The Traumatic Colonel: The Founding Fathers, Slavery, and the Phantasmatic Aaron Burr

1 The Semiotics of the Founders

15 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 LightHorse 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 16 The Semiotics of the Founders 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...