Founders as Fathers: The Private Lives and Politics of the American Revolutionaries
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Founders as Fathers: The Private Lives and Politics of the American Revolutionaries
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Overview
The costs and consequences for the families of these Virginia leaders were great, Glover discovers: the Revolution remade family life no less than it reinvented political institutions. She describes the colonial households that nurtured future revolutionaries, follows the development of political and family values during the revolutionary years, and shines new light on the radically transformed world that was inherited by nineteenth-century descendants. Beautifully written and replete with fascinating detail, this groundbreaking book is the first to introduce us to the founders as fathers.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300210750 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/30/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 344 |
| Sales rank: | 881,942 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Founders as Fathers
The Private Lives and Politics of the American Revolutionaries
By Lorri Glover
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Lorri GloverAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-21075-0
CHAPTER 1
The Last Colonial Patriarchs
* * *
At first glance, Virginia planters seem like highly unlikely candidates for fomenting a revolution. In our mind's eye, men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Patrick Henry always appear as "founders." But they were first and foremost planters; they made their livings from agriculture and spent their formative years on plantations, their lives defined by family, neighbors, and slaves. Virginia's leading men presided over that localistic and agricultural world, as they said, "like patriarchs of old." In addition to their decidedly provincial, planter-centered perspectives, they were deeply loyal to Britain and cavalier about political duties.
Personally, the men who partnered (or conspired) to create an independent America—Jefferson, Washington, and Henry, along with George Mason and James Madison—were as different as could be. Thomas Jefferson achieved renown in diplomacy, politics, education, philosophy, and agriculture. But not even his greatest admirers would describe him as an impressive orator. In formal settings Jefferson worried about stumbling over his words, so much so that he used diacritical marks to help him read the draft of the Declaration of Independence aloud to the Second Continental Congress. He also had an annoying habit of humming to himself. Conversely, Henry was an undistinguished statesman and, Jefferson later gossiped, a lazy lawyer, but his oratory dazzled even his sharpest critics. Mason, never given to profuse praise, concluded, "He is by far the most powerful speaker I ever heard." Madison, though possessing the most brilliantly rigorous mind of the age, spoke so softly that people had to lean in to hear him—perhaps a canny move if he had intended it, which he did not. Washington knew his intellectual limits enough to hold his tongue, which, in time, contributed to his air of gravity. His friend Mason, conversely, said what he thought, regardless of the outcome. "I would not," he told his son, "forfeit the approbation of my own mind for the approbation of any man, or all the men upon earth." They looked wildly different, too. Henry was tall and wiry and vacillated between patrician and homespun, depending on his audience. Mason was shorter and rounder, and though he complained constantly about his health, most contemporaries thought of him as robust (they perhaps conflated his disposition and his health). And then there was the lanky redhead Jefferson, and his best friend and physical opposite, the diminutive intellectual Madison. Rounding out the odd brotherhood was the statuesque, dashing Washington.
As they worked to build a new nation in the 1770s and 1780s, their stark differences in temperament and breadth of talents made them a formidable—if sometimes fractious—lot. They could act together as brilliant and indefatigable allies, unless their agendas diverged, in which case they turned into vicious adversaries who knew exactly how to exploit one another's weaknesses.
For all their differences, on the eve of the American Revolution these Virginians shared in common nearly everything that mattered in their world. Though at different stages of life and on different paths, they wanted the same thing, which was what all well-to-do men from Virginia wanted: to be respected as patriarchs. Patriarchal power, expressed through mastery of a family, a plantation, and the social order, lay at the center of their identity. Exercising that authority was a duty they inherited from their fathers. If they succeeded in preserving their estates and the family's good name, they could bequeath that legacy to their own sons. Office holding followed family lines. Politics was a vital, though part-time obligation of the colony's well-bred (or shrewdly married) planter-patriarchs. A good patriarch—the highest aspiration of a Virginia gentleman—balanced rearing children, building wealth, mastering slaves, protecting kin, leading households, and governing. All of these duties derived from their wide understanding of what family meant and what responsible fathers did.
Family, class identity, and power formed an unbroken circle in colonial Virginia. Patriarchs regarded themselves as caretakers: judiciously growing their inheritance to preserve a patrimony for their heirs. They belonged to an old and inviolable arrangement, inheriting and bequeathing wealth and power within their families and, ultimately, for the greater good of society. They saw their principal duties as familial—broadly defined—and their status as organic. At heart, then, their position in Virginia did not differ fundamentally from that of the king in England; they were linked in a great "chain of being" as patriarchs over worlds large and small.
Without appreciating the families and gentry culture in which this cohort grew up, it is not possible to truly understand their behavior as heads of households in a tumultuous age and as leaders of a radical revolution. We begin, then, by meeting the progenitors of Virginia's, and to a large extent America's, revolution where they lived. Family was the central, transcendent institution in their lives, shaping their identities and vision of the world until events in the 1760s and 1770s redirected their futures in ways unimaginable just a few years before. To their great surprise, this generation turned out to be the last of the colonial breed.
* * *
In 1763, twenty-year-old Thomas Jefferson wrote his friend Will Fleming about his dreams for the future. Jefferson had recently finished his studies at the College of William and Mary, and he was reading law with George Wythe, the most distinguished legal mind in Virginia. Wythe provided his students not only the benefit of his storied legal prowess but also entry into Williamsburg's inner circles of power, and Jefferson's striking intellect made him a welcome addition to the scene, including at the royal governor's mansion. The young student, understandably, saw a bright future for himself.
Young Jefferson had high hopes in 1763: he imagined that he and Fleming would buy neighboring plantations and get married to prominent local women (Will to Sukey Potter and Thomas to Rebecca Burwell). Once established in their homes, the two friends would become partners in a two-horse carriage that they would use to "practise law in the same courts, and drive about to all the dances in the country together." Riding the circuit with Will, owning a plantation with Rebecca, and enjoying a happy social life was, Thomas proclaimed, "the cleverest plan of life that can be imagined."
He had good cause to envision that sanguine future. Though as a teenager he had lost his father, Peter Jefferson, Thomas still had the family advantages necessary to claim the rank of a Virginia patriarch. Peter had been a successful surveyor and planter, served on county courts, and speculated—with great success—in land. Jane Randolph, his mother, belonged to one of the colony's most prominent families. The couple owned thousands of acres of rich land and led a refined lifestyle at Shadwell, their home, and Tuckahoe, the estate of William Randolph, Jane's kinsman and Peter's best friend, where they resided for many years, raising Randolph's children along with their own.
Jefferson knew his family's wealth and connections had brought him to Williamsburg, and that achieving the status of a gentleman and patriarch would continue to depend on family. He grew to manhood imbibing a worldview that pervaded English America: social hierarchy was organic, just, and family-based. Rank depended in large measure on birth; lineage was identity. Slave laws codified the most rigid dimensions of this inheritable social order. White women's legal status—or, more to the point, the absence of a legal status under the doctrine of coverture—was of the same piece. The "lesser sort" of white men—those lacking sufficient land, family connections, and reputations to claim gentry status—learned their place as well. A raft of laws reminded them lest they try to forget. Sartorial statutes even policed clothing, with the "lesser sort" forbidden from wearing certain fabrics and colors.
But even with those family advantages, if Thomas Jefferson wanted to guarantee his reputation as a worthy patriarch, he would have to excel: in his career, at those dances, with a woman. His understanding of how colonial Virginia worked fueled his concern for finding the right kind of wife. Rebecca Burwell was smart, charming, pretty, and an orphan raised by her uncle, William Nelson, a rich and powerful politician. Wooing a reputable woman like Rebecca, Thomas knew, would advance his standing. Career success would likewise depend on carefully cultivated connections, hence his enthusiasm to live near and work with Will Fleming.
Though he didn't say it in his letter to Fleming, slave mastery was also essential to Jefferson's imagined future. Slaves tended the carriages and horses that lawyers used to ride the circuit. They readied the clothes for the dances and, of course, provided the labor that subsidized the lifestyles of Virginia's gentry. Throughout his young life, slaves had daily attended to Jefferson's needs. His first memory, in fact, was of being handed to a slave, who sat him on a pillow and rode him on horseback to Tuckahoe. In his world, racial power was another inheritance, like land, money, and family ties. He would have to work hard to make the most of those advantages, though, if he hoped to join the ranks of the first men of Virginia.
* * *
George Mason IV was born and bred a Virginia planter-patriarch. He descended from a long line of men whose plantations thrived on Virginia's Northern Neck, along the Potomac River. So certain was his family's claim to power that George IV had the luxury of resenting the occasional intrusions on his time made by serving in the House of Burgesses; he resisted calls to public office from time to time, but he could not escape them altogether. Gentlemen like Mason believed that they took care of the "lesser sort" and upheld social order by submitting to political service. While rising men like Thomas Jefferson scrambled for positions that signaled their arrival into Virginia's inner circle, George Mason, secure in his land and his family's reputation, preferred whenever possible to remain at Gunston Hall, where he could, as he wrote to his friend George Washington, "sit down at his Ease under the Shade of his own Vine, & his own fig-tree, & enjoy the Sweets of domestic Life!"
The Mason family story was typical of Virginia's gentry, built on land, marriage, ambition, and luck. The first George Mason—great-grandfather to the revolutionary leader—migrated to Virginia in the early 1650s, and he settled on the Potomac River, in Indian country that he and like-minded farmers struggled to turn into a profitable extension of the Virginia colony. He succeeded in carving an estate out of the wilderness and gave his first-born son both that land and his name. George Mason II was a canny land speculator and proficient planter. He married well, twice, into prominent Chesapeake families. As was the Virginia way, George II turned his family connections and economic success into political power. In the 1690s he took a seat in the Virginia House of Burgesses, where, duplicating his father's priorities, he spent most of his political capital lobbying for frontier defense measures. The first two George Masons understood that the fate of their families depended on land—acquiring it, policing it, and producing lucrative commodities on it.
George Mason III (born in 1690) kept those family traditions alive. He bought more and more land in Virginia and Maryland and followed his late father into public office, first as sheriff of Stafford County and then, in 1715, into the House of Burgesses. This George Mason was also as lackadaisical about his political obligations as he was ambitious for land. During his tenure in the Burgesses (1715–1726), he was formally reprimanded for being absent. He preferred to focus on his diversifying business interests—planting, land speculation, and shipping goods on the Potomac—and his family. He married well, to Ann Thomson, one of the two heiresses of a powerful royal appointee. Inheriting their father's estate made Ann and her sister sought-after brides in Virginia's marriage market, attractive to ambitious men like George Mason III.
Ann and George's first child was born in 1725, and, predictably, named George IV Reflecting his parent's landholdings, he and his two siblings, Mary and Thomson, were all born on different plantations. When George III died in 1735, Ann Mason found herself with three small children, ages two through nine, to raise. Most Virginia widows chose to remarry, but Mason took another course. She became a skilled planter, financial manager, and land speculator. She made sure her children dressed their status: ruffled linen shirts for the brothers and fashionable petticoats for Mary. But she also adeptly managed her household without accruing debts.
Kin helped Ann Mason with those fatherless children, a practice rendered commonplace in the colonial era by Virginia's unhealthy environment. In George Mason's case, John Mercer, his uncle and father's business partner, stepped in. Mercer was rich and well-read; he owned a library of some fifteen hundred volumes. Ann and John oversaw George's education, which was not simply scholastic. As his Uncle Mercer explained, a good tutor should teach a boy to "be particularly careful of his Religion, morals, & behavior, in short he should be a gentleman."
George Mason IV was not an easy man—forthright to the point of gruff, relentlessly uncompromising, intolerant of others' failings—but he was a respected one according to the values of his age. In his twenties and early thirties he amassed vast holdings in Prince William and Fairfax Counties in Virginia, Charles County, Maryland, and Analostan Island. With all those hundreds of acres, he acquired scores of slaves. He looked out for his young relatives and, as his mother taught him, watched his money. In 1750 he married sixteen-year-old Ann Eilbeck. Her father, William Eilbeck, was not only a longtime family friend and business ally, but also one of the richest men in Charles County. And he had but one heir: Ann. (Apparently his father's example showed Mason the advantage of courting a woman whose rich father had no sons.) Mason learned, like his ancestors, that social rank and political power had a mutually reinforcing relationship: gentlemen needed to perform public obligations while political service affirmed gentry status. Following the script for a Virginia gentleman, George took a term on his vestry, served on the local court, and won election to the House of Burgesses in 1758. The next year he and Ann moved into Gunston Hall, where they raised nine children and buried three others.
By his mid-thirties George Mason had made the most of the advantages he enjoyed because of his family, and so rightly claimed the status of a Virginia gentleman. He turned his and Ann's inheritances into a vast estate, some seventy-five thousand acres spread across Virginia and Maryland and onto the southern frontier. He was widely respected for his intellect, and though not temperamentally suited for politics, powerful. He loved foxhunting, horseback riding, and horse racing—the sports of Virginia patriarchs. Ann kept Gunston Hall beautifully appointed, and the couple socialized with the best families in northern Virginia. Her household duties would have been onerous, but she could pass the most difficult jobs—cleaning up after sick children, cooking meals, changing diapers—to her slaves. Slavery purchased every part of their lifestyle. Their son John later bragged, "My Father had among his Slaves—Carpenters, Coopers, Sawyers, Blacksmiths, Tanners, Curriers, Shoemakers, Spinners, Weavers & Knitters, even a Distiller. His woods furnished Timber and Plant for the Carpenters and Coopers—and charcoal for the Blacksmith; his cattle killed for his own Consumption or for Sale, supplied skins for the Tanners Curriers & Shoemakers—and his Sheep gave wool and his Fields produced cotton & Flax for the weavers and Spinners—and his orchards fruit for the Distiller." A colonial planter-patriarch could have achieved no more.
* * *
Mason's friend and neighbor George Washington settled into the same lifestyle, on a nearby plantation, at nearly the same time. The Washingtons, like the Masons, traced their Virginia history back a century, to the 1657 arrival of brothers John and Augustine, but the family owed its prominence principally to the women these first migrants and their sons married. John, the great-grandfather of George Washington, wed the daughter of a prominent Maryland family. By 1668, he owned over 5,000 acres in Virginia's Northern Neck. George's father, Augustine, inherited 1,100 acres of that family estate and shortly married a woman who added 1,750 more. When Augustine's first wife died in 1729, he again married advantageously, to a twenty-one-year-old heiress named Mary Ball.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Founders as Fathers by Lorri Glover. Copyright © 2014 Lorri Glover. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, vii,Introduction, 1,
ONE: The Last Colonial Patriarchs, 6,
TWO: Independence, 36,
THREE: Sacrifice, 69,
FOUR: Liberty and Power, 103,
FIVE: A "Natural Aristocracy", 132,
SIX: "All Other Persons", 164,
SEVEN: "Ourselves and Our Posterity", 192,
EIGHT: Reputation, 219,
Epilogue: Going Home, 248,
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS, 261,
NOTES, 263,
INDEX, 309,
Interviews
Q: How great was the sacrifice of the Virginia revolutionaries?
A: It is hard to remember now how dangerous and audacious it was in the eighteenth century for men like Jefferson and Washington to announce that they, upstart farmers living on the far periphery of the English empire, knew better how to govern than King George himself. On paper, the Continental Army had virtually no chance of beating the greatest military in the western world. The men who signed the Declaration of Independence pledged away their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor. Seeing that through took lifetimes of sacrifice and resolve.
Q: What values did the founders share?
A: Though several became bitter rivals who carried their enmity to the grave, they did share many foundational values: they idealized education, civic virtue, financial independence, rationalism, self-determination, and seeking the common good in civic life. Perhaps most fatefully, though, they all remained unshakably committed to racial slavery, which made their families wealthy, white citizens in their Republic free and equal, and their Revolution fatally flawed.
Q: Did the children of these men tend to follow their fathers into public life?
A: That varied wildly. The Jefferson grandchildren devoted themselves to cleaning up his image for history. They, as well as Dolley Madison, worked to make these men’s writings available to the public. Several of Patrick Henry's and George Mason’s sons served admirably in government and ran successful businesses. But no matter how much they achieved, they could never get out of the shadow of their fathers, the founders. Even the obituaries of the most successful of the founders’ children focused on their famous ancestors.