Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past (Sexuality Studies)

by Thomas A. Foster

  Adams would be pleased with how Americans have cast his moral core. After all, if any Founder were proudly wagging his finger in disapproval at the men discussed in this book, it would be Adams. As an eighteenthcentury Massachusetts denizen, Adams self-consciously performed the role of Puritan descendant. To paraphrase H.L.Mencken's famous stereotype, Puritanism was marked by the "haunting fear that someone somewhere might be having fun." Modern Americans roll their eyes at the Puritan prohibitions on theater and Christmas celebrations, the death penalty statutes for adultery, the compulsory church-attendance laws, and the religious fervor that gave rise to the Salem-witchcraft episode.

  Americans have long embraced this view of the Puritans as sex-phobic, but historians of sexuality have shown it to be superficial. On the one hand, historians point to the stringent laws, brutal condemnation from the pulpit, and harsh punishments meted out for anyone engaging in sex outside marriage. Yet they remind us that this does not mean that Puritans were entirely opposed to sexual expression. Puritans and their descendants celebrated the sexual union of husband and wife. Sexual intimacy was seen as an expression of the household, a romantic, familiar, intimate, and loving bond that husband and wife shared in their hierarchical relationship.'

  A fourth-generation resident of Massachusetts, Adams was a typical product of eighteenth-century New England culture. He was exposed to broader Atlantic influences, moral codes, and ways of structuring sexual lives and identities. He lived in a region with a high rate of premarital sex, an appetite for erotic English literature, and an exposure to people who traveled the Atlantic and knew firsthand of its more liberal sexual subcultures. Like many eighteenth-century New Englanders, he generally disapproved of sex outside marriage and fashioned his identity in opposition to nontraditional sexuality, including the appearance of excess and immodesty.

  As a young man, Adams cultivated a personal self that took part in the emerging world of eighteenth-century sexuality with its move away from strict Puritan morality. Yet at the same time, he lauded himself for being a man who stood above that developing culture, and he modeled himself as wise, courageous, and moral .9 This posturing would become his trademark. Perhaps most famously, he adopted the position of moral observer while a statesman in Europe.

  Of course, Adams was not the only American who claimed to be surprised by European culture. John Jay, like Adams, was also disapproving of other Founders. Yet, like Adams, Jay was also able to couch his critiques in the socially acceptable witty banter of the day. He once wrote to Franklin, "There is no man of your age in Europe so much a favorite with the ladies." 10 Shortly after Morris suffered a debilitating accident, he wrote to him, "Mrs. Plater, after having much use of your legs, has occasioned your losing one of them."" Such double meanings were intended to be both witty and gently chastising-and they reveal a personal certainty not "shocked" by sexual liberties.

  Adams was not quite as adept at this type of banter, although he was not above trying. On his second night in Paris, Adams found himself in a dinner-party conversation that would come to typify his assessment of European manners and morals. According to Adams's posthumously published autobiography, at dinner a married woman ("One of the most elegant Ladies at Table") asked playfully, "Mr. Adams, by your Name I conclude you are descended from the first Man and Woman, and probably in your family may be preserved the tradition which may resolve a difficulty which I could never explain. I never could understand how the first Couple found out the Art of lying together?" We can only surmise the look on Adams's face, but he claims to have "blushed." He writes, "To me, whose Acquaintance with Women had been confined to America, where the manners of the Ladies were universally characterised at that time by Modesty, Delicacy and Dignity, this question was surprizing and shocking." But despite what he calls shock, he demonstrated skill and sociability. With, as he put it, a facial expression of "Ironical Gravity," he replied, "Madame My Family resembles the first Couple both in the name and in their frailties so much that I have no doubt We are descended from that in Paradise. But the Subject was perfectly understood by Us, whether by tradition I could not tell: I rather thought it was by Instinct, for there was a Physical quality in Us resembling the Power of Electricity or of the Magnet, by which when a Pair approached within a striking distance they flew together like the Needle to the Pole or like two Objects in electric Experiments." She responded to this answer with an emphasis on the sexual pleasure of erotics: "Well I know not how it was, but this I know it is a very happy Shock." Adams, however, writes that he had the savvy to bite his tongue and refrain from adding that this pleasure would have come "in a lawfull Way" (within marriage) for fear that she and everyone else would think he was a man of "Pedantry and Bigottry." Adams boasted that he had done his best to engage and yet stand above for all to see.12

  Paris would present Adams with not only actions by Europeans that were beyond his moral code but also behaviors by his fellow political leaders of the new nation that he, like Jay, would critique. And using tact similar to that of Jay, he playfully mentions Franklin's behavior in a letter to Abigail: "My venerable Colleague enjoys a Priviledge here, that is much to be envyd. Being seventy Years of Age, the Ladies not only allow him to embrace them as often as he pleases, but they are perpetually embracing him.-I told him Yesterday, I would write this to America."" Yet his criticisms could also be deeply serious. Adams found Franklin to be quite ineffective, overly social, and irksome in moral stature. Here the politics and the personal were both woefully lacking and linked for Adams. Corresponding with a Mr. Marbois the following year, he writes, "No, said Mr. M., Mr. F. adores only great Nature, which has interested a great many People of both Sexes in his favour. Yes, said I, laughing, all the Atheists, Deists and Libertines, as well as the Philosophers and Ladies are in his Train-another Voltaire and Hume. Yes said Mr. M., he is celebrated as the great Philosopher and the great Legislator of America.-He is said I a great Philosopher, but as a Legislator of America he has done very little."" Adams also became well-known for his moral criticism of his political enemy Hamilton. In January 1797, he writes to Abigail from Philadelphia, "Hamilton I know to be a proud Spirited, conceited, aspiring Mortal always pretending to Morality, with as debauched Morals as old Franklin who is more his Model than any one I know."" At one point, Adams famously referred to Hamilton as a "bastard brat," drawing attention to his birth out of wedlock."

  Throughout his life, Adams would shake his head with disapproval and then pat himself on the back for doing so. Fashioning his sexual identity as the descendant of Puritans, biographers have largely portrayed him as he saw himself-a moral Founder. As this chapter shows, this view of Adams couples well with the contemporary view of him as an ideal husband to Abigail, and it also dispels virtually any question of nonmonogamy during their long years apart.

  Early Memory of Adams

  His very earliest chroniclers echo his own view of himself as a model of moral manhood. Thus, in her 1805 history of the American Revolution, Mercy Otis Warren remarks, "Mr. Adams, in private life, supported an unimpeachable character."" This depiction continues unabated through the century. Although not a work of popular biography, in the 1850s Adams's grandson published a multivolume collection of his papers, including his unpublished autobiography, his diaries, and portions of a biography written by his son John Quincy in the 1830s.18 For his biographers, Adams's own moral compass demonstrated itself at a young age. His grandson's publication includes many such passages. While a young man, he records in his diary his judgment of others. "Let others waste the bloom of Life," he writes, "at the Card or biliard Table, among rakes and fools, and when their minds are sufficiently fretted with losses, and inflamed by Wine, ramble through the Streets, assaulting innocent People, breaking Windows or debauching young Girls." Adams developed an identity that took no pleasure in such immoral pastimes-yet took pleasure in their absence. He boasts, "I envy not their exalted happiness."" As a young man, according to Adams, he wrestled with youthful urges and estab
lished a moral code that would guide his life. Adams pointed out that he was not without passions to control. He complains to his diary in 1759, "My Thoughts are roving from Girls to friends."20 In his autobiography, he indicates his belief in the significance of sexuality by remarking, "Here it may be proper to recollect something which makes an Article of great importance in the Life of every Man." "I was of an amorous disposition and very early from ten or eleven Years of Age, was very fond of the Society of females," he writes. "I had my favorites among the young Women and spent many of my Evenings in their Company."" His diary entries and autobiography attest to his attempts to control his desires and stay focused on virtuous and productive tasks. Publication of his papers has helped biographers and popular memory of the man follow the image that he cultivated of himself, one that he describes as developing early in his life.

  His son's publication includes Adams's barbs aimed at other Founders and European culture in general. Some of Adams's comments suggest a calculated distancing from Franklin and others who passed less judgment in the social world of Parisian diplomats. After hearing about two entangled adulterous couples, he comments, "When I afterwards learned both from Dr. Franklin and his Grandson, and from many other Persons, that this Woman was the Arnie of Mr. Brillion and that Madam Brillion consoled herself by the Amitie of Mr. Le Vailliant, I was astonished that these People could live together in such apparent Friendship and indeed without cutting each others throats." The polyamorous relationship was apparently comfortable for them and known by Franklin and others. Yet Adams liked to see himself as unaware (despite being well-read and circulating among elite colonials and Europeans). "But I did not know the World," he writes. "I soon saw and heard so much of these Things in other Families and among allmost all the great People of the Kingdom that I found it was a thing of course. It was universally understood and Nobody lost any reputation by it." But Adams also argues that any outward acceptance was artificial, "a mere conformity to the fashion." And he counters the notion that participants were content. "Internally," he believes, "there was so far from being any real friendship or conjugal Affection that their minds and hearts were full of jealousy, Envy, revenge and rancour. In short that it was deadly poison to all the calm felicity of Life. There were none of the delightful Enjoyments of conscious Innocence and mutual Confidence." Although aware of nontraditional practices, Adams always has the last condemnatory word in a manner that positions himself as a moral authority. "It was," he declares, "mere brutal pleasure."22

  So it was that the nineteenth century remembered Adams in the manner that he himself established. Much the way Warren writes at the start of the century, John T.Morse in 1884 writes that Adams was "like the better men of the day" in New England; unlike those who wrestled with "hard drinking" and "carnal sins" in the face of strict Puritan teachings, Adams succeeded at being "rigid in every point of morals."" Similarly, Mellen Chamberlain, a judge, librarian, and member of the Massachusetts Historical Society, memorializes the "provincial" Adams in the fashion that Adams had established in his lifetime. For Chamberlain, Adams had "established in his character, and exhibited by his life and action, the best influences of the Reformation."24 Summing up the man, he echoes Warren, stating that his "life, public and private, was without blemish."25

  As was not unusual in the period, little is said about the Adamses' marriage in nineteenth-century accounts. Adams's grandson's collection includes a typical early-nineteenth-century assessment of a Founder's marriage, in that it notes the date and the lineage of the families united by the marriage. According to his grandson, the match was "congenial to his character" in part because of the education of Abigail.26 But the volumes published by his grandson leave out virtually all the letters he penned to Abigail during their courtship. Charles Francis Adams was evidently "unwilling to break entirely through the crust of Victorian propriety."27 Mimicking their achievement of the nineteenth-century domestic ideal, in 1884 Morse tersely but positively notes that theirs was a "singularly happy union."

  An Amorous Puritan Emerges

  Many twentieth-century biographers continue to repeat Adams's own assertions about his disposition as written in his self-reflective, posthumously published autobiography. But increasingly they highlight passages published by his grandson that speak to the concerns of the "first sexual revolution" and that demonstrate he was a normal red-blooded American man, with appropriate levels of sexual interest in women.28 Thus, a 1926 account by popular writer Meade Minnegerode repeats his description of himself as "`of an amorous disposition,' and `fond of the society of females .11129 This assertion safely establishes him as normative and well-suited to the early-twentieth-century understanding of heterosexual urges and desires as natural and appropriate. In keeping with the morality of the day, the author also relies on Adams's own claims to moral virtue, noting that despite these carnal desires, his "youthful flames were all modest and virtuous girls, and always maintained their character through life."3o

  Virtually all early-twentieth-century accounts similarly repeat his own assertions about his moral uprightness and likewise underscore that he was of an "amorous" nature that he "controlled" until he was married to Abigail. Taking pains to highlight Adams's normative desires, in 1928 Samuel McCoy-a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and novelist who also published under the name Ellery Queen, Jr.-published his biography just a few years after Minnegerode's, rescuing from Adams's diary the passages that speak to his having remained a virgin. He also includes Adams's writings about sexual immoralities that he witnessed in his own New England community. Moreover, McCoy quotes a passage in which Adams writes that "`every excess-of passion, prejudice, appetite; of love, fear, jealousy"' and others "`may in some sense be called a disease of the mind.""' For McCoy, this attitude is "modern to the last degree" and "removes Adams from the ranks of those who have died with their century and makes him alive today." Using Adams's language again to characterize his morality, he concludes that Adams was without his wife for years while he was in France and England: "Constantly, nightly, during all these years of separation from her he meets the brilliant, beautiful, sophisticated women of the two capitals, Paris and London; but as he says sturdily, at the age of seventy-six, 'Among all the errors'... `I cannot recollect a single insinuation against me of any amorous intrigue"' [as]... a "`bachelor or a married man."3'

  By mid-century, the centrality of youthful loves to the depiction of proper manhood had given rise to the new inclusion of an early love noted in his personal writings but often overlooked by earlier writers. In the final decades of the twentieth century, biographers routinely mention Adams's relationship with one Hannah Quincy. In 1969, one such account by journalist and biographer Alfred Steinberg notes that the girl fell in love with Adams, who did not share her interest in marriage, given that "he had no money, nor was he yet established in law."33 But little else would change in the midtwentieth century, especially with regard to the portrayal of Adams's sexuality. Writes one, "John had a particular fondness for girls and they, in turn, responded to him."34 In 1979, biographers were still relying almost exclusively on Adams for their assessment of his sexual compass. Thus, writes one, he had an "early fondness for girls," underscoring his normativity in the absence of scandals.35 And, as would become stock, a 1979 academic biography points out that while in Paris, Adams expressed an "uneasiness about their religion and morals."36

  By the end of the twentieth century, Adams's old reputation as a moral man was serving him well but within a very new cultural context. In 1992, historian John Ferling again finds in Adams a man of extraordinary background but suitably ordinary qualities. Writing at the rise of multiculturalism, Adams, a Federalist, elite and stuffy, with a reputation for being priggish, was certainly one of those "dead white males" that so many complained were being pushed aside as the nation focused on the histories of "underrepresented groups." Yet, Ferling has no trouble reaching a broad audience for his Founder.

  His characterization of Adams's moral
ity is similar to that of previous generations and is yoked to Adams's body. In contrast to the virile physical portrayals touted for George Washington, Adams's desexualized physique reinforces his image as a man about whom there could be no sexual scandal. The image adorning the frontispiece of Ferling's book is one of Adams nearing fifty years old. And Adams, Ferling tells us, was a man who at thirty was "pudgy and jowly," a man who "looked soft and flabby." This particular body type could be easily associated with Adams the moral man. Readers are also reminded of his reputation for being "priggish" and very much unlike the charming Washington, Hamilton, Morris, or Franklin. Adams, Ferling points out, "had no idea how to conduct a conversation with a female." Turning Adams's critique of French morals into a positive attribute, Ferling writes that for many of his contemporaries, Adams was a man who failed as a diplomat because he could not "talk small talk or flirt with the ladies."37

  It might strike some as odd that a person who begins as a nineteenthcentury model of moral manhood could appeal to modern readers. Yet it is precisely this kind of man who may well serve as the antidote to an increasingly alarming number of contemporary politicians and public figures who seem sexually unhinged. The long line of political sex scandals that would most recently emerge at the turn of the new millennium includes Gary Hart's withdrawal from the 1988 presidential race when pictures surfaced of him and a girlfriend on his boat, the aptly named Monkey Business. Adams, readers are reminded, was a man with utter control over his sexual desires, which he had mastered at a young age. His one serious crush, on Quincy, had never blossomed. Ferling is quick to point out that he, indeed, felt all the appropriate and healthy attractions, "love" and desire for her "beauty" and "coquettish ways." Indeed, she "captivated Adams." But he was a young man of "constraint in sexual matters," and he was determined to develop his law practice. And then before he knew it, the story goes, she had become engaged to another man, breaking his very normative and healthy heart.38