George Washington's South (review)

This volume, which grew out of a 1999 conference held at the University of Southern Mississippi, adds to the scholarship of George Washington and the eighteenth-century South by providing context and additional perspectives. Our understanding of our first president has been hampered by what contributor Don Higginbotham sees as the tendency to view Washington as "reserved and aloof" (121). Co-editors Tamara Harvey and Greg O'Brien concur, arguing that "no American identity is so strong and true as that of George Washington"—so strong that it "remains startlingly unchanged" (3). In a similar fashion, the popular understanding of the South suffers from a static identity that firmly rooted in the nineteenth century.

While some of the essays in the volume focus exclusively on Washington, most illuminate the region that would eventually become identified as the American South. Only a few—notably those by Warren R. Hofstra, Theda Perdue, and Philip D. Morgan and Michael L. Nicholls—focus on Washington and the South. Nonetheless, those essays that focus primarily on the South also provide the reader with a fuller understanding of Washington's era and the issues that concerned our first national leader.

The South examined in this volume was an evolving region where Native Americans were being pushed out by a burgeoning population of Old World peoples and their descendants. While several essays survey the South as a region, most examine more discrete areas and subregions. Approximately half of the volume is devoted to the interior South, a frontier zone that stretched from the lower Mississippi Valley through the Creek and Cherokee nations to the Shenandoah Valley. There are also two essays on New Orleans and Charleston, respectively.

This multidisciplinary collection of essays is divided into four parts. In the first section, "On the Map and Off," contributors examine the multiple divisions that existed in Washington's America. Daniel H. Usner, Jr. examines three types of boundaries in the lower Mississippi Valley: the familiar international political boundary, the boundaries between Indian nations and colonies, and ethnic boundaries between peoples. These mutable boundaries changed as the United States extended its political control into the region, forcing cartographers and inhabitants to redraw and renegotiate lines of division. Martin Brückner places mapmakers at the forefront of this process as he concludes that "eighteenth-century maps invented 'the South' as a region" as evidenced by "the ways in which cartographic texts depicted and informed popular notions of 'southern' identity" (44). Warren R. Hofstra analyzes Washington's infamous antipathy toward the German and Scotch-Irish farmers of Virginia's backcountry and convincingly argues that Washington's early experience in overcoming his personal feelings helped solidify the public virtue and republican values that would serve him well as a national leader. In her study of elite material culture in French Louisiana, Sophie White demonstrates a cultural exchange that hastened Louisiana's evolution from a relatively open society into one that "promoted stricter delineations" based on increasingly "rigid class, race, and economic demarcations" (88).

In the second section, "George Washington as Person, Symbol, and Southerner," Don Higginbotham—better known for his writings on Washington's public career as a military and political leader—seeks to clarify the private Washington by examining his personal relationships with three women: Mary Ball Washington, Martha Washington, and Sally Cary Fairfax—his mother, wife, and neighbor, respectively. Higginbotham demonstrates that our understanding of these women and their influence on Washington has been hampered by the stereotypes of earlier generations. These three women, like Washington himself, were all residents of Virginia. By contrast, the three poets examined in Carla Mulford's essay hailed from New Jersey and Massachusetts. Mulford, in her essay on the "Poetics of National Memory," utilizes the poetry of Annis Stockton, Phillis Wheatley, and the loyalist Jonathan Odell to argue that "writers—and especially poets—of the day were, in effect, instaurating for commemoration sets of cultural values that can be associated with planter attitudes" (176...