Intimacy in the Early United States

Before she died, Martha Washington burned all the correspondence she had exchanged with her husband George. Historians have long been accused of invading the privacy of men and women of the past: reading their mail, exposing their secrets, and airing their dirty laundry. Martha Washington, for one, protected herself and her husband from the prying eyes of future historians. Their public personas might endure but Martha Washington did what she could to shut the door firmly on her own and George’s private lives. We are left outside, guessing.

As Martha Washington divined, Americans of the early republic cared not only about their own intimate relationships, but often also a great deal about the intimate relationships of others. Three recent books in quite different ways examine what intimacy meant to early Americans: how men and women sought to frame intimacy in their own lives, control the intimacy of others, and through their intimate relationships construct, patrol, and perhaps challenge gender identities.

Mark E. Kann in Taming Passion for the Public Good asks how, in the wake of the American Revolution and amid the rise of liberal ideas about freedom and personal independence, Americans came to accept elite, patriarchal regulation of “their sexual language, behavior, and partners, without provoking widespread citizen anger, protest, or rebellion” (1). He argues that the American Revolution unleashed rampant personal liberty, but this autonomy worried “elites” who thought many Americans lacked the self-control to warrant full political participation (for example, they were too passionate). State and local elites framed their interventions into other people’s sex lives as justified by paternalistic concern, saving individuals from themselves and the community from licentiousness that could undermine the republic. He describes how authorities used gender-specific methods to regulate men and women: for the most part they were hands-off with men (unless they were in prison, in which case Kann shows prison officials’ deep concerns to regulate sex); for women, they expected husbands and fathers to control them—only where male kin failed in the policing of sex would the state step in. For Kann, the acquiescence of Americans to such interference raises a major question about how deeply liberalism penetrated in the early republic. He concludes, however, that patriarchalism in fact buttressed liberalism—they were “mutually dependent”—and “patriarchal authority is the core of liberalism” (8, 161).

The regulatory picture that Kann paints is dark indeed but also exaggerated, at least regarding free, white people. He asserts that an “essential inequality between governors and the governed—between policers and the policed—rendered citizens’ voluntary consent a secondary matter. . . .The discretion that officials used to achieve effectiveness was virtually unlimited. Governors were to preserve people’s welfare by ‘any means necessary . . . Citizens’ rights were secondary’” (25). On the very next page, however, Kann admits that “at the time of the Revolution, many laws regulating people’s sexual behavior were made less severe, were enforced less often, and were accompanied by less harsh punishments” (26). Indeed, in the early republic the scope for public officials to interfere in people’s private sex lives was diminishing. Whereas colonial leaders had prosecuted men and women for fornication, bastardy, and adultery, among a laundry list of other sexual crimes, these cases had largely fallen by the wayside in the early republic. Some older laws remained on the books, but even prosecution against crimes regarded as clear public menaces like prostitution or bawdy houses was both sporadic and largely ineffective, as Kann himself concludes in his penultimate chapter. “Discretion was crucial...