Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past (Sexuality Studies) (4 page)

Collectively, these stories show how gendered sexuality has long figured
in our national identity via the public memory of the political leaders of the
American Revolution. By tracing these histories of public memory, we are
confronted with how blurred the line has long been between sex and politics
in memories of the Founders and how sex has helped tie an ever-diversifying
American public to a handful of staid, elite, white, eighteenth-century men.

Figure 1.1 (above). Portrait of George Washington. (George Washington, the First Good
President, 1846. Gilbert Charles Stuart. Oil on canvas, 1797.)

F ALL THE FOUNDERS, George Washington (Figure 1.1) is at
once the most familiar and the most mythologized. As the unwavering general of the colonial army and the first president of the
Republic, he cuts a commanding figure in American memory. When we see
Washington in our mind's eye, we recall the iconography that depicts him
as a gentleman, a hero, a paragon of personal and civic virtue; we see the
very picture of American manhood at its best. The persistence of such toogood-to-be-true images says something about the ongoing project of national
mythmaking and a common belief in the idea of an essential national character.

Take Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze's painting Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851), for example. Washington stands tall and firm near the prow of
a crowded boat in rough waters; only the tousled American flag behind him
stands taller than he in the fierce wind. He is resolute and powerful, leaving
no doubt about who is in charge. Small wonder, then, that this painting has
been used in so many accounts of the nation's difficult birth and Washing ton's emergence as its hero. We have seen it so many times that we sometimes
fail to really see it, just as we lose sight of its mythic properties.

In 2006, a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of General Washington's
early military campaign in the Revolution dazzled Americans with its
heroic story. The attractive book cover, featuring a version of Leutze's
famous nineteenth-century painting Washington Crossing the Delaware
(Figure 1.2) painted by one of his students, Eastman Johnson, captures
in vivid color the richness of the story.' The central figure of the general
standing at the front of a small boat illustrates the valiant image of Washington that is described within the book's pages. The painting itself is a
national treasure. Eastman's version of Leutze's masterpiece is an interesting choice; it alters a variety of aspects of the original, including a detail
that most might not know-the omission of Washington's ornamental
watch fob, which in the original painting is gold and red, dangling closely
to his crotch (Figure 1.3). Presumably, for Eastman and for contemporary
audiences, the object risks taking attention away from the man and the
gravitas of the moment and instead bestows it on something trivial and
irrelevant, even unseemly.

Eastman Johnson's copy is perhaps more in circulation today than
Leutze's original. A 2011 special issue of Time magazine devoted to the life of
George Washington contains a centerfold reproduction of the famous painting, again with the fob missing.' Georgia school administrators might have
saved themselves a headache had they been able to ensure that the publisher
of their textbooks went with the Johnson version instead of the original
Leutze: In 1999, a Georgia school district instructed teacher's aides to erase
the image of the fob by hand-painting twenty-three hundred fifth-grade
textbooks. In another county, they tore the page from thousands of copies
of the book. In 2002, several editions of an American history high school
textbook that contains the image of Leutze's nineteenth-century masterpiece
were also altered because administrators feared that it would draw attention
to this private area of Washington's body or, worse, might actually appear to
be his manhood, exposed.'

It might strike some readers as odd for me to begin a book on sex and the
Founders with a chapter on George Washington. The depiction of Washington as a desexualized statesman is certainly familiar to Americans. He
does not come to mind immediately when one tries to think of anecdotes
related to sex and the Founding Fathers-certainly not in the same breath
as Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson. Yet inquiry into the private life
of Washington is centuries old, and the discussions highlight how sex has
long been a component of American masculinity. Moreover, while the stories themselves are interesting, they also reveal to us the long-term interconnectedness of sexuality and national identity in public memory of the Founders.

Sex Scandals of the Eighteenth Century

Sexual interruptions to Washington's stately image did not originate in the
twenty-first century's sex-saturated media-driven culture, in the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, in the Victorian era, or even in the early nineteenth
century. In his own lifetime, Washington was no stranger to sex scandals.

Born in Virginia in 1732, Washington was a surveyor and planter before
becoming a lieutenant colonel in the French and Indian War. After the war,
he resumed his life as an elite planter and married the wealthiest widow in
Virginia, Martha Custis. During the American Revolution, he served as general of the Continental Army. He became the first president of the United
States in 1789 and served two terms before stepping down. His retirement
was lauded as a pivotal moment in the establishment of American democracy, as history was rife with military leaders who assumed positions of
political power and remained unwilling to relinquish their authority. Washington died in 1799 at the age of sixty-seven.'

During the American Revolution, Washington was subjected to a variety
of sexually charged public attacks on his personal reputation. These were
designed to attack not simply his character but the larger political project
that he represented. British satirists, for example, lampooned Washington
as a cross-dressing woman. The emasculating slur was then captured in an
engraving that ran in a London newspaper. Captioned "Mrs. General Washington Bestowing Thirteen Stripes on Britania [sic]," it depicts Washington
with his general's tricornered hat, his familiar profile, in a long dress while
exclaiming, "Parents should not behave like Tyrants to their Children."5 The
image was typical of the cross-dressing satire of London's late-eighteenthcentury print culture. Sexual satire in London and America was common,
and leaders bore the brunt of it. Images were not as common as clever verses
and prose, but Washington's stature no doubt warranted the extra expense
for the printer.

During the American Revolution, other sex scandals surrounded Washington. Some writers alleged that Alexander Hamilton, who had become a
close aide, was his illegitimate son. This claim has become one of the enduring myths of the era.' Another tale came from a pamphlet that was published in London, supposedly reprinting captured records of New York trials
of Tories. Included in the testimony was a charge that Washington made
secret visits to a Tory woman. Still another rumor named Washington as the father of a neighbor's son.7 Yet another, from a pro-British newspaper
account, alleged that he had a relationship with a servant girl while in Philadelphia.' In the Revolutionary era, he was smeared with many unsupportable charges, as was the tactic of the day.

Figure 1.2. Cover of David Hackett Fischer's Washington's Crossing, featuring an Eastman
Johnson version of Leutze's masterpiece, which eliminated the gold and red ornamental
watch fob that dangles close to Washington's crotch in the original painting. (David
Hackett Fischer, Washington's Crossing [New York: Oxford University Press, 2004].)

Figure 1.3. Detail from Washington Crossing the Delaware. (Emanuel Leutze. Oil on
canvas, 1851. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Images for Academic Publishing. Copyright
(D Metropolitan Museum of Art.)

As a member of the Freemasons, the fraternal order that was founded
in London in the early eighteenth century, Washington may have enjoyed
the esteem of the brotherhood but would almost certainly, too, have been
the subject of occasional whispers by those who were deeply unsettled by
the all-male secret society. In eighteenth-century newspapers, the Freemasons were mockingly associated with homoeroticism. In the mid-eighteenth
century, for example, the Boston Evening Post ran an engraving and poem
suggesting that Freemasons were overly interested in socializing, drinking,
and dancing with one another. The satire went a step further by accusing the
men of engaging in anal penetration with wooden spikes used in ship building.' Clearly, the desexualized Washington has long been accompanied by a
twin-one sexualized in the public sphere.