The Traumatic Colonel. Ed White
his bust was taken after death, the artist took his drawing-knife to shave off what he supposed to be two enormous wens, but which were in reality the cerebral organs of Amativeness.”22 The excitement of discussing the death mask is such that it evokes anecdote after anecdote, two of which may be shared here. One is the story of Burr’s experiment with a life mask, apparently following the example of his then British host Jeremy Bentham. The mask was taken by the Italian-Irishman Peter Turnerelli, who reportedly left a small stain on Burr’s nose that he could not remove. The other is this story from Hutton:
A proud young mother once exhibited to me her new-born and first-born babe, now a blooming and pretty young girl. I was afraid to touch it, of course, and I would not have “held” it for worlds; but I looked at it in the customary admiring way, wondering at its jelly-like imbecility of form and feature. Alas! when I was asked the usual question, “Whom does she favour?” I could only reply, in all sincerity, that it looked exactly like a pink photograph of my death mask of Aaron Burr. And the young mother was not altogether pleased.23
The phrenological framing, belied by the “jelly-like imbecility of form and feature” of the unformed baby, may be read as the pseudoscientific codification, decades after its career, of the thing called Burr. And where “amativeness” looms ever larger—just as it does in racial discourse—there is a subtle constant concern with color through these details: the white mask, the dark stain caused by the life mask, the pinkish baby face. In Hutton’s Portraits in Plaster, Burr is brought up near the end, immediately preceded by considerations of the masks of Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson. Discussion of Burr is then followed immediately by consideration of the masks of Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, and Abraham Lincoln, as if Hutton is staging some strange theatrical version of the Civil War played out in masks. Two more masks remain—first, that of Lord (Henry) Brougham, a contemporary of Burr and active within British abolition, and then, finally, oddly yet not so oddly, the “Florida Negro Boy.” Why end with this boy, “one of the lowest examples of his race”? Hutton insists that “his life-mask is only interesting here as an object of comparison,” for “whatever the head of a Bonaparte, a Washington, a Webster, or a Brougham is, his head is not.”24 The boy from Florida thus emerges as the point of comparison, the uninteresting illustration so powerful that it must conclude Hutton’s book, the puzzle and its own solution, the conclusion of the sequence that takes us from Washington to Burr and on to Lincoln.
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