8. As Berlant argues, Americans have been engaged in an accelerated "process of collapsing the political and the personal into a world of public intimacy." Berlant, The Queen of America, 1.
9. Headlined a "Self-Portrait of Founding Father's Penis Discovered in 18th Century Letter to Woman," it explains, "Painted with oil paint on canvas, the 220 year-old pic ture features a fully erect Washington standing beside his horse, the fabric of his trousers straining to accommodate the force of his engorged phallus, and was accompanied by a letter peppered with arcane sexual references." Attempting to shock, the article continues by quoting from the alleged document: "`My hickory stick yearns for the purchase of your fertile soil"; see www.newsmutiny.com/pages/Founding-Fathers-Penis.html.
10. Alyssa Bereznak, "Christopher Hitchens on The Daily Show: Sparring with Jon Stewart over the Years," VF Daily, December 16, 2011, available at www.vanityfair.com/ online/daily/20 11/11 /Christopher-Hitchens--on-iThe-Daily-Showi - Sparring-with-JonStewart-Over-the-Years.
11. Larry Flynt and David Eisenbach, One Nation under Sex: How the Private Lives of Presidents, First Ladies, and Their Lovers Changed the Course of American History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 201 1); Virginia Scharff, The Women Jefferson Loved (New York: HarperCollins, 20 10); Charles Callan Tansill, The Secret Loves of the Founding Fathers: The Romantic Side of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Gouverneur Morris, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Devin-Adair, 1964). On the eroticization of modern culture, see Paul Rutherford, A World Made Sexy: Freud to Madonna (Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2007); on normative sexuality, see Gayle S.Rubin, "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality," in Deviations, 1 37-181.
Scharff focuses on women whom Jefferson loved because it "informed his greatest achievements and glowed at the heart of his vision of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Scharff, The Women Jefferson Loved, 384. On love between men in Jefferson's time, see Caleb Crain, American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); Caleb Crain, "Leander, Lorenzo, and Castalio: An Early American Romance," in Foster, Long before Stonewall, 217-252; Richard Godbeer, The Overflowing ofFriendsbip: Love between Men and the Creation of the American Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); and John Salliant, "The Black Body Erotic and the Republican Body Politic, 1790-1820," in Foster, Long before Stonewall, 303-330.
12. Thomas Fleming, The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2009).
13. Wesley O.Hagood, Presidential Sex: From the Founding Fathers to Bill Clinton (1996; repr., New York: Citadel Press, 1998).
14. Michael Farquhar, A Treasury of Great American Scandals: Tantalizing True Tales of Historic Misbehavior by the Founding Fathers and Others Who Let Freedom Swing (New York: Penguin, 2003), xi.
15. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 13, 115-146, 234-259.
16. Lois W.Banner, "`Biography as History' Roundtable: Historians and Biography," American Historical Review 114, no. 3 (June 2009): 583.
17. Available at http://constitutioncenter.org/FoundersQuiz/.
18. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). For a counter to the narrative of progress that Americans hold, see, for example, John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
19. As a cultural history of popular memory, this book is a history of the stories that Americans have told themselves about the intimate lives of the Founders. Scholars have also referred to this approach as the study of "historical consciousness," "historical memory," and "popular historymaking." See Rosenzweig and Thelen, The Presence of the Past, 3. See also Joyce Appleby, A Restless Past: History and the American Public (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005); Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed, IfMemory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 20 1 1), 2, 11, 27; and Foucault, The History of Sexuality. On memory and on cultural uses of history, see also, for example, Mark C.Carnes, ed., Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America's Past (and Each Other) (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001); Jean M. Humez, Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003); Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory; Michael Kammen, A Season of Youth: The American Revolution and the Historical Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978); Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes; Milton C. S ernett, Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Warren I. S usman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (1973; repr., New York: Pantheon Books, 1984); David D.Van Tassel, Recording America's Past: An Interpretation of the Development of Historical Studies in America, 1607-1884 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); and Alfred F.Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999).
20. Van Tassel, Recording Americas Past, 75.
21. On a nineteenth-century "ideology of heroism" and the later development of trading heroes for celebrities, see, for example, Peter H.Gibbon, A Call to Heroism: Renewing America's Vision of Greatness (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2002), 18-35, 90-100.
Traditionally, the genre has been derided by academic historians for being "insufficiently analytical." See Scott E.Casper, ConstructingAmerican Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 327. See also Jill Lepore, "Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography," Journal of American History 88, no. 1 (June 2001), available at www.historycooperative.org/ cgi-bin/justtop.cgi?act=justtop&url=http:// www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/88.1/ lepore.html (accessed February 26, 2010). On academic historians and biography, see AHR Roundtable, "Historians and Biography," American Historical Review (June 2009): 573- 614.
22. On the history of sexuality in America, see, for example, D'Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters; and Kevin White, Sexual Liberation or Sexual License? The American Revolt against Victorianism (Chicago: Dee, 2000).
23. Nancy Isenberg, "The `Little Emperor': Aaron Burr, Dandyism, and the Sexual Politics of Treason," in Pasley, Robertson, and Waldstreicher, Beyond the Founders, 130.
24. Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes, 16.
25. Paul M.Zall, Benjamin Franklin's Humor (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006).
26. Richard Brookhiser, Gentleman Revolutionary: Gouverneur Morris, the Rake Who Wrote the Constitution (New York: Free Press, 2003).
CHAPTER I
1. David Hackett Fischer, Washington's Crossing (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006).
2. Richard Lacayo, with an introduction by Joseph J.Ellis, "George Washington: How the Great Uniter Helped Create the United States," Time (special issue, 2011): 40-41.
3. Michael King, "The Battle of Washington's Bulge," Austin Chronicle, November 22, 2002.
4. The literature on George Washington is enormous. A number of books focus on the construction of his image. See, for example, Marcus Cunliffe, George Washington, Man and Monument (Boston: Little, Brown, 1958); Francois Furstenberg, In the Name of the Father: Washington's Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation (New York: Penguin, 2006); Don Higginbotham, ed., George Washington Reconsidered (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001); Barry Schwartz, George Washington: The Making of an American Symbol (New York: Free Press, 1987); and Harlow G.Unger, The Unexpected George Washington: His Private Life (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2006).
See also John E.Ferling, The First of Men: A Life of George Washington (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988); Paul Leland Haworth, George Washington: Country Gentleman (1915; repr., Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1925); Rupert Hughes,
George Washington: The Human Being and the Hero, 1732-1762 (New York: William Morrow, 1926); and Elswyth Thane, Washington's Lady (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1960).
5. Daily Advertiser (London), January 25, 1783; image from Rambler's Magazine (London), April 1, 1783. See also Patricia Bonomi, Lord Cornbury Scandal: The Politics of Reputation in British America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 25-26; and John C.Fitzpatrick, "The George Washington Scandals," Bulletin No. 1 of the Washington Society of Alexandria, 1929.
6. James Thomas Flexner, "Washington Mythology," American Heritage 41, no. 1 (February 1990): 107.
7. Fitzpatrick, "The George Washington Scandals."
8. See Alice Curtis Desmond, Martha Washington: Our First Lady (New York: Dodd, 1942), 142.
9. By the end of the eighteenth century, items still appeared in newspapers that suggested a link between Freemasonry and a deviant sexual disposition. Critics of the Freemasons denigrated them as men who lacked a normative desire for women and deviated from heterosociability. See Thomas A.Foster, Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man: Massachusetts and the History of Sexuality in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 169-173.
10. See for example, Thomas A.Foster, "Deficient Husbands: Manhood, Sexual Incapacity, and Male Marital Sexuality in Seventeenth-Century New England," William and Mary Quarterly 56 (October 1999): 723-744; Foster, Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man; Anne S.Lombard, Making Manhood: Growing Up Male in Colonial New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Elaine Tyler May, Barren in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1994); and Lisa Wilson, Ye Heart ofa Man: The Domestic Life of Men in Colonial New England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).
11. Kathleen M.Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 303, 337; Foster, "Deficient Husbands."
12. On Washington and political self-fashioning, see, for example, Paul K.Longmore, The Invention of George Washington (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
13. Letter to George Augustine Washington, October 25, 1786, in Theodore J. Crackel, ed., The Papers of George Washington, Digital Edition, available at http://rotunda .upress.virginia.edu/founders/GEWN.html; William M.S.Rasmussen and Robert S.Tilton, George Washington: The Man behind the Myths (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999), 99.
14. Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in NineteenthCentury America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 3.
15. Gordon S.Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different (New York: Penguin, 2006), 51.
16. Richard Brookhiser, Founding Father. Rediscovering George Washington (New York: Free Press, 1996), 164-165.
17. Charles Moore, The Family Life of George Washington (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926), 123.
18. Ruth Miller Elson, Guardians of Tradition: American Schoolbooks of the Nineteenth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1972), 194-195.
19. Gouverneur Morris, An Oration Upon the Death of General Washington (New York: John Furman, 1800), 8. On early veneration of Washington, see, for example, Andrew S. Trees, The Founding Fathers and the Politics of Character (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 135-146.
20. Mason Weems, A History of the Life and Death Virtues and Exploits of General George Washington (New York: Grosser and Dunlap, 1927), 8.
21. Furstenberg, In the Name of the Father, 75-76.
22. Elson, Guardians of Tradition, 201-202.
23. James Kirk Paulding, The Life of Washington (Aberdeen, UK: Clark, 1848), 60. 24. Weems, A History of the Life and Death, 90.
25. Scott E.Casper, ConstructingAmerican Lives: Biography and Culture in NineteenthCentury America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 12.
26. Ibid., 69.
27. Ibid., 29, 35.
28. On public reception of the statue of Washington by Horatio Greenough, see Peter H.Gibbon, A Call to Heroism: Renewing America's Vision of Greatness (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2002), 87-89.
29. Casper, Constructing American Lives, 8-9.
30. R.B.Bernstein, The Founding Fathers Reconsidered (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009), 125.
31. Jared Sparks, The Writings of George Washington, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1837), 1:78.
32. Ibid., 1:106.
33. John Marshall, The Life of George Washington, Commander in Chief of the American Forces, during the War Which Established the Independence of His Country, and First President of the United States, 5 vols. (1804; repr. Fredericksburg, VA: The Citizen's Guild of Washington's Boyhood Home, 1926), 2:52.
34. Washington Irving, Life of George Washington, 4 vols. (New York: Putnam, 1856), 1: 211, 1:253.
35. Casper, Constructing American Lives, 20.
36. Irving, Life of George Washington, I:pref.
37. New York Herald, March 30, 1877. Letter to Sarah Cary Fairfax, September 12, 1758, in Crackel, The Papers of George Washington, Digital Edition, available at http://ro tunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/GEWN.html.
38. Weems, A History of the Life and Death, 373-374.
39. Benson John Lossing, Mary and Martha: The Mother and the Wife of George Washington (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1886), 121-122.
40. Rosemarie Zagarri, ed., David Humphreys' "Life of General Washington" (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 37.
41. Henry Cabot Lodge, George Washington (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889), 107108.
42. Paul Leicester Ford, The True George Washington (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1898), 96.
43. Rasmussen and Tilton, George Washington, 93.
44. Woodrow Wilson, George Washington (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1896), 93.
45. Casper, Constructing American Lives, 9.
46. Daily Commercial (Cincinnati), March 28, 1871.
47. "The Son of Washington," St. Louis (MO) Daily Globe-Democrat, April 21, 1886. See also Fitzpatrick, "The George Washington Scandals."
48. Fitzpatrick, "The George Washington Scandals."
49. Wilson, George Washington, 101.
50. Ford, The True George Washington, 84.
51. Lodge, George Washington, 92.
52. Ibid., 96-97.
53. Casper, Constructing American Lives, 315.
54. Fitzpatrick, "The George Washington Scandals."
55. Kevin White, The First Sexual Revolution: The Emergence ofMale Heterosexuality in Modern America (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 13. See also John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
56. Lacayo, "George Washington," 14, 22.
57. Letter to Sarah Cary Fairfax, May 16, 1798, in Crackel, The Papers of George Washington, Digital Edition, available at http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/GEWN .html.
58. Rebecca Earle, ed., Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter-Writers, 1600-1945 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1999), 7. Historians and literary scholars have argued that letters are performative and illustrate the construction of a self, rather than being simply transparent "documents" to be taken at face value. They are "texts" full of multiple layers of meaning and production of meaning. See, for example, Toby L.Ditz, "Formative Ventures: Eighteenth-Century Commercial Letters and the Articulation of Experience," in Earle, Epistolary Selves, 59-78.
59. See, for example, Thomas Fleming, The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2009), 4-5.
60. Hughes, George Washington, 178.
61. Meade Minnigerode, Some American Ladies: Seven Informal Biographies (1926; repr., Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), 9.
62. Sally Nelson Robins, Love Stories of Famous Virginians, 2nd ed.
(Richmond, VA: Dietz Printing, 1925), 21, 23, 34; italics original.
63. Peter Gay, ed., introduction and "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality," in The Freud Reader (New York: Norton, 1989), 239-292. See also D'Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters.
64. Hughes, George Washington, 410, 488-489.
65. Eugene E.Prussing, George Washington in Love and Otherwise (Chicago: Pascal Covici, 1925), 3, 21.
66. John C.Fitzpatrick, George Washington Himself.•A Commonsense Biography Written from His Manuscripts (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1933), 42.
67. Prussing, George Washington, 32-33.
68. Douglas Southall Freeman, George Washington: A Biography, 7 vols. (New York: Scribner, 1948-1957), 2:338n75.
69. Fitzpatrick, George Washington Himself, 113-114, 110, 41.
70. Moore, The Family Life of George Washington, 84.
71. Hughes, George Washington, 477.
72. Prussing, George Washington, 22.
73. Moore, The Family Life of George Washington, 84.
74. Desmond, Martha Washington, 188. An earlier account claims that "the marriage was a failure in that there were no children" (Haworth, George Washington, 222).
75. Robins, Love Stories of Famous Virginians, 29. In 1960, Elswyth Thane's Washingtons Lady implies that Martha may have become infertile after having measles (28).
76. May, Barren in the Promised Land, 61; White, The First Sexual Revolution.
77. White, The First Sexual Revolution, 57.
78. May, Barren in the Promised Land, 11-12, 131-134, 136.
79. Fitzpatrick, George Washington Himself, 119.
80. Hughes, George Washington, 351.
81. Moore, The Family Life of George Washington, 55.
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