Citizen Bachelors: Manhood and the Creation of the United States

Introduction: Bachelors in Early America

BACHELORS IN EARLY AMERICA November 1772 was a particularly gloomy month for young James Madison. Fifteen years later he would write the U.S. Constitution, thirty-seven years later he would be inaugurated as the fourth president of the United States, yet all of this was too far off for the twenty-one year old to see. Madison wallowed in his own loneliness, trapped at Montpelier, his father’s plantation in rural Orange County, Virginia. Like the country, then locked in a decadelong struggle with Great Britain , Madison seemed unable to declare his independence. The year before he had graduated from the College of New Jersey (which later became Princeton) and had subsequently begun a course of study in the law. Yet the return to his paternal residence had reduced him to a subordinate state. In economic terms there was little difference between him and his twelve-year-old sister Nelly. In a society that ranked one’s value in terms of acres of land and number of slaves, James Madison had neither . He was the master of nothing and no one. As winter approached Madison expressed his pessimism to William Bradford, a friend from college. In a letter dated November 9 Madison blamed his pitiful situation on his sickly nature, claiming “my sensations for many months past have intimated to me not to expect a long or healthy life.” The two men had kept up a lively correspondence since departing Princeton. Bradford kept Madison up to date on their friends, especially those who married. Such news only depressed Madison further as his lack of an estate kept him from even contemplating wedlock. He worried that he would remain forever unmarried and become a subject of vicious gossip. In his letter Madison warned Bradford, who was then living in Philadelphia , not to “suffer those impertinent fops that abound in every City to divert you from your business and philosophical amusements.” Although Madison did not to 2 Citizen Bachelors include himself in this group, his disgust with men of “vanity and impertinence” repeated a popular link between unmarried men and moral depravity.1 For all of Madison’s pessimism, his situation was far from bleak. Although his economic situation kept him from achieving mastery and attaining a family, he was no dependent. His race, class, and gender provided him with opportunities that few other members of the Montpelier estate had. Moreover, his status as a bachelor conferred on him masculine autonomy that gave him agency. Even though he lived under his father’s roof, Madison was not his father’s pawn. Colonel Madison was no stern paterfamilias and placed no pressure on James to assume control of the estate. Instead, he allowed his eldest son to choose his own vocation, which James did by taking more advice from his friend Bradford than from his father. Madison also enjoyed considerable personal liberty, including sexual liberty. Although his strict morals demanded chastity, Madison was regularly titillated by Bradford’s stories of men who did not wait for marriage to engage in intercourse. In one letter Bradford told of a classmate who “put the Cart before the horse” and became “a father before he was an husband.” In another he joked that he had access to a pamphlet titled “On the Management of Children.” “When you are married I will send you one—or sooner, if you please,” he noted wryly.2 Most important, Madison’s status as an unmarried member of his father’s household did not prevent him from taking an active role in politics. Two years after his glum letter to Bradford, Madison was elected to the Orange County Committee of Safety. He then ascended to the Virginia House of Delegates and the Council of State, quickly becoming one of the most influential men inVirginia. In the end Madison was well into his forties before he married and took control of his father’s estate. In the meantime he discovered that bachelorhood conferred upon him all the privileges of manhood including personal , sexual, and political liberty. James Madison lived in an era of dynamic change. In the second half of the eighteenth century the thirteen colonies separated from Great Britain and created a new nation. Concurrent with the creation of the United States was the rise of the bachelor as a distinct identity defined by masculine autonomy. The bachelor stood on equal political footing with any married man, and although his reputation could be linked to sexual immorality, he...