In other places, the original manuscript diaries reveal material edited from the Davenport volumes. Despite her contribution to preserving Morris's original words, occasionally Davenport chooses not to include intimate material. Davenport's November 3, 1789, transcription, for example, contains ellipses; it reads, "Go to the Louvre. A long Tete a Tete with Madame de Flahaut.... Stay till twelve." But if one consults the original diaries, one learns that removed from this passage is his account of what happened while he was at the Louvre: "She being yet a little indisposed and I not perfectly well we are chaste tho with strong Inclinations on both sides to be otherwise." To provide another example, Davenport's entry for the following day reads:
Figure 6.2. Page from Morris's original manuscript diaries showing someone's attempt to shape public memory by eliminating evidence of some of the content. (The Papers of Gouverneur Morris. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Photograph by Melanie R.Miller.)
Return to the Louvre and send to see if Mr. Le Couteulx is yet returned. He is not. Endeavor to disswade her from going to see a new Play is wretched, as I am informed, and at the first Representations of which much Disturbance is apprehended. She persists. I tell her that if she will not go I will embrace her, but otherwise not. She tries every Blandishment... a very serious Scene which terminates in a Declaration on her Part that she will not go to the Play and will not receive the Pleasure, that she may convince me it is Love, not Desire, which operates on her Conduct.
But if we consult the original diary, we discover that Davenport shies away from a more sexually explicit moment shared between the two and written about by Morris. "She tries every Blandishment," he writes, "and I suffer her to succeed so far as to present myself at the Portal of Loves Temple but will not go beyond the Threshold and finally retire. This induces of course a very serious Scene." Here, Morris presents himself as wholly desired by her, physically and emotionally. He insists that she not go to the play and she takes the initiative in sex, which he halts, leaving her to declare love, not lust. In their lover's quarrel, she then "complains also that I did not forbid her, in which Case she would have obeyed, as she repeatedly assured me. I then offer a new Bargain, which is, to caress her and afterwards permit her to do as she pleases." She then receives a written request for her presence at the play, which she turns down. "This," concludes Morris, "is the Result of that Emotion which follows recent Enjoyment."46 Davenport, thus, discretely removes five words that attest to what precisely was the "enjoyment" that causes in his mind his lover to cancel her plans and spend the evening with him. The diary reveals that he writes that after offering his "new Bargain" "to caress her and afterwards permit her to do as she pleases. We accordingly proceed to Action."47
In a few instances, Davenport is able to discern what has been crossed out in the original diary and includes the information in her transcription. Nearly all the edited material is sexual, but some was cut for other conventions of gentility. For example, on April 12, 1789, Morris writes, "Drinking party in America where the Chamber Pot is set on the table with the Bottles. He sets her right as to the Chamber Pot which is placed in a Corner of the Room."48 In the original diary now, "Chamber Pot" at both mentions is replaced with emphatic, dark, scribbled crossing-out.
It would not be until the mid-twentieth century, more than one hundred sixty years after the relationship had occurred, that a biographer would directly address Morris's affair with Madame de Flahaut. In the twentieth century, biography, while still, of course, aiming to tell a moral tale, began to focus on psychology and on the individual. Making good use of the Davenport volumes as well as the original manuscript sources, a 1952 biography by Howard Swiggett is surprisingly frank about Morris's sexual life. The author explicitly bemoans the historical shift in standards toward prudery that would not celebrate such an accomplished bachelor.
Swiggett writes while the culture was committed to the idealized, desexualized, nuclear family but also celebrated bachelor culture that was best captured by the debut of Playboy magazine in 1953.49 Swiggett portrays the late eighteenth century as a time of greater freedom of movement and possibilities. For Swiggett, the salon culture of late-eighteenth-century France is far more desirable than the mid-twentieth-century Americans he writes for: "These people are human and familiar today. There was a great deal of fun and gusto about them, and almost a complete absence of that mixture of pious prudery and `refinement' which appeared sixty-odd years later." For Swiggett, this trend is lamentable: "Biographies of his adversaries portrayed him as a butterfly and a social climber though not a libertine. In part the false picture arose from the lack of sources now available, but even more from the myth-making process which made of the Founding Fathers men utterly deaf to the uproar of sexual life."50
Determined to position himself as of the nonsqueamish world of the eighteenth century and opposed to the prudish Victorian biographers, Swiggett includes passages that speak to this point: "Proceed gently very gently till at last her Lips are prest to mine so much by her Movement as by my Effort. After this I take her in my Arms and in a low voice of interrupted Tenderness exclaim how delightful to press to our Bosom the Being whom we love. I let her enjoy this Sentiment quietly for some Time and find by numerous little Circumstances that her Lips are again disposed to the Expression of Delight." But his account is far more softened and still remarkably romanticized than faithful to the original explicit diaries. The setting is perhaps too much for him to resist: "The melodrama of 1793 began with the King's execution and ended with the Queen's," begins one chapter. Swiggett uses the romance in his breathless depiction of love in the age of Revolution: "Who can say what was in the minds of these two people in the months that followed, each at times so completely recognizable, each so incomprehensible? Their behavior is wanton and flagrant, and one may say, well, this is simply the loose morals of the eighteenth century. But that is frequently not the case at all, when as so often they are as careful of what people may say as any conventional moderns.""
Roosevelt comments on Morris's physical attractiveness, but beginning with Swiggett, Morris's body becomes a site of displaced sexual interestcasting a light away from his intimate relationships and focusing it instead on his disability and his desirability, using growing Freudian influences to explain how Morris's psychological and sexual development was affected by the loss of his leg: "Physically he was magnificent, well over six feet tall, a strong, athletic figure without the lankness of Jefferson or Monroe.... Even after the loss of a leg his bearing was so splendid that the French sculptor, [Jean-Antoine] Houdon, had him pose for his figure of Washington," writes Swiggett.52
Swiggett puts a lot of explanatory weight on Morris's leg: "Whenever a lady, who had once yielded to him, refused to go on, he behaved in the most unreasonable and petty manner, usually leaving at once. It is so unlike his sweet reasonableness in larger matters that the question arises whether it is not the result of sensitiveness about his leg, `the mark of that misfortune to this hour,' a sensitiveness usually masked, but still representing his only inner uncertainty and sense of inferiority." At other times he notes what he called Morris's "`aggression' complex arising from the inferiority his amputated leg gave him." Writing about Morris being left behind as the army mobilized, Swiggett paints a remarkably sexualized image. "Gouverneur Morris, a stump hanging from his magnificent body," he writes, underscoring his point about being left out of normalized manhood where soldiers are praised and attractive to women. He "had to watch them" leaving as "all the beauties" watched from every door and window.53
Public reaction to the Swiggett biography was mixed. Academic reviewers, writing prior to the advent of a subfield of the history of sexuality that would have pointed to the significance of his erotic identity, instead laud the book for not being dishonest about Morris's personal life but criticize the book for neglecting that which was considered more important activities of political leaders of the Revolutionary era-state building. The flagship journal o
f early American history notes that it was "entertaining" and "lively fare for those who enjoy knowing the peccadilloes of history's magnetic figures" and praises Swiggett's ability to not "quibble with his subject's morals"-but also criticizes the book for not focusing on that which was "serious."54 The Yale Law journal criticizes Swiggett for giving "tomcattery primary consideration" at the expense of Morris's notable achievements. "Acts of intercourse with Adele de Flahaut, for example, are analyzed for number, location, and other preliminary and subsequent details on some 73 pages," laments the reviewer, while "the work of the Committee on Style rates something less than a page."55
Although academic reviewers were unappreciative, Time magazine's reviewer praises the book, embraces the personal life of this unusual Founder, and pitches the melding of psychological and sexual, the personal and political to its middle-class readership of 1950s America. The review in Time seems to have been heavily influenced by the cult of the bachelor in mid-twentieth-century America. Calling him a "Merrymaking Forefather," the reviewer praised the overly romantic and psychologized account and includes such lines as "But for Bachelor Morris, the cause of freedom was no reason to neglect the cause of love." Despite this review in Time magazine, Morris's place in public memory remained tenuous, allowing him to therefore be "rediscovered" yet again in later years.
In 1970, an academic historian attempts to rescue Morris from lack of recognition in a political biography that focuses on his most notable accomplishments. The book does not hide his affair with Adele de Flahaut, but in its two-paragraph description, the book does not characterize the relation-
ship as anything other than an affair with a married woman-as it was.56 Perhaps this is why academic reviewers called it "clear but unexciting."57 The author explains the happy marriage using sexual appeal and sexual drive: "He had had his share of conquests, and now, with an appreciation of the practical requirements of marriage, he had selected a compatible woman of youth, good looks, high birth, good education, and, if that much of her enemies' charges was true, lively sexuality." (Anne had been accused of "intimacy with a Negro slave, and of advances to a guest at the home of friends" in addition to giving birth to and destroying a child conceived with her sister's husband.)58
At the bicentennial, the popular American Heritage magazine ran a story on Morris, noting that he was "one of the most valuable of the Founding Fathers." It also masks his affair with Flahaut as a personal relationship with political overtones. Flahaut's relationship with Talleyrand is described, as is Flahaut's desire to marry Morris. But only someone familiar with this bachelor's relationship would have known of their own intimate connection. Flahaut and Talleyrand are, indeed, described as having an affair. Talleyrand is described as her "official lover," but Morris and Flahaut appear more like social intimates, once again presenting Morris as the chaste, but desirable, bachelor.59
A Founder Rediscovered
A recent move to explore and make accessible the lives of the more aristocratic Founders has opened up new public space for memorializing Morris. It is too soon to know the outcome for Morris's reputation from the recent publication of several biographies. In recent years, five biographies have been published about him. Reflecting our current discomfort over viewing the intimate lives of the political Founders of this country, the books capture our culture's tension between the overtly sexualized (yet superficial) and the continued emphasis on depersonalized political views.
Given the cultural shift toward incorporating personal lives into biography, the recent biographies all acknowledge the affair with Madame de Flahaut, although some do so with more emphasis than others. A recent biography by one academic historian attempts to place Morris among the pantheon of great men who founded the nation. Yet Morris's personal life is not obliterated in the hands of this biographer-a full chapter is devoted to explaining his affair with Madame de Flahaut.
At the same time, given its scholarly focus on his political world, James Kirschke's academic account appears to be an unlikely candidate for bringing Morris to the public. It spends few pages discussing the affair and characterizes it as follows: "They entertained each other in an amitie amoureuse, a romantic friendship, with the major emphasis on the amitie (friendship)." It also uses physical appeal both to capture the reader's attention and to explain his self-indulgences: "As regards female charms, he seems to have felt that the only way to get rid of temptation was to yield to it."60
The most popular of these five twenty-first-century books capitalizes on Morris's sexual life. In 2004, a journalist published Gentleman Revolutionary: Gouverneur Morris, the Rake Who Wrote the Constitution. With its emphasis on Morris's sexual and romantic life, the account is by the far the more popular read.' Yet the characterization of Morris as a "rake" is problematic and underscores the troubling nature of Morris's affair with Madame de Flahaut. If one were to characterize it as mundane, Morris would become the Founder who endorsed nonmarital and extramarital relationships as realistic possibilities for American manhood. To characterize him as a rake is remarkably less subversive, because it mobilizes a sensationalism that one need not take seriously as a model of American life. Robert Lovelace, one of the most famous rakes of the eighteenth century, is a character in the bestselling novel Clarissa. Lovelace is typically misogynist, has no intentions of providing joy for his lover, and focuses solely on the quantity of his conquests and his pride-a character type quite far from Morris.
Morris rarely describes himself as a seducer in his writing. It is true that predatory men, then as now, view themselves as merely enacting a model of male sexual prowess that entails seduction and coercion. Yet, Lovelace also continually uses derogatory terms to describe Clarissa (witch), and such men, both fictional and real, nearly always reveal the use of force. The description of Morris as a rake has found its way into other works. Although a recent book on the intimate lives of the Founders does not include a chapter on Morris, he is referenced once-as "Gotham's best known rake" in a chapter on Hamilton.62 Morris, however, never mentions pleasure at forced conquest, nor does he quantify his experiences in a way that suggests his focus was on numbers of seduced and abandoned partners. At times, he specifically describes himself as unlike other men who cared not for women's interests in them. Describing dinner on one New Year's Eve, for example, he writes, "At Midnight the Gentlemen kiss the Ladies but I do not attempt this Operation because there is some resistance and I like only the yielding Kiss and that from Lips I love."63 The rake, as a type, self-servingly highlights his ability to bring pleasure, which is generally connected to quantities of women rather than long-term relationships, but notably for Morris, his pride at giving pleasure is not always focused on self but rather emphasizes mutuality ("we perform twice very well the pleasing act").64 In many diary entries, he uses "we" instead of "I" when referring to having sex.
Emphasizing the debauched headiness of the late eighteenth century, the conservative popular journal the National Review, for which Richard Brookhiser writes, loves the depiction of him as a rake in Brookhiser's account. It declares, "There is more good living, more elegant theater, and certainly more documented sexual seduction in Morris's life than in that of any other member of our republic's heroic generation. In feats of voluptuousness Morris was without a superior, perhaps without an equal; only Aaron Burr can possibly compete with him in attested gallantry in bedrooms and Parisian salons. But, unlike Burr, Morris found time, in between what he called his oblations to Venus, to write the Constitution of the United States." Sex makes for, well, sexy biography to contemporary readers. Yet for the reviewer, Morris's explicit writings could be reconciled with the other Founders only if depicted as French. "We are very far, here, from the severe neoclassicism usually associated with the founding generation," quips the reviewer. "Morris had forsaken the examples of Addison's Cato and the American Cincinnatus, General Washington, for the pretty, perfumed classicism of Boucher and Fragonard." Yet Morris was the product not of French culture but of New York and Ph
iladelphia as well as any European urban center. And his diaries reveal that his philandering was not awakened or limited to his time in France. Morris's behavior and identity were the product of the elite cosmopolitan pleasure culture of the late-eighteenth-century Atlantic World that the Founders inhabited.
His Body
The recent popular and academic biographies of Morris self-consciously take as their goal securing public recognition of an overlooked Founder. Writing in an era of skepticism for yet another celebratory account of an elite white man, the authors are also able to use sex and disability to make Morris seem ordinary, vulnerable, and sympathetic. Drawing on earlier depictions, his sexuality and disability are frequently linked, with many accounts celebrating his sexual prowess and portraying his disability as a potential hurdle that he cleared.
Part of this project is that Morris's body is imagined to be an appealing one. Kirschke's recent academic account briefly describes Morris's desirability and his physical attributes: "That many women could not resist his charm quickly becomes apparent to anyone studying the period. By all reports, as well as by the evidence provided in the surviving portraits, Morris was a big man, with a heavy, sensual face, a large nose, a broad forehead, and a worldly manner."" Recent popular biography also takes this approach. Brookhiser writes that at six feet tall, Morris had an "imposing physical stature." And he notes, "He rarely paid for sex." This attraction apparently transcends time. Commenting on an image of Morris, the book explains, "Women of the twenty-first century who see the picture say they would like to meet the subject."66
Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past (Sexuality Studies) Page 21