Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past (Sexuality Studies) (9 page)

For this author, the love of husband and wife was not just privately
shared. It radiated outward, bolstering the beleaguered American forces: "Everybody enjoyed being with the Washingtons at headquarters because of
their obvious fondness for each other and the good cheer they radiated.""'

Turn-of-the-century popular accounts rely on lore and speculation as
much as the romanticized accounts published a century earlier. The introduction to Worthy Partner, a 1994 publication of the letters and writings of
Martha Washington, repeats a nineteenth-century account that the courtship was romantic "love at first sight.""' "After they married," explains the
author, "there is not a sign that George was a bored or unhappy husband.
They shared a bed throughout their marriage (no separate bedrooms here),
and he desired her companionship as often as possible when he was away
from home during the war and the presidency.""' A recent biography by
journalist Fleming asserts-without a source of evidence for the claim-that
Martha was "the only person with whom Washington could relax and speak
candidly." Fleming further emphasizes a chemistry between them by focusing on how Martha must have felt when marrying George on the heels of her
first husband, whom he describes as a "rather pathetic" man. "Martha," he
imagines, "must have felt a few tremors," as Washington "must have been a
breathtaking sight" on his wedding day. He poignantly remarks that upon
her death, Martha was "almost visibly eager to join the man she had loved so
long and so deeply in an eternity of happiness.""' Keep in mind that all of
these deeply personal insights about the affective bond between Martha and
George come from scant few letters to analyze: Martha famously destroyed
virtually all of their correspondence after his death.

As we have seen, one of the reasons that Americans today may not know
that Washington never fathered children is that there is a long history of
portraying Washington as a model father figure-of the nation to be sure,
but also of his own household. And any of the negative associations with
childlessness-homosexuality, impotence, lack of desirability-have been
roundly countered by his memorializers for well over a century.

The desire to create a more approachable Washington has led to a sustained and perhaps increased portrayal of the man as an appealing father
and family man. This trend continues today, as demonstrated by biographer
Bruce Chadwick and others who emphasize Washington's paternal side by
using the terms "stepfather" and "father" interchangeably-and "daughter" and "stepdaughter," in the same manner. In descriptions of certain
moments, such as when Martha's daughter Patsy died, the term "father" is
used to underscore the bond between them. Thus, Chadwick follows "Patsy
died in her father's arms" with "The stoic Washington was too overcome to
offer much detail on his daughter's sudden demise." 126 Chadwick is right to
characterize the relationship in this manner, but the unintended effect may be to contribute to a long history of compensating for what some might find
controversial about Washington's family life.

Figure 1.7. Washington family statues. Greeting visitors to the Mount Vernon Visitor
Center is a group of statues that depict George and Martha striding youthfully alongside
two young children. Although the youngsters appear to be members of the nuclear
family, the legend identifies them as grandchildren. (Statue of Washington and Family.
Mount Vernon Visitor Center. Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association.)

Reacting in part to the relatively recent historical inquiry into the
lives of ordinary Americans, Washington's image makers have sought to
depict him as still relevant for a populace who sees elite, slave-holding
men as less and less the central focus of early American history. Thus, the
new visitor center at Mount Vernon, in an explicit attempt to "humanize" Washington and connect with contemporary museumgoers, returns
to the image of Washington the family man with a set of four statues
in the welcome area. The statues that greet visitors are of George and
Martha striding youthfully, accompanied by their grandchildren (Figure
1.7). The effect is to recreate an image of the nuclear family. To many
visitors, the children could appear to be their own.117 But on the floor,
engraved in the stone tile at the foot of each statue, not set off by any color or distinguishing features, is a name and age, and each of the children has "grandson" and "granddaughter" presented for those who would
closely inspect.

At the same time, by the end of the twentieth century, many writers
have taken it upon themselves to directly address the issue of Washington
not having children. And for the first time, most accounts offer readers
what they now want-an explanation. This approach has been taken for at
least two reasons. First, the move to make Washington more ordinary and
accessible, as typified by all biographies today, includes saying more about
this aspect of his life. Second, the contemporary issues around childlessness
have become much more public today. If marriage was the central aspect of
becoming a man in the eighteenth century, having a child has become one of
the measures in contemporary society.

Many contemporary biographers draw on the letter that Washington
sent to his nephew to assert that he was sterile. For example, "The conclusion
that he was sterile is inescapable," Brookhiser confidently declares. "The act
of generation... was one he could not perform.""' Given masculine standards of the day that negatively characterized sexually dysfunctional men
as, among other things, withdrawn and weakly, one wonders if Washington
were sterile, would he have shared this information with his nephew?

Of course, some writers are more tentative than others but are nonetheless
explicit in their speculation. According to the ever-changing popular website Wikipedia, for example, "George and Martha never had any children
together-his earlier bout with smallpox followed, possibly, by tuberculosis
may have made him sterile.""' Another biographer notes that, given Martha's
children from a previous husband, George was "probably... sterile."130

Notably, impotence is virtually never suggested, unless it is being
ruled out. Washington's award-winning biographer James Thomas Flexner
explains to the readers of popular history magazine American Heritage
that the "evidence presents a very strong presumption that Washington
was, although not impotent, sterile.""' "There is nothing in his behavior,"
writes another biographer, "to suggest that he was impotent, or that his
sexual nature caused him any deep uneasiness.""' Another portrays Washington as a man who was clearly performing his husbandly duty beyond
question and claims that Washington was "mystified why, year after year,
he and Martha could produce no Washington heir.""' Most recently, a
2009 biography also does not raise impotence as a possibility, declaring
that "reasonable speculation suggests two possibilities.... Martha may
have had difficult deliveries... that left her unable to conceive again,
or Washington's bout with smallpox... may have left him sterile." This account also seems to suggest that impotence was not at work, as Washington never expressed guilt or self-consciousness. Indeed, the author infers
that Martha was the problem in his explanation that George was filled
with "forbearance" and "understanding" as he "tried to help Martha deal
with her almost uncontrollable maternal anxiety." (This interpretation is
based, it seems, on the one brief surviving letter that we have from Martha to George in which she comments on a "rainey and wett" day during
which she expressed feeling "sorry" that he would "not be at home as soon
as" she had "expected.")134

The inquiry into Washington's childlessness is not just limited to popular biography. In a medical journal, John K.Amory publishes his conclusion
that Washington could not likely have been impotent given what we know
about him as a "healthy, vigorous man." Tellingly, the author also rules out
sexual infertility as the result of a sexually transmitted disease (despite their
commonness in eighteenth-century America), noting Washington's "character and strong sense of moral propriety."135 We know that erectile dysfunction occurs far more frequently than sterility-although frequency today
may not match that of Washington's era. Nonetheless it is striking that writers resist raising the possibility."'

A minority of biographers are invested in singling out Martha, mother
of two of her own children, as the cause of the Washingtons' childlessness.
Writes one pair, "According to a tradition passed down in Masonic circles,
Martha Washington would have needed some sort of corrective surgery in
order to conceive additional children after the birth of Patsy." 137 In another
account, the author imagines Martha accepting blame for the couple's never
having their own child: "I never gave you a child of your own and you never
reproached me, not once." 131

On the scale of emasculating sexual deficiencies, it seems that sterility
ranks slightly lower than impotence. Sexualized manhood has long been
predicated on the ability to penetrate. The colonial-era medical literature,
for example, argues that sterile men should not divorce, as they could still
fulfill the marital duty of sexual intimacy. The impotent man could not.1i9
In the eighteenth century, childless couples could and did consult midwives,
physicians, and reproduction manuals, but we have no evidence that George
and Martha did any of this-again, perhaps suggesting the problem was not
a mystery to them.'4o

For some writers, the question of whether the problem lay with George
or Martha is answered by the conclusion that he did, indeed, reproducejust not with Martha. In recent decades, there has been increasing public attention given to the idea that Washington fathered a child with an enslaved woman. The descendants of a man named West Ford have identified him as a direct descendant of Washington, and, indeed, the evidence seems to suggest that, much like the case of Jefferson, someone in
the Washington family was his father. Although oral history has linked
him to the Washington family for centuries, Ford is initially identified as
Washington's son in print in the 1940s, first in the Pittsburgh Courier and
later in a book on race in colonial America. As one recent biographer of
Washington concludes, "In the matter of West Ford, the documentary evidence is ambiguous, but there is virtually no doubt that he was kin to the
first president.""' A fictionalized history that uses oral tradition imagines
how Washington could have been Ford's father.142 If Washington could be
proven to have been sterile or impotent, he would clearly not be the father
of either Ford or Posey.

Founding Father

In modern biographies, then, readers learn that, although childless, Washington was decidedly heterosexual, monogamous, and ideally suited for
fatherhood. In biography as well as imagery, sleight of hand could lead many
to believe that Washington had his own children. The compensatory portrayals of Washington-those that emphasize his masculine sexual appeal,
his interest in women, his romantic marriage, and his paternal nature-all
dispel any questions about manhood that childlessness could raise. As the
next chapter shows, the ability of biographers to use success in private life
to balance out perceived deficiencies of masculine virility would play out in
the accounts of Jefferson's life as well-although with an unintended consequence.

If we step back from the stories of Washington's romantic life, we can see
broad changes that indicate an early shift from an emphasis on the national
significance of his personal life to a closer reflection on his personal and
individual character. This shift mirrors trends in the nation as well as the
emergence of a psychology of sex that highlights the centrality of sexual
desires and behaviors for personal character. Yet throughout the twentieth
century, the trend reverses; although in the early twentieth century, the focus
on sex and individualized personhood deepens, by the turn of the new millennium, sexuality has become so associated with national social and political matters that inquiry into Washington's personal life could speak to a host
of contexts, including the emphasis on the history of ordinary Americans
and multiculturalism and a reactionary politics that concerns itself with a
perceived sexual liberation in contemporary America and a distressing move away from a stereotyped more moral past. The tendency to include more
material of a sexual nature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is
not just a story of decreased censorship and increased liberalism. It is also
a story about changing understandings of what is normal and Americans'
corresponding desires to remember the nation's first president as desirable
and masculine.

The question of not having his own children has been answered by
pointing out that he raised children. For one recent biographer, Washington's Mount Vernon was teeming with children. In this biography, journalist
Harlow G.Unger does not discuss that Washington had no children of his
own until the very end of the narrative, when he concludes the book with
a final paragraph that begins, "Although George Washington had no issue,
well over five thousand descendants of his extended family survive in virtually every state," thus endowing him with the necessary progeny for manhood.143 Indeed, with this line of thinking, to those five thousand we might
add the hundreds of millions of U.S. residents living today-what better
counterweight to childlessness than paternity for every living American for
the duration, something no other man living or dead, not even the most
prolific, could claim? Military hero and successful politician, Washington
without question was and is still a model of successful American manliness
as a public figure. And, through the careful handling of artists and biographers, in national memory the private Washington, as well, truly achieves
manhood without issue.