Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
Volume 109 / Number 3
ABSTRACT:
Historical Memory, Sectional Strife, and the American Mecca: Mount Vernon, 1783–1853
- Jean B. Lee, pp. 255–300
Between the Revolution and the Civil War, Mount Vernon uniquely functioned as a repository of historical
memory, site of emotional homage to George Washington, and the nation's most sacred place. After Washington resigned
command of the army in 1783, hundreds of people annually traveled to Mount Vernon in search of the American
Cincinnatus. Following his death and entombment there, the numbers swelled into the thousands and, by the 1850s,
to more than ten thousand people each year. Although Washington family heirs owned and lived at the estate until
1860, in telling ways the public had long since claimed putative posession. Furthermore, for several decades
before the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association was formed, and subsequently bought the site on behalf of
the American people, its permanent disposition was debated at length, sometimes contentiously, in
print and political arenas. Much of the contention was sectional in nature, for Mount Vernon stood on
southern soil, while Washington belonged to the nation. Yet, when sectional strife escalated dangerously
through the 1850s, passions and rhetoric changed, and the nation's most sacred place attained unique status
in the public imagination: if Mount Vernon could be preserved, the Union would be preserved.
This essay examines how and why people from all areas of the United States came to envision Mount Vernon as a
place so nationally significant--indeed, so sacred--that it had to be made permanently accessible to every citizen. Because
surviving evidence is both plentiful and richly evocative, the memories, rituals, and rhetoric elicited by Mount Vernon
likely comprise the best example, except for Washington himself, of how Americans shaped and took sustenance
from remembering the American Revolution.
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