By the 1820s, artists were creating a visual hagiography of the founders. John Trumbull’s paintings of the signing of the Declaration of Independence (at the top of this post) and George Washington resigning his commission (below) were both placed in the rotunda of the Capitol during that decade. Trumbull used the techniques he had learned as a painter of scenes from the Bible to make two scenes with very little visual interest (a bunch of guys signing a document and a man quitting his job) more compelling. Trumbull tried to emphasize the “silence and solemnity of the scene” around the signing of the Declaration, casting central figures like Jefferson, Adams, and Washington in a heroic light.
But Americans in the early 19th century didn’t all revere the founders. Jacksonian politics of the “common man” dismissed aristocrats like Washington and Jefferson, and the messy compromises they’d made were in danger of falling apart as the country expanded and the struggle over slavery became fiercer.
As the nation tumbled toward civil war, leaders who wanted to keep the union intact tried once again to turn toward the founders as a unifying force. Abraham Lincoln in his 1860 Cooper Union speech said that
It is surely safe to assume that the thirty-nine framers of the original Constitution, and the seventy-six members of the Congress which framed the amendments thereto, taken together, do certainly include those who may be fairly called “our fathers who framed the Government under which we live.”
And in his most famous speech, the Gettysburg Address, he again venerated the founding generation:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
The memory of the founders wasn’t enough to prevent civil war, but American leaders turned back toward them after the conflict as part of a civil religion that could heal the nation’s divisions.
The 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 1876 provided a perfect opportunity for a divided nation to unify itself with some mythmaking. George Washington, especially, became a figure of pop-culture adulation, as people bought up paintings, badges, medallions, and statues in his likeness. The 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia combined the wonders of the Second Industrial Revolution with a commemoration of the founders in the city where they had signed the Declaration of Independence.