely in the hands of private, but still public-minded, collectors. Sixty-seven items on exhibit come from the Huntington collection, twenty-seven from the Gilder-Lehrman Foundation, nineteen from the Pierpont Morgan Library, fourteen from the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association and fifteen from the National Museum of American History. That in the nineteenth and twentieth century men could acquire wealth beyond what Washington ever could have imagined may be a fitting part of his legacy.

Fifty years after Washington's death, Mount Vernon was a crumbling ruin. The Dalzells tell the story of Washington spending a lifetime building his estate, and being indifferent to its fate after his death. Mount Vernon was saved from obliteration only by the 1850s crusade of Ann Pamela Cunningham, daughter of a South Carolina planter. Donations from southern women and from one notable northern man, Edward Everett, saved Mount Vernon as a monument to Washington. Everett was known in his own day for his oration on Washington, though in history he stands forever in Lincoln's shadow, having given the major, but now forgotten, oration at Gettysburg. Everett's Washington oration raised money for Pamela Cunningham's cause, but today Mount Vernon survives through the private efforts of the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association.

The road to Mount Vernon is easier to travel today than it was in Washington's lifetime. The Dalzell book is a welcome introduction to house and an exploration of this place where Washington's quests for honor and property converged. Mount Vernon was, and has been restored to be, a spectacular stage setting, and the Dalzells bring us behind the scenes which enhances our appreciation of the performance. This is a book for all students of history, of material culture, of art and architecture, of landscape design, and for all visitors to Mount Vernon.

The central problem of Washington's legacy remains unresolved. After our own pilgrimage down the George Washington Memorial Highway to Mount Vernon, my son, anxious not to disturb my own rapture at the site, confessed that "Washington was a great man. But I don't like the way he lived." What did he mean, I asked. "He had all those people working for him who weren't his relatives." I thought of another boy from Massachusetts, who traveled the then unpaved and rutted road to Mount Vernon with his father in 1848. "Bad roads meant bad morals," he wrote. "The moral of this Virginia road was clear, and the boy fully learned it. Slavery was wicked, and slavery was the cause of this road's badness which amounted to social crime--and yet, at the end of the road and the product of the crime stood Mount Vernon and George Washington." Henry Adams could not quite understand, nor can we, how George Washington could be "deduced . . . from the sum of all wickedness." [10]

This contradiction remains at the heart of Washington's legacy and may be one reason we find it difficult to embrace him with the fervor Brookhiser would like us to do, or with the passion the Turkish people embrace Ataturk. A man of conflicting passions and ambitions, Washington has much to teach us, but we are grown wary of teachers. He built up a fortune but would not allow his heirs to live in ease, lest they fail to attend to their own business. Nor would he forbid others to build and maintain family estates, and because men like Huntington or Morgan in the last century, or Gilder and Lehrman in this, can acquire great wealth, we all now can gaze upon Washington's letters and his relics.

We will observe the 14th of December this year much as we do every other December day, preoccupied with the approaching holidays, Christmas and Kwanzaa, Hanukkah and Ramadan, all observed peacefully and sometimes nearly simultaneously in our republic. Washington would approve the achievement of the secular dream which Ataturk failed to realize. We will worry more about the approaching new year, with the fear that our computer systems will crash because of a problem we now call Y2K (we are too busy a people to keep repeating words like millennium) and because our technicians thought that to save valuable disc space they could omit unnecessary numerals from their software.

Washington, the painstaking keeper of records, would have understood their desire to save space, but would not have permitted them to get away with such a short-sighted solution. His eyes, like ours, were forever fixed on the future, his mind on the main chance. If we do not pause in our own race to the future to reflect on the man who put us on the road to it, we may be honoring his memory, after all.

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Notes

1. Time, November 24, 1997, p. 4. [back]

2. Carl Galmer quoted in Jet, December 1, 1997, p. 24. [back]

3. "Address to Congress on Resigning Commission," Annapolis, December 23, 1783, in George Washington: Writings, ed. John Rhodehamel (1997), 547-48. [back]

4. Thomas Hart Benton, ed., Abridgement of the Debates of Congress (1860), 1:14. [back]

5. Mary Antin, The Promised Land (1912; 1997), 180. [back]

6. Robert Burns, "Ode for General Washington's Birthday," The Poems of Robert Burns (1898), 258. [back]

7. Phillis Wheatley, "To His Excellency General Washington," The Poems of Phillis Wheatley, ed. Julian D. Mason, Jr. (1966), 90. [back]

8. Felix Gilbert, To the Farewell Address: Ideas of Early American Foreign Policy (1961); Victor Hugo Paltsits, Washington's Farewell Address (1935). [back]

9. Jefferson, "First Inaugural Address," in Messages and Papers of the Presidents, ed. James Richardson (1908), 1:324, 322, though I have followed Merrill Peterson's text, reprinted from the National Intelligencer, in not capitalizing Republican and Federalist. [back]

10. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography, ed. D.W. Brogan (1961), 47. [back]

Bibliography

Richard Brookhiser. Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington. New York: The Free Press, 1996. 240 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $24.50 (cloth); $13.00 (paper).

Robert F. Dalzell, Jr. and Lee Baldwin Dalzell. George Washington's Mount Vernon: At Home in Revolutionary America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 322 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $30.00.

Fritz Hirschfeld. George Washington and Slavery: A Documentary Portrayal. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1997. 272 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, and index. $29.95.

Mark E. Kann. A Republic of Men: The American Founders, Gendered Language, and Patriarchal Politics. New York and London: New York University Press, 1998. 232 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $55.00 (cloth); $18.50 (paper).

Willard Sterne Randall. George Washington: A Life. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997. 708 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00 (cloth); $15.95 (paper).

John Rhodehamel. The Great Experiment: George Washington and the American Republic. New Haven: Yale University Press, and San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1998. 160 pp. Illustrations. $27.50.

Matthew Spalding and Patrick J. Garrity. A Sacred Union of Citizens: George Washington's Farewell Address and the American Character. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1996. xviii + 216 pp. Notes and index.

Thomas G. West. Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1997. 200 pp. Afterword, notes, and index. $22.95.

About the Author

Robert J. Allison, Department of History, Suffolk University, is the author of The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776-1815 and helped plan "Changing Meanings of Freedom: A Symposium on the 225th Anniversary of the Beginnings of the American Revolution," held in June 2000.