Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past by Thomas A. Foster (review)

Given the prominence of the Founding Fathers in popular and scholarly histories of the United States, an examination of over two hundred years of commentary on the sexual lives of six prominent Founders (Washington, Jefferson, John Adams, Franklin, Hamilton, and Gouverneur Morris) should illuminate issues of national identity. Such is the project and promise of Thomas A. Foster’s Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past. “Americans,” he writes, “increasingly need to know what is American and see themselves in that definition” (5). How we think and have thought about the sex lives of the Founders will, he believes, fulfill that need in great part.

A brief introduction (eight-and-a-half pages) is followed by six biographical chapters, a form selected to “engage with the construction of public memory…as well as to consider the ways that biography itself participates in defining manliness and appropriate sexualities more generally” (7). These are promises not kept. We get snapshots, so to speak, of different aspects of someone’s reputation at different times, but very little about how these help us understand masculine identity configurations over time. Most importantly, Foster never demonstrates his most important claim: “how gendered sexuality has long figured in our national identity via the public memory” (9). Even as he shows the continuing interest in the “real lives” (2) of the Founders, he never demonstrates how this gendered sexuality has mattered to national identity. Understanding how power and/or authority are formed and operate is never so simple as to be taken for granted.

There are methodological problems as well. The selection process isn’t described. Each merits inclusion as a Founder, though Morris’s inclusion might raise an eyebrow, something acknowledged in a backhanded fashion by a statement that he “operates in the book as a prime example of how the connections between sex and manliness in cultural memory of the Founders are not limited to the top tier” (7). But in fact, it is his sexual frankness that gains him inclusion.

Another problem is that, while the book’s theses invoke current scholarly discussions, the book seems directed at a reader who knows almost nothing about the Founders or the Revolutionary Era. How else to account for informing the reader that Jefferson “remarkably” died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (47), or for the biography of John Adams to conclude by noting the “coincidence” of his death on the same day (78). Moreover, the use of tags such as “best-selling author Joseph Ellis” (33) or “historian Gordon S. Wood,” (97), et al. indicates a need to inform an unaware reader. What early Americanist has to be introduced to Gordon Wood or Joseph Ellis?

Sex and the Founding Fathers has value as a source of data. One has to respect the research that has gone into the book. The data raises important questions about gender, sexuality, and masculinity as normative and actual behaviors shift that over time as they structure personal and national identities. The work of answering these questions remains undone.