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Our founding parents
THE INTIMATE LIVES OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS
By Thomas Fleming
480 pp. HarperCollins Smithsonian $27.99
Reviewed by Elizabeth McCullough
We may not have the patience to wade through the intricacies of health care reform or the economic stimulus plan, but the American public seems to have an insatiable appetite for sex scandals involving politicians. Hiking the Appalachian Trail will never seem the same after South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s heartfelt confessions of love for his Argentinean mistress. President Bill Clinton’s escapades have cast a stain of ignominy on the little blue dress. And I’m not sure what kind of euphemism would cover what Louisiana Senator David Vitter and former governor of New York Elliot Spitzer have been up to with their hired companions.
No matter what their party, when politicians are riding high, they seem to many people to be larger than life. Their morals are stouter, their children more accomplished, their spouses more devoted than those of ordinary men and women. When scandal hits and we get a raw and unfiltered look at their intimate relationships, suddenly these great men and woman seem very small, very human. Perhaps it’s better not to look too closely, and avoid the inevitable disappointment.
Perhaps it’s better, too, to leave the great men and women of our past, the Founders, on their pedestals, but Thomas Fleming, who has published seventeen histories dealing with the Revolutionary period, has a different notion. “Far from diminishing these men and women,” he writes in the introduction to The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers, “an examination of their intimate lives will enlarge them for our time.”
The book is about the personal lives of the Founding Fathers, but it was the mothers, daughters, lovers, and female friends in the founders’ lives who created and sustained their intimate connections. While Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, or Thomas Jefferson travelled for months or years at a time on diplomatic missions, the women in their lives were working equally hard at different sort of diplomacy, building a network of relationships that reached throughout the colonies and across the Atlantic to sustain the new nation.
Intimate Lives is divided into six “books,” each devoted to one of the founders: George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. Fleming provides enough of an outline of the major historical events and accomplishments of each man’s life to set the scene for their intimate relationships. He begins with each man’s family of origin, believing that “mothers have an especially strong influence in the shadowy realm of emotions.” Then follow young love, marriage, and parenthood.
Fleming also provides some enlightening background on the expectations the people of the time had for marriage and family life. “In the eighteenth century,” Fleming explains, “a man could choose to be a husband with all the panoply and power the word implied in a world that gave him virtually absolute authority over a wife. Or he could seek and hopefully find in his life’s companion a person with whom he could share his deepest hope and fears and ambitions.” When a man like George Washington or John Adams addressed his wife as “dear friend,” it was not an expression of cool esteem; rather, it was one of the greatest compliments one could give to one’s spouse.
The intersection of private life and the young nation’s “increasingly rancid” politics began early in the American Revolution. Salacious gossip was the first weapon of choice in any political rivalry. Looking back two hundred years later, it’s hard to take some of the rumors seriously: Did anyone at the time really believe that Dolley Madison was “promiscuous” or that James Madison and Thomas Jefferson literally “pimped” her out to foreign diplomats? On the other hand, serious rumors about the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings began spreading during Jefferson’s first term of office, and two centuries later they are still being discussed with great passion. On this subject, Fleming is careful to present all sides of the issue, but it’s clear he very much doubts that Jefferson is the father of any of Hemings’ children. The weight of the evidence seems to contradict that stance, but the controversy goes on.
The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers is not just a recounting of sexual scandal. Fleming’s narrative proves that without the support of their families, the founders simply could not have gotten the United States off the ground. At the same time he makes abundantly clear how much these men and women sacrificed for their country.
Although he removes them from their lofty pedestals, Fleming does the founders—the mothers and the fathers of their country—an honorable service by revealing that they were not just great, but also greatly human.
Elizabeth McCullough is a freelance writer living in beautiful Charlottesville, Virginia, with her husband and two children. Visit her at http://cvillewords.com.
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