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1. The Semiotics of the Founders

Where did (or do) the Founding Fathers come from?

There are two default answers that seem to prevail. The first understands the elevation of the Founders as a natural phenomenon, the result of some determinable combination of moral or social complexity, political superiority, and/or practical efficacy. Thus, we remember Thomas Jefferson because of his leadership of the Democratic Party, his authorship of the Declaration of Independence, the hallmarks of his presidency, his exceptional intellect, his tortured grappling with slavery, and so on. Or we commemorate George Washington because of his military leadership, his combination of virtues, his special status as a “first” president, his Farewell Address, and the like. By this reasoning, the lesser status of second- and third-tier figures (the Patrick Henrys, Silas Deanes, or Light-Horse Harry Lees) simply reflects their lesser abilities or achievements. A second, more complex explanation for the Founders’ status focuses on their construction by contemporary and subsequent cultural productions. We honor a Benjamin Franklin because of his thorough self-promotion and an extensive array of portraiture, poems, parades, and so forth, which have been glossed and perpetuated for more than two centuries. That both of these explanations—a quasi-Darwinian natural selection of great men or the concerted efforts of cultural hegemony—seem commonsensical and, often enough, compatible speaks to the tremendous cultural power of the Founders, so dominant that they corral nature and history to justify their genealogies.

The 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 had, at the moment of the rupture with Great Britain, almost a century’s tradition of cultic, symbolic investment in a political leader, unique in the empire in being institutionally unmoored and located primarily in print and pictorial representations.

This special iconic status, inherited by George III, anticipated the domain eventually to be occupied by the Founding Fathers. But a particularly North American occupation of this semiotic space also depended on the emergence of the king’s negative composite during the years of the imperial crisis. Bernard Bailyn long ago noted the oddly persistent significance of John Stuart, the third Lord Bute, in pre-Revolutionary rhetoric, in which he was not only “the root of the evil” of the imperial crisis but also the “malevolent and well-nigh indestructible machinator” behind British politics.⁵ If Bute is now largely unknown in popular Revolutionary lore, he appeared repeatedly in texts of the imperial crisis, from the Stamp Act controversy to the Declaration of Independence. Historian John Brewer has provided the most detailed account of the iconography of Bute,⁶ trying to explain the strange “range and extent of hostility to Bute” by excavating the underlying “theory of politics” motivating this antipathy (MLB 5).⁷ Indeed, Brewer, whose work belongs within the transatlantic “republican synthesis,” argues that the fixation on Bute resulted from a conjunction of whig beliefs about monarchical prerogative, undue nonparliamentary influence, and fears of an unbalanced constitution, going so far as to add that such associations with Bute were unfair and somehow incorrect.⁸ While one should certainly link the figure of Bute with related ideological positions, we should not let this prosaic translation exercise obscure Bute’s tremendous symbolic composition, which Brewer elsewhere discusses. Two qualities seem most important. For one thing, Bute was a centripetal figure combining and channeling other figures. Indeed, other political officials were deemed Bute’s “locum tenens”—his placeholders—in the parlance of the time, such that his distance or absence from the political scene simply provided more proper names to constitute his power.⁹ These secondary figures—considered “‘cyphers’ or agents for the minions of Bute” (FLB 102)—were linked metonymically in discourse: Bute and this or that puppet. But in narrative, these connections were made through the emplotment of conspiracy, whereby secondary characters were metaphorical placeholders of the primary figure. In this framework, Revolutionary conspiracy theories may be read not so much as explanations of events, or indices of theories of historical causality, but rather as maps of semiotic layerings.

Just as important, however, was a countervailing centrifugal or splitting dynamic, whereby Bute gathered together traits, events, and qualities that could not initially be linked with King George. “Clearly, it was argued, responsibility” for absolutist tendencies in government “could not be placed upon a King who it was traditionally claimed ‘could do no wrong’” (FLB 114). Thus emerged a theory of a secret “inner cabinet,” or a “dual system of government”—a public or legitimate or monarchically constrained order, on the one hand, and, on the other, a secret, scheming, and prerogative-driven system (FLB 98, 102); thus also emerged the scandalous accusations that Bute had sexual relations with the Princess Dowager (FLB 111).

We see both of these dynamics in the North American versions of Bute, where he is the central figure in characterological clusters including other figures, most notably Lords North and Mansfield. Thus, we find John Leacock’s satirical, mock-scriptural First Book of the American Chronicles of the Times presenting this composite vision: “Behold, yonder I see a dark cloud like unto a large sheet rise from the north, big with oppression and desolation, and the four corners thereof are held by four great beasts, bute, mansfield, bernard and hutchinson.”¹⁰ When, in 1776, Leacock published his mock metadrama The Fall of British Tyranny, “Mr. bute” would top the list of “Dramatis Personnæ” as “Lord Paramount,” with Mansfield, Dartmouth, North, and others in subordinate roles.¹¹ John Trumbull’s 1775 M’Fingal opened linking its central character with a Scottish rebelliousness that “With Bute and Mansfield swore allegiance / . . . to raze, as nuisance, / Of church and state the Constitutions.”¹² Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s 1776 dramatic poem “The Battle of Bunkers-Hill” envisioned General Gage crying “Oh bute, and dartmouth knew ye what I feel.”¹³ The popular pamphlet series The Crisis, collaboratively written in England but published serially and repeatedly in the colonies, was full of similar references.¹⁴ Bute, for example, “sternly bids North lay another tax,” while anti-American “sentiments are Bute’s by Mansfield’s penn’d”; royal speech, in yet another installment, is “no ordinary composition, it originates from Bute, is trimmed up by Mansfield, adopted by North, and pronounced by a royal Orator.”¹⁵ Similarly illuminating is a 1776 pamphlet, published in Philadelphia, focused on persuading Quakers to join the independence movement. In one scene, four of the main characters—the Irish American “Pady,” the Quaker “Simon,” the Scottish American “Sandy,” and the New Englander “Jonathan”—have largely come to agreement about the imperial crisis but suddenly come to blows as they begin to fantasize that one another are scheming counselors to the king: “Simon: If you were lord North, I would—then fetches Sandy a blow and knocks him over the bench, and breaks his arm;—whilst Jonathan and Pady keeps struggling on the floor, Jonathan cries out if you were lord Bute, but I would—and in striving to throw him, breaks his leg, and down he goes, crying out for justice.”¹⁶ Apologizing for the broken limbs, Simon says, “When I began to think of lord North, it put me all in a fume his laying the Americans at his feet,” while Jonathan answers, “That’s what made me think of Bute when you mentioned the other, and I thought they should go together.”¹⁷ One last example: Mercy Otis Warren begins her History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution describing “Lord Bute, who . . . had become the director of the monarch on the throne of Britain” and by “secret influence” had made Parliament “the mere creature of administration.”¹⁸ She later mentions Bute’s retirement in 1766, but adds “there had been an extraordinary variety and succession of characters in the colonial department” who had subsequently “taken the lead in this thorny path”—she mentions lords Grenville, Rockingham, North, Hillsborough, and Dartmouth.¹⁹

Thus, the semiotic field, on the eve of the Revolution, was occupied by two complementary figures: a positively valorized George III and the negatively charged, aggregative figure of Lord Bute. George represented an executive power, a royal prerogative, an ability to act on behalf of the colonists, though acting in silence. Bute, by contrast, represented deliberative powers—suasion, rhetoric, manipulation, misinformation, and jesuitical sophistry. What is important, from our point of view, is that this pairing persisted even after the sudden emotional reversal toward the king, at which point the pairing designated differently inflected qualities mobilized for tyrannical purposes. The king still represented executive power, though in the form of coercive actions and violence, and these were complemented by the schemes and plans of Bute and his minions. Such a dichotomy is implicit, for example, in The Crisis number 18, which suggests that “Fate hangs on Bute’s proud will and George’s brow. / Below, North represents absconding Bute, / Above, a Nation dyes by Roy le veut.”²⁰ Here George is the exterior bodily expression—the brow—as compared to Bute, whose “will” speaks of intellectual, emotional, and religious interiority.²¹

Generating Washington

We pause here to discuss briefly the semiotic square theorized by the structuralist linguist and narratologist Algirdas Greimas.²² Greimas argues that a given cultural situation will be structured around a fundamental opposition that expresses a logical understanding of that moment. In the mid-1770s, many British North American colonials perceived their political conflict as an opposition between a practical, politically active, yet nonintellectual kingly force and a deliberative, insinuating intellectual advisory force. What is important about this binary, for Greimas, is that, when it comes to be perceived as inadequate, its stalled logic generates its solution or transcendence—that is, a culture does not simply reset or shift to altogether different figures but attempts to develop a solution from within its semiotic constraints. What this means for the political conflict in question is that the Revolutionary response would be constrained by the terms of the initial pairing.

We see precisely 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 “anarchy” of the American independence movement.²⁸ Franklin passed these letters on to North American colleagues, who published them. All indications suggest that Franklin hoped to effect a reconciliation between the colonies and the empire by casting Hutchinson as a scapegoat, but the public drama cast Franklin very differently. With the 1773 publication of the Hutchinson letters, and relations inflamed by the Boston Tea Party, Franklin himself became the scapegoat and was famously called before the Privy Council—in the “Cockpit”—to receive criticism and insults from Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn. Franklin famously received an hour of abuse in total silence, while the audience cheered and laughed. Two days later, Franklin was fired from his position as deputy postmaster general of North America; relations between Great Britain and the colonies continued to deteriorate. Meanwhile, as Michael Warner notes in his account, “The incident greatly recuperated Franklin’s colonial reputation, which had suffered in the mid-1760s, and did much to inflame revolutionary sentiment.”²⁹

The Hutchinson affair—or the Wedderburn-Franklin exchange, as it was frequently presented in the early republican press—proved fundamental to the formation of “Franklin” not because of its biographical significance but because it took the famous figure of the intellectual and encoded it in relation to the figure of Lord Bute. The Cockpit humiliation made this distinction hard to avoid: Wedderburn was one of Bute’s alleged minions and as solicitor general embodied the position of imperial intellectual—the schemer using his wits to insult, mislead, manipulate, and misdirect. In this confrontation, the intellectual Franklin’s behavior was recast in a contrasting position: he had used his formidable gifts to expose the schemings of Bute and company. This use of his intellect—to bring bad political advising to light and therefore check it, rather than to obscure it further—was then doubly encoded as he refused to use his famous wit to respond to the Privy Council, opting instead for silence. In this respect, “Franklin” answers and corrects the figure of Lord Bute much as “Washington” answers and corrects the figure of the king. Where Bute was a figure of considerable culture and learning complementing, enabling, and amplifying the executive symbolic position, Franklin suddenly rises to significance as a corrective figure. A perfect illustration may be found in John Trumbull’s 1774 poem “An Elegy on the Times,” which Elihu Hubbard Smith featured prominently as the opening piece of his 1793 anthology American Poems, Selected and Original. The poem laments the “mock debate,” “servile vows,” “well-dissembled praise,” and generally “fruitless offerings” of English politics (ll. 48–52)³⁰ and then transitions to this description of Franklin’s encounter:

While Peers enraptur’d hail the unmanly wrong,

See Ribaldry, vile prostitute of shame,

Stretch the brib’d hand and prompt the venal tongue,

To blast the laurels of a franklin’s fame!

But will the Sage, whose philosophic soul,

Controul’d the lightning in its fierce career,

Hear’d unappal’d the aerial thunders roll,

And taught the bolts of vengeance where to steer;—

Will he, while echoing to his just renown

The voice of kingdoms swells the loud applause;

Heed the weak malice of a Courtier’s frown,

Or dread the coward insolence of laws? (3)

In the event, Franklin remains silent “While Infamy her darling scroll displays, / And points well pleas’d, oh, wedderburne, to thee!” (4). Characteristics later associated with Franklin—most notably his ribald humor and his expressiveness about wealth—are at this moment English vices one could never associate with the seemingly puritanical and disinterested scientist. Franklin stands an impassive scientific observer, his response to hostile questioning akin to his “unappal’d” assessment of the thunderstorm. Nonetheless, we may see glimmerings of mythical elements later to accrue to Franklin—for example, the adoption of the Poor Richard persona, in which intelligence assumes an assertive modesty; or the crucial figure of the printer (as distinct from the author), who publishes but also maintains a kind of modest silence; or the scientist, who tries to describe things as they are, as opposed to the political theorist describing how they should be; or the creator of the public library, trying to make information available to all. Indeed, the famous 1778 portrait of Franklin by Joseph-Siffred Duplessis—Franklin in simple coat, lips noticeably clamped shut—pictorially codifies this symbolic moment.³¹

Let us be clear about our argument. The symbolic relational pairing of George III and Lord Bute generated not one new position (Washington) or an infinite series of countersymbols (Washington, his generals, various political leaders, and so on) but a decisively answering pair: Washington-Franklin. Washington was not a substitution for George III but an important correction and therefore a new relational position, just as Franklin signaled a relational corrective to the Bute figure. Consequently, the emergence of these new figures retroactively confirmed and clarified the original generative roles of king and Bute. Aggressive action and shadowy insinuation were reworked as reluctant action and intellectual illumination, at least for the time being. If biographical behaviors provided raw material for these new positions, so much the better; but these symbolic configurations were not dependent on such data and drew easily on fictional and apocryphal embellishments, selective distortions of the historical record, and composite biographical details of adjacent and subordinate figures.

Founders: The Next Generation

By the moment of the Constitutional Convention, these two mythological figures, Washington and Franklin, played parts on the political stage—the former called out of retirement to preside over the convention, the latter providing the most published written defense of the new system and the tactic of the unanimity resolution.³² Alexander Hamilton, assessing the prospects for ratification, listed Washington’s influence as the major advantage, and Luther Martin, an opponent, later published his convention notes in which he seemed to complain that “neither General Washington nor Franklin shewed any disposition to relinquish the superiority of influence in the Senate.”³³ Noah Webster’s October 1787 pamphlet concluded with a glorification of Washington and Franklin as “fathers and saviors” of the country; another piece in the Massachusetts Centinel warned anti-Federalists that Americans “will despise and execrate the wretch who dares blaspheme the political saviour of our country.”³⁴ If many essays did not refer to the two giants, they nonetheless suggest the tremendous influence of these figures in popular assessment of the Constitution. By November, Roger Sherman of Connecticut could write,

It is enough that you should have heard that one party has seriously urged that we should adopt the new Constitution because it has been approved by Washington and Franklin, and the other, with all the solemnity of apostolic address to Men, Brethren, Fathers, Friends, and Countrymen, have urged that we should reject as dangerous every clause thereof, because that Washington is more used to command as a soldier than to reason as a politician—Franklin is old—others are young—and Wilson is haughty. You are too well informed to decide by the opinion of others and too independent to need a caution against undue influence.³⁵

Washington and Franklin remained firmly iconic and still somewhat differentiated in their respective roles of executive actor and deliberative intellectual—useful formulations for supporters, dangerous ones for critics. When an early anti-Federalist piece, Samuel Bryan’s Centinel No. 1, challenged the icons, then, it had to characterize Washington as naive (that is, so much an actor as to lack intellect) and Franklin as senile (his mind having succumbed to his bodily aging).³⁶ Most anti-Federalists, though, passed over the two in silence or tried to characterize the convention with reference to a noniconic figure, as in the preceding allusion to Wilson or when a piece in Philadelphia’s Independent Gazetteer described the convention as a group of physicians directed by “John Adams, Esquire.”³⁷

With the Revolution receding, however, both “Washington” and “Franklin” drifted into a somewhat bland period when their significance seemed to lose definition. Perhaps the best illustration of this loss of symbolic force is the poem written by young Charles Brockden Brown, titled “Inscription for Benjamin Franklin’s Tomb Stone.” When Philadelphians circulated the poem and learned that Franklin wanted to write his own epitaph, Brown’s brother apparently sent the poem to the State Gazette of North Carolina, where it appeared as “An Inscription for General Washington’s Tomb Stone”—Washington’s name was simply inserted in place of Franklin’s. If the references to the “Shade of Newton” and “Philosophy’s throne” today seem baffling, it appears that generalized platitudes about “American’s favorite . . . / Whose soul for the want of due room, / Has left us to range in the skies” could fit the one as easily as the other.³⁸

As the war continued into the early 1780s, there had been signs of the generation of new positions emerging. The strongest versions of new positions centered on the figures of Benedict Arnold and Major John André. If Richard Snowden’s aforementioned The American Revolution ignored the Declaration of Independence, it gave great attention to Arnold, whose crucial turn is announced toward the end of the second volume: “And it came to pass, in the one thousand seven hundred and eightieth year of the Christian Hegira, in the ninth month, on the twenty-first day of the month, that Satan entered the heart of Benedict” (2.148–49). The final verses of the chapter speak of “the fatal fruit of treachery” and how “the monuments of thy victory on the plains of Saratoga, serve only to blaze forth the death of thy fame” (2.158). It is tempting to see in Arnold simply a crude evil counterpart to Washington, the Satan to the latter’s Christ—self-promoting in contrast to Washington’s self-denial and so forth. But again we must consider the Arnold position in relation to André, introduced by Snowden as “valiant in war, and where the brave were, there was he” (2.150). It is this positive coding that gives meaning to the full André narrative, in which two details were important. First, he was captured by American sentries who had misidentified themselves as Tories—“they spake in the subtilty of their hearts,” as Snowden puts it (2.153). Second, when tried by the Americans, he maintained his integrity—“he answered with dignity, composure, and truth; his magnanimity did not forsake him, in the hour of extremity” (2.155–56). Perceiving the prisoner as “a shining model of all that was excellent!” the Americans want to save him but execute him from a sense of duty (2.156). This drama is still more pronounced in William Dunlap’s 1798 play André, strongly declared a tragedy in the introduction: in Dunlap’s drama, the ranking American figure, the “General,” struggles to do his duty according to his larger cause and reluctantly orders André’s hanging.³⁹ The André figure thus requires a more complex relational understanding of Arnold, for the concern of this tentative constellation of the mid-1780s was not crude demonization but a formulation of sin and treason in a framework of Revolutionary republicanism. André was on the side of evil, was himself a good man, showed signs of great culture, was tricked by the American sentries and abandoned by Arnold—in all these details, this figuration attempted to express the moral challenges of postmonarchical justice in a politically divided society of patriots and tories. André’s position was important precisely because of its association with, and difference from, the Arnold position. The problem posed by the pair, then, was not one of evil but an important revision of the Washington and Franklin positions. Washington signified reluctant action, but Arnold represented less its opposite, after the fashion of George III, than the dangers of the Washington position for the ambitious and valiant: Arnold was less Washington’s antithesis than a figure generated from the Washington position, so constrained by the rigors of selflessness as to be driven to the enemy. André, meanwhile, signaled an important variant of Franklin—the cultured intellectual, a careful conduit of information, a figure of virtue . . . but for the wrong side. Relative to Arnold, André became the tragic traitor but perhaps more importantly allowed a vicarious staging of an encounter between Washington and Franklin. In any case, the historical persistence of these figures, especially of Arnold, should be read as a trace of this brief moment when the emergent Founders’ constellation was still largely military in orientation and the nascent national semiotics were organized around questions of loyalty.

But if the Arnold-André pair marked a brief detour of the 1780s, a different and more decisive constellation was to emerge in the 1790s. Washington and Franklin were symbolically reinvested in important ways, and two different figures emerged. How did this happen? We would stress here three concurrent phenomena. The first Washington administration witnessed a series of political conflicts over national economic development and the related role of the government therein. In each instance, the stakes were high, while the terms of debate were abstract—concerned with constitutional hermeneutics, for example, or with the unintended consequences of state interventions in economic subsystems. The year 1790 witnessed a debate around Hamilton’s February “First Report on Public Credit,” concerned with the retirement of national debt; the following year saw this conflict extended to include the problems of banking and currency, this time focused on Hamilton’s “Report on a National Bank” (submitted December 1790); and 1792 saw yet another conflict, this time over mercantilism and the interpretation of the Constitution’s “general welfare” clause and triggered by Hamilton’s “Report on the Subject of Manufactures” (submitted December 1791). Each of these conflicts was accompanied by a substantial body of print argument—not just Hamilton’s theses but a number of essays, pamphlets, and editorials, not to mention internal Cabinet memoranda. Each conflict was narrowly decided in favor of the northern financial classes, and none of these conflicts could, in its own turn, activate the semiotic resources to mobilize mass political action, instead leaving the elites deadlocked. Consequently, these years also witnessed a series of interventions to break this deadlock and translate these conflicts into an iconic repertoire, whereby political disagreements could be reconfigured symbolically.

Critical here was the rise of a new form of political press. In the summer of 1791, for example, Jefferson and Madison, having led and lost the battle against the bank, began urging Philip Freneau to relocate to Philadelphia to launch a national newspaper capable of answering John Fenno’s Gazette of the United States, founded at Hamilton’s instigation in 1789; Freneau’s paper, the National Gazette, began publishing in late October 1791. From that moment, print played an increasingly important role in ironizing political discourse. There had already been partisan newspapers, to be sure, but now competing discourses were coordinated and synchronized by national papers. Both papers continued to publish essays of political theory—indeed, Hamilton and Madison wrote scores of tracts during these years—but the classic essay of the deliberative public sphere was increasingly complemented by new forms influenced by Revolutionary propaganda. Freneau’s satire “Rules for Changing a Limited Republican Government into an Unlimited Hereditary One” (July 1792) beautifully illustrates this transition. Presented as a series of proposals for subverting the Revolutionary heritage, the essay’s main achievement was the construction of the persona of a devious conspiratorial monarchist. The essay concluded ominously:

Should it be found impossible, however, to prevent the people from awaking and uniting; should all artificial distinctions give way to the natural division between the lordly minded few and the well-disposed many; should all who have common interest make a common cause and shew an inflexible attachment to republicanism in opposition to a government of monarchy and money, why then * * * * *—⁴⁰

This abrupt conclusion not only confirms the semiotic priority granted to character over plot but typographically denotates the symbolic space to be filled in the next few years. Whatever the subject matter of public discourse, character would become a regular part of political debate. In 1791, the publication of The Rights of Man prompted a huge body of secondary literature not simply on Paine’s arguments but on Paine himself, giving us the legendary caricature of the rabid, drunk womanizer.⁴¹ A decade later, it was routine for the Federalist newspapers to publish long mocking analyses of the president’s writing style, as if his character and policies could be ascertained by his elaborate and effeminate diction and sentence structure.

These same years saw a series of pamphlets written as political commentary and presenting an informal characterological theory of political partisanship—this is the moment we typically recognize as the birth of the US party system. From our perspective, the primary cultural work of the party framework was the translation of political disputes into characterological terms, as parties came to be defined not so much by political and theoretical positions or the economic interests of their member groups as by individuals or personality profiles. A good illustration of this emerging analysis can be found in William Laughton Smith’s 1792 pamphlet The Politicks and Views of a Certain Party, Displayed, which began by marveling at the attacks from Freneau’s paper on measures “sanctioned by the Man we all love and revere”—Washington, of course.⁴² The ensuing narrative of votes translated the economic debates of 1790–92 into a tale of this congressman expressing shame and remorse, these congressmen voting in secret in committee, and those who “never openly avowed” their views (11). Hamilton’s particular positions were recast as indices of his historic stature as a minister of state (“his reputation traversed the ocean and in distant climes his Name was mentioned among the great ministers of the age”); criticisms were therefore the result of “Envy” begotten from “Fame” (12). Deliberative disagreements over the duration clause in the banking bill were now described with reference to “solemn threats, sulky looks, big works and great Guns” (17). This political breakdown coincided with “the arrival in this Country of a certain Personage” (3)—Jefferson’s return from France—and this “personage,” later called “the Generalissimo” (with Madison, his “second in command,” known also as “the General”; 22), is the subject of the final third of the essay.⁴³ In these pages, we find one of the first character sketches of this next moment of the Founders:

Had an inquisitive mind in those days [1790] sought for evidence of his Abilities, as a Statesman, he would have been referred to the confusions in France, the offspring of certain political dogmas fostered by the American Minister, and to certain theoretical principles only fit for Utopia: As a Warrior, to his Exploits at Monticelli; as a Philosopher, to his discovery of the inferiority of Blacks to Whites, because they are more unsavory and secrete more by the kidnies; as a Mathematician, to his whirligig chair. (29)

Elsewhere Jefferson is cast as “a certain tall and awkward Bird which hides its head behind a Tree and supposes itself unseen tho’ its posteriors are publicly displayed” (32–33), as “this philosophical Patriot, or patriotic Philosopher” (35), and as the devious sponsor of the “Poetaster” (Freneau) given a position as a translator in the State Department (33).

Contributing to this partisan polarization was the well-known international conflict between the two global powers vying for hegemony. The catalyzing role of the French Revolution provided a lexicon for accelerating and polarizing the semiotic unfolding. In early 1793, the execution of Louis XVI (January) and the declaration of war against Britain (February) set the stage for recurring crises with France through the next two decades. If students of American history even today have a hazy familiarity with a series of proper nouns from this period—Genet, the Jay Treaty, the XYZ Affair—it is because each name denotes a scandal that momentarily clarified and advanced the semiotic polarization, ostensibly around the polar terms of England and France. If events during the Jefferson and Madison administrations revealed the ephemeral nature of this distinction, this did not make it insignificant.

Finally, we must add that Federalist rule clamped down on popular political outlets. Popular instruction had already been discouraged during the first Congress (August 1789), but the crucial moment came with the formation of the Democratic-Republican Societies (spring 1793), concurrent with the arrival of Genet. These societies’ association first with Jacobinism and then with the so-called Whiskey Rebellion led to their condemnation in Washington’s Message to the Third Congress (November 1794) and a military expedition led by Washington himself, with Hamilton at his side. After the suppression of the insurrection—which itself had a tremendous chilling effect—popular political engagement was increasingly displaced to the press and the party. The frenzy over the XYZ Affair and the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 further stifled popular political activities, while increasing the political significance of the national partisan papers. Again, we miss the important structural and cultural transformations of the moment if we see these events as “tap[ping] into a widespread, deep-seated, and preexisting animus towards such ideas”; as Seth Cotlar has argued, the reverse is the case—this moment “led to the rapid crystallization of a xenophobic and explicitly anti-revolutionary vision of American politics.”⁴⁴

The extensive political conflicts and mobilizations, their complex and esoteric formulations, the international polarization, an electoral system consolidating a two-party complex, the rise of the partisan press and the diminution of vernacular political organization—all of these meant that the 1790s would see the reactivation of the Founders constellation. We should be clear: we are not arguing that the Founders were the inevitable cynical production of propagandists seeking to mobilize supporters. Propagandists were at work and accentuated the partisan inflections, to be sure, but the symbolic imperative and its effectivity betoken a cultural phenomenon beyond political manipulation. As the Arnold-André pairing showed, the symbolic constellation did not need to be confined to the macropolitical sphere, as the iconic portraiture of the later nineteenth century was to demonstrate, with constellations that incorporated Native Americans and prominent African Americans. But in the 1790s, this characterological activity was concentrated in the political sphere, as we saw with William Laughton Smith’s 1792 pamphlet. For Smith selected and assembled many of the details that would allow for a range of different inflections—for example, the significant gendering and sexualization of the Founders evident in allusions to Jefferson’s cowardice. If Hamilton, in 1792, was already privately writing that Jefferson and Madison “have a womanish attachment to France and a womanish resentment against Great Britain,” it was works such as Smith’s that established this semiotic code firmly in public discourse.⁴⁵ It is equally worth noting that Hamilton (with whom Smith was in agreement) has only the vaguest contours in Smith’s pamphlet—it was through the corresponding attacks on Hamilton that his positive and negative qualities themselves coalesced. Again, when contemporary works of Founders Chic excitedly declare that the great Founders were subject to vicious personal attacks, they obscure the very role of such attacks in creating the Founders as a system—it is not despite such personalized insults that the great Founders emerged but in part because of them.

We may now spell out the constellation that emerged over the 1790s. Washington, who was originally a figure of executive restraint in contrast to George III, now took on partisan inflections—from a Federalist viewpoint, cautious, nonaligned government-building, or from a Republican viewpoint, Anglophilic passivity exploited by underlings. Franklin, originally a figure of republican illumination in contrast to Lord Bute, now emerged as a marker of radical cultural mobilization, either deluded or virtuous, depending on one’s party. (The competition between these inflections, we may note, heuristically guides the attempts, in today’s scholarship, to locate a figure such as Franklin politically—such attempts continue the posthumous constellational work of the 1790s.) These two positions could then generate two new positions using the semiotic material associated with the Jefferson and Hamilton portraiture. The former emerged as the embodiment of action rendered as knowledge—Doing becoming Knowing. He was the Philosopher-President, associated, increasingly, with the Declaration of Independence, the Virginia Constitution, Notes on the State of Virginia, the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, and eventually the forming of the Library of Congress and the University of Virginia. Ensconced in his hilltop plantation estate of Monticello, he pursued governance through retreat, again with positive or negative variants. For Republicans, he was the theorist of democracy who withdrew from the Washington (and later Adams) administrations, to direct an opposition through ideas. For Federalists, he was the coward of 1781 (the famous flight from the British), now ridiculously theorizing racial difference while exploiting slave labor, then shuffling about in his slippers playing with his inventions. Hamilton, meanwhile, embodied the reverse movement, as the enactor of intellectual mastery through active programs—Knowing becoming Doing. Thus, he was then known (and still is) as the builder of national institutions (the Federalist Party, the Treasury, banking, the military, tax policy, infrastructure, etc.). Far from withdrawing to bucolic isolation, he was a figure of the city and the office, commemorated for work as Washington’s right hand and the behind-the-scenes orchestration of the Constitutional Convention. For Federalists, he was the very force of visionary energy itself, while for Republicans, he was the manipulative schemer. And we can see here how the Jefferson-Hamilton pair, generated from the reconfigured Washington-Franklin pair, fed back into the revision of the latter. From the Federalist perspective, Hamilton combined the intellect of Franklin with the achievements of Washington; from the Republican perspective, Jefferson combined the enlightened democratic commitments of Franklin with the careful restraint of Washington. And so too the reverse: for Federalists, Jefferson combined Washingtonian passivity and delay with Franklinian heterodoxy and immorality, while for Republicans, Hamilton pursued a conniving Franklinian system-building with a combination of Washington’s Anglophilia and militaristic aggression.

In the Revolutionary moment, the Washington-Franklin pair emerged from a royalist cultic system to address and explore the question of political resistance, the affective combinatorics of republicanism. In the 1790s situation, still defined by the sense of republican intellectual hegemony, the problem was governance, not the challenge to government, and the consequent parsing of the problem took different shape. Because this symbolic system was not first and foremost about political positions but about affective fantasy, it matured in ways that paralleled other imaginative media of the time. We might note that the constellation of the ’70s

had more in common with the characterological portraits of heroic historiography (from which it drew and which it fed), whereas the configuration of the ’90s inevitably drew more on the novel, in which women were often, if not always, central figures. Thus, the ’90s witnessed a dual gendering and sexualization of the Founders, already prefigured in Judith Sargent Murray’s portrait of the republican mother as commonwealth president—a female Washington. Again we may draw on our seemingly trivial and nonacademic knowledge of the Founders to sketch out their respective positions. Washington could emerge as the Father of the Nation not despite his apparent sterility and childlessness⁴⁶ but precisely because of it, a position affirmed by the complementarily vague status of Martha Washington: cautious and reluctant action found its sexual manifestation in surrogate parenting. By contrast, the “knowing” Franklin emerged as a figure of sexual activity, with his wife receding into the shadows, obscured by the more prominent William, the bastard son who became the royalist governor as a marker of sexual excess. The Jefferson and Hamilton positions played out these masculine variants—the Jeffersonian scandals of the day stressed his widower status but also his illicit sexual relationships (first the assault on Elizabeth Walker, his neighbor’s wife; later the liaison with Sally Hemings). He was not quite masculine in a solid sense but still sexually active, and his nonpromotable heirs (slaves) signaled a variant of the childless Washington and Franklin’s bastard. Meanwhile, Hamilton was himself the bastard son, and his tremendous intellect could not prevent him from entanglement with Maria Reynolds and her husband. In each instance, the gendered and sexual characterization rounded out the political portrait: Washington’s restraint meant that his citizens (or, in some variants, his slaves) were his “children”; Franklin’s ideological tendencies became manifest in excessive sexuality; Jefferson’s focus on reflexive theorization meant that he produced not a solid republican family but property to be analytically assessed; and Hamilton’s focus on aggressive masculine enactment led to a spectacularly self-destructive affair.