The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers Read online

  The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers

  Thomas Fleming

  TO THE WOMEN IN MY LIFE:

  Katherine Dolan Fleming

  Alice Mulcahey Fleming

  Alice Fleming

  Susan Riley

  Sharon Kivisto Fleming

  Kathryn Feder

  Helen Fleming

  Lucie Fleming

  Pauline Fleming

  Madeleine Fleming

  The heart has its reasons,

  of which the mind knows nothing.

  —BLAISE PASCAL

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Book One

  George Washington

  The Agonies of Honor

  Partner in Love and Life

  From Great Somebody to Lady Washington

  The Other George Washington Scandals

  Book Two

  Benjamin Franklin

  The Sins of the Father

  The Oldest Revolutionary

  Mon Cher Papa

  Book Three

  John Adams

  An Amorous Puritan Finds a Wife

  Portia’s Dubious Diplomat

  Second Banana Blues

  Party of Two

  Remembering Some Other Ladies

  Book Four

  Alexander Hamilton

  Bastard Son and Wary Lover

  The Woman in the Middle

  Love’s Secret Triumph

  Book Five

  Thomas Jeffferson

  Romantic Voyager

  The Traumas of Happiness

  Head Versus Heart

  The Wages of Fame

  If Jefferson Is Wrong, Is America Wrong?

  Book Six

  James Madison

  A Shy Genius Makes a Conquest

  Partners in Fame

  How to Save a Country

  Appendix:

  The Erosion of Jefferson’s Image in the American Mind

  Notes

  Searchable Terms

  About the Author

  Other Books by Thomas Fleming

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Acknowledgments

  A book of this dimension leaves the writer indebted to a wide range of people. I want to express my gratitude, first, to the numerous librarians who have assisted me, beginning with my early work on the American Revolution at Yale University. More recently, Lewis Daniels, the librarian at the Westbrook Public Library in the Connecticut town of the same name (where I spend my summers), has been especially helpful in tracking down books in the state’s research libraries for me. Equal gratitude goes to Mark Bartlett and his staff at the New York Society Library. Another thank you in this regard is warmly extended to W. Gregory Gallagher of the Century Association library—and to the librarians of the New York Historical Society.

  Special thanks must go to Mary Thompson, the research historian at Mount Vernon, who gave me several hours of her time during a visit. Also helpful was Washington scholar Peter Henriques, who generously shared with me some of his research. Several geneticists advised me on exploring the world of chromosomes and haplotypes, notably Kenneth Kidd, MD, of Yale University; Brian Ference, MD, formerly of Yale, now in private practice in Michigan; and Dr. Edwin Knights, who has written widely on the subject and practices in New Hampshire. Also helpful have been science writer Steven Corneliussen and his associates, biostatisticians William Blackwelder and David Douglas, who helped me probe the arcane world of probability.

  Steven Bernstein, who is writing a history book of his own, found time to explore several collections in the Library of Congress and other libraries in Washington, DC. He also played a part in tracking down hitherto unknown facts about Samuel F. Wetmore, ghostwriter extraordinary. My son, Richard Fleming, with his computer skills and his access to the Columbia University Library, gave me significant aid on a variety of topics, ranging from Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin to Joseph Pulitzer. Another son, attorney Thomas J. Fleming, took time from his busy practice to advise me on the logic, legal and otherwise, of certain arguments in the text. Most helpful of all, with her mastery of computer research as well as her editorial experience, was the most important woman in my life, Alice Mulcahey Fleming. Also invaluable was the advice and counsel of my editor, Elisabeth Kallick Dyssegaard, as the manuscript evolved over the past two years.

  —THOMAS FLEMING

  Introduction

  With leaks and wandering emails, talk shows and tell-all aides, the private lives of today’s politicians seem to have become public property. Whether this may eventually unravel the republic is frequently debated in the media. Not a few columnists and late-night gurus maintain that the best and brightest are now loath to enter politics.

  Still, the number of politicians has not noticeably declined. Nor are we the first generation to take a more than passing interest in the personal lives of our elected leaders. Convinced that historical perspective might be the best answer to the Götterdämmerung tone that the discussion sometimes takes, I decided to explore the roles of women in the lives of the first group of American politicians to win fame—George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. Collectively, most historians agree, these are the founding fathers, the men who made the greatest contribution to the birth of the nation.

  I was soon watching a young George Washington riven with desire for the wife of his close friend. I stood with Thomas Jefferson at the bedside of his dying wife, Martha Wayles, as he sobbed a fateful promise that he would never marry again. I saw a youthful Alexander Hamilton imbibe a toxic mix of fear and anger in his psyche when his headstrong mother banished his hapless father from her bed.

  As one Jefferson biographer has remarked, every man carries on a lifelong dialogue with his mother, sometimes in his conscious mind, more often in his unconscious. Mothers have an especially strong influence in the shadowy realm of emotions. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson seem to have inherited their mothers’ temperaments. Some historians think John Adams’s mother, Susanna Boylston Adams, was a manic depressive, who passed on the illness to her favorite son.

  Although the women in these famous lives spoke 150 years before feminism entered the American vocabulary, their independent voices will surprise many people. The men and women of 1776 were far more candid and realistic about sexual desire and marital relationships than Americans of the twenty-first century realize. They gave serious thought to the ancient conflict between the sexes and talked and wrote about it in ways that still have relevance today.

  This was evident from the novels they read and the stories that were printed in the newspapers. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela was the most popular novel of the era. This story of a servant girl’s rise to wealth and power proved that virtue was rewarded and simultaneously delivered titillating descriptions of a young woman agonizing over sexual desire. When fifteen-year-old Betsy Hanford of Virginia married wealthy fifty-one-year-old John Cam, the local newspaper reported, “She is to have a chariot and there is to be no padlock put upon her mind.”

  The women of 1776 had high expectations from marriage. They wanted not only affection but respect as persons. For a lucky few, these essentials could blend into near adoration. One Virginian began his letters to his wife, with “My dearest life” and declared that she “blessed the earth” with her presence. At the same time, essays and letters about unhappy marriages frequently appeared in the newspapers. One correspondent in the Virginia Gazette blamed these misfortunes on women who spent too much of a man’s m
oney on luxury, and on men who for the sake of beauty or wealth married “a fury” or an “ideot [sic].”

  We will see how strongly the founders, especially those primary political rivals Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, stressed the importance of a happy marriage in a man’s life. Thanks to his five years in France as America’s ambassador, Jefferson was able to compare American and European marriage customs and found America’s far superior. Fidelity was virtually unknown among the French upper classes. Jefferson advised young Americans to abandon dreams of a grand tour, lest they acquire the Old World’s attitude toward women.

  Recent decades of scholarship in herstory have made us aware of a dark side of women’s lives in the eighteenth century. Other than from private tutors, they had almost no educational opportunities. Divorce was seldom granted by the courts, and a woman’s property was legally controlled by her husband. On the eve of America’s independence, we will see protofeminist Abigail Adams protesting these inequalities in a famous letter to her husband, John—and his less well-known, extremely unsatisfying reply.

  A woman also had little control over her reproductive life. Pregnancy and childbirth were dangerous. Equally troubling was the awful infant mortality rate. The primitive medicine of the era made childhood almost as perilous. By late middle age, Martha Washington had lost all four of her children to death. Martha Wayles Jefferson lost four out of six children in ten years. Benjamin Franklin’s marriage was poisoned by his wife’s bitterness over the death of their four-year-old son, Frankie, while his hated illegitimate half-brother, William, thrived.

  As Franklin’s story makes clear, the founders’ marriages were not without controversy. Did George Washington recklessly pursue other women after he married Martha, as the British and later his American political enemies claimed? Is there convincing proof that Thomas Jefferson had a long-term sexual relationship with his mulatto slave, Sally Hemings? Why did the curvaceous well-off widow, Dolley Payne Todd, marry pintsized, sickly James Madison? As first lady, Dolley had to deal with vicious rumors about her sex life. She met them with a shrewdness that wives of contemporary politicians might well emulate.

  All the women in the founders’ lives had to confront and cope with fame. This little-understood phenomenon transformed many aspects of their private lives into public dramas. The fame that the founders sought and won was not the same as our modern version of it, mere celebrity. For them, fame was an enormously serious matter, involving a man’s place in history. It was reserved for founders or rescuers of nations or givers of laws and required the approval of men of judgment and intelligence.

  All the founders were aware that the Revolutionary upheaval and the task of creating a nation gave them unique opportunities to win this ultimate accolade. “You and I,” John Adams wrote to a Virginia friend in 1777, “have been sent into life at a time when the greatest lawgivers of antiquity would have wished to live.” In 1778, Alexander Hamilton wrote a pamphlet attacking certain congressmen who were using their positions to get rich. Hamilton could not understand how a man could succumb to such a “mean pursuit” when he had a chance to be THE FOUNDER OF AN EMPIRE [Hamilton’s capitals]. “A man of virtue and ability, dignified with so precious a trust, would rejoice that fortune had given him birth at [such] a time.”

  Washington, debating whether to risk his fame by endorsing the dubious idea of a constitutional convention in 1787, told a friend, “To see this country happy is so much the wish of my soul, nothing on this side of Elysium can be placed in competition with it.”

  For some women this kind of fame could be a stimulant. But it could also be a beast in the jungle, almost an evil spirit. This was especially true of Abigail Adams, who had to endure years of agonizing loneliness while her husband pursued diplomatic fame in Europe. Even worse was Elizabeth Hamilton’s ordeal when her husband defended his fame as the creator of the new nation’s financial system by making a public confession of his infidelity with a Philadelphia temptress.

  When we explore the wives’ influence on these famous lives, we discover evidence so strong, it can easily be asserted in some cases—that of John Adams, for instance—that the great man would never have earned his place on fame’s ladder without the woman at his side. The same conclusion is even more true for James Madison. While Martha Washington destroyed all but a handful of the personal letters she exchanged with George, there is evidence that she was by no means a mere fellow-traveler on Washington’s journey to fame.

  Knowing and understanding the women in their lives adds pathos and depth to the public dimensions of the founding fathers’ political journeys. We do them no dishonor when we explore how often public greatness emerged in spite of personal pain and secret disappointment. Far from diminishing these men and women, an examination of their intimate lives will enlarge them for our time. In their loves and losses, their hopes and fears, they are more like us than we have dared to imagine.

  BOOK ONE

  George Washington

  THE AGONIES OF HONOR

  On March 30, 1877, the New York Herald, one of the largest newspapers in America, printed a lengthy love letter that had been written on September 12, 1758. Not exactly hot news, you might say. Had the editors lost their collective marbles? The Herald’s editors did not think so. Nothing they printed that day created more of a sensation among their readers. The letter was from George Washington. Here is the heart of its text, exactly as it was printed:

  Tis true I profess myself a votary of love. I acknowledge that a lady is in the case and further I confess that this lady is known to you. Yes, Madame, as well as she is to one who is too sensible to her charms to deny the power whose influence he feels and must ever submit to. I feel the force of her amiable beauties and the recollection of a thousand tender passages that I could wish to obliterate till I am bid to revive them. But experience, alas, sadly reminds me how impossible this is, and evinces an opinion which I have long entertained, that there is a destiny which has control of our actions, not to be resisted by the strongest efforts of human nature. You have drawn me, dear Madam, or rather have I drawn myself into an honest confession of a simple fact. Misconstrue not my meaning; doubt it not nor expose it. The world has no business to know the object of my love declared in this manner to you when I want to conceal it. One thing above all things in this world I wish to know, and only one person of your acquaintance can solve me that, or guess my meaning. But adieu to this till happier times, if I shall ever see them.

  In this welter of indirection and hinted meanings was George Washington crying out, “I love you! Do you love me?” The Herald’s headline was: “A Washington Romance.” Beneath it was a subtitle: “A Letter from General Washington Acknowledging The Power of Love.” Then came an introduction to the text:

  In a collection of rare and autograph letters which will be sold by Bangs & Co. this afternoon we find the accompanying letter written by General Washington at the age of twenty six and never before made public. The present owner purchased it in England some years ago for the sum of L15. The letter is addressed to Mrs. Sarah Fairfax at Belvoir. This lady was a Miss Cary, to whom George Washington once offered his hand but was refused for his friend and comrade, George William Fairfax. Irving asserts that it was a sister of Mrs. Fairfax, Miss Mary Cary, after Mrs. Edward Ambler.

  “Irving” refers to Washington Irving, author of an acclaimed five-volume biography of Washington. But the Herald reporter dismisses Irving’s assertion by citing an article that was published in Scribner’s magazine in June of 1876, in which a Fairfax descendant insisted it was Sally Cary, Mrs. Fairfax, for whom Washington “had a tenderness.” He quotes from the article: “It is fair to say that papers which have never been given to the public set this question beyond a doubt. Mrs. George William Fairfax, the object of George Washington’s early and passionate love, lived to an advanced age in Bath, England…Upon her death at the age of eighty-one, letters, still in possession of the Fairfax family, were found among her effects, sho
wing that Washington had never forgotten the influence of his youthful disappointment.”

  Next came a gaffe that underscores why newspapers are often called history’s first draft. The reporter noted that in the sentences preceding the confession that he was “a votary of love,” Washington rebuked Sally Fairfax for suggesting in a letter to him that he was preoccupied with “the animating prospect of possessing Mrs. Custis.” The reporter blithely dismissed this reference to Washington’s future wife: “It is hardly probable that Washington means to express his love for Mrs. Custis, for her husband was then living—in fact did not die until twenty years after the date of this letter.” Readers who had access to Washington Irving’s biography swiftly discovered that Daniel Parke Custis had been dead more than a year when Washington wrote this September 12, 1758, letter to Sally Fairfax. Worse, on or about June 5, 1758, he had become engaged to marry Martha Dandridge Custis.1

  For Americans who regarded George Washington as a virtual incarnation of divinity—and they were numerous in 1877—the letter created consternation. It was only three months after the fervent yearlong celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of independence, in which Washington had been portrayed as the ultimate hero. Today, the Bangs auction house would have been rubbing its hands with unconcealed glee and kiting the price of the manuscript into the stratosphere. In 1877, no bidding took place. Bangs merely announced that the letter had been sold for $13. Even in 1877, when the dollar was worth perhaps thirty of our depreciated dollars, the price is much too low to be believable. Rumor long maintained that the purchaser was J. P. Morgan, but no evidence has been discovered to support that assertion. Whoever he was, the buyer evidently felt he was performing a patriotic act by removing the letter from sight.