Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past (Sexuality Studies)
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The sexual revolutions of the 1920s and 1960s breathed new life into sexual and romantic details of the Founders' lives. Throughout the twentieth century, sexual desires increasingly became viewed as a psychologically healthy part of a man's life. As the writings of Sigmund Freud and his ilk have made their mark on American culture, sexual expression has become an important part of being "normal," and the Founders are no exception. In addition to being ever more sexually explicit, American memory also yokes nationalist concerns about domesticity to our image of the Founders, and writers push ever harder to depict the Founders as exceptionally happy in their marriages and homes, despite the lack of evidence to support such claims.
In the twenty-first century, we have seen best-selling books about the Founders and a renewed interest in the moral and virtuous exceptionalism of the Founding generation. A changing political and demographic world has increasingly made the Founders-slave-owning, elite white men-seem irrelevant, but Americans have used sex to relate to them and connect in a way that parades itself as universal. From museums to political stump speeches, the Founding Fathers are as publicly prominent now as they have ever been. American memory in this moment uses sex to connect eighteenth-century men with contemporary concerns. Jefferson, for example, has emerged as a multicultural hero, Washington is seen as a virile father, and Morris and Franklin are considered as delightfully modern in their approach to sexuality.
The book is organized into this introduction, six numbered chapters, and a conclusion. Chapters focus on specific political leaders of the American Revolution and Founding of the nation. Although the term "Founding Father" was coined in the early twentieth century, even in his own lifetime, Washington was called the "father" of the nation.24 Different generations have quibbled over who belongs in the pantheon, but few would dispute that the men featured in this book-Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, and Franklin-are some of the most significant of the group. Morris, although less well-known, operates in the book as a prime example of how the connections between sex and manliness in cultural memory of the Founders are not limited to the top tier. Indeed, many others will come to mind for readers as a good fit for this study-Benjamin Rush wrote about masturbation; James Madison, hardly considered an ideal model of masculinity, fathered no children with Dolley yet is remembered as the father of the Constitution; and Aaron Burr, who shot and killed Hamilton in that famous duel, was early vilified as a libertine and seducer, only to be recently recast as an early feminist. The list goes on.
Structuring the book along biographical lines rather than topically allows it to engage with the construction of public memory of these individuals as well as to consider the ways that biography itself participates in defining manliness and appropriate sexualities more generally. We can see how over time reputations shift, as the public emphasizes aspects of a Founder's biography that have been ignored and dismisses others that have loomed large in earlier tellings. We can see too how one generation's portrayal is no more or less "true" than another's and how each shapes the narrative to fit its cultural moment. Chapter 1 examines how Americans have remembered Washing ton's virility. As the "father of the nation," Washington invokes a masculine ideal and has done so for as long as Americans have been remembering him. That he fathered no children of his own puts particular pressure on cultural memory to shore up his image as a model of heroic manhood. Chapter 2 examines Jefferson's legacy, which today is most notably associated with his intimacy with Herrings. By examining how his portrayal morphs from that of a chaste widow to that of a man with passionate relationships, we can see just how important the sexualizing of his image has been for laying the groundwork for today's understanding of him as a man with two families, black and white. Chapter 3 examines how Americans have remembered Adams. In his own lifetime, he wore his moral code on his sleeve and did not hesitate to castigate his fellow Founders for their sexual immorality. The extraordinary number of surviving letters between him and his wife, Abigail, has led many to cast them as uniquely matched and "modern" in their loving bond. Today, Adams is also uncomfortably embraced as a prickly, cranky, prude-a man who embodies the Puritan core of American national morality. The avuncular elder statesman, Franklin, is the focus of Chapter 4. Franklin is today remembered as the nation's "foxy grandpa," and his sexual appetites have become celebrated in a way that puts the lie to a line between sex and political life.15 Chapter 5 focuses on Hamilton, the man on the tendollar bill, who is most famously remembered for being killed while in office as secretary of the Treasury in a duel with then-Vice President Burr. Less often recalled is Hamilton's extramarital affair and the very public pamphlet that he authored to fully explain the circumstances. Chapter 6 examines the least-known of the men in this book, Morris, who has recently been called the "rake who wrote the Constitution."26 A bachelor for most of his life, Morris is the only Founder for whom extraordinarily revealing sources came to light long after his death. His detailed diaries remark on sexual intimacies with married and unmarried women, providing a treasure trove for some biographers and an embarrassment for others.
The Founders lived in a world that fit neither the stereotyped image of a Puritanical past nor a more modern sexual culture that makes them "just like us." The problem with using sex to make the Founders relatable is that sex is not transhistorical: It can't be used in this manner any more than medical or racial understandings of the day can be used to connect readers from early America to today.
Remembering the intimate lives of the Founding Fathers with simple tropes, hyperbolic superficialities, and meaningless romanticized generalizations prevents us from meaningfully engaging with eighteenth-century sexual variance. Doing so also trivializes sex, perpetuating our own discomfort with the topic, a discomfort with a long history. Superficial glosses relegate the subject of sex to the status it held in previous generations-one of titillation, shame, and humor-all of which rely on a certain assertion of the transhistorical or human understanding of sexuality. But the ways in which Americans have ordered their sexual lives and their sexual identities have changed greatly over the centuries. Viewing the Founders' intimate lives and identities as somehow accessible to us through surface descriptions, such as "love at first sight" or "healthy sexual appetites," prevents us from taking historical sexual identities and sexual expressiveness seriously. By focusing in a sustained way on the manner in which Americans have asked and answered their own questions about sexual intimacy and the Founders of the nation, we can examine how Americans have both broached and obscured sexual realities and the cultural connections between sex and nationalized masculinity in the public memory of these men.
Collectively, these stories show how gendered sexuality has long figured in our national identity via the public memory of the political leaders of the American Revolution. By tracing these histories of public memory, we are confronted with how blurred the line has long been between sex and politics in memories of the Founders and how sex has helped tie an ever-diversifying American public to a handful of staid, elite, white, eighteenth-century men.
Figure 1.1 (above). Portrait of George Washington. (George Washington, the First Good President, 1846. Gilbert Charles Stuart. Oil on canvas, 1797.)
F ALL THE FOUNDERS, George Washington (Figure 1.1) is at once the most familiar and the most mythologized. As the unwavering general of the colonial army and the first president of the Republic, he cuts a commanding figure in American memory. When we see Washington in our mind's eye, we recall the iconography that depicts him as a gentleman, a hero, a paragon of personal and civic virtue; we see the very picture of American manhood at its best. The persistence of such toogood-to-be-true images says something about the ongoing project of national mythmaking and a common belief in the idea of an essential national character.
Take Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze's painting Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851), for example. Washington stands tall and firm near the prow of a crowded boat in rough waters; only the tousled American flag behind him s
tands taller than he in the fierce wind. He is resolute and powerful, leaving no doubt about who is in charge. Small wonder, then, that this painting has been used in so many accounts of the nation's difficult birth and Washing ton's emergence as its hero. We have seen it so many times that we sometimes fail to really see it, just as we lose sight of its mythic properties.
In 2006, a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of General Washington's early military campaign in the Revolution dazzled Americans with its heroic story. The attractive book cover, featuring a version of Leutze's famous nineteenth-century painting Washington Crossing the Delaware (Figure 1.2) painted by one of his students, Eastman Johnson, captures in vivid color the richness of the story.' The central figure of the general standing at the front of a small boat illustrates the valiant image of Washington that is described within the book's pages. The painting itself is a national treasure. Eastman's version of Leutze's masterpiece is an interesting choice; it alters a variety of aspects of the original, including a detail that most might not know-the omission of Washington's ornamental watch fob, which in the original painting is gold and red, dangling closely to his crotch (Figure 1.3). Presumably, for Eastman and for contemporary audiences, the object risks taking attention away from the man and the gravitas of the moment and instead bestows it on something trivial and irrelevant, even unseemly.
Eastman Johnson's copy is perhaps more in circulation today than Leutze's original. A 2011 special issue of Time magazine devoted to the life of George Washington contains a centerfold reproduction of the famous painting, again with the fob missing.' Georgia school administrators might have saved themselves a headache had they been able to ensure that the publisher of their textbooks went with the Johnson version instead of the original Leutze: In 1999, a Georgia school district instructed teacher's aides to erase the image of the fob by hand-painting twenty-three hundred fifth-grade textbooks. In another county, they tore the page from thousands of copies of the book. In 2002, several editions of an American history high school textbook that contains the image of Leutze's nineteenth-century masterpiece were also altered because administrators feared that it would draw attention to this private area of Washington's body or, worse, might actually appear to be his manhood, exposed.'
It might strike some readers as odd for me to begin a book on sex and the Founders with a chapter on George Washington. The depiction of Washington as a desexualized statesman is certainly familiar to Americans. He does not come to mind immediately when one tries to think of anecdotes related to sex and the Founding Fathers-certainly not in the same breath as Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson. Yet inquiry into the private life of Washington is centuries old, and the discussions highlight how sex has long been a component of American masculinity. Moreover, while the stories themselves are interesting, they also reveal to us the long-term interconnectedness of sexuality and national identity in public memory of the Founders.
Sex Scandals of the Eighteenth Century
Sexual interruptions to Washington's stately image did not originate in the twenty-first century's sex-saturated media-driven culture, in the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, in the Victorian era, or even in the early nineteenth century. In his own lifetime, Washington was no stranger to sex scandals.
Born in Virginia in 1732, Washington was a surveyor and planter before becoming a lieutenant colonel in the French and Indian War. After the war, he resumed his life as an elite planter and married the wealthiest widow in Virginia, Martha Custis. During the American Revolution, he served as general of the Continental Army. He became the first president of the United States in 1789 and served two terms before stepping down. His retirement was lauded as a pivotal moment in the establishment of American democracy, as history was rife with military leaders who assumed positions of political power and remained unwilling to relinquish their authority. Washington died in 1799 at the age of sixty-seven.'
During the American Revolution, Washington was subjected to a variety of sexually charged public attacks on his personal reputation. These were designed to attack not simply his character but the larger political project that he represented. British satirists, for example, lampooned Washington as a cross-dressing woman. The emasculating slur was then captured in an engraving that ran in a London newspaper. Captioned "Mrs. General Washington Bestowing Thirteen Stripes on Britania [sic]," it depicts Washington with his general's tricornered hat, his familiar profile, in a long dress while exclaiming, "Parents should not behave like Tyrants to their Children."5 The image was typical of the cross-dressing satire of London's late-eighteenthcentury print culture. Sexual satire in London and America was common, and leaders bore the brunt of it. Images were not as common as clever verses and prose, but Washington's stature no doubt warranted the extra expense for the printer.
During the American Revolution, other sex scandals surrounded Washington. Some writers alleged that Alexander Hamilton, who had become a close aide, was his illegitimate son. This claim has become one of the enduring myths of the era.' Another tale came from a pamphlet that was published in London, supposedly reprinting captured records of New York trials of Tories. Included in the testimony was a charge that Washington made secret visits to a Tory woman. Still another rumor named Washington as the father of a neighbor's son.7 Yet another, from a pro-British newspaper account, alleged that he had a relationship with a servant girl while in Philadelphia.' In the Revolutionary era, he was smeared with many unsupportable charges, as was the tactic of the day.
Figure 1.2. Cover of David Hackett Fischer's Washington's Crossing, featuring an Eastman Johnson version of Leutze's masterpiece, which eliminated the gold and red ornamental watch fob that dangles close to Washington's crotch in the original painting. (David Hackett Fischer, Washington's Crossing [New York: Oxford University Press, 2004].)
Figure 1.3. Detail from Washington Crossing the Delaware. (Emanuel Leutze. Oil on canvas, 1851. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Images for Academic Publishing. Copyright (D Metropolitan Museum of Art.)
As a member of the Freemasons, the fraternal order that was founded in London in the early eighteenth century, Washington may have enjoyed the esteem of the brotherhood but would almost certainly, too, have been the subject of occasional whispers by those who were deeply unsettled by the all-male secret society. In eighteenth-century newspapers, the Freemasons were mockingly associated with homoeroticism. In the mid-eighteenth century, for example, the Boston Evening Post ran an engraving and poem suggesting that Freemasons were overly interested in socializing, drinking, and dancing with one another. The satire went a step further by accusing the men of engaging in anal penetration with wooden spikes used in ship building.' Clearly, the desexualized Washington has long been accompanied by a twin-one sexualized in the public sphere.
Today, perhaps the most obvious sex "scandal" surrounding Washington is that he never fathered any of his only wife's children. This was certainly unusual in the eighteenth century. Consolidated families, stepchildren, the raising of other people's children and extended family, and multiple marriages due to the death of a spouse were all common in the eighteenth century. Not siring any children, however, was decidedly rare.10 In some colonies, one of the only grounds for divorce, in addition to adultery and abandonment, was sexual incapacity at the time of marriage. Some women in New England, for example, divorced their husbands for being impotent or sterile. Divorce was more difficult to obtain in Virginia, but as an elite woman, Martha certainly would have had options for separation if she so desired and could demonstrate that her husband was dysfunctional. She would almost certainly have been aware of the negative cultural view of men with sexual inability. The language of the household medical literature of the period deems infertile husbands as lesser men."
In his lifetime, however, Washington played the role of consummate general, head of household, and father to his wife's children and suffered no scathing commentary about his manhood with regards to having no children of his own.12 The issue was raised perhaps in closer
circles, going undocumented and now lost to us. The only surviving mention of the issue comes from a letter written by Washington to his nephew Augustine. In the letter, Washington reassures his nephew that he could develop lands that he would eventually inherit from Washington, because Washington would not be having any other heirs. "If Mrs. Washington should survive me," explains Washington, "there is a moral certainty of my dying without issue; & should I be the longest liver, the matter in my opinion, is hardly less certain; for while I retain the faculty of reasoning, I shall never marry a girl; & it is not probable that I should have children by a woman of an age suitable to my own, should I be disposed to enter into a second marriage."" As this chapter shows, Washington's positioning himself as capable of having children has been taken at face value by biographers concerned with developing an explanation for his having had no children. But we would do well to heed the reminder of early American scholars, such as Karen Lystra, who notes that understanding historical subjects "by reading their mail is neither as simple nor as straightforward as it sounds."14
Having no son meant that he had no heir to inherit his political dynasty. Even at the time, commentators remarked that this helped the Republican transfer of power and authority. As historian Gordon Wood points out, "So prevalent was the thinking that Washington resembled an elected monarch that some even expressed relief that he had no heirs."15 Such relief may not have been unwarranted. John Adams's oldest son, John Quincy Adams, became president. Fortunately, Washington, James Madison, James Monroe, and Jefferson did not have sons of their own, or, according to some, the Virginia dynasty may well have threatened the democracy in its infancy."