The Property of the Nation

After living through the presidency of a real estate developer allegedly worth more than a billion dollars, readers will be eager to learn how George Washington was transformed from a wealthy, aristocratic planter into a “man of the people” in the half century after his 1799 death (p. 9). Matthew R. Costello's The Property of the Nation is an engaging guide to that process. Deeply researched and clearly written, the book argues that visitors to Washington's tomb helped create the belief that the first president's memory belonged to “all Americans” by their very insistence that they had the right to make pilgrimages to Mount Vernon (p. 56). Costello thus contributes to the history of tourism by tracing the “democratization” of Washington's memory in the first half of the nineteenth century (p. 8). Although Costello never defines democratization, he uses the term to mean that Americans increasingly created and consumed narratives in which the first president was a “self-made man” rather than a rich slave owner (p. 214

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