Civic texts, slavery, and the formation of American nationalism (George Washington)

This dissertation studies the formation of nationalism in the early nineteenth-century United States. It argues that early American nationalism was created in part through “civic texts”—popular political and didactic works like pamphlets, biographies, sermons, political orations, almanacs, newspaper reporting, broadsides, even material objects like ceramics and paintings. These civic texts constituted the medium through which political ideologies were disseminated and nationalism forged. To overcome social, political, and geographical divisions among Americans, they created a unifying heritage of nationalist memories, and erased divisive aspects of early American life.; The dissertation examines how these civic texts created nationalist memories through a process of remembering and forgetting. It focuses particularly on how they created of an image of George Washington as a unifying national father, and how they erased the centrality of slavery to early American life. A host of pamphlets, biographies, textbooks, and other didactic tracts turned Washington into a de-politicized figure who could unite Americans as “father of the nation.” This exaltation, however, forced civic texts to confront complex legacies of Washington and slavery. Civic texts sought to overcome the threats to political and social unity by inculcating virtues among the populace in order to create proper republican subjects. Promoting virtues grounded in self-control and individual autonomy as the basis of citizenship, they sought to shape and unify divergent individual wills. In so doing, however, civic texts further reformulated the relationship between slavery and freedom, aggravating pervasive fears of slave rebellion, and connecting concerns about republican instability to fears of slave insurrection. Even as nineteenth-century civic texts tried to overcome the contradictions between slavery and freedom, they never fully erased slavery from the nationalist memories. It remained a hidden presence, continuing to shape the contours of early American nationalism.