Founders as Fathers: The Private Lives and Politics of the American Revolutionaries by Lorri Glover (review)

Founders as Fathers: The Private Lives and Politics of the American Revolutionaries is an extended exploration of how a political metaphor shaped the era of the American Revolution. The enduring label of “founding father,” Lorri Glover argues, captures how “public and private, politics and family—were indelibly linked in the revolutionary age” (p. 1). To understand the power of this rhetoric, she situates familial metaphors in the complex, often tragic, and frequently interracial family lives of a group of five men—Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, George Mason, James Madison, and George Washington—all fathers of a particular type, the Virginia patriarch.

The book opens in the mid-eighteenth century, when most members of Glover’s Virginia cohort were just growing into their lives as the “last colonial patriarchs” (p. 6). “Patriarchal power,” she explains, “expressed through mastery of a family, a plantation, and the social order, lay at the center of their identity” (p. 7). All of their actions were carefully calculated to serve this ideal: they married cousins to consolidate landholdings and served in vestry politics to bolster family status. Familial metaphors, therefore, were how they understood and sought to remake the relationship between Great Britain and the colonies.

But as resistance turned into the American Revolution, these men’s choices constantly pulled them between politics and family, with politics often winning. To succeed as Revolutionaries, they had to fail as patriarchs, leaving home for months or years at a time and neglecting hapless stepsons and pregnancy-plagued wives. Instead, men like George Washington created fictive families of “brother” soldiers and protégés during the war. In peacetime, they struggled to reconfigure authority in families that had become “more fluid and more flexible” during wartime upheavals (p. 92). The results of their renegotiations remain in the family letters and founding documents that Glover skillfully plumbs for vivid details.

Glover’s focus on the conservative nature of patriarchy allows her to explain why these men stopped short of realizing the full implications of Revolutionary ideals in law. Chagrined by their hypocrisy in opposing “slavery” from Britain and aware of men who manumitted their slaves, these five kept their own slaves in order to conserve the wealth of their white families; they also institutionalized their hypocrisy in law. Although during the Revolution these men frequently placed the national family above their kin responsibilities, afterward they refused to do so. As Glover notes, the greater emotionalism of the Virginia gentry after the Revolution did not extend to the enslaved members of their families or shake up familial power. Thomas Jefferson responded to news of the death of his longtime enslaved companion Jupiter by asking his daughter about “‘the bottling of my cyder’” (p. 184). A different kind of conservatism led these men to cling to ideas of “natural” gender hierarchies. Dependent on savvy wives and doting on intelligent daughters, these men refused to open universities or give political rights to free women.

Glover explains her focus on five Virginia elites by arguing that they, above all, produced the values, ideas, and documents of the era. Further research will test the regional specificity of these men’s understanding of masculinity and family and how they influenced political culture in tension with other regional masculinities. Rosemarie Zagarri’s recent article “The Family Factor: Congressmen, Turnover, and the Burden of Public Service in the Early American Republic” (Journal of the Early Republic, 33 [Summer 2013], 283–316) suggests that high levels of congressional turnover in the nineteenth century can be explained in part by northern and southern congressmen’s unwillingness to be parted from their families for long periods. The politics of family values, rooted in the Revolutionary moment, had implications for American governance we are just beginning to understand; Glover’s book provides an evocative template.