A Renegade History of the United States

by Thaddeus Russell

  Women in particular enjoyed the freedom from sexual shame. When men did not satisfy their wives, the wives felt free to leave them. In 1797 Louisa Lovinger not only committed adultery but also justified it in a way that would have been punishable by death earlier in the Puritan era and by imprisonment or ostracism later in the Victorian period. When a neighbor asked if she was ashamed of her actions, Lovinger replied “that she [was] not, that her husband was away the whole week at the store and she had not good of him, and that she will not stay with him much longer.” Eleanor Lightwood deserted her husband in 1788 because he was “an ugly little fellow,” and “she saw a number of faces that she liked abundances better.” While Eliza McDougall’s husband was away at sea, she took another lover and bore a child with him. When her husband returned, he told her, according to a friend who overheard the conversation, “Betty I will forgive you all that has happened if you will tell me who was the father of the child.” To this she replied, “It was a better fellow than you.” And while women who worked even briefly as prostitutes in later periods were branded with infamy forever, in the early new nation, one’s participation in the profession was not a bar to respectability or marriage. Some prostitutes during this era even married into high society. In 1809 William Penn, the great-grandson of the founder of Pennsylvania, married a woman known in Philadelphia as “a common Prostitute of this city” and did not lose his standing among the local elite.

  The sexual terrain in other early American cities was not much different. In 1774 one British visitor to New York, Patrick M’Roberts, was astonished to find in the neighborhood around St. Paul’s Chapel, where George Washington attended services during the two years that New York City was the nation’s capital, that public sex was entirely normal. There were “above 500 ladies of pleasure [who] keep lodgings contiguous within the consecrated liberties of St. Paul’s. This part of the city belongs to the church, and has thence obtained the name of the Holy Ground. Here all the prostitutes reside, among whom are many fine well-dressed women, and it is remarkable that they live in much greater cordiality one with another than any nests of that kind do in Britain or Ireland.” King’s College (later Columbia University), also situated on the Holy Ground at Park Place and Broadway, was a great source of customers for the many prostitutes who provided “a temptation to the youth that have occasion to pass so often that way.” An aristocratic lieutenant of the British army named Isaac Bangs inspected the Holy Ground in 1776 to find out why half of his soldiers had sought out “an intimate Connexion with these worse than Brutal Creatures.” When he first saw them, “I thought nothing could exceed them for impudence and immodesty; but I found the more I was acquainted with them, the more they excelled in their Brutality.” After visiting New York in 1794, the Frenchman Moreau de St. Mery wrote, “Whole sections of streets are given over to streetwalkers for the plying of their profession.” Women “of every color can be found in the streets, particularly after ten o’clock at night, soliciting men and proudly flaunting their licentiousness in the most shameless manner.” Similar scenes were witnessed at Fell’s Point in Baltimore and on Ann Street on Boston’s North End.

  Evidence that American cities were libertine havens literally played in the streets—thousands of children born out of wedlock. Never in American history have more “illegitimate” children been born, per capita, than during the era of independence. Lyons estimates that in Philadelphia alone, in the years 1767 to 1776, one in roughly thirty-eight adults was parent to an illegitimate child. After the war, nonmarital sex appears to have grown increasingly popular. From 1790 to 1799 there was one parent of a bastard in roughly twenty adults. Between 1805 and 1814, the next documented ten-year period, there was one illegitimate parent in roughly ten adults in the cradle of American liberty. During this period, the population of Philadelphia almost tripled, but “bastardy” increased tenfold.

  Promiscuity was rampant in early American cities. Of the more than one thousand women who bore bastard children in Philadelphia in the second half of the eighteenth century, only five had more than one child with the same man. Upper-class moralists blamed the rise in bastardy on irresponsible fornication among the lower classes. They were right. Of the bastardy cases in which economic class could be ascertained, 25 percent of the fathers were so poor that they paid no taxes; 34 percent were taxed at the lowest level of one or two pounds; and 30 percent paid three to eight pounds but worked as butchers, bakers, carpenters, carvers, metalsmiths, joiners, hatters, bricklayers, upholsterers, weavers, and schoolteachers. When John Adams went to a local shop or bookseller in Philadelphia, Boston, or New York, he would have seen evidence that the rabble were having more fun than he was: shelves full of sheep-gut condoms, pornographic almanacs, and various pills and potions to cure venereal disease. According to many accounts, such items were standard in early American retail businesses.

  Does all of this mean that many women in early American cities—especially poor women—were sluts and whores, and that poor men were more animalistic than upper-class men? Well, yes. But if you value your personal freedom, these people should be your heroes.

  Like laws against prostitution, laws against fornication and adultery were largely ignored in the revolutionary period. In Philadelphia, between 1790 and 1799, only one couple was arrested for cross-racial fornication; only two couples were brought before the courts for fornicating in public; and not one person was charged for simple fornication between two consenting single white adults, despite overwhelming evidence that most Philadelphians were breaking these laws. Seventy percent of adultery cases that were mentioned in divorce proceedings were not criminally prosecuted.

  Even in the Puritan stronghold of New England, premarital sex increased markedly in the late eighteenth century. European visitors to the region were frequently shocked at the liberties taken by young and old alike. “I have entered several bedchambers,” wrote Alexandre Berthier, a member of the French military who toured Massachusetts in 1780, “where I have found bundling couples, who are not disturbed and continue to give each other all the honest tokens of their love.” Observers were most amazed at the permissiveness of parents and older adults toward the intimacies of young people. The German traveler Johann Schoepf saw during his stay in New England in 1783–84 that when parents knew of late-night bed sharing, “the young woman’s good name [was] no ways impaired.” Indeed, young people rarely felt the need to hide such couplings and did not need to be formally courting to spend the night with someone. “[O]n the contrary, the parents are advised, and these meetings happen when the pair is enamored and merely wish to know each other better.” The growing practice of “bundling” was not always just innocent cuddling. Historians estimate that between 30 percent and 40 percent of pregnancies in late-eighteenth-century New England were premarital.

  Women were extraordinarily free during this period, most strikingly in their ability and willingness to leave their husbands. The monarchy and colonial governments declined to regulate marriage, and so there were virtually no divorce laws in America until after independence. Perhaps because of this lack of formal consequences, in the late colonial period—when the cities had grown large enough to offer many choices of mates and work and social networks—women fled their husbands in great numbers. Between 1726 and 1786, when Pennsylvania passed its first divorce law, 801 husbands in the colony placed advertisements in newspapers announcing that their wives had left them and their marriages were null and void. And again, it was the bottom classes who drove this part of the first American sexual revolution: 62 percent of the men who advertised the dissolution of their marriage were from the city’s lowest laboring classes. What is most striking, and most liberated, about the runaway wives is that most of them showed no shame: only 5 percent of the advertised runaways offered a public explanation for their actions. The prevalence of the self-divorce advertisements demonstrates, as Lyons puts it, “that for many segments of eighteenth-century society, marriage did not have to be permanent. For
these couples and the community that countenanced their behavior, marriage was not tightly bound for life; marital bonds could be broken.”

  Far more women chose not to marry at all during this period than at any time in the first two hundred years of the United States. Researchers estimate that at least one-quarter of women living in late colonial American cities were not married. Nowhere were women more free from the expectations that they be wives and mothers than in revolutionary Philadelphia, where more than one-third of the adult female population was not only unmarried but also living with nonrelatives.

  Many generations before feminists made women’s work in the “public sphere” acceptable, female inhabitants of the early, freewheeling American cities worked in every imaginable profession. They were blacksmiths, butchers, distillers, dockworkers, hucksters, innkeepers, manual laborers, mariners, pawnbrokers, peddlers, plasterers, printers, skinners, and wine-makers. Many women in the eighteenth century not only worked in what later became exclusively male occupations but also owned a great number of businesses that would soon be deemed grossly unfeminine. Hannah Breintnall was typical of a class of female entrepreneurs who benefited from the looseness of gender norms in early America. When her husband died, Breintnall opened the Hen and Chickens Tavern on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, not far from the residences of many of the Founding Fathers and the State House where the United States was made. The fact that a woman owned the bar did not stop the sheriff from holding public auctions at the Hen and Chickens, nor did it stop patrons from making Breintnall, by the time she died in 1770, one of the wealthiest inhabitants of the city. In Philadelphia alone, in the two decades before the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, at least 110 women worked as tavern keepers, and more than 75 operated retail shops of various sorts. Historians have estimated that as many as half of all shops in early American cities were owned and operated by women. Moral judgments appear to have had little effect on these renegade women. Many operated houses of prostitution inside their taverns. Margaret Cook, one of these shameless tavern owners, should be celebrated by every American woman who values her freedom. In 1741 Cook was brought into court on charges that she welcomed as patrons “Whores, Vagabonds, and divers Idle Men of a suspected bad conversation” and that she “continually did keep bad order and Government.” Twenty years later, apparently unchastened, Cook returned to court to face the very same charges.

  Women owned and operated a large percentage of American taverns before and during the Revolution, especially in the rough-and-tumble port cities. Roughly 40 percent of the taverns in Boston during the 1760s were owned by women. In Charleston in the fifteen years before the Revolution, a majority of the tavern keepers were women. The less respectable the tavern, the more likely it was to be owned by a woman.

  Public houses that aimed for a refined clientele almost invariably barred women from serving or drinking on the premises. According to Salinger, “Women only rarely operated taverns described as genteel places with good entertainment.” But in most of American society, through most of the eighteenth century, women not only served alcohol in public but also drank it. Most upper-class “society” taverns barred women, and respectable women rarely drank in taverns, but fortunately, most taverns were low class and most women were not respectable. In fact, the modern dating scene was predated in many colonial taverns that were known as places where men and women could meet one another. Historians estimate that women consumed from one-eighth to one-quarter of the spirituous liquor in early America, and early temperance organizations claimed that one hundred thousand women were bona fide “drunkards.”

  SODOM AND THE SEA

  One day during his stay in Philadelphia, John Adams walked to the docks and, with his back turned to the pleasure-filled streets of the city and his eyes to the Delaware River, felt his spirit rise as he looked upon the newly built USS Delaware launching into the river. Adams “stood upon the Wharf to see the fine figure and Show she made.” To his son Charles, he wrote that from such a sight “Thus you see, that a Foundation is laying, in Arts, and Manufactures, of a rising State.” He then toured the foundries on Front Street along the river, where war ships and cannons were manufactured for the patriots. He could see that so long as hunks of iron and brass continued to be melted down, molded, and hammered into weapons, the rebels had a chance. In March 1777, he wrote excitedly to Charles of the foundries where he had seen “Howitzers” and “several brass six Pounders newly cast.” But right behind him, the wharf was filled with the bawdiest, most depraved, and most pleasurable houses of ill repute in America.

  In the early eighteenth century, pirates made the wharves of port cities around the world the wildest scenes of freedom and pleasure in the early modern age. Pirates brought to shore an antiwork, libertine ethos that was eloquently stated by Bartholomew Roberts, better known as Black Bart, a famed buccaneer who prowled the Atlantic coast from the West Indies to Newfoundland. Comparing legitimate employment with piracy, Roberts quipped, “In an honest Service there is thin Commons, low Wages, and hard Labour; in this, Plenty and Satiety, Pleasure and Ease, Liberty and Power.” After retiring from their lives on the high seas, many pirates stayed on the wharves or fathered children who built ships or became stevedores, sailors, or other sorts of maritime workers. And so on Ann Street (now North Street) on Boston’s North End, Water Street at the southern tip of Manhattan, Fell’s Point on the Baltimore Harbor, and all along Front Street in Philadelphia, where John Adams admired the shipworks, sailors on leave spent their money freely on drink, women, and flamboyant clothes, impromptu dances spilled out of taverns, and people of all colors tangled together.

  Pirates and other rowdy seafarers also helped create something that, were we to see it now, we would call gay liberation. When John Adams explored the streets, he might have walked past men exposing their penises, the eighteenth-century transatlantic code for men seeking partners of the same sex. Adams might have brushed past Ann Alweye or Mary Hamilton, tall women with large hands and protruding Adam’s apples, who slept with men and were themselves males—males who dressed as women. Daniel Sweeny was another male who enjoyed bending his gender in early Philadelphia. He was arrested for “being a Nuisance” by “dressing in woman’s clothes” but, further suggesting a looseness of sexual mores, was released after four days. These were the transvestites who appear in the public record. There were many more. In 1784 the newspaper the Philadelphiad described effeminate “fops” filling the city’s public spaces:

  At ev’ry corner and in ev’ry street / Some gaudy useless animal we meet, / Resembling men in nothing but their shape, / … / Observe the thing its gaudy pinions spread, / Pride in its eye with sense inverted head. / … / Come, lend a hand, we’ll learn him how to dance. / … / His green silk breeches grafted blue behind, / With all his trapings of a piece with these, / Behind a fright, before designed to please.

  Significantly, two of the fops mentioned in the newspaper, “Tom Tug” and “Jack Tinsel,” were both seafarers. If John Adams had visited one of the city’s four libraries, a source of great pride among the Founding Fathers, he might have noticed that one of the most frequently borrowed books was The Adventures of Roderick Random, a novel featuring Lord Strutwell and Captain Whiffle, effeminate dandies festooned in pink and red satin, ornate jewelry, powder, and perfume, who seduce young men with discussion of sodomy among the ancients and claims of “the exquisite pleasure” of “this inclination.” According to Lyons, such men by and large lived “unmolested by Philadelphia society at the end of the eighteenth century.”

  Before the pirates brought their ways ashore, acts of “sodomy” (homosexuality was invented as a term and a concept much later) were condemned and punished in various and spectacular ways. John Winthrop, the founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, explained that it was necessary to execute sodomites because their activities “tended to the frustrating of the ordinance of marriage and the hindering [of] the generation of mankind.” Men who were caught �
�spending their seed upon one another” were hanged, whipped, and branded across the colonies in the seventeenth century. But as piracy flourished in the Atlantic from the late seventeenth century into the mid–seventeen hundreds, a great number of men spent their seed upon one another unpunished. The historian B. R. Burg claims that during the so-called golden age of piracy, most if not all of the buccaneers had sex with one another. Pirates were primarily devoted to pleasure, and they cared little how they got it. Thus, “[t]he male engaging in homosexual activity aboard a pirate ship in the West Indies three centuries past was simply an ordinary member of his community, completely socialized and acculturated.” Prosecutions for sodomy declined sharply in the colonies in the eighteenth century, even as the population increased geometrically, and in the port cities during the American Revolution, little or no misspent seed was punished. In Philadelphia, where at least 20 percent of the adult male population spent time at sea, there was not a single prosecution for sodomy from 1750 to 1800.

  Same-sex intimacy was not exclusive to men. Moreau de St. Mery was shocked by the number of women in Philadelphia who “give themselves up at an early age to the enjoyment of themselves.” Even more shocking, something “almost unbelievable,” was that “they are not at all strangers to being willing to seek unnatural pleasures with persons of their own sex. Among common people, at a tavern keeper’s, for example, or at a small shopkeeper’s, the daughter of the house, when no longer a child, sleeps with the [female] servant.”

  A MOTLEY RABBLE

  The culture of pleasure and freedom was dangerous not just to American revolutionaries but also to anyone interested in maintaining social order. The British army learned this lesson in Boston on March 5, 1770, the night the American Revolution began.