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

Lorri Glover has revised our view of some of the founding fathers by placing them firmly in their nonpolitical role as domestic, plantation patriarchs. She focuses specifically on powerful Virginians: George Mason, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington. These men, she argues, were patriarchs of often large and complicated families that included biological children, step-relations, assorted relatives, unrelated protégés, and, importantly, slaves. According to Glover, they all used their view of “family” as a template for their involvement in the American Revolution and the nation’s founding. For example, as patriarchs, they participated in public life, including politics, as an extension of their familial obligations. But being fathers shaped not only the level of their participation but also their thinking about the political change that marked the era. As the Revolution demanded more of their energies, public-minded patriarchs had to make a choice between their emerging country and their domestic responsibilities. Unlike many studies of the founding fathers, Glover places these men firmly within the private sphere and claims that the domestic world influenced their behavior on the public stage. Fatherhood, therefore, is at the heart of this study and the center of the founders’ decision making.

Key to Glover’s analysis is the burden of public service as the Revolution approached. Ironically, as these men used familial rhetoric to make sense of their expanded political roles they found themselves being pulled away from their homes and their children. Washington, married but childless, made a choice to privilege this political life. Mason, a single father with many young children, pulled back in order to stay at home with his family. Glover sees the importance of family patterns in the constitutional debates as well. The founders’ “political views emerged out of their very different experiences—experiences shaped by the weight or absence of family responsibilities” (198). For example, those with fewer familial obligations could focus more on the national family rather than on the more parochial interests of Virginia.

Of course others have examined the domestic lives of these men. Classic studies such as Jan Lewis’s The Pursuit of Happiness and Daniel Blake Smith’s Inside the Great House made the first efforts to examine them from the inside out. Glover has built on this work and on recent scholarship concerning manhood, such as Thomas A. Foster’s Sex and the Founding Fathers. Likewise, she includes important new work on the Jefferson controversy, such as Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello.¹ What is new here is how Glover ties these studies together by emphasizing the complexity of the founders’ family life, gender roles, and relationship to slavery and the part that these complexities played on the public stage.

These men were slave masters as well as fathers. Glover’s perspective on this issue emerges from what she labels the “sounds of silence” (185) in the surviving records. She argues that the men she studies chose to maintain slavery, despite the obvious contradictions, because of their overriding need to provide for their households. In their world, a successful patriarch provided for his family by depending on slave labor. The founders understood the conflict between their new rhetoric of liberty and freedom from oppression and the reality of slaveholding, yet they made a decision, collectively, to leave this contradiction for future generations to tackle. In the case of slavery, they all privileged the needs of their families over the needs of their nation, so none of them freed their slaves during their lifetimes. Thus, Glover provides us with a new way to untangle the issue of the founders as slaveholders.

She likewise finesses the change other historians have outlined in late eighteenth-century family life among propertied whites by dovetailing older authoritarian imperatives with new directives. She argues that earlier familial ideas that had simply emphasized patriarchal power gave way to...