Hello all!  Here's a second project I am working on, a section of the introduction to an edited collection of the Washington eulogies, selections from the 230 plus sermons, eulogies, discourses, and speeches delivered between December and February 1799-1800. 

2.  Religion, Virtue and the American Enlightenments:  Converging Anxieties after Independence.

(i). Crisis and virtue.  There was a growing concern about virtue among the newly independent American confederation of states.  In July, 1776, Jefferson had asked his friend John Page, anxiously, “We know the Race is not to the swift nor the Battle to the Strong. Do you not think an angel rides in the Whirlwind and directs the Storm?”  (Bobrick)  While in Paris 1784-89 he seemed to forgive the looming violence of the French Revolution. In a letter to a friend, he wrote,  “A healthy nation needs to shed a little blood every now and then.” (find this quote). But in the former colonies, anxiety prevailed about everything from government form to public virtue, religion and education. Who would be responsible for sustaining virtue, and restraining the new freedoms that had been won so hard and at so great a cost?  Ratifying conventions for the individual state constitutions reflected much concern about preserving the virtue of the American people that had been demonstrated in its finest hour during the war for Independence and that now must be sustained in a new era  whose government, moral fabric, and religion, had yet to be defined.[1]  Inheritors of both Biblical and Classical traditions concerning virtue and morality, many of the founders spliced together sources, as they had before independence, to define their identity and their unique virtues. 

            Patrick Henry was most exercised about the decline in public virtue as Virginia composed its first Constitution.  His defense of public morality and virtue is among the most actively religious and specifically Christian, while Jefferson and Madison continued to hammer away at some form of civic virtue that could be instilled without the trappings of any denominational or established religion.  Jefferson most feared the clergy’s role in manipulating the vulnerable; like his mentor John Witherspoon, Madison feared a theocracy of any kind, even if it was elective and multidenominational as in Henry’s model.    At the center of the debates were the full spectrum of senses that “virtue” and “morality” had acquired across the colonies during their long struggle for their freedoms, enshrined in the maxim that only a virtuous people can be free.  The last decades of Washington’s life and his death were surrounded by anxieties concerning the new nation, the virtue of the people, and the disputes concerning republicanism that threatened to bring the new nation to dissolution and chaos.

Washington’s Farewell Address, widely circulated and reprinted in the decade after its publication, articulated the virtues of the new nation in specifically moral and religious terms, and explained  urgently why they must be sustained.  Regionalism, factionalism, and a decline in religion had all begun to erode the virtuous patriotism which had bought America its independence.  “I shall carry with me to my grave the constancy of your support as a strong incitement to unceasing vows that heaven may continue to you the choicest tokens of its beneficence; that your union and brotherly affection may be perpetual; that the free Constitution, which is the work of your hands, may be sacredly maintained; that its administration in every department may be stamped with wisdom and virtue; that, in fine, the happiness of the people of these States, under the auspices of liberty, may be made complete by so careful a preservation and so prudent a use of this blessing.”  Adopting the role of presiding minister at a wedding ceremony, Washington enjoins and blesses the union, a union already threatened by regional and political factionalism.  “Interwoven as is the love of liberty with every ligament of your hearts, no recommendation of mine is necessary to to fortify or confirm the attachment.”  But encourage and exhort he does, proclaiming the civic virtues necessary to “sacredly maintain” the Constitution and the union which it defines and protects.  “It is of infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness.”   Never underestimate the dangers of a love of power, he warns.  Protecting the checks and balances defined in the Constitution is like the security religion provides, and only religion can provide, in checking the excesses of our baser instincts.  “Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice.  Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles.  Virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.”  In these and other formulations Washington sets out the terms in which he will be defined and remembered, but even more, he provides a canon of virtues that are explicitly tied to religion. 

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[1] Francois Furstenberg, In the Name of the Father. Washington’s Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation. New York: Penguin, 2006. Furstenburg examines two moments of crisis, just after Independence, and during and after the Constitution ratifying conventions, through a detailed analysis of the popular press and pamphlet culture which disseminated the debates and the new “nationalism that promoted consent to the constituted political authorities and a sense of mutual political obligation” (21).  His chapter on the Washington eulogies, “The Apotheosis of George Washington,” is a valuable study of the mass media and readerships for “civic texts” that disseminated a “civic religion” centered in linking nationalism with religion, and, in response to Washington’s death, encouragement of the attitudes of resignation, gratitude, and consent (also see Pauline Maier, American Scripture).   The chapter does not provide any detailed analysis of individual sermons or eulogies.

...Regarding 18th C women rhetorical figures, public speakers, in Britain and America, recent collections on Quaker women (Rebecca Larson, Daughters of Light) and Baptist women (Curtis Freeman,Prophetesses and Preachers: Baptists and Prophetesses in 18th C England (2011);  are fascinating studies of the over 300 women in each group who circulated in Britain in America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were well regarded and respected.  One, Rachel Wilson, a Quaker, was invited to speak at the College of New Jersey (Princeton) by the student body in 1768!