“Statement of account of Gouverneur Morris”

From the American Philosophical Society, Melanie Miller shared an intriguing glimpse of her work editing the papers of Gouverneur Morris.

Morris succeeded Thomas Jefferson as the U.S. of A.’s minister to France in 1792, having been in that country since 1789. He therefore got to see the French Revolution.

What’s more, these documents show, Morris got involved.

Labeled simply as a “statement of account of Gouverneur Morris, July-September 1792,” the paper is a record of the money Morris agreed to receive from Louis XVI to raise a counter-revolutionary force when it became clear that the monarchy was in danger of violent overthrow. This was a remarkable episode—while he was U.S. minister, Morris conspired with some of Louis’s loyal counselors to try to save the monarchy and help the royal family escape. . . .

Another group of items that I was delighted to find relate to the much-admired Marquis de Lafayette, whom Morris knew during the American Revolution and saw again in France. The letters came from Morris’s close friend and business partner, James LeRay de Chaumont. They discuss LeRay’s efforts to obtain repayment of an enormous personal loan Morris made to Lafayette’s wife at her request, to cover their “debts of honor” after the Marquis—whose fall from leader of the Revolution to being considered a traitor had been swift, just as Morris had predicted— fled France and was imprisoned by the Austrians. Our research for Morris’s later diaries (1799-1816) originally led us to the tentative conclusion that Morris had never been repaid. These letters confirm it. His later financial difficulties were considerably exacerbated by this default.

It was acknowledged by her family and others that Morris saved Mme. de Lafayette from the guillotine during the Great Terror, and his diaries show that his efforts led to the Austrian emperor’s decision to release the Marquis in 1797. A letter from LeRay, who met with Mme. de Lafayette in Paris more than once after she and her husband returned to France and were restored to their estates, confirmed what I could only infer from Morris’s letters: that Madame de Lafayette (who had never forgiven Morris for speaking truth to her husband in the early days of the Revolution) seemed outraged that Morris had the nerve to request repayment…

Founders Online currently hosts the papers of seven prominent men involved in forming the American republic, with John Jay the most recent addition. Though as a Bostonian I should root for Samuel Adams to be added to that list, I can’t help but think that Gouverneur Morris’s papers would be so much more fun.

Gouverneur Morris and the “determined resolution”

Alas, I can’t find any poetry written at the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

But there were verses composed during Virginia’s ratifying convention in June 1788.

Virginia was crucial to the prospects of the U.S. of A. It was the oldest colony, the largest state, the bridge from the mid-Atlantic to the three more southern states. It was the home of the only man many Americans could picture as the new chief executive, George Washington.

The convention included some strong proponents of the new Constitution, like James Madison and Edmund Randolph, and some powerful opponents, like Patrick Henry and George Mason.

Gouverneur Morris traveled south from Pennsylvania to watch the debate in Richmond. While there, he stayed with a lawyer named John Marshall. Both men were strong Federalists.

Morris left Marshall with an “Extempora” poetic comment on the proceedings:

The State’s determined resolution
was to discuss the Constitution
For this the members come together,
melting with zeal and sultry weather
And here to their eternal praise,
to find it’s hist’ry spend three days
The next three days they nobly roam
thro ev’ry region far from home
Call in the Grecian, Swiss, Italian,
the Roman, Dutch rapscallion
Fellows who freedom never knew,
to tell us what we ought to do
The next three days they kindly dip yee
deep in the River Mississippi
Nine days thus spent ere they begin,
let us suppose them fairly in
and then resolve my gentle friend,
how many months before they end.

This verse remained in Marshall’s papers and wasn’t published until the twentieth century.

“The unanimous assent of 11 States and Colonel Hamilton’s”

The Statutes and Stories blog has a couple of new posts detailing an archival discovery related to the New York delegation to the Constitutional Convention.

The first article by University of Wisconsin professor John Kaminski, attorney Adam Levinson, and Sergio Villavicencio of the Alexander Hamilton Awareness Society is a bit breathless for my taste, but the second steps back and raises a lot of thoughtful questions about how to interpret incomplete evidence.

The background of this story is that the state of New York sent three delegates to the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, aimed at revising the Articles of Confederation. One of those men was a leading proponent of having that meeting, Alexander Hamilton. You may have heard of him.

The other two were judge Robert Yates (1738-1801) and his former trainee, attorney John Lansing, Jr. (1754-1829?), both from Albany. The two men were related by marriage and also allied in politics. Like Gov. George Clinton, they opposed strengthening the national government. In sum, they went to Philadelphia to outvote Hamilton on the state’s delegation.

Around 30 June, after the convention had met for a little more than a month, Hamilton went home to New York City. He was getting to propose his ideas, but he couldn’t even get his own state to support them.

Yates and Lansing followed about 10 July. They could see that the convention was moving toward creating a constitution for a stronger federal government, and they didn’t want any part in that.

As the blog posts explain, on 20 August Hamilton told his fellow Federalist Rufus King:

I have written to my colleagues informing them, that if either of them would come down I would accompany him to Philadelphia. So much for the sake of propriety and public opinion.

No one has found Hamilton’s actual letter, so we don’t know how he phrased that offer. As the three authors ask, “Did Yates and Lansing understand Hamilton’s letter to mean that he would only go back to Philadelphia if one of them joined him?” The comment “So much for the sake of propriety and public opinion” suggests Hamilton wrote to the two men purely as a political move.

In any event, Hamilton did go back to participate in the closing sessions. He couldn’t vote on behalf of New York since that state had required all three of its delegates to be present for votes. But he was talking.

In early September the meeting approved a new draft Constitution for the U.S. of A., totally rebuilding the national government. On 17 September the chairman of what had become a Constitutional Convention, George Washington, wrote in his diary:

Met in Convention, when the Constitution received the unanimous assent of 11 States and Colonel Hamilton’s from New York.

Washington distinguished between the eleven states that had a quorum of delegates at the convention and the lone voice from New York piping up unofficially. (Rhode Island wasn’t there at all.) Everyone knew Hamilton didn’t represent his colleagues’ views. Nonetheless, New York didn’t oppose the new document.

Proponents of the new Constitution emphasized that seemingly unanimous vote of the states. Hamilton insisted that every delegate present should sign it. Gouverneur Morris came up with language to indicate the men were signing as witnesses to the state votes, not to endorse the new document personally. Even so, Elbridge Gerry, George Mason, and Edmund Randolph refused to sign.

The new archival discovery is an expense report from Robert Yates to the government of New York for his service as a delegate, including “May June & July 1787 59 Days at 32s pr Day.” At the bottom of that document is the entry:

To my Comming as far as New York in my Way to Philadelphia for the Same purpose where I heard that the Convention rose [i.e., adjourned] a Day after my arrival and my return home 12 Days at the Same rate

As Kaminski, Levinson, and Villavicencio point out, this record shows Yates was on his way to Philadelphia as the convention was completing its work. Had he arrived in early September, his voice would have canceled out Hamilton’s approval of the Constitution. He could have added to the chorus protesting the document and refusing to sign. He could even have sent for Lansing and turned New York’s vote to a no.

Instead, Yates got as far as New York City, learned the convention was done, and went back home. He and Lansing both argued against ratifying the proposed Constitution at New York’s state convention. Their side lost narrowly, 30 votes to 27.

The Statutes and Stories blog posts discuss other small revelations coming out of these expense records, as well as questions they don’t answer but other documents might. It’s a good example of how even mundane bureaucratic documents can reveal crucial facts.

“She thinks her forte is the understanding”

Marie Anne Pierrette Paulze was only thirteen years old in 1771 when she was married to Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier.

Marie Anne’s family was under pressure to marry her to a powerful nobleman in his fifties, so Lavoisier—a twenty-eight-year-old colleague of her father’s—seemed preferable.

Marie Anne’s father and husband both worked as tax collectors for the French monarchy, a lucrative and unpopular profession. In 1775 Antoine Lavoisier was also appointed to oversee the manufacture of gunpowder at the Paris Arsenal, which stimulated his interest in science.

Over the following years the Lavoisiers worked together closely. Marie Anne helped Antoine set up laboratory experiments, took notes on the results, translated English scientific treatises into French (adding her own commentary), and created illustrations for the papers Antoine wrote. The image above shows Marie Anne’s own drawing of them and their staff at work.

Those papers included demonstrations of the conservation of mass, arguments against phlogiston theory, a new system for naming chemicals, and the first attempt to list the modern elements. Lavoisier also advocated for some social reforms, but of course he continued to collect taxes.

Gouverneur Morris arrived in Paris in 1789 and wrote about the Lavoisiers in his diary:

[8 June 1789:] Dine with Mr. deLavoisier. . . . Madame appears to be an agreeable woman. She is tolerably handsome, but from her manner it would seem that she thinks her forte is the understanding rather than the person.

In other words, she valued her brains over beauty.

[25 Sept 1789:] Go to the Opera according to my promise and arrive towards the close of the piece at the loge of Madame Lavoisier. . . . Go to the Arsenal and take tea with Madame Lavoisier en attendant le retour de Monsieur [while awaiting the return of Monsieur] who is at the Hôtel de Ville. As Madame tells me that she has no children I insist that she is une paresseuse [an idle girl], but she declares it is only a misfortune. Monsieur comes in and tells us of the obstination of the bakers. . . .

[6 Oct 1789:] Go to the arsenal. Admitted with difficulty. They are at dinner. Madame Lavoisier is detained in town, as all carriages were stopped and the ladies obliged to join the female mob. While we sit at table, we learn that the militia and the Régiment National are marching towards Versailles.

The French Revolution was breaking out around this upper-class set.

At first the Lavoisiers kept up. Antoine sponsored a press to publish political and scientific material, proposed education reforms, and helped to promote the new metric system. In 1791 the republic abolished the tax-collecting organization. The next year, Antoine lost his job overseeing gunpowder and had to move out of the Arsenal.

But the Lavoisiers were still very rich. Marie Anne hosted dinner parties and after-dinner salons. In 1791 Morris visited her gatherings with William Temple Franklin. At one the company discussed a “riot at Birmingham,” blaming it on British government policy. After another Morris wrote, “there are a number of Gens d’Esprit [wits] who are in general but so so company.”

In January 1793, the French government executed Louis XVI. That spring the radical Jacobin party took over, and in October the government executed Marie Antoinette. The next month, the authorities arrested Antoine Lavoisier and his former tax-collecting colleagues, including Marie-Anne’s father. They were convicted of defrauding the state and guillotined in May 1794.

Two months later, the Thermidorian counterrevolution began. Near the end of 1795 Antoine’s clothing was delivered to his thirty-seven-year-old widow with a note declaring that he had been “falsely convicted.”

TOMORROW: The widow Lavoisier.

Dublin Seminar on Disabilities, 25-26 June

The 2021 Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife will take place online on 25-26 June. This year’s theme is “Living with Disabilities in New England, 1630-1930.”

The founder and longtime director of the Dublin Seminar, Peter Benes, passed away in March. As a scholar, organizer, editor, and encourager of other researchers (like me), he embodied the spirit of this annual seminar, which sought to focus on ordinary people and the stuff of everyday life.

Peter and his colleagues held their first seminar in 1976 in Dublin, New Hampshire (hence the name). For over three decades now, the seminar has been hosted by Historic Deerfield. Last year’s meeting had to be postponed because of the pandemic, and this year’s will be online, but it will still come to us through Historic Deerfield.

The full schedule of presentations is available here. Among the papers that caught my eye:

• Casey L. Green, “The Language of Impairment: Disability among New England Men, 1690-1800."
• Andrew J. Juchno, “‘The Fancies and Whimsies of People over-run with Melancholy’: Melancholy and the New England Church from Cotton Mather to Jonathan Edwards”
• Ross W. Beales, Jr. “‘either insane, enthusiastical, or in Liquor’: An Eighteenth-Century New England Minister’s Response to Mental Illnesses”
• Katherine R. Ranum, “Hearing the Gospel in a Silent World: Understanding the Intersection of Theology, Disability and Religious Practice in the Early Modern British Atlantic”
• Ben Mutshler, “For Service and Suffering: Invalid Pensioners in Colonial Massachusetts” 
• Benjamin H. Irvin, “[‘A] number of Toes & a quantity of good health’: The ‘Black Regiment’ and Veterans’ Disability after the Revolutionary War”
• Jennifer W. Reiss, “‘Pity That So Fine a Man Has Lost His Leg’: Gouverneur Morris and Early American Disability”
• Jerad Pacatte, “‘Fitness for Freedom’: The Lived Experience of Disability, Enslavement, and Emancipation in Early New England”

Other sessions focus on the Civil War and later periods, and I might have missed some papers with eighteenth-century content because I didn’t see that in their titles.

Among the other sessions are a conversation with Laurie Block, Executive Director of Straight Ahead Pictures and the founder and Executive Director of the Disability History Museum, and a summary address by Nicole Belolan on “Folklife and the Material Culture of Disability History in Early America.”

There will be live captioning provided by CaptionAccess, and K-12 educators can sign up for professional development points.

Registration for the 2021 Dublin Seminar costs $75, $65 for seminar members, and $45 for students, and is available online. Registrants can request complimentary lecture abstracts through e-mail. The goal of the Dublin Seminar is to produce a volume of the best papers on each seminar’s topic a couple of years afterward.

(The picture above shows Gouverneur Morris’s artificial leg, courtesy of the New-York Historical Society.)

S.H.E.A.R. Comes to Cambridge, 18-21 July

On 18-21 July, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic will have its annual meeting in Cambridge.

S.H.E.A.R. was founded in 1977 as “an association of scholars dedicated to exploring events and meanings of United States history between 1776 and 1861.” Or, as one of the founders put it, “the group between the William and Mary Quarterly and Civil War History.”

Anyone who studies “the long eighteenth century” knows the natural pressure to stretch chronological boundaries. Furthermore, while the Omohundro Institute’s conferences and journal cover colonial and Revolutionary America, it doesn’t function as an academic society affiliated with the American Historical Association. The only such society covering the period that includes the Revolution is the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and that emphasizes the interdisciplinary study of the culture of the “long eighteenth.”

As a result, the S.H.E.A.R. conference now tends to extend over the Revolutionary period. The titles of papers at this conference show they span the period of 1750 to 1874 at least. Look through the conference program (P.D.F. download) booklet for information about all the paper sessions, panel discussions, and keynote talks.

Here are some of the paper and session titles that caught my eye:

• “Angelica Church and Caesar’s Daughter: Family and Faction in Federalist New York,” Tom Cutterham
• “’Independence within Independence’: The Vermont Republic in the Revolutionary Atlantic,” Jacqueline Reynoso
• “Death, Resistance, and Public Order: State Reactions to Slave Suicide in Eighteenth-Century New York,” Sarah Pearlman Shapiro
• “The Rise and Fall of the American Fop: From John Adams to Washington [Irving?],” Irving Eran Zelnik
• “The Modernity and Morality of the American Revolution and Early Republic as Displayed by Gouverneur Morris in France,” Emilie Mitran
• “‘Government of the Slaves’: Recaptured Black Loyalists and the Birth of the Virginian State at the Chiswell Lead Mines, 1775-1785,” Sean Gallagher
• “‘Out of the Jawbones of Scotch Grampius’: Scottish Merchants and Personal Identities and Personal Identities in Revolutionary North Carolina, c. 1770-1780,” Kimberly Sherman
• “North American Quiet, West Indian Storm: The Constitutional Politics and Legacy of the Somerset Decision,” Matthew Mason
• ”Tenacious American Indian Women: Thwarting Federal Treaty Policies and Dispossession Along the Wabash in the 1790s,” Susan Sleeper-Smith
• “The Mother Of: Memorializing Mary Washington in Antebellum Virginia,” Kate Haulman
• “Servants of General Washington?: Free Blacks and the Power of Imagined Social Capital,” Cassandra Good
• “Jefferson Matters: Situating and Eighteenth-Century Founder in Twenty-First-Century America,” Annette Gordon-Reed
• “Benjamin Rush and the Enlightenment Critique of Habit,” Joseph M. Gabriel
• “Benjamin Banneker: Avid Astronomer, Ambivalent Abolitionist,” Eric Herschthal

Plus, there are roundtable discussions on “New Directions of Military History in the Early Republic,” “Telling the Republic’s Founding Story in Its Moment of Peril,” and “The Culture of Confederation: How Did the 1780s Make America?” Not to mention a whole three-paper session on “Vampirism, Healing, and Consumption in the Early National Era.”

Registration for the four-day conference costs $78 for members of professorial rank, $114 for non-members, and $52 for graduate students, independent scholars, and the like.

Daen on Van Horn’s The Power of Objects

Laurel Daen recently reviewed Jennifer Van Horn’s The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America for H-Net. Here’s an interesting extract from that review:

Van Horn uses portraits of young women in Charleston that feature masks and dresses worn to masquerade balls to consider women’s contested relationship with civility and changing imperial identity in the 1760s. Although no masked galas were ever held in America, colonists knew about them due to their popularity in London. Charlestonian women wore masquerade garb in their portraits, Van Horn suggests, not only to display their awareness of British trends, but also to assert a degree of sexual power that was otherwise prohibited in polite society.

Masquerades were associated with licentiousness. By adopting the style in their portraits, young women celebrated the phase of their lives in which they engaged in courtships and thus retained some control over the future social networks of their families. Elite men argued that women’s masked likenesses exposed the passions that threatened their civility, but they nevertheless tolerated the trend, knowing that women’s urges would soon be contained within marriage.

Van Horn also notes how the masquerade served as a symbol of the impending imperial conflict. While patriots used masks to signify British duplicity and represented America as a courting woman who held power over her suitor, British military officers literally employed masks to transmit secret information and loyalists depicted America as a bride to Britain.

Daen also highlights Van Horn’s discussion of the wooden legs that Gouverneur Morris used—different styles in Europe and in America.

Lucy Knox, Mistress of the Chess Board

On 24 Aug 1788, Lucy Knox wrote to her husband Henry from Trenton about having recently beaten Gouverneur Morris at chess.

That game might have been good preparation for Morris’s travel later that year to France, where chess could mean so much more. He wrote of calling on “Mme. [Sophie le Couteulx] Dumolley, who is at chess” before they embarked on an affair; of the Vicomte de Ségur, who declares “the pursuit of a woman is like a game of chess, when in consequence of a certain set of moves the success is certain”; and of the bishop of Autun, whose “passion for play has become extreme,” claiming to have won “in the society of chess-clubs, about thirty thousand francs.”

But for Lucy Knox, that chess game might have been just another day at the board. In 1804 Anna Cutts wrote to her sister, Dolley Madison, about visiting Lucy Knox in Boston:

We have very pleasant lodgings, and for my companion, the famous Madame Knox, who although very haughty, I find pleasant and sensible. Chess is now her mania which she plays extremely well, only too often for my fancy, who am not of late so partial to it. Every morning after breakfast there is a summons from her ladyship, which if I attend, pins me to her apron-string until time to dress for dinner, after which she retires, again inviting me to battle. Out of twenty-one games, in only two, and a drawn game, has she shown me any mercy; she is certainly the most successful player I have ever encountered.

The image here is the only known portrait of Lucy Knox. It’s a caricature in silhouette created by one of Robert Morris’s sons, supposedly showing how her high hair-do made wearing a hat difficult. I think it could make a good chess-piece.

Did Gouverneur Morris Slap Washington on the Shoulder?

A footnote in Recollections and Private Memoirs of Washington, written largely by George Washington Parke Custis and edited by Benson J. Lossing in 1861, passes on this story:

It is related of the Honorable Gouverneur Morris, who was remarkable for his freedom of deportment toward his friends, that on one occasion he offered a wager that he could treat General [George] Washington with the same familiarity as he did others. This challenge was accepted, and the performance tried. Mr. Morris slapped Washington familiarly on the shoulder, and said, “How are you, this morning, general?” Washington made no reply, but turned his eyes upon Mr. Morris with a glance that fairly withered him. He afterward acknowledged, that nothing could induce him to attempt the same thing again.

No source is stated, and both Custis and Lossing were “print the legend” guys, often unreliable on both details and broad strokes. However, in this case there seems to be a stronger basis for the tale.

In Inquiry into the Origin and Course of Political Parties in the United States, written by Martin Van Buren and published after his death by his sons in 1867, a letter dated 1857 passes on a story that Jacob Burnet (1770-1853) told in 1852:

He related an anecdote of Washington which he had from the lips of Alexander Hamilton.

When the Convention to form a Constitution was sitting in Philadelphia in 1787, of which General Washington was President, he had stated evenings to receive the calls of his friends. At an interview between Hamilton, the Morrises, and others, the former remarked that Washington was reserved and aristocratic even to his intimate friends, and allowed no one to be familiar with him. Gouverneur Morris said that was a mere fancy, and he could be as familiar with Washington as with any of his other friends. Hamilton replied, “If you will, at the next reception evening, gently slap him on the shoulder and say, ‘My dear General, how happy I am to see you look so well!’ a supper and wine shall be provided for you and a dozen of your friends.”

The challenge was accepted. On the evening appointed a large number attended, and at an early hour Gouverneur Morris entered, bowed, shook hands, laid his left hand on Washington’s shoulder, and said: “My dear General, I am very happy to see you look so well!” Washington withdrew his hand, stepped suddenly back, fixed his eye on Morris for several minutes with an angry frown, until the latter retreated abashed and sought refuge in the crowd. The company looked on in silence.

At the supper which was provided by Hamilton, Morris said: “I have won the bet but paid dearly for it, and nothing could induce me to repeat it.”

That story went into James Parton’s Life of Thomas Jefferson (1874), and from there into Max Farrand’s Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (1911). That’s one of the most authoritative sources in American historiography, which might mean it deserves more scrutiny.

Farrand also noted another version of the same anecdote. In his Life and Correspondence of George Read (1870), William Thompson Read said he’d received the same story from “Mrs. Susan[ne] Eckard [1776-1861], of Philadelphia, daughter of Colonel James Read [1743-1822],” who administered the Continental Congress’s Marine department in the 1780s:

Gouverneur Morris, a very handsome, bold, and—I have heard the ladies say—very impudent man. His talents and services are part of American history. He wore a wooden leg. He was not related to the great financier, who was said to be a natural child. The office of Mr. [Robert] Morris was only divided from papa’s by a small entry, and was constantly visited by Mr. Gouverneur Morris, and papa’s also.

One day the latter entered, and papa was so struck by his crest-fallen appearance that he asked, “Are you not well?”

He replied, “I am not,—the devil got possession of me last night.”

“I have often cautioned you against him,” said papa, playfully, “but what has happened to disturb you?”

“I was at the President’s last night; several members of the Cabinet were there. The then absorbing question, (‘I forget,’ Mrs. E. writes, ‘what it was’) was brought up. The President was standing with his arms behind him,—his usual position,—his back to the fire, listening. Hamilton made a speech I did not like. I started up and spoke, stamping, as I walked up and down, with my wooden leg; and, as I was certain I had the best of the argument, as I finished I stalked up to the President, slapped him on the back, and said, ‘Ain’t I right, general?’ The President did not speak, but the majesty of the American people was before me. Oh, his look! How I wished the floor would open and I could descend to the cellar!

“You know me,” continued Mr. Morris, “and you know my eye would never quail before any other mortal.”

In fact, Gouverneur Morris wasn’t in the U.S. of A. during Washington’s terms as President, so that version of the story could not be true. But it’s quite plausible that Eckard misunderstood a reference to Washington as president of the Constitutional Convention, as in the Burnet version of the tale.

We thus have what appear to be three strands of an oral tradition, one put to paper in 1857, another printed in 1860, and a third, independent version written down before 1861. Each of the two letters describes a short chain of storytellers leading back to Hamilton and Morris. So even though this incident didn’t get set down in any form until seven decades after it supposedly happened, it looks credible.

I Only Read This Book for the Relatable Past

You might think that Thomas A. Foster’s Sex and the Founding Fathers is about the sexual behavior of the men who led the American Revolution and the creation of the federal government. But take a look at the subtitle: The American Quest for a Relatable Past.

That signals how this study isn’t about those men’s sexual thoughts or behaviors, about which we have very little information, anyway. Rather, it’s about how American authors have described the sexual side of those men’s lives, in many cases selecting and massaging the known facts to fit what they wanted the readers of their times to believe, or what readers wanted to read.

For instance, what has it meant to Americans that George Washington, the “Father of His Country,” evidently couldn’t father children? Was it a somewhat embarrassing reflection on his masculinity, or a natural frustration that humanizes him, or even a handy refutation of the occasional suggestions that he had children out of wedlock? (Of course, he could have had extramarital affairs without leaving the evidence of a fertile man.)

Foster notes Washington biographers stating strenuously that his infertility problem could not have been due to a sexual transmitted disease—that was simply beyond reason. But they were mum about the possibility of erectile dysfunction, a much more common problem for men but one with symbolic implications of impotence in other areas. (Foster doesn’t discuss a theory I recall seeing bandied about in recent decades, that Washington might have had Klinefelter syndrome, due to XXY chromosomes. Talk about raising gender issues!)

Foster also discusses how historians have treated John Adams, who was known for his long, close, and faithful marriage, and Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, and Gouverneur Morris, who weren’t. Originally the book also discussed Aaron Burr, but Foster converted that material into this article at Common-Place; in contrast to the others, American authors could gleefully discuss Burr as a libertine because he became a villain in the national saga.

Sex and the Founding Fathers also shows how the Founders serve as a barometer of the culture’s attitude toward sexual behavior. For instance, late in the Victorian period the Massachusetts Senator George F. Hoar decided that Franklin, of all people, didn’t belong in a National Hall of Fame:

Dr. Franklin’s conduct of life was that of a man on a low plane…one side of his character gross and immoral. . . . [His letter] on the question of keeping a mistress, which, making allowance for the manners of the time, and all allowance for the fact that he might have been partly in jest, is an abominable and wicked letter; and all his relation to women, and to the family life were of that character.

Come on, Senator, tell us how you really feel!

For me the star of this book was Gouverneur Morris, the least known of its subjects. He was frankly interested in sex throughout his long bachelorhood. Foster argues that Morris doesn’t deserve to be called a rake, however, because he (at least sometimes) passed up sex if he and his lover weren’t really in love, because he cared about whether those women had a good time, and because some of his affairs lasted for years. He just had a lot of them, and his (married) male friends liked to gossip about him.

Foster notes that only four full-length biographies of Morris were published in the 1800s and 1900s. Since 2003, however, there have been “three academic works and two popular biographies.” Those discuss the sexual side of Morris’s life more frankly—far more frankly—than books of previous eras did. Perhaps Gouverneur Morris is the Founder for our time.

In case you wonder, Sex and the Founding Fathers does come with illustrations. Illustrations like “A Philosophic Cock,” a political cartoon attacking Jefferson for his relationship with Sally Hemings.

Paine, Prisons, and Poetry

Yesterday’s posting left Thomas Paine and Robert Smyth, former baronet, in Revolutionary Paris at the end of 1792. Both Englishmen by birth, they were enthusiastic supporters of the French Revolution.

Unfortunately for them, in February 1793 the French government declared war on Britain, as well as the Dutch Republic. It was already at war with Austria, Prussia, Brunswick, Sardinia, Spain, and Portugal, and perhaps some smaller Germany and Italian states I haven’t tracked. So there were rather few foreigners in France who didn’t fall under suspicion.

The Jacobin faction took power in June 1793 and began to arrest lots of people. Sometime in the fall of 1793, Smyth was confined at the College des Écossais or “Scots College,” shown above. While there he became friends with a couple of British teenagers: James Millingen (1774-1845), then working for a bank and later a respected archeologist, and Charles Este (1775-1841), son of a prominent London clergyman and theater critic who had come to France in 1789 to study medicine.

In December the Jacobin government stripped Paine of his seat in the National Convention because he was a foreigner. He was soon in prison as well, and came close to being executed. The American minister to France, Gouverneur Morris, didn’t intervene for him as a citizen of the U.S. of A., and Paine later blamed President George Washington for that neglect.

While in jail, Paine received some encouraging letters in English from a woman who signed her notes “From a Little Corner in the World.” Paine replied as “the Castle in the Air.” He may have fallen in love with his correspondent. At the very least he sent back poetry that that included verses like these:

I gazed and I envied with painful goodwill,
And grew tired of my seat in the air;
When all of a sudden my Castle stood still,
As if some attraction was there.

Like a lark from the sky it came fluttering down,
And placed me exactly in view,
When whom should I meet in this charming retreat,
This corner of calmness, but You.

Also, this poetic argument for why he didn’t believe in the Old Testament God:

Their country often he laid waste,
Their little ones he slew;
But I have shown a better taste
In choosing Y, O, U.

That latter verse was published in Jack Fruchtman, Jr.’s Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom.

After Maximilian de Robespierre and the radical Jacobins were deposed in July 1794, the French government started to treat foreigners more gently. Smyth petitioned the government for release in September. A new American diplomat, James Monroe, got Paine out of jail in November.

Only then, according to the standard biographies, did Paine discover that the lady writing to him was Smyth’s wife Charlotte. Most authors don’t believe that she and Paine had a sexual affair, even if she was calling herself a “Little Corner” while he was a “Castle,” and even if he wrote to her more passionately than to practically anyone else.

Paine remained on excellent terms with Robert Smyth. In one of his published essays he referred to the man as “a very intimate friend of mine.” He lived with the Smyths in 1796 while recuperating from his months in prison. As France’s war with Britain raged on, Paine wrote letters that allowed Robert Smyth to return home before he was arrested again. He recommended Smyth to American businessmen. Paine even sent Smyth another poem about love:

’T is that delightsome transport we can feel
Which painters cannot paint, nor words reveal.
Nor any art we know of can conceal.

And so on.

After Britain and France signed the Treaty of Amiens in 1802, Robert Smyth returned to Paris to restart his business. But he died in April of that year, “of a sudden attack of gout” according to the British historian John Goldworth Alger. Despite his father’s 1792 renunciation of all hereditary titles, eighteen-year-old George-Henry Smyth took up the family baronetcy.

TOMORROW: The Smyths and the Estes.

George Washington and the Fish House Punch

Yesterday’s rerun of Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! on N.P.R. reminded me that I wanted to look into a story its host had told about George Washington: that he went on a “three-day bender” on Fish House Punch, the favored drink of the Philadelphia gentlemen’s club variously known as the Schuylkill Fishing Company and the State in Schuylkill. Well, that’s the way that comedy game show put it. The Philadelphia Inquirer stated the case this way in 1992:

In 1787, George Washington was an honored guest at the club and no doubt sampled the punch. After he made an entry in his diary that he was en route to dine at the Fish House, his diary remains suspiciously blank for the next three days.

I’ve found references to that story as early as 1974. The 9 June 1975 New Yorker quoted a member of the club telling the same story, complete with the three-day gap in his diary—but no specific dates.

The club’s own History of the Schuylkill Fishing Company, published in 1889, states that members invited Washington to dine with them on 14 June 1787. They might have chosen that date because it was twelve years after the Continental Congress had voted to form the Continental Army. Or it might just have been convenient.

Washington was in Philadelphia that summer for the Constitutional Convention, and he kept a sparely-written diary of how he spent his time. The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography published a transcript of that journal in 1889. Back at home in Mount Vernon, Washington copied those entries with a little editing into his main series of diaries, which can be read at Founders Online. Neither version shows any gap at all in the June entries, or in any other summer month.

Furthermore, Washington’s diary suggests he didn’t accept the Schuylkill Fishing Company’s invitation. His entry for 14 June says:

Dined at Major Moores (after being in Convention) and spent the evening at my own lodgings.

The editors posit that was Thomas Lloyd Moore, a major in the Continental Army. He wasn’t a member of the Schuylkill club.

On 30 June, Washington recorded that he:

Dined with a Club at Springsbury—consisting of several associated families of the City—the Gentlemen of which meet every Saturday accompanied by the females of the families every other Saturday.

This was the Cold Spring Club at Springettsbury. He went there again on 11 and 25 August and 8 September. The journal shows Washington dined out with other local social groups as well.

From 30 July through 4 August, Washington took two out-of-town fishing trips with Robert Morris, Gouverneur Morris, and others. (He also went back to Valley Forge to look around: “Visited all the Works, wch. were in Ruins; and the Incampments in woods where the ground had not been cultivated.”) So Washington did fish. But I don’t see any record confirming the story that Washington visited with the Schuylkill Fishing Company in 1787 or sampled its Fish House Punch, much less felt under the weather for three days afterward.

Usually the burden of proof for historical stories rests on those telling them: they should provide evidence that events happened as they describe. Because of all the gaps in the historical record, skeptics needn’t prove something didn’t happen. But in this case the very records that proponents of the Fish House Punch story point to—Washington’s diaries for 1787—actually appear to disprove that legend.

The Wall Calendar Contest Answers!

Last Sunday I announced a quiz on early American politicians with the prize of a Colonial Williamsburg wall calendar. The deadline for entries was last night, so now I can reveal the answers.

The most useful key to my trivia questions is that I fancy myself a tricky bastard. So what look like obvious answers are usually wrong. To put it another way, I like questions based around facts that caught me by surprise when I first read them.

1) What office(s) in the government of the United States of America did John Hancock hold and when?

I tried to write this question to restrict the period to after the states adopted the Articles of Confederation in 1781, thus forming a permanent government of the U.S. of A. That would eliminate Hancock’s stretch as chairman of the Second Continental Congress from May 1775 to October 1777. By the time the Articles were ratified, he was home as Massachusetts’s most popular politician.

Hancock declined to run for reelection as governor at the end of 1784, citing poor health, and then put his name in as a delegate to the national Congress. When he came back to Philadelphia in late 1785, members of the Congress voted him chairman again for old times’ sake. The legislature barely met for the next few months and Hancock hardly did anything, but he got to sit out the Shays’ Rebellion and the controversial measures to suppress it. Hancock made a triumphant return to the governorship, popularity intact, in May 1787. Best political instincts of his generation, I say!

Thus, in the government of the U.S. of A., Hancock held the office of President of the United States in Congress Assembled (or President of the Congress) from November 1785 to June 1786. No points off for mentioning his earlier term, but a correct answer should include that later tenure.

The closest to the correct answer to this question came from Nathan C. Traylor of The History Tavern.

2) Gouverneur Morris was never a governor, alas, but he was a member of the Continental Congress, the Constitutional Convention, and the U.S. Senate. From where?

Morris (pictured above) represented New York in the Continental Congress, but then moved to Philadelphia in 1779. He represented Pennsylvania in the Constitutional Convention, but then moved back to New York in 1788. He represented New York in the U.S. Senate in 1800-1803.

Ben answered this question exactly.

3) In 1789 Alexander Hamilton took office as the first Secretary of the Treasury, but he was ineligible to be President. Why?

It’s often said that the U.S. Constitution’s requirement that the President be an American citizen from birth would have kept—perhaps was even written to keep—Hamilton from holding that office. He was born on the Caribbean island of Nevis. But in fact the Constitution says the President must be “a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution.” No one’s met the second qualification for a long time, but Hamilton did.

So why wasn’t Hamilton eligible to be President in 1789? He was too young. He was born in 1755, making him only thirty-four in that year. Indeed, when Hamilton first came to New York, he told people that he’d been born in 1757, perhaps to make himself seem even more precocious than he was.

This question stumped everyone. The force of myth is strong. Not to mention tricky bastards.

4) What Pennsylvanian did George Washington appoint as Postmaster General?

Again, there’s a first-thing-that-comes-to-mind answer: Benjamin Franklin, famous as our first Postmaster and famous Pennsylvanian! But he was appointed Postmaster by the Continental Congress back in July 1775. (He had also held the post under the Crown.)

President Washington appointed three men as Postmaster General: Samuel Osgood, Timothy Pickering, and Joseph Habersham. Which one was Pennsylvanian? Pickering (shown here).

But wait! Wasn’t this the same Timothy Pickering who commanded the Salem militia during the Battle of Lexington and Concord? The same who served as Secretary of War under Washington and Secretary of State under Washington and John Adams? Yes!

In 1786, after business reversals, Pickering moved from Massachusetts to northeastern Pennsylvania to make a new start. He was living there when he secured the appointment as Postmaster General. Eventually he moved back to Massachusetts in time for Adams to accuse him of being part of the mythical “Essex Junto.”

Nathan, Ben, and Phillip Blancher all picked out Pickering.

5) Of the first seven Presidents of the United States, which men had publicly acknowledged biological sons as heirs when they were in office?

George Washington, James Madison, and Andrew Jackson had no biological children; they helped to raise stepchildren and adopted children. Thomas Jefferson had several children, but his only son by his wife died as an infant and he didn’t acknowledge his likely sons by Sally Hemings. Likewise, James Monroe’s only son died young, leaving him with two daughters.

John Adams had three adult sons when he was President (two when he left office). John Quincy Adams also had three. It’s notable that one of John Adams’s sons became President, and one of John Quincy Adams’s became a U.S. Representative and top diplomat.

So for a country that eschewed hereditary political power, America did accept a sort of dynasty from the only early Presidents for whom that was biologically possible. If the other early Presidents had had sons as heirs, would we have had more Presidents named Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Jackson?

Ben and GSGreatEscaper correctly named the brace of Adamses. Mike Barresi named those two but also guessed Monroe.

Well played, all! No one had all correct answers (that slippery Hamilton question!), and everyone got some points. By a nose, the winner of the wall calendar is…Ben!

(Send me a comment or email with a mailing address, Ben, and I’ll mail the calendar this week.)

TOMORROW: And you thought this was over.

The 2013 Wall Calendar Contest

I find myself with an extra Colonial Williamsburg wall calendar for 2013. It’s about 8 inches by 11, with a color photograph for each month and notations of major holidays and events at the museum. (Colonial Williamsburg sells a larger wall calendar; I think this one is printed as a promotion.)

Back in 2010, I ran a contest to give away an extra copy of a book, so I decided to do the same with this wall calendar.

Since we’re finishing an election year, here are five questions about early American politics.

1) What office(s) in the government of the United States of America did John Hancock hold and when?

2) Gouverneur Morris was never a governor, alas, but he was a member of the Continental Congress, the Constitutional Convention, and the U.S. Senate. From where?

3) In 1789 Alexander Hamilton took office as the first Secretary of the Treasury, but he was ineligible to be President. Why?

4) What Pennsylvanian did George Washington appoint as Postmaster General?

5) Of the first seven Presidents of the United States, which men had publicly acknowledged biological sons as heirs when they were in office?

If you want to play along, put your best answers in a comment on this posting by Friday, 7 December, at 8:00 P.M., Boston time. I’ll screen all those Blogspot/Blogger comments so they’ll remain hidden until. Include a name or unique pseudonym with your answers. (If you comment on Facebook, your answers will be visible to some people—but I still don’t understand how to make Facebook work.)

Since we’re in the age of Wikipedia and Google, I won’t be surprised to see more than one Boston 1775 reader respond with a complete set of correct answers. In that case, I’ll number all the comments that contain the correct answers and pick one winner randomly. After posting the answers here on Saturday, I’ll contact that winner by email to get a surface-mail address for the calendar. Hey, it worked once before!