Rhetoric, Ritual, and the Fashioning of Public Memory in Washington's America

Abstract

As America entered a new and unshaped political existence after the ratification of the constitution by eleven of the thirteen states, the notion of a country had to be publicly ratified in the collective imagination. Visual culture provided a means of establishing a shared public memory in the minds of an informed public. George Washington’s processions in such places as Gray’s Ferry and Trenton prior to his inauguration as president were marked by ceremonies that deliberately made use of symbol and rhetoric as a means of resolving the tension between individualism and collectivism through the respected persona of the president-elect. The record of these events is perhaps most visibly represented in the Columbian Magazine, the American journal with the greatest circulation of the day.