Visualizing Morris has also proved to be problematic for biographers. Reinforcing the able-bodied image, several works mention that Morris stood in as a body double for Washington as Jean-Antoine Houdon created his famous sculpture of the general. One includes an image of the completed Washington sculpture, so we have an image of Washington, perhaps the most able-bodied of Founding Fathers, appearing in a biography on Morris-the statue standing in for Morris's body in effect and the caption reading that Morris "posed for the body."67
The images of Morris most often used in his biographies are portraits of only his face. Brookhiser's work sensationally features an image of Morris seated in a chair, his wooden leg in full view (Figure 6.3). The image used was created in 1861 by Alonzo Chappel. Notably, Chappel chose to expand on the Ezra Ames portrait of Morris by adding a peg-leg to draw attention to his distinctiveness. Being featured on the cover of an account that focuses on Morris sexual life and fashions him as the "rake who wrote the constitution" yokes together his sexuality and disability. The image evokes something of a "pirate" model of masculinity. His peg-leg conjures up that deviant counternorm model of manhood in a way that celebrates the masculine risk-taking and sexual conquests that are vividly highlighted in the book.
Popular resources today continue this view of Morris's disability as a hurdle he cleared and link it to his sexual life. The Constitution Center's online biographical sketch euphemistically gestures to his extensive romantic history: "As a young man, Morris lost his leg in a freak carriage accident, but this did not appear to diminish his very active engagement with women. ... Despite his wooden leg, Morris served in the militia as well."68 Here the sketch fashions his manly attributes of sexual and military prowess.
The ever-changing Wikipedia has at various times offered versions on a similar theme. For example, one rendition, under "personal life and legacy" once mentioned only his marriage and the following: "Unhampered by his wooden leg, he led a lively life with both married and unmarried women."69 Yet we know that his mobility and success in his own time suggest less restriction and stigma than would emerge in the twentieth century in both Europe and America. Indeed, it would be just as plausible to state that because of his disability he enjoyed romantic relations with a variety of women as it would be to state that in spite of his disability he did so-as most accounts anachronistically portray it. Wikipedia later changed it to this: "Morris's public account for the loss of his leg was that it happened in a carriage accident, but there is evidence that this was a story to cover for a dalliance with a woman, during which he jumped from a window to escape a jealous husband. Morris was well-known throughout much of his life for having many affairs, with both married and unmarried women, and recorded many of these in his diary. 1171
Figure 6.3. Portrait of Morris. Relying on a portrait by Ezra Ames, Alonzo Chappel added a peg-leg to his 1861 version. The portrait, used on the cover of an account that fashions Morris as the "rake who wrote the Constitution," links his sexuality and his disability. (Cover of Richard Brookhiser, Gentleman Revolutionary: Gouverneur Morris, the Rake Who Wrote the Constitution [New York: Free Press, 2003].)
That Morris focused largely on one main lover in Paris and wrote extensively about mutual sexual pleasure puts the lie to the image of him as a rake. Yet the image of him as a rake celebrates for today's readers a masculine personal life that is designed to connect with contemporary audiences who may otherwise pull away from the cane-wielding aristocratic Founding Father.
When Morris wrote the preamble to the U.S.Constitution, he cemented his position in American history. Generations of Americans who learned about Morris saw a man who for most of his life remained a bachelor and was active in social circles, diplomacy, and business. For more than a century, if one were to approach Morris as a model of American manhood-one that links national masculinity to historical models of manliness-only the chaste bachelor would be in view.
Relatively few nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors have written about Morris, but for those few who have, his life first has to be recast to fit the early American model of the heterosocial yet chaste bachelor. Morris's transformation from chaste bachelor to the "rake who wrote the Constitution" highlights the enduring problem of publicly remembering and celebrating a sexually active, disabled, bachelor Founding Father.
HE POLITICAL LEADERS of the American Revolution and the early United States were men who lived in a world now lost to us. Seeking to make moral, masculine examples of those men, Americans have constructed various interpretations of their private lives to stand alongside their celebrated public accomplishments. In examining how sex and intimacy have operated in the public memory of the Founders' lives, we can see that sex has long figured in civic identity.
In many ways, the personal lives of the Founding Fathers come down to us from the subjects themselves. It has often been said that the Founders shaped how their own legacies would develop. Through very conscious editing of personal papers, through autobiography, and through constant self-scrutinizing, they performed themselves in life and in death. The Founders were acutely, self-consciously aware of their places in history, and they crafted their images for posterity.' The most famous example of this is Benjamin Franklin and his Autobiography, which has been used to illustrate his self-fashioning. As the previous chapters have shown, we can also see the impact of the Founders' self-fashioning in many of their legacies, including George Washington's comportment, Alexander Hamilton's published explanation for his adulterous affair, Thomas Jefferson's careful controlling of his papers, and John Adams's loud Puritanical protestations.
Beginning in the nineteenth century, Americans would not remain content with merely celebrating public and political achievements of the Founders. They also wanted to laud the most famous leaders of the American Revolution as singularly and uniquely model men in their private lives. This sense of that generation's greatness is today explicitly contrasted with contemporary culture. The love between John and Abigail, for example, is noted for its "unconditional commitment" and held aloft as something that "especially today" "is the exception rather than the rule."' In an era of intensive media coverage of celebrity divorces, high-profile political adultery scandals, and controversy over marriage equality for lesbians and gay men, depictions of idealized marriage between George and Martha, John and Abigail, Martha and Thomas, and Alexander and Elizabeth acquire significant resonance. Their relationships become the model of American national virtuea greatest generation, which modern Americans can never hope to match, a sacred national benchmark against which to castigate contemporary culture.
This book has focused on how the long history of sex in the public memory of the Founders of our nation has generally reflected mainstream ideals. But that history has also shored up sexual minorities as well as political causes. President Bill Clinton's team, for example, pointed to the adultery of Hamilton to attempt to offset some of the criticism he was taking. By gesturing not only to history but also to a Founder, the message was one of legitimacy. Abolitionists used the story of Jefferson as a slave-owning rapist to highlight the corruption of the nation in its refusal to end slavery. Gay activists have pointed to Hamilton to show that LGBTQ people have contributed to the nation without recognition and while enduring unacceptable persecution.
The did he/didn't he question has come up repeatedly in the histories examined here. Although history is full of gaps in the record and lacks many desired smoking guns, Americans have never hesitated to speak definitively about the loves and inner lives of the Founders, despite a lack of documentation. Definitive answers alleviate uncertainty. The desire for them underscores that the stakes are quite high in examinations of the private lives of individuals as important to national identity as are the Founders.
Although my focus here has been on intimate lives, the mythic proportions revealed should give us pause when we read the latest blockbuster biographies of the Founders. In the Middle Ages, hagiographies were written to venerate the saints. T
oday, the popular biographies that are lately in vogue are sophisticated enough to acknowledge the complexities of race, class, and gender inequity in the past or the ups and downs of married life and the failings of individual men. But such accounts are warts-and-all hagiographyones that present failings only to dismiss them or have them overshadowed by an overarching theme of exceptional greatness. The final lines of a recent biography on John and Abigail Adams illustrate well the tone of exceptional ism in today's popular biographies: "John drew his last breath shortly after six o'clock. Witnesses reported that a final clap of thunder sounded at his passing, and then a bright sun broke through the clouds.... [H]is body was laid to rest alongside Abigail's. They have remained together ever since."3 Many of the great nineteenth-century-derived myths and tales of romantic moments of the Founders are still in circulation today-indeed, arguably more than ever.
The romanticized view of the intimate desires and sexual relationships of the Founders offends our understandings of history and serves only the present. We still glide over uncomfortable historical nuances regarding such matters as the nature of love and marriage in early America.' Jefferson was some thirty years older than Sally Herrings, who was enslaved and but sixteen when he "claimed her as his sexual partner."5 Abigail was barely fourteen when she first met twenty-one-year-old John. George courted Martha before she was even out of mourning for her deceased first husband. But all of these bonds have in some fashion or other been romanticized as modern in their sense of equality and love.
The "Founding Fathers" are constructions of cultural memory. The "Founders," the political leaders of the Revolution and nation's creation, were individuals, flesh and blood, and as such led lives that would not reflect later ideals of manly sexual behaviors and desires. It is, of course, quite ironic that the political leaders of the American Revolution would come to serve as role models of personal life for American masculinity in the Victorian era-and today. Although a segment of our contemporary culture continues to hold the Founding Fathers aloft as more moral and virtuous than today's generation, doing so requires ignoring what the Founders themselves told us about their lives. It has often been pointed out that the men associated with freedom and liberty held others in bondage and viewed democracy with skepticism. What is less often acknowledged is that the men associated with an era of supposed morality and Christian values of monogamy and marriage have nearly all been linked to infidelity and sex out of wedlock.'
There is still a certain degree of ambivalence about the relevance of private behavior for an assessment of public figures. On the one hand, we want to know more than can be known given the historical record and the private nature of the questions asked of individuals long gone. On the other hand, we do not want to know everything, because we do not want public figures and national heroes to exhibit anything other than positive attributes, and their sexual expressions must somehow conform to that depiction.7 Thus, even the most negative of behaviors must be explained away. Unlike contemporary sex-scandalized politicians who can be removed from office and dis appear from public view, we are stuck with the Founding Fathers. They are going nowhere, and so we rewrite and respin and reremember them in various ways to present them in a positive light. Biographers generally laud their subjects (albeit with more sophistication than those of the early nineteenth century). Rarely is a biography of a Founding Father written to disgrace the individual or remove him from the pantheon. The recent trend has been to expand only that top circle of important Founders.
This book, with its examination of how Americans have created and re-created the sexual histories of the most famous of the political leaders of the American Revolution, shows how sex has long been a component of civic and national identity. It should also challenge us to avoid superficially characterizing the complex personal lives of famous individuals, including political leaders, in society today. And it should make us ask ourselves what we are hoping to accomplish by mobilizing familiar tropes and stock depictions of romantic life. Such portrayals draw on a centuries-old history in America of connecting personal to public personas-and often rest on a host of tropes informed by a range of prescribed characteristics. By focusing on cultural constructions of the intimate lives of the Founders, this book challenges how we configure sex and gender in our public evaluations of prominent Americans-and perhaps should also give us pause about private considerations of ourselves and each other. What future generations will make of these men and their private lives remains to be seen, but given the longtime interest in this aspect of their lives, one thing seems certain: They will take an interest in the men's private lives. But those private lives, as remembered by future generations, will likely not be the ones we know today.
INTRODUCTION
1. Indeed, in recognition of this issue, several museums of Founding Fathers' homes have launched efforts to circulate more youthful, vital images in an effort to connect to modern audiences. And recent biographies that strive to make the Founders more appealing (dubbed "Founders chic" by friend and foe alike) likewise frequently highlight the heights and musculature of the men in their youth in efforts to dispel the dusty old images held in most American's minds. The term "Founders chic" comes from Evan Thomas ("Founders Chic: Live from Philadelphia," Newsweek, July 9, 2001). But "Founders chic" "is really "`Federalist chic,"' according to Jeffrey L.Pasley, who observes that the increased interest in Founders often focuses on conservatives who did not embrace democracy or the "expansion of individual rights," such as Washington, Adams, and Hamilton. Pasley, "Federalist Chic," Common-place.org, February 2002, available at www.common-place. org/publick/200202.shtml.
2. Mason Weems, A History of the Life and Death, Virtues and Exploits of General George Washington (New York: Grosser and Dunlap, 1927), 8; italics original.
3. This book, therefore, builds on my earlier work on sex and masculinity and on the long history of sexual identities in America. See, for example, Thomas A.Foster, Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man: Massachusetts and the History of Sexuality in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006); and Thomas A.Foster, ed., Long before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America (New York: New York University Press, 2007). See also George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1995); and Regina G.Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
4. Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1993), 3. See also Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992); David Glassberg, "Public History and the Study of Memory," Public Historian 18, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 7-23; and Patrick Hutton, "Recent Scholarship on Memory and History," History Teacher 33, no. 4 (August 2000): 533-548.
5. Gore Vidal, Imperial America: Reflections on the United States ofAmnesia (New York: Nation Books, 2004).
6. Jill Lepore has argued that "historical fundamentalism" is used by the Tea Party and others to support their contemporary political claims. This viewpoint posits the Founders and the "sacred texts" of the nation as "ageless and sacred and to be worshipped" and the Founders as "prophets." Jill Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 6. See also Francois Furstenberg, In the Name of the Father: Washington's Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation (New York: Penguin, 2006); and Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Knopf, 1997). In her study of biography, Paula R.Backscheider argues that "nations have modeled themselves on and understood each other through the great, lasting subjects of their biographies." Paula R. Backscheider, Reflections on Biography (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999), 167.
7. Although academic historians have moved "beyond the Founders" in their understanding of the vital role that ordinary peo
ple played in the establishment of the United States, including non-elites and political minorities, such as women, African Americans, and a host of immigrants, the public largely has not. In political history, see Jeffrey Pasley, Andrew W.Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, eds., Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). See also Alfred F.Young, Gary B.Nash, and Ray Raphael, eds., Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation (New York: Knopf, 2011).
Trevor Burnard argues that to the public, the Founders are all the more important because of the later development of the United States as a world power. Trevor Burnard, "The Founding Fathers in Early American Historiography: A View from Abroad," William and Mary Quarterly 62, no. 4 (October 2005): 745-763.
Lauren Berlant argues that in contemporary society, "intimacy, sexuality, reproduction, and the family... are properly interrelated with these questions of identity, inequality, and national existence." See Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 8. Other scholarship in LGBTQ history and Queer Studies has expanded our recognition of how heteronormativity figures in national discussions of sexual citizenship. Sex and the Founding Fathers contributes to this growing body of literature that examines how sex figures in the national identity. For other examples, see Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); David K.Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); and Gayle S.Rubin, Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). See also Robert O.Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012); and Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
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