Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History, and Nation-Making from Independence to the Civil War

“More than Ordinary Patriotism”: Living History in the Memory Work of George Washington Parke Custis

127 “MoreThanordinaryPatriotism” Living History in the Memory Work of George Washington Parke Custis = seth C. Bruggeman Americans love revival. Renaissance fairs, battle reenactments, and time-traveling television shows have all become enduring fixtures in the cultural landscape. At historic sites and museums where playacting passes for pedagogy, the phrase “living history” distinguishes studied reenactment from amateur histrionics. Plimoth Plantation, Conner’s Prairie, and Greenfield Village are just a few examples of living-history museums where education and research commingle with high-order simulation. Virginia’s Colonial Williamsburg is probably the most famous, but it too is only one of many whose intellectual roots historians usually associate with either the historic-house museum movement born at Mount Vernon during the 1850s or Artur Hazelius’s open-air Skansen museum, which set out during the 1890s to protect Nordic folkways from the onslaught of industrial modernity. In both instances, we are told, a combination of politics and nostalgia motivated men and women to dress like their ancestors and play the part for the sake of posterity. Although this kind of fanciful remembering has earned its share of detractors, living history still ranks 128 SETH C. BRUGGEMAN among the most popular ways to learn about history in the United States today.1 That it does should not surprise us. Living history’s theatrical immediacy , its claims to authenticity, and the patriotism it implies through shared experience speak loudly to Americans who have grown distrustful of discursive pasts conjured in stuffy classrooms and tired textbooks.2 They want a real story about the past, and they want it to captivate them. It makes perfect sense that their late nineteenth-century counterparts turned to memory in the midst of whirlwind technological, political, and social change. It makes such perfect sense, in fact, that historians may have overlooked an even earlier precedent for the present preoccupation with the performance of public memory. During the nation’s first two decades, before Americans had even decidedhowtoremembertheRevolutionanditsheroes,GeorgeWashington Parke Custis staged the kind of mnemonic spectacles that keep places like Colonial Williamsburg in business today. Custis was George Washington’s adopted grandson, the first of the nation’s First Children. As an adult he built the iconic white house that now looms over Arlington National Cemetery. There Custis publicly reenacted his memories of Washington in performances so grand that one observer considered them evidence of “more than just ordinary patriotism.”3 Revisiting Custis’s memory work gives us a new benchmark by which to measure the significance of mimesis in the American historical imagination. It shows us that performative pasts have ensured Washington’s place at the forefront of American national memory since nearly the beginning. We would be wrong, though, to mistake Custis’s patriotism for just that. Sifting through what little we know about his life and work suggests that living history, no matter how powerful its promise of impartiality, has always been complicit in the politics of nation making. Indeed, if Custis’s patriotism was more than ordinary, what made it so was the mingling of personal and political motives underlying his hope that Americans would always remember Washington at the center of the Revolution. Bringing those motives into view sheds light on the earliest stirrings of Revolutionary memory, while reminding us that, even today, authenticity is not always what it seems. 129 “More than Ordinary Patriotism” AManBorntoRemember With very few exceptions, historians have either overlooked Custis or treated him incidentally in connection with his more famous relatives. One history of Arlington National Cemetery, for instance, devotes far fewer pages to Custis than to his eminently more famous son-in-law, Robert E. Lee.4 Custis’s obscurity in the historical record is consistent with his own biography, which itself is a study in mnemonic rupture. From the beginning Custis struggled with familial continuity, albeit amid the staggering fortunes of Virginia’s plantocracy. His father died only months after Custis ’s birth in 1781, leaving behind a wife, Eleanor Calvert, and Custis’s three older sisters. John Parke Custis, who was Martha Washington’s son by her first marriage, had succumbed to “camp fever” (probably typhus) shortly after the victory at Yorktown, where he served as a civilian aide-de-camp to General Washington. Martha, who had lost both of her children and had none with George, persuaded her daughter-in-law that the Washingtons should raise Custis and his sister, Eleanor, as their...