In recent years, the more "realistic" depiction of their marriage as troubled but strong continues to grow. Appealing to a culture of marriage advice that emphasizes the "hard work" of modern, more equitable partnerships, the Adamses emerge as a secondary type of ideal American marriage, the one of "real" life. In 2002, journalist Richard Brookhiser also tempers the view of Abigail and John as in love. "Theirs was a marriage of true mindssmart, clever, censorious, and passionate," he concedes. But Brookhiser does not romanticize their time apart, noting that "Abigail found herself less and less remembered."" In a clear break from a romantic view of their marriage, another author notes the separation and difficulties of the marriage and does not frame it as picture perfect. At one point, he suggests that if John had not been absent, they would have "stopped talking to each other"-"the only thing worse than the letters she didn't get were the few that reached her." Moreover, he notes that the "flirtatious and affectionate correspondence" between Abigail and Lovell met her "emotional needs" in a way that John could not due to his absence and his inability to write in such a manner.71
But despite the efforts of some recent biographers to depict their prolonged and painful separations more realistically, for the most part the romanticized characterization remains cemented in public memory. Whatever their difficulties, the view of John and Abigail as not simply romantic but uniquely romantic has captured the imagination of biographers and the American public. This presumption plays on the contemporary view of early American sexuality as devoid of passion and thus marriages as stuffy and Puritanical.
Abigail's pining itself is romanticized in popular depictions of the couple. Indeed, the statues erected in 2001 in Adams's birth place, Quincy, Massachusetts, place John across the street from Abigail and their son, with Abigail looking lovingly across the street at him.
The discussion of the rockiness of their marriage, therefore, has done little to tarnish Adams's reputation as a moral man (virtually no writers speculate that either may have had an affair) and has had no effect on the romance industry that has sprung up around them. In recent years, the relationship of John and Abigail has been cast as one of the "great love stories" of the American Revolution, inspiring popular historians to refer to them as the "Romeo and Juliet of the American Revolution.."72 Such titles as 200l's John and Abigail Adams: An American Love Story highlight the relationship and imply that it was somehow unusual. In 2003, Diggins's biography depicts the couple as extraordinary. Indeed, he argues, "The forty-five-year marriage between John and Abigail Adams constitutes one of the great romances in the history of the American presidency." Calling it a "rapture of fused souls," his book describes their marriage as one that was able to weather the long absences, in part because of their true love for one another (illustrated by passages from letters that express fondness rather than bitterness at absence). This interpretation is enhanced by Abigail's dedication and the fact that she "accepted the conventional code of female behavior," which led her to be devoted to managing home and farm. Her letters, it assures readers, are "whimsical rather than whining."13
The extraordinarily large number of their letters that survives todayin contrast to the lost or destroyed correspondence of many famous early American couples-has prompted historian Page Smith to call it "one of the greatest epistolary dialogues between husband and wife in all history."74 In many ways the surviving database is more unusual than the relationship that it captures. When viewed from a historian's perspective, "the historical record of their family life is at best sketchy," yet most Americans use the letters exchanged during their separations to describe their relationship when together. Indeed, Americans "imagine" the couple "walking hand in hand" with the "children skipping alongside them," at one "blissful reunion."75 Casting their relationship as a great love, the interactive website for the pop ular 2005 series American Experience presents five letters to attest to this love.76 These include, rather unremarkably, (1) a courtship letter in which John asks for kisses, (2) a letter from Abigail in which she attests to missing him greatly in his absence,77 (3) a letter from John to Abigail during her pregnancy78 (4) a letter from Abigail expressing her loneliness,79 and (5) a letter from John asking Abigail to come to New York as soon as possible.80 Exaggeration is typical of popular interpretations of their relationship, but the substance of their letters is not very different from that of correspondences between other eighteenth-century couples, whether courting or long married. We know, for instance, that such letters were exchanged between Hamilton and his wife as well as between other Founders and their lovers and wives. Romantic letters about each other portray the members of these couples as in love and romantic-similar to the Adamses.81
The depiction of a "singularly happy union" is noted as early as 1884 and is in full swing today. A recent review of the 2007 edition of John and Abigail letters, My Dearest Friend, captures this romantic emphasis. In a collection of letters notable for including not only their courtship and war years but also his presidency and retirement, the reviewer nonetheless chooses to focus the beginning of the review on what has become familiar to many, the romantic bond of husband and wife: "He was her `Lysander,' after the Spartan hero," the review begins. "She was his `Diana,' after the Roman goddess of the moon. She called him `My Dearest Friend.' He called her `Miss Adorable' and his `Heroine,' who sustained "with so much Fortitude, the Shocks and Terrors of the Times." "They were" the reviewer writes, "uncommonly well-matched partners who shared a passionate dedication to the Revolutionary cause, as well as a love of books and history, a playful sense of humor, a voluble literary gift and deep and abiding affection for each other." The blog promoting the book rhetorically asks, "The Romance of the 18th Century?" (italics mine).82
Currently in stage plays and popular biographies and websites, the depiction of John and Abigail as the "Romeo and Juliet" of the American Revolution endures.8i For Adams, this portrayal has meant being heralded as the uniquely ideal husband-half of a rare and extraordinary couple. Indeed, they have been called "America's greatest love story."84 Best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Joseph Ellis declares them the "premiere husband-andwife team in all American history." This was a couple who, while Adams was in Europe, "learned to love each other at an even deeper level than before and locked that love in place, and nothing they experienced for the rest of their lives ever threatened their mutual trust."85
Adams's self-congratulating prudery was part of his masculine identity as much as Washington's virile masculinity. This reminds us of the multiple models of sexual masculinity in eighteenth-century America and the variety of ways that sex could inform manliness in the Founding era. Tracing the stories that Americans have told and retold about Adams-stories that emphasize his sexual morality, his romantic marriage, and his early heartbreak-lays bare a long history of cultural importance, with significant bearing on assessments of character and personhood that Americans have attached to the sexual and romantic desires and behaviors of the Founders.
Figure 4.1 (above). Portrait of Franklin. (Portrait of Benjamin Franklin. Engraving by H. B. Hall, 1868. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., LC-USZ62-25564.)
ENJAMIN FRANKLIN (Figure 4.1) is the Founder who has come to be most associated with Americanness. He has been the subject of biographies bearing such titles as Benjamin Franklin: An American Life and The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin. Even scholars wrestling with the constructedness of this image must contend with the notion that he is viewed as genuinely American and has been for more than a century. Thus, historian Gordon S.Wood, who argues that Franklin was in many ways our most European Founding Father, entitled his biography The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin.' Franklin, one recent author argues, had great "influence on the American character," including "virtues and traits that he, more than anyone, helped to imprint onto our national fabric."2
The notion of Franklin as not just American but a modern American is fueled in part by the embrace of his allegedly li
beral approach to sexuality. In the words of one of his recent biographers, journalist and writer Walter Isaacson, "Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us.... [T]hat ambitious urban entrepreneur, seems made of flesh rather than of marble, addressable by nickname, and he turns to us from history's stage with eyes that twinkle from behind those newfangled spectacles. He speaks to us, through his letters and hoaxes and autobiography, not with orotund rhetoric but with a chattiness and clever irony that is very contemporary, sometimes unnervingly so. We see his reflection in our own time."3 Today's depiction of him as essentially one of us, a modern, not one of them, a colonial, draws partly on how he approached his most intimate relationships.
Even though Thomas Fleming describes him as a man with an "ungovernable sex drive" and as a "septuagenarian" "with sexual appetites of gargantuan proportions," today Franklin is virtually never the womanizer, rake, seducer, or sexual harasser.' Instead, public memory recalls him as a harmless, elderly, "ladies' man," "flirtatious," and humorous. There is no one answer as to why his sexuality appears benign in contemporary public memory. Some aspects of his behavior speak in his favor. He did not abandon the son he fathered before his marriage but instead took him in and raised him. Biographies universally characterize his marriage as monogamous, and he never had a reputation for adultery a la Alexander Hamilton. His reputation for being a ladies' man emerged largely from Parisian salon culture and not from the nineteenth-century fears of urban seduction and abandonment of young women. Biographers routinely emphasize that women fell for him, conveying the sense of him as charming rather than predatory. Finally, it matters most that Franklin was the old man of the Revolution, in his seventies when the other Founders were in their twenties and thirties. In his most commonly circulated images, he is frozen in time at a point in his life past his prime-balding, overweight, older, his sexuality nonthreatening and endearing. He is more like Santa Claus than a seducer.
There is still great public interest in his intimate life. As biographer Paul Zall puts it, "If Washington was the father of his countrymen, Franklin was their foxy grandpa."' It has become something of a national inside joke, an open secret enjoyed. Franklin historian Claude-Anne Lopez notes that as she gave lectures across the country, she was "asked repeatedly how many affairs Franklin had" and "how many illegitimate children."6 Similarly, the first executive director for the Benjamin Franklin National Memorial in Philadelphia, at the turn of the twenty-first century, notes that the "most commonly asked question by letter or phone and in conversations with thousands of people... had something to do with Franklin and women. Have you ever figured out who was the mother of Franklin's illegitimate son, William? How many illegitimate children did he have? How could he have sex with all of those women in France when he was already seventy years old at the time he arrived there?" 7
As this chapter shows, Franklin's general eighteenth-century openness about the body and sexuality for centuries has divided many Americans, making them either uncomfortable with his views or thrilled by his apparent modernity. For some, Franklin's sexually explicit writings have served to bolster the image of Franklin as modern, forward-thinking, and uniquely American. Yet for others, the ambiguity of his personal writings, the depiction of him as aged and not youthful, and the nature of his transgressions have allowed for a willful disengagement with the sordid specifics of his personal life.
In His Lifetime
Franklin is the best-known Founder never to have served as president. He was born in 1706 in Boston and died in Philadelphia in 1790. He began his career as a writer and publisher, and in his own lifetime, he became oftquoted for his aphorisms, which still populate the lexicon today. But he eventually garnered even greater fame as an inventor and American statesman. As Americans for generations have learned, among his most famous inventions are the lightening rod, bifocals, and the Franklin stove. During the American Revolution, as a diplomat, he secured the vitally important support of the French, which ultimately enabled American victory in the War for Independence.
It has never been a secret that Franklin transgressed norms of masculine sexuality in a host of ways, including fathering a child out of wedlock, writing ribald prose, and, according to many, in his widowhood having sexual relationships with women. And as we have seen in previous chapters, such details of intimate life have long figured in the public assessment of political figures. His public demonstration of his ease with amorousness made him the topic of talk in his lifetime and controversial in memory.
Franklin contributed to the genre of ribald essays that proliferated in early American print culture. Franklin's essay "Advice on the Choice of a Mistress," for example, published in Philadelphia in 1745, typifies his titillating oeuvre. Written as an epistle to a friend, the essay on the surface argues that young men should marry. But if they do not, he quips, they should choose old women over young women as lovers. In typical Franklin fashion, he lists eight points explaining why. Beyond the first two points, which extol older women as more "knowledgeable" and more "amiable" than younger women, his advice becomes racier. Points three and four note that older women risk no "hazard of children" and are better at keeping an affair secret, thereby protecting a man's reputation. Point five playfully anticipates the reader's association of youth with sexual pleasure, asserting provocatively that "regarding only what is below the girdle, it is impossible of two women to know an old from a young one." Moreover, "as in the dark all cats are gray, the pleasure of corporal enjoyment with an old woman is at least equal, and frequently superior, every knack being by practice capable of improvement." The sixth point notes that one risked the "ruin" of a "virgin" with young women. Number seven, the "compunction is less." Number eight, the punch line, as it were, states that old women make preferable lovers because "they are so grateful!" "Choice of a Mistress" and similar writings exhibit Franklin's interest as a printer in capitalizing on the public's appetite for sexually charged material. Franklin's early writing, "Speech of Polly Baker," a satire written in the voice of a young woman on trial for having her fifth child out of wedlock, was written earlier but published in American newspapers in 1747; it too has been used to demonstrate his humor and his open sexuality. Other essays, such as "Hooped Petticoats and the Folly of Fashion," glibly cover topics that would later distress Victorians more than they did Franklin's colonial readership.'
Unlike Hamilton, who publicly confessed to his adultery, Franklin's public declarations do not necessarily reflect on his comportment, nor do they always carry an explicitly immoral message by standards of the day. As satire, their multiple meanings and interpretations leave his legacy open to a variety of viewpoints regarding sexual morality. Indeed, most of his writing in this vein, although it significantly gives voice to radical sexual erotics, more often than not also makes the point of monogamy, marriage, and moderation so typical of the dominant norms of the day. Thus, some Americans could read the "Speech of Polly Baker," for example, as a critique of Puritanical laws and a celebration of extramarital sexual expression, but others could see it as poking fun at such immoralities.
His most famous writings reveal that eighteenth-century readers embraced Franklin in part because at the surface (and perhaps at the core as well), his message emphasizes mainstream early American sexual culturesmarriage, monogamy, and moderation. In his Autobiography, for example, Franklin notes that not marrying his lifetime companion, Deborah Read, was one of his life's "great errata." When we consider Franklin's writings in conjunction with his life collectively, they suggest a much more normative sexuality than they seem to suggest individually. Modern readers would be wrong to assume that they and Franklin alone can recognize the more radical, sexual meaning of his writing. Early Americans would also have simultaneously appreciated the humor and frankness while embracing marriage. Franklin published numerous tracts that demonize the bachelor and draw attention to the deviant sexuality of the single life. Franklin singles out bachelors in not only his writings but also his will. Regarding
funds that he leaves to the city of Boston, he specifically denies financial benefit for them.
As the writer of such pieces and a public figure, Franklin could not escape the scrutiny of his sexual conduct. His political opponents first used allegations of sexual transgressions in an attempt to discredit him in local contests. Historian Wood describes the scandals that were part of the Pennsylvania elections in October 1764: "Franklin was accused of a host of sins," including "lechery" and "abandoning the mother of his bastard son."9 In the 1764 election for Pennsylvania Assembly, Franklin's personal integrity was skewered in the press. Pamphlets charge him with, among other things, fathering his son William by a "kitchen wench." Another exclaims, "Franklin, though plagued with fumbling age, Needs nothing to excite him, But is too ready to engage, When younger arms invite him.""
Even after that election, given Franklin's fame, the stories continued in America and abroad. In the 1770s, London newspapers carried scurrilous stories about Franklin, most speculating on the identity of his son's mother. The June 1, 1779, London Morning Post, for example, alleges that William's mother was an "oyster wench" and accuses Franklin of abandoning her to "die of disease and hunger in the streets."" At the height of the Revolution, Franklin's sexual reputation not only could impugn his manhood but could also be enlisted to denigrate American national identity.
Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past (Sexuality Studies) Page 13
