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

Home > Other > Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past (Sexuality Studies) > Page 26
Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past (Sexuality Studies) Page 26

by Thomas A. Foster


  84. Available at www.rememberingtheladies.com/Rememberingtheladies/AbigailAdams.html.

  85. Ellis, First Family, 3, 108.

  CHAPTER 4

  1. H.W.Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Doubleday, 2000); Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003), 216-217; and Gordon S.Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Penguin, 2005). For an analysis of slavery figured into Franklin's Americanness, see David Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004).

  2. Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin.

  3. Ibid., 2.

  4. Thomas Fleming, The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2009), 77, 103.

  5. Paul M.Zall, Benjamin Franklin's Humor (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005), 1. For an early-twentieth-century biography that depicts Franklin's flirtatiousness as charming and nonthreatening, see Benjamin Franklin, Dr. Benjamin Franklin and the Ladies: Being Various Letters, Essays, and Bagatelles and Satires to and about the Fair Sex (Mount Vernon, NY: Peter Pauper Press, 1939). The title page reads, "collected for the Public Delight." The text includes the at-times controversial "Speech of Polly Baker" and "Choice of a Mistress."

  6. Claude-Anne Lopez, My Life with Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 24.

  7. Larry E.Tise, ed., Benjamin Franklin and Women (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), ix-x.

  8. On Franklin, see, for example, Carla Mumford, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Franklin (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

  9. Gordon S.Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different (New York: Penguin, 2006), 101.

  10. Quoted in Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin, 216-217. See J.Philip Gleason, "A Scurrilous Colonial Election and Franklin's Reputation," William and Mary Quarterly 18 (January 1961): 79-80.

  11. Quoted in Sydney George Fisher, The True Benjamin Franklin (1898; repr., Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1900), 107-108.

  12. Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin, 329.

  13. On the Chevalier D'Eon, see Gary Kates, Monsieur D'Eon Is a Woman: A Tale of Political Intrigue and Sexual Masquerade (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

  14. John Jay's Correspondence, vol. 1, April 27, 1780, 311.

  15. David Schoenbrun, Triumph in Paris: The Exploits of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 197.

  16. Ruth Miller Elson, Guardians of Tradition: American Schoolbooks of the Nineteenth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 191-192.

  17. Scott E.Casper, ConstructingAmerican Lives: Biography and Culture in NineteentbCentury America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 90-91.

  18. Leonard W.Labaree et al., eds., The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 125-126; italics original.

  19. Wood, Revolutionary Characters, 88.

  20. Although, as Ruth Miller Elson argues, Franklin is often used in schoolbooks to depict the self-made man, other scholars are correct to point out that Franklin is not universally celebrated. Political scientist Jerry Weinberger reminds us that his "reputation did not always fly so high." Among his most famous early critics are such influential writers as Max Weber, D.H.Lawrence, and Charles Angoff, who considered him to be "shallow at best and as a full-blown philistine at worst." Jerry Weinberger, Benjamin Franklin Unmasked: On the Unity of His Moral, Religious, and Political Thought (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005), ix.

  21. Edwin S.Gaustad, Benjamin Franklin (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006), 11-12.

  22. Introduction to Memoirs of the Late Dr. Franklin (London: 1790).

  23. Carla Mulford, "Franklin, Women, and American Cultural Myths," in Benjamin Franklin and Women, ed. Larry E.Tise (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 105-106.

  24. The next several paragraphs draw on Nian-Sheng Huang, Benjamin Franklin in American Thought and Culture, 1790-1990 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1994); and Tise, Benjamin Franklin and Women, introduction.

  25. Quoted in Tise, Benjamin Franklin and Women, 9.

  26. Ibid.

  27. Ellen Carol DuBois, ed., Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B.Anthony: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), 137; Mulford, "Franklin, Women, and American Cultural Myths," 115-117.

  28. Quoted in Fisher, The True Benjamin Franklin, 127-128.

  29. Tise, Benjamin Franklin and Women, 7.

  30. M.L.Weems, The Life of Benjamin Franklin (1829; repr., Philadelphia: Hunt, 1845), 155.

  31. John T.Morse, Benjamin Franklin (1889; repr., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1897), 15.

  32. Ibid., 16.

  33. John Bach McMaster, Benjamin Franklin as a Man of Letters (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1887), 45.

  34. John Stevens Cabot Abbott, Benjamin Franklin (New York: University Society, 1876), 80; italics original.

  35. Quoted in ibid., 99.

  36. Ibid., 111-112. For earlier accounts that are also explicit, see Orville Luther Holley, The Life of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Cooledge, 1848); Henry Stueber, The Works of Dr. Benjamin Franklin (Boston: Bedlington, 1825); and Horatio Hastings Weld, Benjamin Franklin: His Autobiography (New York: Harper, 1856).

  37. Frank Strong, Benjamin Franklin: A Character Sketch (Dansville, NY: Instructor Publishing, 1898).

  38. George Canning Hill, Benjamin Franklin: A Biography (New York: Worthington, 1888), 29.

  39. Frederick Jackson Turner, "Franklin in France," Dial, May 1887, 7, available at http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?view=image;size=100;id=mdp.39015030979556;page= root; seq= 19; num=7 (accessed February 14, 2012).

  40. Quoted in J.A.Leo Lemay and P.M.Zall, eds., Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism (New York: Norton, 1986), 276.

  41. Phillips Russell, Benjamin Franklin: The First Civilized American (1926; repr., New York: Brentano's, 1927).

  42. Ibid., 1.

  43. Morse, Benjamin Franklin, 420.

  44. Fisher, The True Benjamin Franklin, 121-122.

  45. Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin (New York: Viking Press, 1938), 90-94.

  46. E.Lawrence Dudley, Benjamin Franklin (New York: Macmillan, 1915).

  47. Frank Woodworth Pine, ed., The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Holt, 1916), 39.

  48. Paul Elmer More, Benjamin Franklin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900).

  49. Russell, Benjamin Franklin, 222-223.

  50. John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 234.

  51. Russell, Benjamin Franklin, 138.

  52. Tise, Benjamin Franklin and Women, 3.

  53. 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), 44-46.

  54. Schoenbrun, Triumph in Paris, 145.

  55. Russell, Benjamin Franklin, 31.

  56. Claude-Anne Lopez, Mon Cher Papa: Franklin and the Ladies ofParis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 19-20.

  57. Schoenbrun, Triumph in Paris, 59.

  58. Robert Middlekauff, Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 14.

  59. Lopez, Mon Cher Papa, x.

  60. Ibid., vii-viii. For an excellent analysis of this issue and an outline of how to remedy it, see Susan E.Klepp, "Benjamin Franklin and Women," in David Waldstreicher, A Companion to Benjamin Franklin (Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 237-252.

  61. Schoenbrun, Triumph in Paris, 137, 60.

  62. Quoted in Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin, 348.

  63. Tansill, The Secret Loves of the Founding Fathers, 51. For other examples of relati
vely recent popular depictions of a highly sexual Franklin, see Andrew M.Schocket, "Benjamin Franklin in Memory and Popular Culture," in Waldstreicher, A Companion to Benjamin Franklin, 479-498.

  64. Tansill, The Secret Loves of the Founding Fathers, 39-40.

  65. Fleming, Intimate Lives, 82.

  66. Weinberger, Benjamin Franklin Unmasked, 102-103.

  67. Paul M.Zall, Franklin on Franklin (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 100.

  68. Blaine McCormick, Ben Franklin, America's Original Entrepreneur: Franklin's Autobiography Adapted for Modern Times (Irvine, CA: Entrepreneur Press, 2005), 106.

  69. Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin, 72.

  70. Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, 32.

  71. Edmund S.Morgan, Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 45.

  72. Ibid., 112.

  73. Claude-Anne Lopez, "Three Women, Three Styles: Catharine Ray, Polly Hewson, and Georgiana Shipley," in Tise, Benjamin Franklin and Women, 51-52.

  74. "Ben Franklin Myths and Facts. An Interview with Historian J.A.Leo Lemay in the University of Delaware U Daily." Available at www.udel.edu/PR/UDaily/2005/mar/ franklin061605.htm1 (accessed April 10, 2009).

  75. Claude-Anne Lopez, "Why He Was a Babe Magnet," Time Magazine, July 7, 2003.

  76. Ibid.

  77. Tansill, The Secret Loves of the Founding Fathers, 78.

  78. Quoted in ibid., 79.

  79. Middlekauff, Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies, 15.

  80. Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin, 357.

  81. Quoted in ibid.

  82. Schoenbrun, Triumph in Paris, 143.

  83. Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin, 365.

  84. Lopez, "Why He Was a Babe Magnet."

  85. Lopez, Mon Cher Papa, 243.

  86. Middlekauff, Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies, 19.

  87. Ruth H.Bloch, Gender and Morality in Anglo-American Culture, 1650-1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 114-115.

  88. Mulford, "Franklin, Women, and American Cultural Myths," in Tise, Benjamin Franklin and Women, 111; italics original.

  89. Gaustad, Benjamin Franklin, 101-102.

  90. Middlekauff, Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies, 20, 116, 115.

  91. Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin, 357.

  92. Lopez, "Three Women, Three Styles," in Tise, Benjamin Franklin and Women, 51-52.

  CHAPTER 5

  1. Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Penguin, 2004); John Lamberton Harper, American Machiavelli: Alexander Hamilton and the Origins of U.S.Foreign Policy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Willard Sterne Randall, Alexander Hamilton: A Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).

  2. Alexander Hamilton, documentary film, American Experience series (PBS, 2007).

  3. Ibid.

  4. Available at www.alexanderhamiltonexhibition.org/index.html (accessed February 9, 2009).

  5. Jacob Katz Cogan, "The Reynolds Affair and the Politics of Character," Journal of the Early Republic 16, no. 3 (1996): 389-417. On Hamilton and honor, see Andrew S. Trees, The Founding Fathers and the Politics of Character (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 45-72.

  6. Alexander Hamilton, The Reynolds Pamphlet (Philadelphia, 1797).

  7. On the sexual culture of the late eighteenth century, see, for example, Richard Godb eer, Sexual Revolution in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); and Clare A.Lyons, Sex among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of the Revolution, Philade phia, 1730-1830 (Chap el Hill: Un ivers ity of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2006).

  8. Cogan, "The Reynolds Affair," 390, 392. On Hamilton's changing historiography, see Stephen F.Knott, Alexander Hamilton and the Persistence ofMyth (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002).

  9. See, for example, Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and John Chester Miller, The Federalist Era, 1789-1801 (New York: Harper & Row, 1960).

  10. Cogan, "The Reynolds Affair," 398.

  11. John Wood, A Correct Statement (New York: Hopkins, 1802), 9, as cited in Cogan, "The Reynolds Affair," 399. Cogan's analysis of the Reynolds affair highlights the gendered rhetoric of the controversy: "Republican reaction focused on the supposedly private concern of his alleged adultery," while "Federalists stressed Hamilton's masculine public virtue, his disinterested service to the nation, and feminine licentiousness" (400).

  12. Henry Jones Ford, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Scribner, 1920), 310.

  13. Johan Jacob Smertenko, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Greenberg, 1932), 105, 232, 107-108.

  14. Quoted in ibid., 105, 232, 107-108; italics original.

  15. Richard Godbeer, The Overflowing of Friendship: Love between Men and the Creation of the American Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 128.

  16. Fawn M.Brodie, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (New York: Norton, 1975), 265. On Jefferson-Hamilton, see, for example, Thomas J.DiLorenzo, Hamilton's Curse: How Jefferson's Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution-And What It Means for Americans Today (New York: Crown Forum, 2008).

  17. Forrest McDonald, Alexander Hamilton: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1979), 15.

  18. John C.Miller, Alexander Hamilton and the Growth of the New Nation (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959), 463-465.

  19. Smertenko, Alexander Hamilton, xii.

  20. McDonald, Alexander Hamilton, 229.

  21. John C.Hamilton, The Life ofAlexander Hamilton, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton, 1840-1841), 1:2.

  22. Henry Brevoort Renwick and James Renwick, Lives of john Jay and Alexander Hamilton (New York: Harper, 1840), 151

  23. Lewis Henry Boutell, Alexander Hamilton: The Constructive Statesman (Chicago: Privately Printed, 1890), 15. There is no mention of bastard status in Edward Sylvester Ellis, Graeme Mercer Adam, and Bernard John Cigrand, Alexander Hamilton: A Character Sketch (Chicago: Union School Furnishing, 1899); James Edward Graybill, Alexander Hamilton: Nevis-Weehawken (Lansing, MI: Press of Wynkoop Hallenbeck Crawford, 1898), 7; and George Shea, Alexander Hamilton: A Historical Study (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1877).

  24. William Graham Sumner, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1890), 1.

  25. Henry Cabot Lodge, Alexander Hamilton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1898), 1.

  26. Charles Arthur Conant, Alexander Hamilton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1901), 5-6.

  27. Allan McLane Hamilton, The Intimate Life of Alexander Hamilton (New York: Scribner, 1910), 1-2, 7, 10-11, 48.

  28. Quoted in ibid., 1-2, 7, 10-11, 48.

  29. William S.Culbertson, Alexander Hamilton: An Essay (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1911), preface.

  30. Smertenko, Alexander Hamilton, 9.

  31. Ralph Edward Bailey, An American Colossus: The Singular Career of Alexander Hamilton (Boston: Lothrop, Lee, and Shepard, 1933), 18.

  32. Smertenko, Alexander Hamilton, preface, xii, xiii.

  33. Miller, Alexander Hamilton and the Growth of the New Nation, 62.

  34. McDonald, Alexander Hamilton, 6.

  35. Arnold A.Rogow, A Fatal Friendship: Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998).

  36. Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, 367-368, 363.

  37. Renwick and Renwick, Lives of john jay and Alexander Hamilton, 303-304.

  38. Knott, Alexander Hamilton and the Persistence ofMyth.

  39. James Parton, Life of Thomas Jefferson (Boston: Osgood, 1874), 539.

  40. Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (New York: Doubleday, 2006).

  41. Parton, Life of Thomas Jefferson, 534.

  42. Ibid., 539, 534.

  43. Shea, Alexander Hamilton, 406, 405-407.

  44. John T.Morse, The Life of Alexander Hamilton, 2 vols. (Boston: Little Brown, 1882), 2:336-338.

  45. Lodge, Alex
ander Hamilton, 276.

  46. On folly, see Miller, Alexander Hamilton and the Growth of the New Nation, 463.

  47. Smertenko, Alexander Hamilton, 231.

  48. Bailey, An American Colossus, 213.

  49. 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), 179-182, 186.

  50. Broadus Mitchell, Heritage from Hamilton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), 39.

  51. Smertenko, Alexander Hamilton, 233.

  52. Tansill, The Secret Loves of the Founding Fathers, 204-205.

  53. Hamilton, Intimate Life, 116-117.

  54. Bailey, An American Colossus, 272-273.

  55. Richard B.Morris, ed., The Basic Ideas of Alexander Hamilton (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), 427.

  56. Tansill, The Secret Loves of the Founding Fathers, 210.

  57. Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton, The Conqueror: Being the True and Romantic Story ofAlexander Hamilton (Toronto, Canada: Morang, 1902), 371-372.

  58. Hamilton, Intimate Life, 60.

  59. Eugene E.Prussing, George Washington in Love and Otherwise (Chicago: Pascal Covici, 1925), 173-177.

  60. Bailey, An American Colossus, 272.

  61. Tansill, The Secret Loves of the Founding Fathers, 197-198, 209.

  62. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 58-61.

  63. Frederick Scott Oliver, Alexander Hamilton, an Essay on American Union (New York: G.P.Putnam's Sons, 1907), 389.

  64. Ford, Alexander Hamilton, 310.

  65. Ibid., 312-313. For another early-twentieth-century biography that lauds Hamilton's "moral courage" and points to his having "vindicated his official honor" by confessing to the affair, see Claude Gernade Bowers, Jefferson and Hamilton: The Struggle for Democracy in America (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 34, 190.

  66. Nathan Schachner, Alexander Hamilton, Nation Builder (New York: McGrawHill, 1952), 174.

  67. Morse, The Basic Ideas ofAlexander Hamilton, 427.

 

‹ Prev