Defining the Family of Washington: Meaning, Blood, and Power in the New American Nation

This article examines the many meanings of family that George Washington deployed throughout his life, with particular attention to his claim to having "no family." Drawing on kinship theory, historiography, and Washington's writings, it situates his varied understandings of family in the context of Anglo-American notions of inheritance law, lineage, and blood. Washington's and his fellow Americans' definitions of family were also intimately tied to the political ideals of a new republic hoping to sever family from government power. Careful analysis of the family as an ever-changing and situational process in Washington's life provides a model for an alternative way of approaching family history.