A tribute poem worked by the niece of Tobias Lear in strands of hair taken from the heads of George and Martha Washington, entwined around threads, and stitched onto a black satin backing. (Strawbery Banke Museum)

Relic or Remembrance?

Getting to the root of the early republic’s obsession with George Washington’s hair

A stunning artifact in the Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, reflects the coming together of word and flesh, faith and fetish in early American patriotic memory culture. Crafted by the niece of Tobias Lear, George Washington’s private secretary, not long after Washington’s 1799 death, it is a framed poem celebrating the heaven-bound destinies of arguably one of the nation’s first power couples. It is written in bodily fragmentum: in hair clipped from George and Martha Washington’s heads and stitched onto paper backing.

In fact, snippets of hair from the first president’s pate are held—often out of public view, like an embarrassing family secret—in more than 100 of the nation’s museums, research universities, archives, libraries, and historical societies. Mount Vernon alone retains more than 50 purported locks of Washington’s hair.

Even allowing that it was common in early America to keep hair locks of the loved and lost, and that some caches of “George Washington’s hair” surely must be fake, copious references to keepsake stashes in 18th- and 19th-century letters and diaries leave no doubt that what might be dubbed with only mild exaggeration a “cult” of George Washington’s hair flourished in the young United States. The years between 1790 and 1840 were also an era of “evangelical surge,” according to historian Mark Noll, when revivalist grassroots Protestantism reached new fervor. Faced with discrimination and prejudice, Catholics in the United States pointed out the seeming hypocrisy of American Protestant evangelicals, who, Cincinnati’s Catholic Telegraph complained in 1835, were eager to “receive with respect and guard with reverence” the “illustrious Washington’s hair,” but accused Catholics who honored saints’ relics of “idolatry.”

How indeed could the Presbyterian layman, banker, and author John Fanning Watson enthuse in his 1830s Annals of Philadelphia: “I have the hair of Washington” in his personal collection of patriotic relics? What mental gymnastics allowed Yale chemistry professor and Protestant evangelical Benjamin Silliman in 1824 to beg George Washington’s nephew Bushrod Washington to allow him to not only touch but be cocooned for several evocative moments in General Washington’s headquarters tent (the same exhibited today in Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution)? How could an evangelical congregation in Fredericksburg, Virginia, write to the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, Roman Catholic Charles Carroll, to request his moral and financial support for their plan to build a new church building with a shrine to Mary Ball Washington, the mother of George Washington, to hold her reinterred bones?

And why did evangelical ministers—Theodore Dehon, Samuel Worcester, Marcellus Post, Manasseh Cutler, and others—delightedly recount in their sermons and memoirs their pilgrimages to Mount Vernon? Post stood reverently at George Washington’s tomb—“the moral arch in the keystone of union and of empire,” while others snapped off twigs, or, as Reverend Cutler recollected doing himself, cut off entire “boughs … from the trees” surrounding Washington’s tomb to keep as “precious relics of our own and our country’s best friend.”

In 1840, when Wesleyan University student Charles Downing traded some furniture to Hamet Achmet—Revolutionary War veteran and self-attested former slave of George Washington—for six strands from a larger parcel of Washington’s hair that Achmet claimed had been entrusted to him. Downing recorded that the president of the university, Methodist evangelical theologian Willbur Fisk, became alarmed that Achmet was not keeping his deposit of Washington’s hair “securely preserved.” Fisk was already on record in an 1832 autobiographical travelogue denouncing Catholic adoration of religious relics as “pagan.” Yet, in that same book, Fisk framed patriotic and even Methodist church-history relics as essentially different: They were not mystically endowed religious relics, but rather material aids to memory, the very sort the new science of memory prescribed.

In the 1820s and ’30s, not only Wilbur Fisk, but American Protestants in general—without abandoning their opposition to the veneration of religious relics—rationalized their own affinity for patriotic items in terms of a secular and scientific take on the nature of memory. It was a view that demanded physical props to support memory. And no matter how enthusiastically some people might respond to them, they nevertheless remained artifacts.

Like other relics-turned-artifacts evoking the nation’s founding, extant locks of George Washington’s hair were increasingly analyzed scientifically, rather than venerated religiously. These methods were supposedly more objective, yet in reality, often were not. In the late 1840s, Peter Ariel Browne of Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences tested the tensile strength of Washington’s hair, comparing it to hair from people of other races in an effort to support the ethnographic biases of the time.

Whether regarded as relics or artifacts in the early republic, surviving samples of George Washington’s mane illustrate the general applicability of fellow founder Thomas Jefferson’s 1825 aphorism, “Politics, as well as Religion, has it’s [sic] superstitions.”