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 27
Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past (Sexuality Studies) Page 27

by Thomas A. Foster

68. Ibid., 426. See also Richard B.Morse, ed., Alexander Hamilton and the Founding of the Nation (New York: Dial Press, 1957), which is a longer version and contains all the same editor's explanations.

  69. Alexander Hamilton (2007).

  70. Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, 367. Mrs. Hamilton's devotion and the story of her not letting Monroe sit down when he came to visit her years later is the final passage of Randall's 2003 account. Randall, Alexander Hamilton, 424.

  71. Alexander Hamilton (2007).

  72. Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, 363, 203.

  73. Joseph A.Murray, Alexander Hamilton: America's Forgotten Founder (New York: Algora, 2007), preface.

  74. Alexander Hamilton (2007).

  75. Ibid.

  76. Murray, Alexander Hamilton, preface.

  77. Richard Brookhiser, Alexander Hamilton: American (New York: Free Press, 1999), 99.

  78. Murray, Alexander Hamilton, preface.

  79. Alexander Hamilton (2007).

  80. Murray, Alexander Hamilton, preface.

  81. Ibid.

  82. Thomas Fleming, The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2009), 229.

  83. Randall, Alexander Hamilton, 409. Notably, given Randall's depiction of Hamilton's affair as the product of his ego, he does not need to fall back on the portrayal of Hamilton as purely devoted to his wife (save for one "lapse"), and thus he writes freely of other "loves," including one Kitty Livingston from his youth and a nearly lifelong affair with his sister-in-law, Angelica Church.

  84. Godbeer, The Overflowing of Friendship, 127; see chap. 4.

  85. Sumner, Alexander Hamilton, 252, 105.

  86. Hamilton, Intimate Life, 242.

  87. Miller, Alexander Hamilton and the Growth of the New Nation, 22.

  88. Jonathan Katz, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (New York: Crowell, 1976), 452-456.

  89. Linda Rapp, "Alexander Hamilton," available at www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/ hamilton_a,3.html December 20, 2007; Hamilton, Intimate Life, 245, 241-242. See Caleb Crain, "Leander, Lorenzo, and Castalio: An Early American Romance," in Long before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America, ed. Thomas A.Foster (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 229. On same-sex romantic friendships in early America, see also Godbeer, The Overflowing ofFriendsbip.

  90. Available at www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-04-24/my-apology- to-yale/full/.

  91. William Benemann, Male-Male Intimacy in Early America: Beyond Romantic Friendships (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2006), 100.

  92. Fleming, Intimate Lives, 219.

  93. Hamilton, The Reynolds Pamphlet.

  CHAPTER 6

  1. Papers of Gouverneur Morris, original diary entry for October 11, 1789, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (hereafter Diary, LOC).

  2. Theodore Roosevelt, Gouverneur Morris (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1899), 364.

  3. William Howard Adams, Gouverneur Morris: An Independent Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), xvi.

  4. Max M.Mintz, Gouverneur Morris and the American Revolution (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970); Roosevelt, Gouverneur Morris; Jared Sparks, The life of Gouverneur Morris: with selections from his correspondence and miscellaneous papers; detailing events in the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and in the political history of the United States, 3 vols. (Boston: Gray and Bowen, 1832); Howard Swiggett, The Extraordinary Mr. Morris (New York: Doubleday, 1952).

  Morris's granddaughter and great-granddaughter published selected letters and edited diaries. Gouverneur Morris, A Diary of the French Revolution, ed. Beatrix Cary Davenport, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939); Anne Cary Morris, ed., The Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris, Minister of the United States to France; Member of the Constitutional Convention, 2 vols. (New York: Scribner, 1888).

  5. Adams, Gouverneur Morris; Richard Brookhiser, Gentleman Revolutionary: Gouverneur Morris, the Rake Who Wrote the Constitution (New York: Free Press, 2003); James J. Kirschke, Gouverneur Morris: Author, Statesman, and Man of the World (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2005); Melanie Miller, Envoy to the Terror: Gouverneur Morris and the French Revolution (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2006); and Melanie Miller, An Incautious Man: The Life of Gouverneur Morris (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2008).

  6. Adams, Gouverneur Morris, xi.

  7. Kirschke, Gouverneur Morris, 13.

  8. See Alan Crawford, Un wise Passions-A True Story of a Remarkable Woman-and the First Great Scandal of Eighteenth-Century America (New York: Simon a nd S chus ter, 2005). See also Christopher L. Doyle, "The Randolph Scandal in Early National Virgiia,n 1792-1815: New Voices in the "Court of Honour," Journal of Southern History 69 (2003): 283-318.

  9. For a recent example, see Gordon S.Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different (New York: Penguin, 2006). For an overview of the controversy over what some see as a renewed hagiography of the Founding Fathers, see David Waldstreicher, "Founders Chic as Culture War," Radical History Review 84 (Fall 2002): 185-194.

  10. Thomas A.Foster, Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man: Massachusetts and the History of Sexuality in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006); Christopher Looby, "Republican Bachelorhood: Sex and Citizenship in the Early United States," Historical Reflections/ Reflexions Historiques 33 (Spring 2007): 89-100; Laura Mandell, "What's Sex Got to Do with It? Marriage versus Circulation in the Pennsylvania Magazine, 1775-76," in Long before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America, ed. Thomas A.Foster (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 331-356; Dana D.Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in American Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Bryce Traister, "The Wandering Bachelor: Irving, Masculinity, and Authorship," American Literature 74 (2002): 111-137; and Scott Slawinski, Validating Bachelorhood: Audience, Patriarchy and Charles Brockden Brown 's Editorship of the Monthly Magazine and American Review (New York: Routledge, 2005). On disability and sexuality, see, for example, Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow, eds., Sex and Disability (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

  On bachelors in American culture, see, for example, Howard P.Chudacoff, The Age of the Bachelor: Creating an American Subculture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (New York: Anchor, 1987).

  11. Thomas A.Foster, "Reconsidering Libertines and Early Modern Heterosexuality: Sex and American Founder Gouverneur Morris," Journal of the History of Sexuality 22, no. 1 (January 2013): 65-84.

  12. Quoted in Brookhiser, Gentleman Revolutionary, 260.

  13. Nancy Isenberg, Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr (New York: Penguin, 2008).

  14. Mary E.Fissell, "Hairy Women and Naked Truths: Gender and the Politics of Knowledge in Aristotle's Masterpiece," William and Mary Quarterly 60 (January 2003): 60. See also Elaine Forman Crain, "`I Have Suffer'd Much Today': The Defining Force of Pain in Early America," in Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America, ed. Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and Fredrika J.Teute (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 370-403; Thomas A.Foster, "Recovering Washington's Body-Double: Disability and Manliness in the Life and Legacy of a Founding Father," Disability Studies Quarterly 2, no. 1 (January 2012); and David Waldstreicher, "The Long Arm of Benjamin Franklin," in Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prostbetics, ed. Katherine Ott, David Serlin, and Stephen Mihm (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 300-326; and Thomas A.Foster, "Recovering Washington's Body-Double: Disability and Manliness in the Life and Legacy of a Founding Father," Disability Studies Quarterly 2, no. 1 (January 2012).

  15. Hal Gladfelder, "Plague Spots," in Turner and Stagg, Social Histories of Disability, 56.

  16. David M.Turner and Kevin
Stagg, eds., Social Histories ofDisability and Deformity (London: Routledge, 2006), 4-8, 57.

  17. Turner and Stagg, Social Histories, 57.

  18. Kirschke, Gouverneur Morris, 119 ; italics original.

  19. Mintz, Gouverneur Morris, 141.

  20. Morris, A Diary of the French Revolution, 2:247.

  21. Diary, LOC, March 19, 1791.

  22. Morris, Diary and Letters, 1:165.

  23. Paul Longmore, Wby I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 20. Disability scholars remind us, for example, that places like Chicago in the twentieth century passed ordinances restricting the movement of disabled individuals in public, most notably the poor and homeless.

  24. See, for example, William L.Chew, III, "`Straight' Sam Meets `Lewd' Louis: American Perceptions of French Sexuality, 1775-1815," in Revolutions and Watersheds: Transatlantic Dialogues, 1775-1815, ed. W.M.Verhoeven and Beth Dolan Kautz (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 61-86.

  25. Morris enjoyed a reputation for being a ladies' man even in his early twenties in America. See, for example, Adams, Gouverneur Morris, 29. On late-eighteenth-century urban centers, see, for example, Richard Godbeer, 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 Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2006). See also Isenberg, Fallen Founder, 233-235.

  26. Miller, Envoy to the Terror, xi.

  27. Steven Kale, French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 2; Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). On connections between politics and sexuality, see, for example, Lynn Hunt, ed., Eroticism and the Body Politic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).

  28. Kale, French Salons, 3.

  29. Ibid., 7.

  30. On women, salons, and the development of the public sphere in France, see, for example, Roger Chartier, ed., The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lydia G.Cochrane (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991); Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); Joan B.Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); and Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Celebres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

  31. Morris, A Diary of the French Revolution, 2:165.

  32. The Papers of Gouverneur Morris, original diary entry for May 18, 1791, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (hereafter Diary, LOC). All of this is deleted by Davenport and only available to us from the original diaries.

  33. Diary, LOC, February 12, 1791.

  34. Diary, LOC, August 10, 1791. For other examples, see also entries for October 10, 16, 1791; December 9, 1791; and January 1, 1792.

  35. Diary, LOC, July 30, 1791.

  36. Diary, LOC, June 15, 1792.

  37. Diary, LOC, May 18, 1791.

  38. The Cyprian Queen is a reference to Venus or Aphrodite; italics original.

  39. John H.Summers, "What Happened to Sex Scandals? Politics and Peccadilloes, Jefferson to Kennedy," Journal of American History 87, no. 3 (December 2000): 825-854. On biography, see Scott E.Casper, Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). On print culture and national identity in the early Republic, see, for example, Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993); Christopher Looby, VoicingAmerica: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) ; and Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (1990; repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

  40. Sparks, The Life of Gouverneur Morris, 1:295.

  41. Henry Bertram Hill, review of Gouverneur Morris, A Diary of the French Revolution, ed. Beatrix Cary Davenport, Journal of Modern - History 12 (March 1940): 103-104. Yet this reviewer could not refrain from adding his own moralizing, remarking that the affair was "a thing which robbed him of a part of his character."

  42. Roosevelt, Gouverneur Morris, 26-27.

  43. See, for example, Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

  44. Roosevelt, Gouverneur Morris, 197.

  45. Ibid., 204-205.

  46. Morris, Diary of the French Revolution, 1:284-285.

  47. Diary LOC, November 4, 1789.

  48. Diary LOC, April 12, 1789.

  49. Chudacoff, The Age of the Bachelor; John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Ehrenreich, The Hearts ofMen.

  50. Swiggett, The Extraordinary Mr. Morris, 2, 5.

  51. Ibid., 258, 179.

  52. Ibid., 4.

  53. Ibid., 209, 317, 319, 181, 92.

  54. The Extraordinary Mr. Morris by Howard Swiggett, reviewed by Gordon B.Turner, William and Mary Quarterly 9, no. 4 (October 1952): 571-572. See also the review by Burke M.Hermann, Pennsylvania History 20 (January 1953): 108-109.

  55. John P.Frank, review of The Extraordinary Mr. Morris by Howard Swiggett, Yale Law journal 6l (1952): 1227-1231.

  56. Mintz, Gouverneur Morris and tbe American Revolution.

  57. Charles W.Akers, review of Gouverneur Morris and the American Revolution, Journal of American History 58 (Fall 1971): 440-441.

  58. Mintz, Gouverneur Morris, 234, 236.

  59. Arnold Whitridge, "A Representative ofAmerica," American Heritage 27 (June 1976).

  60. Kirschke, Gouverneur Morris, 209, xxiv.

  61. Brookhiser misunderstands some of Davenport's ellipses. Combining the desperate events of the French Revolution with the budding romance, he remarks, "Less than a week after his encounter with Foulon's dismembered corpse, Morris made love for the first time to Adele de Flahaut. Recording the event in his diary, he was unusually laconic, slipping behind the mask of three dots." Brookhiser, Gentleman Revolutionary, 1 11.

  62. Thomas Fleming, The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2009), 225.

  63. Diary, LOC, December 31, 1789. Melanie Miller similarly points out that Morris "liked and respected women." Miller, An Incautious Man, 97.

  64. Diary, LOC, May 28, 1791.

  65. Kirschke, Gouverneur Morris, xxiv.

  66. Brookhiser, Gentleman Revolutionary, 11, 61.

  67. Mintz, Gouverneur Morris and tbe American Revolution.

  68. Available at www.constitutioncenter.org/explore/FoundingFathers/Pennsylvania. shtml.

  (accessed July 8, 2008).

  69. Available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gouverneur-Morris (accessed January 17, 2007).

  70. Available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gouverneur_Morris (accessed April 16, 2009).

  CONCLUSION

  1. See, for example, Joseph Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 18; and Douglass Adair, Fame and the Founding Fathers (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1974), ch. 1.

  2. Joseph Ellis, First Family: Abigail and john (New York: Vintage, 2010), ix.

  3. Ibid., 255.

  4. For an excellent example of work that carefully
reminds readers that love and marriage are historically contingent, see Virginia Scharff, The Women Jefferson Loved (New York: HarperCollins, 2010).

  5. Ibid., 217.

  6. Thomas Jefferson, for example, has most recently been the subject of discussion about sexual relations between slave-owning Founding Fathers and their slaves-but oral histories also testify to George Washington and James Madison as fathers of enslaved descendants. On Washington, see, for example, Henry Wiencek, An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation ofAmerica (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003). On James Madison, see, for example, the work of Betty Kearse. Jonathan Mummolo, "African American Seeks to Prove a Genetic Link to James Madison," Washington Post Monday, June 11, 2007.

  7. 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: A Gayle Rubin Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 137-181.

  Abbott, John Stevens Cabot. Benjamin Franklin. New York: University Society, 1876.

  Adair, Douglass. Fame and the Founding Fathers. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1974.

  Adams, Charles Francis. The Works ofjobn Adams. Boston: Little, Brown, 1856.

  Adams, William Howard. Gouverneur Morris: An Independent Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003.

  The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997.

  Alexander Hamilton. Documentary film. American Experience series. PBS, 2007.

  Amory, John K. "George Washington's Infertility: Why Was the Father of Our Country Never a Father?" Fertility and Sterility 81, no. 3 (March 2004): 495-499.

  Anderson, John E., et al., "Infertility Services Reported by Men in the United States: National Survey Data." Fertility and Sterility 91, no. 6 (June 2009): 2466-2470.

  Appleby, Joyce. A Restless Past: History and the American Public. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.

  Thomas Jefferson. New York: Times Books, 2003.

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

 

‹ Prev