Question 1
Through surveys of cultural representations and historic people from the period, Rachel Hope Cleves demonstrates that new conversations about and expressions of gender and sexuality flourished immediately after the Revolutionary War for white Americans while noting that Native and African Americans faced increasing scrutiny, coercion, exploitation of their sexualities and genders.
Please identify two or three important examples of “Revolutionary Sexualities and Early National Genders” from her essay and/or from Bronski’s chapter, indicating author’s last name and page numbers (as printed in the original) for each example.
Question 2
In “Sexual Desire, Crime, and Punishment in the Early Republic,” Mark Kann discusses the transition from an emphasis on corporal punishments commonly used during the colonial period (such as hanging, whipping, and public display in stocks) to “long-term incarceration in penitentiaries” (page 287) during the first several decades of the new, post-Revolutionary War republic. Please name and discuss a few ways these changes were directly related to then-current ideas about criminal sexual behavior–and remember to indicate the page numbers informing your thoughts.
18 A Queer History of the United States
Early colonial life in the northern continent was a mass of con- tradictions. It was extraordinarily intolerant, yet often surprisingly lax. The European settlers’ relations to the native peoples ranged from murderous genocide to a complex series of eroticized relation- ships. While Europeans brought with them a persecuting society, the manifestations of that society took many forms. One of the
lasting legacies of colonial social and .legal culture was the appli- cation of laws prohibiting and punishing sexual activity between people of the same sex. Treating some sexual behaviors differently because potentially they had less impact on the community had a twin effect on future American culture. It gave rise to the social (and eventual legal) concept of “consenting adults” and to a domestic-
based idea of privacy that offered protections to some people at certain points in history.
This concept of privacy, however, had another, damaging, im- pact on future social convention and law. By assigning sexuality to a private sphere, it prevented any public acknowledgment or dis- cussion of almost all sexual activity. Thus it laid the groundwork
for same-sex sexual behaviors and identities to be hidden and even considered shameful. While the Puritans rejected what they saw as sexual license or overt licentiousness in British culture, they fully ac- cepted the role of sexuality and sexual desire in everyday life. This sharp divide-not exactly a contradiction, although it may have ap- peared so later, as sexual mores in American culture became more
lenient-has remained a basic tenet of America’s cultural life. The tension between the needs and demands of society and the decisions of an individual to live her or his life as part of, yet separate from, the community informed the four centuries that followed Europeans arriving in this foreign land.
TWO
SEXUALLY AMBIGUOUS REVOLUTIONS
The transition from the colonial period to the Revolutionary era,
during which a daring political experiment took root, led to the emergence of a new nation. Fundamental to this new nation was
the reshaping of ideas about gender and sexual behavior as they re- lated to the political concept of the citizen.
The period from the Pilgrims’ landing to the early eighteenth
century was a time of enormous population growth. In 1700 the Anglo-European population in the Northeast was 250,000. By 1720 that number had almost doubled to 475,000. This surge in popula- tion was accompanied by the rapid growth of cities-by 1725 the population of Boston was over 12,000, nearly doubled from 6,700 in 1700; Philadelphia was home to rn,ooo people. New York, al- though growing rapidly, had just 7,000 residents (by 1800 it would have 60,000). In 1760, colonists numbered I.5 million-six times the population at the turn of the century.
This expansion of colonies and people meant that the influence of Puritanism was waning. Many of the newer colonies were founded on non-Puritan beliefs.
In 1682 Charles II granted wealthy English Quaker William Penn a large tract of land west of what is now New Jersey. Penn nallled it Sylvania for its densely wooded terrain, and then renamed it Penn- sylvania after his father. (Like many of the colonies, Pennsylvania was a commercial venture that was intended to turn a profit for its investors, in this case through the trading of furs and lumber.)
19
Michael Bronski, A Queer History of the United States, (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2011)
20 A Queer History of the United States
Penn’s charter for the new colony reflected his progressive Quaker views. There was freedom of religion for all who believed in God, and a constitution that called for two “houses” of government and that allowed, in the spirit of a Quaker “open discourse.” Most important, Penn treated the native peoples of the area- primarily the Lenni Lenape, called the Delaware tribe by the An- glo settlers-with respect, buying land from them rather than at- tacking and taking it. Pennsylvania grew quickly as Quakers from all over Europe settled there, joined by Catholics, Amish, Menno- nites, and Jews. Penn designed Philadelphia-the city of brotherly love, denoting many faiths-between 1682 and 1684. Within fifty years it was the second largest urban area in the colonies. Progres- sive Quaker views on religious freedom and abolition-and later, sexual freedom-would be a strong influence on American political thought.
This rapid growth and diversity meant that the social and reli- gious cohesiveness of the early colonies was lost; the Puritans’ strict social demands on the individual were waning and being questioned.
The infamous Salem witch trials of 1692 and 1693, in which twenty people were executed and :five more died in prison, were a grim man- ifestation of the excesses of the Puritan imagination. However, the Massachusetts General Court issued a public apology for the trials five years later and eventually granted monetary compensation to the families of those executed. The 1682 Pennsylvania sodomy law did away with the death penalty for sodomy and replaced it with a whipping, six months of hard labor, and the forfeiture of a third of the accused’s estate. (Thirty-two years later Pennsylvania made sodomy a capital crime again, reflecting changing demographics and belief systems.)
The growing assemblage of people, social structures, and politi- cal entities fostered a sense of pluralism unique to the colonies. But this pluralism did not reconcile the tension between the freedom of the individual and the need for a strong state formally embodied by the personal moral rectitude of the Puritans.
Sexually Ambiguous Revolutions 21
SLAVES AND CITIZENS
Despite the progressive inclination of some colonies, the persecuting society persisted. Colonists continued their sexualized treatment of native people, sodomy laws proliferated, and the legal, economic, and cultural institution of slavery was introduced into the colonies. It is impossible to understand American history-including the posi- tion of LGBT people-without acknowledging the overwhelming, debilitating effect that slavery has had on this country. From the mid-seventeenth century, organized, profit-driven slavery influenced all aspects of American life. Slavery struck at the heart of the ideals of individualism, personal liberty, and equality that were present, in sophisticated and rudimentary forms, at the birth of the colonies. Slavery was integral to how the colonies, and later the Republic, continued to reconceptualize individual freedom, race, property, and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.
From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, over Af- ricans were brought to North America as slaves. However, this is a relatively small number compared to the twelve million Africans who were transported and sold, mostly in the Caribbean and South America, in the mid-Atlantic slave trade, also referred to as the first Middle Passage.
Slavery arose in the colonies hand in hand with both European and African indentured servitude, which was commonplace. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries more than half of all white Eu- ropean (mostly British) immigrants to the colonies were indentured servants. These were often rural people who, dispossessed of their land and unemployed, were living in poverty in English cities. Their indenture, a contractual agreement with the person or firm who brought them to the colonies, lasted five years, after which they were free.
In the mid to late seventeenth century, laws in the colonies be- gan to change. In a Virginia court declared that John Casar, an African servant, was legally a slave for life. Gradually, African indentured servants became legally treated as slaves, with no pos- sibility of ending their servitude. This shift occurred for a number
20 A Queer History of the United States
Penn’s charter for the new colony reflected his progressive Quaker views. There was freedom of religion for all who believed in God, and a constitution that called for two “houses” of government and that allowed, in the spirit of a Quaker “open discourse.” Most important, Penn treated the native peoples of the area- primarily the Lenni Lenape, called the Delaware tribe by the An- glo settlers-with respect, buying land from them rather than at- tacking and taking it. Pennsylvania grew quickly as Quakers from all over Europe settled there, joined by Catholics, Amish, Menno- nites, and Jews. Penn designed Philadelphia-the city of brotherly love, denoting many faiths-between 1682 and 1684. Within fifty years it was the second largest urban area in the colonies. Progres- sive Quaker views on religious freedom and abolition-and later, sexual freedom-would be a strong influence on American political thought.
This rapid growth and diversity meant that the social and reli- gious cohesiveness of the early colonies was lost; the Puritans’ strict social demands on the individual were waning and being questioned.
The infamous Salem witch trials of 1692 and 1693, in which twenty people were executed and :five more died in prison, were a grim man- ifestation of the excesses of the Puritan imagination. However, the Massachusetts General Court issued a public apology for the trials five years later and eventually granted monetary compensation to the families of those executed. The 1682 Pennsylvania sodomy law did away with the death penalty for sodomy and replaced it with a whipping, six months of hard labor, and the forfeiture of a third of the accused’s estate. (Thirty-two years later Pennsylvania made sodomy a capital crime again, reflecting changing demographics and belief systems.)
The growing assemblage of people, social structures, and politi- cal entities fostered a sense of pluralism unique to the colonies. But this pluralism did not reconcile the tension between the freedom of the individual and the need for a strong state formally embodied by the personal moral rectitude of the Puritans.
Sexually Ambiguous Revolutions 21
SLAVES AND CITIZENS
Despite the progressive inclination of some colonies, the persecuting society persisted. Colonists continued their sexualized treatment of native people, sodomy laws proliferated, and the legal, economic, and cultural institution of slavery was introduced into the colonies. It is impossible to understand American history-including the posi- tion of LGBT people-without acknowledging the overwhelming, debilitating effect that slavery has had on this country. From the mid-seventeenth century, organized, profit-driven slavery influenced all aspects of American life. Slavery struck at the heart of the ideals of individualism, personal liberty, and equality that were present, in sophisticated and rudimentary forms, at the birth of the colonies. Slavery was integral to how the colonies, and later the Republic, continued to reconceptualize individual freedom, race, property, and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.
From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, over Af- ricans were brought to North America as slaves. However, this is a relatively small number compared to the twelve million Africans who were transported and sold, mostly in the Caribbean and South America, in the mid-Atlantic slave trade, also referred to as the first Middle Passage.
Slavery arose in the colonies hand in hand with both European and African indentured servitude, which was commonplace. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries more than half of all white Eu- ropean (mostly British) immigrants to the colonies were indentured servants. These were often rural people who, dispossessed of their land and unemployed, were living in poverty in English cities. Their indenture, a contractual agreement with the person or firm who brought them to the colonies, lasted five years, after which they were free.
In the mid to late seventeenth century, laws in the colonies be- gan to change. In a Virginia court declared that John Casar, an African servant, was legally a slave for life. Gradually, African indentured servants became legally treated as slaves, with no pos- sibility of ending their servitude. This shift occurred for a number
22 A Queer History of the United States
of complex reasons, the most pertinent of which is that Africans, in contrast to indentured whites, had no outside social and cultural support systems of other Africans in the country and thus were more
easily enslaved. Contemporary European societies had not promoted or regulated
persecution on this large a scale. By 1860, the slave population in the United States had grown to four million, a third of the popula- tion in the fifteen (out of thirty-three) states that sanctioned slavery. In some states slaves were in the majority. In 1720, just under 70 percent of South Carolina’s population was enslaved.
Slavery was also tied to religious belief. Virginia ruled in
1682 that
all servants . . . which shall be imported into this country ei- ther by sea or by land, whether Negroes, Moors, mulattoes or Indians who and whose parentage and native countries are not Christian at the time of their first purchase by some Chris- tian … and all Indians, which shall be sold by our neighbor- ing Indians, or any other trafficking with us for slaves, are hereby adjudged, deemed and taken to be slaves to all intents and purposes any law, usage, or custom to the contrary not-
withstanding. 1
Lawmakers in the colonies were constructing a separate class of nonwhite, non-Christian people to be an economic bulwark of free labor. They had several reasons: a growing landowning class that did not want the competition of a new class of freed indentured servants; a shift, mostly in southern states, to agricultural products such as tobacco and cotton that were labor intensive; and a massive westward expansion of colonies that needed labor.
Except for Quakers, most colonists did not consider slavery con- tradictory to Christian theology. Its proponents justified the prac- tice by citing verses in the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels, including Genesis 9:25-27, in which Noah’s grandson Canaan is condemned to slavery: “Cursed be Canaan[ The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers.” The biblical justifications for slavery, not unlike the
Sexually Ambiguous Revolutions 23
biblical justifications for the condemnation of same-sex sexual activity, were used to both enforce draconian laws and justify ex- traordinarily harsh punishments.
Because slaves were deemed to be “property,” slaveholders had unlimited legal power over them, including the right to sell them for profit and separate them from their loved ones. Thus slaves were denied the basic right of maintaining relationships with their bio- logical and chosen families. Slave owning was not simply a matter of personal property, but was woven into the social fabric of the Republic. For example, laws held slave owners accountable for not punishing runaway slaves, since such behavior was seen as a threat to public safety.
It would be inaccurate and unwise to make strict parallel claims for the oppression of slaves and gay people. But the extensive legal and social effects of slavery have shaped the social and political con- text of America today. The acceptance of slavery as a philosophical concept and political reality laid the groundwork for the justification of “othering” -designating a group of people as “different,” placing them outside of the legal, social, and moral framework granting full citizenship. As was the case for both native people and religious dissenters, othering is the enactment of Moore’s persecuting society and Douglas’s sequestering of the impure from the pure. The tem- plate of othering in slavery has two main effects that apply to LGBT people and other minorities.
First, slavery constructed a legal system that mandated nonciti- zenship for slaves (which, after slavery was abolished, evolved into second-class citizenship for African Americans). This denial of citi- zenship, however, did not release slaves from the obligation of obey- ing the law, which was often enforced more harshly on them than on full citizens. While racialized slavery-abolished by the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865-is clearly the extreme example of noncitizenship, its hierarchical legacies are applied to other marginalized groups throughout U.S. history.
Second, the widespread acceptance of legalized slavery reinforced and normalized mainstream society’s ideas about moral and sexual inferiority. Just as early Spanish settlers accused native peoples of
24 A History of the United States
a natural inferiority and intrinsic sexual immorality, white colo-
nists, even if they were not slaveholders, presumed that Africans were less than human and incapable of moral Christian behavior. To
the Europeans, native people and Africans who looked and behaved
differently from them were dangerous to the accepted morality of
the dominant culture, and therefore they were treated with varying
degrees of moral and social scorn.
Accusations of sexual immorality often took two forms. The first
was the charge of dangerous hypersexuality. In the second-and
counterintuitive-form, the sexual outcast becomes the object of
repressed sexual fantasies of the mainstream culture. This was cer-
tainly the case in America, in which dominant culture’s sexual fan-
tasies were projected onto the sexuality of the enslaved Africans.
These myths included prodigious sexual desire in African women
and men and, in the post-Civil War years, the idea that all African
men were capable of sexual violence and rape. These projections
were used by the dominant group as reasons to maintain their posi-
tion of physical and social power. A primary reason, for instance,
why slave owners depicted enslaved women as hypersexual was to
justify their right to rape these women. This presumed hypersexual-
ity was the excuse for white men to be sexual with enslaved women
and the reason they needed to be controlled.
The articulation of these sexual fantasies raised enormous anxi-
ety in the dominant culture, thus making the minority group the
target of more physical violence. Under slavery, this violence mani-
fested itself in a pervasive culture of sexual humiliation, sexual
harassment, and rape, all used to control and subjugate Africans.
Projected sexual fantasies tell us nothing about the Africans or their
descendants, but a great deal about the women and men who held
them. By othering, European colonists began constructing a new
national identity and citizenship premised on a massive displace-
ment of their own sexual and gender anxieties onto marginalized
groups.
This mixture of erotic fascination and anxiety is embedded in the
numerous Indian captivity narratives, such as the best-selling 1682
memoir A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary
Sexually Ambiguous Revolutions 25
Rowlandson, that were hugely popular from the late seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth century. These works-usually
about European women captured by, then forced to live with (and
often marry) native people-excited and titillated European readers,
as the “innocence” of “white women” was threatened by the raven-
ous and dangerous sexuality of nonwhite men. (William Bradford
saw a similar threat at Merrymount with the intermarriage of white
men and Native American women.)
This othering of Native Americans was a major way that col-
onists conceptualized sexuality and same-sex relationships. In a
complex mixture of displaced sexual idealization and fear, Native
American characters appear as eroticized demons and ghosts in Eu-
ropean American literature from the mid-seventeenth century on.
In the popular colonial and European American imagination, these
Native American characters embodied the overt sexuality and “nat-
ural” desire that the Europeans lacked or repressed. These fantasies
of native people were, in essence, a critique of what was consid-
ered by majority culture to be normative sexual desire and behavior.
This idea of nonwhite people possessing a “natural” or uninhibited
sexuality-recalling, in a more positive way, how the early Spanish
conquistadors saw native people-is inherently racist. Nevertheless,
by the mid-nineteenth century it had evolved to become founda-
tional to how America . culture was to conceptualize male-male
relationships. 2
Ideas about the “natural” and the “civilized” are often at the
heart of how a culture classifies people, groups, and actions. Sex-
ual activity between people of the same sex is often described as
“unnatural” in religious and legal discourse-it is contrary to what
“nature” or “natural law” intended. This is why sodomy statutes
often refer to “unnatural acts.” European and colonial society con-
sidered itself “civilized” when contrasted with nonwhite peoples.
Yet the othering of a behavior or identity as dangerous may, under
certain ambiguous conditions, make it more desired. In this way, the “unnatural” became “natural” only when enacted by an already
“civilized” white person. This is an example of purity and danger
congealing around sexuality and gender.
24 A History of the United States
a natural inferiority and intrinsic sexual immorality, white colo-
nists, even if they were not slaveholders, presumed that Africans were less than human and incapable of moral Christian behavior. To
the Europeans, native people and Africans who looked and behaved
differently from them were dangerous to the accepted morality of
the dominant culture, and therefore they were treated with varying
degrees of moral and social scorn.
Accusations of sexual immorality often took two forms. The first
was the charge of dangerous hypersexuality. In the second-and
counterintuitive-form, the sexual outcast becomes the object of
repressed sexual fantasies of the mainstream culture. This was cer-
tainly the case in America, in which dominant culture’s sexual fan-
tasies were projected onto the sexuality of the enslaved Africans.
These myths included prodigious sexual desire in African women
and men and, in the post-Civil War years, the idea that all African
men were capable of sexual violence and rape. These projections
were used by the dominant group as reasons to maintain their posi-
tion of physical and social power. A primary reason, for instance,
why slave owners depicted enslaved women as hypersexual was to
justify their right to rape these women. This presumed hypersexual-
ity was the excuse for white men to be sexual with enslaved women
and the reason they needed to be controlled.
The articulation of these sexual fantasies raised enormous anxi-
ety in the dominant culture, thus making the minority group the
target of more physical violence. Under slavery, this violence mani-
fested itself in a pervasive culture of sexual humiliation, sexual
harassment, and rape, all used to control and subjugate Africans.
Projected sexual fantasies tell us nothing about the Africans or their
descendants, but a great deal about the women and men who held
them. By othering, European colonists began constructing a new
national identity and citizenship premised on a massive displace-
ment of their own sexual and gender anxieties onto marginalized
groups.
This mixture of erotic fascination and anxiety is embedded in the
numerous Indian captivity narratives, such as the best-selling 1682
memoir A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary
Sexually Ambiguous Revolutions 25
Rowlandson, that were hugely popular from the late seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth century. These works-usually
about European women captured by, then forced to live with (and
often marry) native people-excited and titillated European readers,
as the “innocence” of “white women” was threatened by the raven-
ous and dangerous sexuality of nonwhite men. (William Bradford
saw a similar threat at Merrymount with the intermarriage of white
men and Native American women.)
This othering of Native Americans was a major way that col-
onists conceptualized sexuality and same-sex relationships. In a
complex mixture of displaced sexual idealization and fear, Native
American characters appear as eroticized demons and ghosts in Eu-
ropean American literature from the mid-seventeenth century on.
In the popular colonial and European American imagination, these
Native American characters embodied the overt sexuality and “nat-
ural” desire that the Europeans lacked or repressed. These fantasies
of native people were, in essence, a critique of what was consid-
ered by majority culture to be normative sexual desire and behavior.
This idea of nonwhite people possessing a “natural” or uninhibited
sexuality-recalling, in a more positive way, how the early Spanish
conquistadors saw native people-is inherently racist. Nevertheless,
by the mid-nineteenth century it had evolved to become founda-
tional to how America . culture was to conceptualize male-male
relationships. 2
Ideas about the “natural” and the “civilized” are often at the
heart of how a culture classifies people, groups, and actions. Sex-
ual activity between people of the same sex is often described as
“unnatural” in religious and legal discourse-it is contrary to what
“nature” or “natural law” intended. This is why sodomy statutes
often refer to “unnatural acts.” European and colonial society con-
sidered itself “civilized” when contrasted with nonwhite peoples.
Yet the othering of a behavior or identity as dangerous may, under
certain ambiguous conditions, make it more desired. In this way, the “unnatural” became “natural” only when enacted by an already
“civilized” white person. This is an example of purity and danger
congealing around sexuality and gender.
26 A Queer History of the United States
FROM PURITANISM TO ENLIGHTENMENT THOUGHT
We now refer to the extraordinarily radical political, cultural, and
scientific ideas of the eighteenth century, collectively referred to-
using a phase coined in the mid-nineteenth century-as the En-
lightenment. In Europe, the Enlightenment drastically transformed intellectual life, majority consciousness, and social structures. Its
effect on the colonies was profound, since it led directly to the Amer-
ican Revolution and the establishment of the Republic with the writ-
ing of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Declaration
of Rights in 1776. At heart, the Enlightenment was a rejection of the age of faith-
belief and acceptance of ideas and concepts without evidence. The
Enlightenment grew out of the new scientific methods of thinkers
such as Isaac Newton, who “proved” the existence of gravity in his
1684 On the Motion of Bodies in an Orbit, and Rene Descartes, who in his 1637 Discourse on the Method helped invent rationalism, a philosophical system that prioritized logic to arrive at its conclu-
sions. One of the most important claims of the Enlightenment was
the insistence that every human being had equal worth, dignity, and
personal integrity. However, many of the Enlightenment thinkers
who formulated these radical ideas did not apply them to everyone,
harboring prejudice against nonwhites, Jews, and women even as
they argued for equality. Some even constructed “scientific” evi-
dence to rationally prove a biological inequality.
Some colonialists embraced one of the most radical ideals of the
Enlightenment: John Locke’s concept of the separation of church
and state. For millennia, religious and political structures had been
inextricably bound together. The Papacy forced kings and emper-
ors to enact Catholic policy; monarchies were predicated on the di-
vine right of kings; civil legal systems were based largely on canon
law. That is why sodomy-in Catholic and Protestant theology, a
sin-was written into civil law. The First Amendment’s religion
clauses-“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment
of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”-marked a criti-
cal and significant turning point in how the United States would
be governed. Certainly the thinking of colonialists such as Thomas
Sexually Ambiguous Revolutions 27
Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams was
enormously influenced by Enlightenment philosophers such as John
Locke, Voltaire, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Almost all of the men
who wrote the foundational documents of the new American po-
litical system were deists-they believed in a supreme being but not
necessarily in organized religion, and they rejected the belief that the
scriptures were divinely inspired. They envisioned the laws of United
States to be, in true Enlightenment tradition, based on reason and equality.
There was one aspect of continental thought that had no impact
on how the founders viewed sexuality. By the mid-178os many Eu-
ropean countries were enacting penal reform to recodify confusing
and repetitive statutes and bring laws more in line with contempo-
rary thinking. Sodomy laws were in direct conflict with principles
of the Enlightenment that called for personal sexual autonomy. But
despite a clearly articulated separation of church and state, the colo- nies never abolished their sodomy laws.
This was not true in France, which abolished its sodomy law us-
ing Enlightenment precepts. In 1789-more than a decade after the American Declaration of Independence-the French National As-
sembly produced the Declaration of the Rights of Man, boldly stat-
ing that true civil liberty included the right “to do anything that
does not injure others.”3 By 1791 this progressive thinking reached
its logical conclusion when the Constituent Assembly abolished pun-
ishments for crimes “created by superstition, feudalism, the tax sys-
tem, and despotism.” These included blasphemy, heresy, witchcraft,
and sodomy, all crimes that were distinctly related to the persecuting
society throughout European history. The only crimes connected
with sex punished under the new French legal code were rape, child
prostitution, and the selling of obscene pictures. This extraordinary
legal reform had wide-ranging effects when, in 1810, it was incorpo-
rated into the Napoleonic Code. As a result, it was implemented in
all French colonies and wherever Napoleon established governments
in Europe and the Americas.
In the context of the European Enlightenment, such a reform makes sense. Writers such as Denis Diderot, Jean-Paul Marat, Mon-
tesquieu, and Voltaire had written about the need to decriminalize
28 A History of the United States
personal sexual behavior (which they saw as an ethical decision,
not a criminal even if they personally thought sodomy was
wrong or unnatural. (Voltaire’s famous quip about his own forays
into male-male sexual activity dispfays Enlightenment ambivalence:
“Once, a scientist; twice, a sodomite.”)
Why did the American revolutionaries not follow France’s ex-
ample? Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson attended dinner
parties in Paris with some of these philosophers. The notion of sex-
ual autonomy even rearticulated, for Enlightenment thinkers, the
Puritan concept of individuality and care of the self and body. Yet
not only did the thirteen original colonies keep their sodomy laws,
they maintained, elaborated on, and enforced them for the next 212
years. Was it that the United States, composed of colonies rooted
in many conflicting religious and civil polities, would be unable to
agree on a nonambivalent way to conceptualize sexual behavior?
Or was it that a country premised on dissent from England had to
continue to assert its identity as such?
A crucial response to this question-which is central to thinking
about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people-is that during
the Revolutionary era, American culture was undergoing significant
and complicated transformations regarding gender. Gender was un-
derstood by the majority of Americans as a stable system that had its
roots in Genesis 5:2: “Male and female created he them; and blessed
them, and called their name Adam.” Gender is a primary organi-
zational focus in any culture. In the newly formed United States-
predicated on revolutionary ideas, yet deeply flawed in the execution
of them-concepts of gender would undergo major changes that
evidenced this ambivalence. The presentation of a firm, masculine
authority as the face of the new American citizen exposed the ten-
sion of wanting to be free and needing to assert control.
INVENTING THE AMERICAN MAN
One of the most important changes of the Revolutionary era was
the invention of a new form of American masculinity. As the col-
onies claimed their political independence from Great Britain, it
Sexually Ambiguous Revolutions 29
was clear they would have to establish a new, distinct culture that
would reflect their own political ideology. One of the ways they
did this was to consciously invent a new “American man” who rep-
resented all of the new virtues of the Republic and had little con-
nection to the traditional Englishman. This new American man
was bold, rugged, aggressive, unafraid of fighting, and comfortable
asserting himself. This model was in complete contrast to the En-
glishman, who was stereotyped as refined, overly polite, ineffectual,
and often effeminate. The new American man was personified in
popular myth-making by rural colonists such as Ethan Allen, who
fought the British in Vermont and New York State, and John Paul
Jones, the Scottish-born naval mastermind who famously said in
battle, “I have not yet begun to fight.”
This new action-oriented American. man already existed in
some form, due to the conditions of survival on the frontier. The
Revolution was well fought by the colonists because they were an
armed society and “just about every white man had a gun and could
shoot.”4 The new American man, a mythic prototype defined by his
heroic actions in the colonial militia, was also a prototype of the
citizen. Not only were slaves unable to join a militia, but so were friendly native Americans, free Africans, white servants, and white
men without homes. These restrictions ensured that the prototypi-
cal American man was of a certain class, ethnicity, property, and citizenship status.
A prime example of this fabrication of American manhood is
Royall Tyler’s 1787 The Contrast, the first American-written play produced in the United States. A traditional comedy of manners,
the play pitted the foolish, duplicitous, American-born but British-
identified Mr. Billy Dimple-a “flippant, pallid, polite beau, who
devotes the morning to his toilet … and then minces out”-against
the play’s the very .American Colonel Manly, who is all that
his names implies. The Contrast is insistently didactic and aimed at creating a new American citizen-based culture. The play’s prologue
states its political purpose: “Exult,· each patriot heart!-this night
is shewn I A piece, which we may fairly call our own; I Where the proud titles of ‘My Lord! Your Grace!’ I To humble Mr. and plain Sir give place.”
30 A Queer History of the United States
At the play’s end, as he is called a coward for refusing to fight with Dimple, Manly explains:
Yes, Sir. This sword was presented to me by that brave Gallic hero, the Marquis De la Fayette. I have drawn it in the service of my country, and in private life, on the only occasion where a man is justified in drawing his sword, in defence of a lady’s honour. I have fought too many battles in the service of my country to dread the imputation of cowardice. Death from a man of honour would be a glory you do not merit; you shall live to bear the insult of man and the contempt of that sex whose general smiles afforded you all your happiness. 5
In one grand speech, Tyler connects the colonial revolution to Amer- ican manhood, national pride, personal honor, and different-sex desire.
This is, in part, why the United States did not abolish its sodomy laws. Highly gendered societies reinforce traditional ideas about gender through regulating sexual behavior. In the fervor of those revolutionary years and the promotion of a national masculinity, the idea that sodomy laws might be abolished might have been under- stood, even by Enlightenment men, as counterproductive.
But the creation of a prototype American man presented a host of broader questions and problems. If there was a new American man, did there also have to be a new American woman? Would she be as bold and adventurous as her male counterpart? There is no question that colonial and Revolution-era women worked hard and exhibited enormous physical and psychological strengths; they often ran homes and businesses when men were off fighting. Life was filled
with everyday hardships as the country grew and the Revolutionary War continued for eight years. Yet in the traditional Puritan equa- tion of different-sex relationships in a family, a man’s strength was defined, enhanced, and complemented by a compliant woman. At this point the myth of the new American man-and the nation’s new gender roles-become less coherent. Like all strictly delineated systems of gender, the new American models could not represent the diverse lives of actual people.
Sexually Ambiguous Revolutions 31
The evolving American culture was filled with enormous anxi~ ety over the meaning of gender roles. First, many of the men who conceptualized this new country were not good examples of the new American man. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton, with their fine manners, powdered wigs, large estates, and voluminous libraries, were far closer to the image of the wealthy, aristocratic, educated Englishman from which the country was distancing itself. Second, the women in this circle were also well educated and frequently spoke their minds, contrary to the subordinate role women were thought to hold in society. During the 1776 Continental Congress, Adams and his wife, Abigail, wrote one another frequently, and she was direct in her concerns:
I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors …. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.
That your sex are naturally tyrannical is a truth so thor- oughly established as to admit of no dispute; but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of master for the more tender and endearing one of friend. 6
John Adams dismisses her concerns with a joke: “We dare not exert our power in its full latitude. We are obliged to go fair and softly, and, in practice, you know we are the subjects. We have only the name of masters, and rather than give up this, which would com- pletely subject us to the despotism of the petticoat … “But it is clear that the new American nation and the new American man valued free white men above women and all other men. 7
Abigail Adams was not the only woman with these ideas. Over the next decade, women lobbied for suffrage, only to be consis- tently denied the right to have a voice in their government. While
32 A Queer History of the United States
some states allowed female suffrage for a short while, this quickly
changed. Women were denied suffrage in New York in 1777, in
Massachusetts in 1780, and in New Hampshire in 1784. In 1787 a constitutional convention allowed the states to decide on suffrage;
all states but New Jersey denied women the right to vote. New Jersey
revoked female suffrage in 1807. In 1867 the Fourteenth Amend-
ment stipulated specifically that suffrage is the right of male citizens
alone.
JUST FRIENDS
In societies in which gender and power are inexplicably intertwined,
often little respect is given to people who desire their own sex or who
do not conform to accepted gender expectations. Same-sex relation-
ships and desires, however, manifest themselves in various, often
more socially acceptable, ways. This is especially true in the com-
plicated interplay between companionship, community, and eroti-
cism in people’s lives. The clearly defined separate social spheres for
women and men-both the public and the private for men, and most
often the domestic for women-give rise to clearly defined same-sex
cultures, usually referred to as “homosocial.” This term does not
necessarily imply an erotic or sexual component-although those
could, and often do, exist-but rather describes a social construct
that emerged in specific ways during the eighteenth century.
Homosocial space at this time gave birth to distinct same-
sex relationships that were referred to in popular and literary cul-
ture as romantic or intimate friendships. These friendships were
important to the women and men who engaged in them-often
as important and long-lasting as traditional heterosexual marriages
-and were an accepted, praised, and significant social institution.
Alan Bray argues that these friendships were largely a product of the
Enlightenment-that the ideas of egalitarianism, brotherhood, and
rational love (as opposed to uncontrolled, passionate love) helped
contribute to a new concept of deeply committed, emotionally pas-
sionate friendship between members of the same sex. 8 It is possible that some of these friendships embodied similarities to our contem-
Sexually Ambiguous Revolutions 33
porary ideas of romantic and sexual relationships. In many ways they were understood as a beneficial and complementary alternative
to marriage. A major function of heterosexual marriage was to regu-
late sexual activity that would lead to reproduction, but this new
idea of friendship, for men as well as women, often provided a more enlightening, expressive outlet.
We can easily find evidence of “romantic friendships” in the lives
of both famous and common people. Feminist historians have un-
covered extensive, complex networks of female friendships in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and examined what they meant, not only to the individual women but to the society in which they
lived.
Personal could be political allegiance, but not neces-
sarily national allegiance. Women involved in these friendships un-
derstood the social significance and resonance, which sometimes
challenged social norms, of their deep and intense connections.
Sarah M. Grimke, the abolitionist and feminist, signed her letters
to her beloved Mary Parker “thine in the bonds of womanhood.”
Grimke-understanding the implications of “bonds” in slavery-
used the phase to signify the deep connection between herself and
Parker and how they were bound together as women, as well as op-
pressed together as women.
The writers’ language also situates them in the realm of the erotic.
In the first decade of the nineteenth century, Eunice Callender of
Boston wrote to her cousin and intimate friend Sarah Ripley (whose
letters, she wrote, “breathe forth the sentiments of my soul”): “Oh
could you see with what rapture … all your epistles are open’d by
me … then would you acknowledge that my Friendship at least
equals your own, and yours I believe is as true as pure a flame as ever
warmed the breast of any human Creature.” 9
This language was common within male romantic friendships as
well. Daniel Webster wrote to James Hervey Bingham in an 1804
letter: “Yes, James, I must come; we will yoke together again; your
little bed is just wide enough; we will practice at the same bar, and
be as friendly a pair of single fellows as ever cracked a nut.”10 Such
intensity and devotion were emblematic of how these relationships
reflected the newly professed equality and fraternity of society and
34 A Queer History of the United States
the nation. The Marquis de Lafayette wrote affectionately to George Washington on June 12, 1799, during the height of the Revolution:
My Dear General … There never was a friend, my dear gen- eral, so much, so tenderly beloved, as I love and respect you: happy in our union, in the pleasure of living near to you, in the pleasing satisfaction of partaking every sentiment of your heart, every event of your life, I have taken such a habit of be- ing inseparable from you, that I cannot now accustom myself to your absence, and I am more and more afflicted at that enormous distance which keeps me so far from my dearest
friend. 11
Because of their intensity, intimate friendships could be as compli- cated as any sexual relationship, and not always smooth, as we see in this letter from LaFayette to Washington, written a few months
after the previous one:
My dear general-From those happy ties of friendship by which you were pleased to unite yourself with me, from the promises you so tenderly made me when we parted at Fishkill, gave me such expectations of hearing often from you, that complaints ought to be permitted to my affectionate heart. Not a line from you, my dear general, has yet arrived into my hands, and though several ships from America, several despatches from congress or the French minister, are safely brought to France, my ardent hopes of getting at length a let- ter from General Washington have ever been unhappily disap- pointed: I cannot in any way account for that bad luck, and when I remember that in those little separations where I was but some days from you, the most friendly letters, the most minute account of your circumstances, were kindly written to me, I am convinced you have not neglected and almost for- gotten me for so long a time. I have, therefore, to complain of fortune, of some mistake or neglect in acquainting you that there was an opportunity, of anything; indeed, but what could injure the sense I have of your affection for me. Let me beseech
Sexually Ambiguous Revolutions 35
you, my dear general, by that mutual, tender, and experienced friendship in which, I have put an immense portion of my hap- piness, to be very exact in inquiring for occasions, and never to miss those which may convey to me letters that I shall be so much pleased to receive.12
Lafayette’s second letter to Washington can be read a communica- tion from a hurt, angry lover. We have no conclusive evidence that George Washington and the Marquis de were sexually in- volved as lovers-nor, as historian Charley Shively points out, do we have any evidence that they were not-but what we do know is that the two men had an intensely emotional, companionate friendship with erotic overtones. Their relationship can only be understood in the context of a national fight for freedom from political oppression and the ideals of the Enlightenment. Passionate same-sex friendships were often public and acknowledged by the culture in which they thrived. As public relationships, they influenced and were influenced by the political culture of the time. 13
REVOLUTIONARY GENDER
In 1778 an anonymous contributor to the Worcester Spy wrote that the newly formed American people had “broken the line that divided the sexes.”14 At the end of the eighteenth century, three very differ- ent people-two real and one fictional, all of them born women- captured the pubic imagination for breaking that divide.
The first was Jemima Wilkinson, a charismatic evangelist who was born a Quaker in q52. In 1775, during a series of debilitating illnesses and fevers, she believed that Christ entered her body and that she was now neither female nor male, but was commanded to bring her ministry to the new country. She renamed herself “Pub- lick Universal Friend,” refused to use the pronouns “she” or “he,” and dressed in gender-neutral clerical garments that made her sex unreadable (although contemporary accounts state that many in her audience saw her as male). Wilkinson’s gender presentation, as well as her theological message-she preached complete sexual ab-
36 A Queer History of the United States
stinence, strict adherence to a narrowly defined interpretation of the Ten Commandments, unqualified universal friendship, and the apocalyptic vision of the harshest Hebrew Bible prophets-made
her a sensation throughout Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and Mas- sachusetts. In the mid-178os the popular press and pamphlet culture covered her sermons in detail and placed particular emphasis on her sexually ambiguous persona. She had a huge following that verged on a cult and eventually started her own religious settlement in cen-
tral New York State. Deborah Sampson Gannett’s public career was as noted as
Wilkinson’s. She was born in I]6o outside Plymouth, Massachu-
setts. In May I782, dressed as a man, she enrolled in the Conti- nental Army under the name Robert Shurtliff. She fought in several battles until she was discovered, after being wounded in I783, to be a woman. She received an honorable discharge and in 1785 married Robert Gannett. In a few years’ time they had three chil- dren. Sampson Gannett was relatively unknown until 1797 when, in conjunction with the writer Herman Map.n, she published a
semifictional narrative of her time as a cross-dressed Revolution-
ary soldier. It was titled The Female Review: or, Memoirs of an American Young Lady, Whose Life and Character Are Peculiarly Distinguished-Being a Continental Soldier, for Nearly Three YearsJ in the Late American War. The work was a straightforward tale that touched on the author’s possible homosexuality through
descriptions of titillating, affectionate interactions with women. Sampson Gannett’s intention in publishing the narrative was to
public attention for her attempt to be awarded a military
pension. In I802 Sampson Gannett commenced a series of public lectures
about her life. She spent much of her time on stage-after stating that she could not explain why she chose to cross-dress and join the
Continental army-extolling traditional gender roles for women. Near the end of the presentation, she left the stage, returned dressed in her army uniform, and executed complicated and physically tax- ing military drills. Her presentation was extremely popular in Bos-
ton, and she repeated it in other New England cities. In after years of petitioning and with help from Paul Revere, Sampson Gan-
Sexually Ambiguous Revolutions 37
nett was finally awarded the full pensions she deserved by both the
state of Massachusetts and Congress. The Female Review and Sampson Gannett’s public performance
were popular because her dual public image as a brave soldier and a traditional woman tantalized the post-Revolutionary audience. By consciously refusing to be cast firmly in either gender role, Sampson
Gannett insisted that she would be both and neither at the same
time. This transgressive approach to gender identity was also present
m an work of fiction titled The Female Marine, or the Adven- tures of Miss Lucy Brewer. Most probably written by Nathaniel Hill Wright, an obscure Boston literary figure, it is a breathless, first- person narrative that frequently references Sampson Gannett’s life. The Female Marine tells the story of a young woman who is seduced, impregnated, loses her child, and then is forced to work in a Boston
brothel. She escapes and, dressed as a man, spends three years on the USS Constitution as a sailor. After many adventures, including potential romantic entanglements with women, she marries well.15
The Female Marine was so popular that it brought forth five sequels, testifying to the enormous reader interest in cross-dressing literature. These sequels included a self-defense from the madam of
the brothel in which Lucy had been sequestered and a new story of male impersonation by a character named Almira Paul.
The public interest in the topic of female transvestism was not isolated to stories about these three strikingly different women. Late eighteenth-century American literary and popular culture was ob-
sessed with this new notion of the cross-dressed female warrior.16
Novels such as Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond, or The Secret Witness; the memoir of famous cross-dressing British sailor Hannah Snell, a popular version of which was published in Thomas’s New- England Almanack; several plays based on the life of Joan of Arc; numerous broadsides of popular ballads detailing the exploits of cross-dressing female soldiers and sailors-all were extraordinarily
popular with audiences. These sermons, books, lectures, pamphlets, novels, plays, and
ballads struck a chord with the new American audience. Female
and male readers saw themselves at the center of a whirligig, a
38 A Queer History of the United States
quickly evolving culture that was breaking from the old world but
not yet settled in the new. Howard Zinn points out that “between
the American Revolution and the Civil War, so many elements of
American society were changing-the growth of population, the
movement westward, the development of the factory system, expan-
sion of political rights for white men, education growth to match
the economic need-that changes were bound to take place in the
situation of women.”17 Certainly the examples of Wilkinson, Samp-
son Gannett, and the fictional Lucy Brewer all point to new, if not
explicitly articulated, freedoms that were opening for women in a
country that was expanding on an almost daily basis. But they also
are an indication of new ways of looking at gender. In highly public ways, these three women opened a liminal space
in which new ideas and constructs of gender and sexual behavior
could be discussed. In news reports and public presentations, both
Wilkinson and Sampson Gannett were mythologized-even fic-
tionalized as much as Lucy Brewer. Historian Susan Juster claims that Wilkinson is best understood as a “spiritual transvestite.” 1s She
makes the point that Wilkinson took seriously Paul’s claim in Ga-
latians 3:28 that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither
slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all
one in Christ ” In this sense, Wilkinson’s “transvestism” is indeed spiritual. But it is also gendered. It can easily be understood as a purely American phenomenon that blurs the line between male
and female while at the same time creating the U.S. citizen-
literally the Publick Universal Friend-who is both religious and
secular. This image supports and yet contradicts the Revolution’s
new gender roles, as well as the concept of separation of church and
state central to the Constitution. To be neither male nor female, to
experiment with coded representations of lesbianism, to banish-as
Wilkinson did-traditional pronouns was a radical embrace of new
articulations of public sexuality and understanding of gender.
Can we call Jemima Wilkinson, Deborah Sampson Gannett, or
Lucy Brewer transgender or transvestite? Not by the standards and
the vocabulary of their time. These women, however, helped set the
groundwork for a national culture that was open to experimentation
in gender and sexual identity. The connecting line moves backward
Sexually Ambiguous Revolutions 39
as well as forward. It applies to the Enlightenment-influenced pas- sionate friendships and the nationalized gender roles for women and
men of the Revolution. Some of these new manifestations of gender
behavior offered alternatives to social expectations, but they can
also be seen as the building blocks to a more concise dichotomy be-
tween the public and private as a form of gender regulation.
The reality of the persecuting society never completely vanishes
from U.S. history. It becomes increasingly refined. In the colonies,
social and political persecution of certain groups was relatively in-
discriminate, making few distinctions among individuals within
a minority group. Gradually, by the beginning of the nineteenth
century, we see a cultural schism occurring between the
and the public, which was largely the reason people were
able to explore nontraditional gender roles. It was permissible for women and men to have passionate private friendships, which may
have included an erotic or sexual component, as long as they con-
formed to accepted gender norms in public. It was acceptable for women such as Sampson Gannett to transgress gender norms in
public as long as they adhered to traditional norms in their personal
relationships.
This increasing split in public spheres and private spheres was
a major shift in how sexual behavior and gender-and also citi-
zenship-were conceptualized. Full citizenship was, and to a large
degree still is, predicated on keeping unacceptable behavior private.
This complicated relationship between the public and private is at
the heart of LGBT history and life today.
27
2 REVOLUTIONARY
SEXUALITIES AND EARLY NATIONAL GENDERS
(1770s–1840s) Rachel Hope Cleves
Shortly before members of the Constitutional Convention gathered in Philadelphia in May 1787 to write a new frame of government for the United States, a young author named Noah Webster moved to the city of brotherly love and set his own pen to addressing the nascent nation’s challenges. Only a revolution in manners, he argued, more significant than “all the laws of power, or the little arts of national policy,” could secure true independence. The prob – lem, Webster worried, was that the changes to American society he witnessed under way in Philadelphia were pointing in the wrong direction. American women were dressing like French coquettes and American men were behaving like English “bucks and bloods.” Far from improving in morals, the nation appeared to be on the point of losing its virtue.1
Did the United States undergo a sexual revolution during its first decades of independence? Did the rallying cry of liberty extend beyond the statehouse to the bedrooms, barrooms, and barns where the nation’s citizens engaged in their own sessions of congress? An emerging historiographical consensus suggests that the Revolution licensed an expanding range of non-marital and non-normative erotic expression for white youth. On the other hand, the strengthening of the independent American state may have limited the range of sexual expres – sion for people of color, most especially native Americans. If there was a sexual revolution in the early republic (1770s–1840s), historians must consider carefully the geographic and demographic limits of that transformation.
Print Culture The loosening of sexual codes for white men and women can first be observed in the late- eighteenth-century’s growing North American print culture, centered in Philadelphia. As revolutionary sentiments shook up the established hierarchies of colonial society, the impact appeared in the diversified offerings of the port city’s book-importers and presses. Their inventories stretched far beyond political prints that debated the cause of independence or the proper composition of the new state, to more risqué sexual prints, many featuring humorous or sensational representations of same-sex sexuality.2
Clare A. Lyons uses the book advertisements printed in the city’s newspapers, almanacs, and catalogues to track the circulation of homoerotic texts in Philadelphia after the 1750s. British novel Roderick Random, which featured the queer characters Captain Whiffle and Lord Strutwell, proved especially popular in the century’s final decades, and the novel underwent its first local reprint in 1794. Another popular British import, the pornographic Memoirs of a Woman of Plea – sure, featured sex between women as well as between men. Local authors also contributed to the city’s bawdy print culture with texts such as The Philadelphiad, a 1784 pamphlet that illustrated the “modern characters of both sexes” who walked the city’s streets, including sodomitical fops and whores.3
Early national Philadelphia’s best-known local author, Charles Brockden Brown, explored a range of homoerotic possibilities in his novel Ormond, or the Secret Witness (1799). In Long Before Stonewall, literary critic Stephen Shapiro calls Ormond the most radical novel written by an American before 1850. The gothic novel’s main love story takes place not between its endangered heroine, Constantia Dudley, and her sinister male suitor, Ormond, but between Constantia and her girlhood friend Sophia Courtland, who indulges a “romantic passion” for the damsel in distress. After Constantia engages in a long flirtation with Ormond’s cross-dressing sister Martinette, who explains that she feels herself a “stranger to sexual distinction,” the heroine kills Ormond and runs off to live happily ever after with Sophia.4
The sexually ambiguous and gender-bending character of Martinette is hardly unique, however, to revolutionary and early national print culture. Greta LaFleur discovers numerous examples of variant gender and sexual expression in eighteenth-century North American sources, and most especially in texts from the 1790s. Like Lyons, LaFleur examines both texts authored in North America and those accessible through importation and reprinting. John Bennett’s Letters to a Young Lady, which circulated in North America after 1791, included lengthy attacks on “effeminate” men and “virago” women, both of whom threatened to upset the proper conduct of heterosexual relations. Texts about the gender-switching spy Chevalier d’Eon, who lived as a man for the first half of his life, then as a woman until she died, likewise enjoyed popularity in North America—and Philadelphia in particular—during the 1790s. LaFleur specu lates that d’Eon served as the inspiration for battle-hymn-of-the-republic composer Julia Ward Howe’s incomplete 1840 novel The Hermaphrodite, featuring a character like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando who changes sex throughout the novel.
The figure of the female husband appeared far more frequently in revolutionary and early national prints than the hermaphrodite, popping up in newspapers, periodicals, and books, both local and imported. The prototypical female husband character was a working-class woman who had chosen to assume male garb at some time in her youth, then lived her life as a man to the point of marrying another woman, before her sex was accidentally exposed (most often by death or arrest). Female husband stories often alluded to the illicit sexual desires that might have motivated the subject’s sex change, although newspapers and periodicals were constrained by the era’s obscenity laws from stating the lesbian content in these stories. Notably, the female husband was rarely portrayed as an object of hatred or revulsion. Rather she appeared as an anti-hero in most narratives: a disreputable, yet admirable, plucky go-getter unwilling to be subordinated by her society’s strict limits on the boundaries of female behavior.
Women who passed as men to serve in the era’s wars figured as especially popular characters in period prints. Al Young’s work on narratives about the real-life Deborah Sampson, who served as Robert Shurtliff in the American Revolution, and Daniel A. Cohen’s work on narratives about the fictional characters Lucy Brewer and Almira Paul, who supposedly served as sailors during the War of 1812, indicate that allusions to women’s same-sex desire constituted an important element of these tales. Female soldier narratives demonstrated what Cohen calls
Rachel Hope Cleves
28
a “playful gender radicalism,” intended to amuse a readership of youth, sailors, and prostitutes (although, no doubt, the old, land-bound, and monogamous also sneaked peeks).5
In general, revolutionary and early national print culture featured more accounts of women than men who crossed gender and sexual boundaries, but exceptions can be found. In a digital exhibit for OutHistory.org, Jen Manion discusses a pair of matching tales aimed at youth, “Lucy Nelson; Or, The Boy Girl” (1831) and “Billy Bedlow; or, The Girl-Boy” (1832), which treated male and female gender variance even-handedly. In both stories, the author instructed children about the necessity to correct gender-crossing behavior. As Manion points out, however, young gender-variant readers may have found recognition in these tales and re-imagined the stories’ endings to better suit their own emotional needs.
Anti-masturbation tracts were another genre of early national didactic literature that raised queer possibilities. Historians have long puzzled over why masturbation suddenly came to be perceived as a social problem afflicting youth in the mid-eighteenth century. Perhaps it had something to do with the expanding expression of same-sex desire at the time. As pioneer historians of sexuality Vern Bullough and Martha Voght argued in a 1973 article, masturbation and homosexuality often overlapped in religious and medical literature. British author Samuel Solomon’s Guide to Health (1800), an extended advertisement for the author’s anti-masturbatory patent medicine the “Cordial Balm of Gilead,” warned that children often learned mastur – bation from school friends or same-sex instructors. American experts during the 1830s, such as Boston doctor Samuel Bayard Woodward, related similar concerns. Woodward argued that children should be discouraged from sharing beds in boarding schools and factory dormitories to cut down on mutual masturbation. The surprisingly explicit treatment of same-sex intimacy, even between girls, in these respectable tracts confirms historian April Haynes’ observation that “antimasturbation discourse legitimized almost any type of public sexual speech.”6 It is hardly surprising that pornographers took advantage of this leeway, leaving a legacy of textual confusion between sources intended to instruct and those designed to titillate.
Revolutionary Youth Did early national society share the queer possibilities found in its dynamic print culture? The first wave of Revolutionary social history, published during the 1970s and 1980s, focused attention on the era’s gender reformations, as seen in the rise of companionate marriage, republican motherhood, and the affective family.7 As historians debated whether these devel – opments yielded a revolution for women, however, they skirted over concurrent social de – velopments that pointed away from the heterosexual family. Since 2000, a growing body of work has suggested that many women in the revolutionary and post-revolutionary periods sought to avoid marriage and motherhood, pursuing personal liberty as single women, despite their limited earning power and legal rights.
Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller’s 1984 social history Liberty, a Better Husband offers a foundation for this new scholarship by demonstrating the huge uptick of unmarried Ameri – can women after the Revolution. Whereas only 2–3 percent of New England women during the colonial era remained unmarried for life, that figure rose to over 22 percent by 1870. The critical turning point came in the 1780s.8 More recently, Martha Tomhave-Blauvelt has asserted that many young women in the post-revolutionary period feared marriage as an end to their freedom, a change in status that would entail endless labor as well as repeated exposure to the grave physical dangers of pregnancy and childbirth. Some chose to remain single for the attractions that the unmarried life provided, in particular the opportunity to focus on
Revolutionary Sexualities (1770s–1840s)
29
intimacies with other women. Lisa L. Moore’s recent work on Sarah Pierce, founder of Con – necticut’s Litchfield Academy, discusses this early woman educator’s dream of creating a household with fellow Litchfield-native Abigail Smith. Pierce exchanged letters with Smith’s brother, doctor and writer Elihu Hubbard Smith, discussing their mutual aversion to heterosexual marriage. According to Moore, “Connecticut of the 1790s provided a context of sexual liberation, [and] antimarital gender egalitarianism.”9
Such sentiments may have flourished among Pierce’s set of literary men and women friends, but it cannot be said to have extended generally throughout post-revolutionary America, which remained aggressively pro-conjugal. The rejection of marriage and maternity should be understood, in and of itself, as a queer choice for women of the time, whether or not an erotic interest in other women went alongside. Following this logic, Kathryn Kent writes about the mid-nineteenth-century spinster as an “emergent, queer, protoidentity,” a conclusion echoed in work by Heather Love.10
Many women who married nonetheless participated in the cultural revolution in attitudes towards sexuality by pushing back against what historian Susan Klepp calls the “enslavement” of a lifetime of childbearing. Newly politicized women demonstrated their capacity for citi – zenship by exercising the masterful art of self-restraint, particularly in physical relations with men. New brides in the mid-Atlantic states resisted old customs that dictated they endure being kissed by all the male attendants at their weddings. More importantly, new wives resisted dic – tates to bear as many children as fate delivered. Instead, women self-administered abortifacient herbs and restricted their sexual relations, often over their husbands’ objections. By the 1830s, the demand for family planning had led to the expansion of contraceptive choices in the United States, with female syringes and male condoms both becoming more widely available.11
Not all men resisted these attacks on reproductive sexuality. A sizable number also chose singlehood. Sarah Pierce’s friend Elihu Smith stayed a bachelor until he died at age twenty- seven in the arms of friends Samuel Latham Mitchill and Edward Miller. The Revolution inspired new and vigorous defenses of the single life. During the Colonial era, Thomas Foster argues, bachelors were stigmatized as deviant sexual types who disrupted the marital order. After the Revolution, according to John McCurdy, the new state government abolished laws that had targeted bachelors as subjects of regulation and special taxation. Changes in attitudes toward bachelorhood fit with the increasingly commonplace role of sexual experimentation in American youth culture. Diaries kept by a handful of Virginia bachelors in the 1780s and 1790s describe a “world charged with sexual opportunity and activity.” Often that activity was heterosexual, but sometimes it was not, which caused concern for moral authorities. The argument made by a bachelor essayist in the American Universal Magazine that if instead of marrying women, “we could make it convenient . . . to marry one another, perhaps the married state might be less tormenting,” gave credence to long-held suspicions that bachelors had queer tendencies.12
Those tendencies found expression in the fad for romantic friendships that spread during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In this form of relationship, promoted by transatlantic sentimental literature, unmarried youths shared intense same-sex attachments char acterized by expressions of deep love and devotion. A historiographical debate has long raged over the question of whether such intimacies should be understood as sexual. Caroll Smith-Rosenberg’s field-defining article “The Female World of Love and Ritual” (1975) and Lillian Faderman’s chapter on romantic friendships in Surpassing the Love of Men (1981) shared in an early consensus that the relationships were not erotic except in rare exceptions. These early works inspired vociferous reactions in the 1990s from scholars such as Lisa L. Moore and Marylynne Diggs, who offer strong evidence that not only were some romantic friendships
Rachel Hope Cleves
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sexual, but the potential for erotic expression within these relationships was well understood at the time.
Scholars of men’s romantic friendships have also challenged Smith-Rosenberg’s and Faderman’s claims that romantic friendships were specific to women and emerged from nineteenth-century constructions of femininity. Yet here too are debates over the presumed asexuality of such relationships. For example, literary critic Caleb Crain describes the revolutionary-era intimacy between Philadelphia bachelors John Fishbourne Mifflin, James Gibson, and Isaac Norris as “a fortiori sexual,” whereas the historian Richard Godbeer des cribes the triad as bound by platonic affection. Godbeer directs readers to set aside “modern assumptions about love between members of the same sex” and accept that men could forge deep emotional ties without concurrent sexual desire. Godbeer’s caution extends even to his reading of a seemingly indiscrete letter from Brown College student Virgil Maxcy to his friend William Blanding. Maxcy, who had previously shared a bed with his friend, wrote to Blanding bemoaning their separation, “for I get to hugging the pillow instead of you. Sometimes I think I have got hold of your doodle when in reality I have hold of the bed posts.” Blanding signed his letter “your cunt humble.” This letter might read like a smoking gun, but Godbeer disagrees, concluding simply, “one cannot help but wonder.”13
There seems little room to debate about the sexual content in the letters between South Carolinian college students Thomas Jefferson Withers and James Henry Hammond, penned in the 1820s. These are so explicit that when Martin Duberman originally sought to publish the documents the archive denied him permission. He went forward anyway, analyzing the letters in a landmark 1981 article in the Journal of Homosexuality. In the first letter Withers writes “I feel some inclination to learn whether you yet sleep in your Shirt-tail, and whether you yet have the extravagant delight of poking and punching a writhing Bedfellow with your long fleshen pole—the exquisite touches of which I have often had the honor of feeling?” In the second, Withers speculates that during their separation Hammond has been wielding his “elongated protuberance . . . at every she-male you can discover.” This second letter indicates that close friendships served as a theatre of possibility not only for same-sex sexual behavior, but also for the development and expression of queer identities. Withers’s “she-male” fits into a queer lineage extending backwards in time to the eighteenth-century sodomitical fops from Roderick Random, and forwards in time to the sexual inverts found in the writings of late nineteenth-century sexologists, like Richard von Krafft-Ebing.14
Evidence of same-sex behavior and identity can likewise be found in the letters between Massachusetts-born Charity Bryant and her romantic friends during the late eighteenth century. Bryant’s correspondence might have escaped close inspection if not for the remarkable marriage she later established with Sylvia Drake in Weybridge, Vermont, which lasted from 1807 to 1851. Viewed from the perspective of her subsequent union, Bryant’s earlier friendships can be seen as instrumental in the development of her lesbian persona. Letters written by Bryant’s friends (she instructed recipients to burn the ones she authored), describe the joys of sleeping in each other’s arms and of pressing heads to breasts, in an act that historian Karen Hansen, writing about a post-Civil War female couple, has called “bosom sex.”15 At rare moments, the surviving letters hint at genital intimacies and suggest Bryant’s formation of a sexual identity focused on giving pleasure rather than receiving. This assumption of an active male role, as it was understood at the time, resonated with Bryant’s later identity as the female husband within her marriage to Drake. It is also in keeping with the sexual practices of Anne Lister, the contemporaneous British gentlewoman whose coded diaries offer historians the most explicit window onto lesbian sexuality at the time.16
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Law and Society17
Tight restraints on sexual speech for respectable citizens, especially women, limit the extent of direct textual evidence we have of individuals’ erotic experiences during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This holds true particularly for same-sex experiences, which remained under powerful social proscriptions. However, if same-sex lovers risked their repu – tations by inscribing too explicit declarations of mutual desire in their letters, for the most part they did not risk the graver punishments that had haunted colonial-era offenders. As colonies became states and British institutions were reinvented for American independence, the Revolution unleashed a wave of legal reforms, which disarmed capital statutes regulating sodomy.
Recent work by B. R. Burg, one of the founders of gay history, indicates that this wave of legal change began, as most waves do, at sea, and only later swept the land. In 1775, John
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Figure 2.1 Silhouettes of Sylvia Drake and Charity Bryant framed with locks of their hair. Collection of Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History, Middlebury, Vermont.
Adams drafted a set of regulations for the new navy of the United Colonies, which broke from British precedent by omitting the provision to punish buggery and sodomy with death. Adams’s omission was sustained by several subsequent updatings of the US naval code, and no trials for sodomy took place within the American navy until 1805. Those charges resulted in no punishment for the accused; neither did charges in an 1835 case. The testimonies in the latter case, however, did reveal a well-developed same-sex subculture within the antebellum US navy, involving relations between young “chickens” and older sailors, who went “chaw for chaw” (mutual masturbation) or engaged in anal sex.18
Changes to legal codes within the new states followed soon after independence. Pennsylvania downgraded sodomy from a capital crime to one punishable by imprisonment in 1786. New York and New Jersey did the same in 1796, followed by Rhode Island (1798), Massachusetts (1805), and Connecticut (1821). In the South, Thomas Jefferson proposed revising Virginia’s legal code in 1777 to punish male sodomy through castration and female sodomy by nose- boring, but the punishment was not reduced until 1800 (when it was replaced with imprison – ment). Maryland began punishing sodomy with hard labor in 1793. Georgia strangely had no sodomy statute at all until it instituted a punishment of life imprisonment in 1816. In 1826, Delaware instituted the least severe punishment for sodomy of any state—a maximum jail time of three years, plus the already-archaic practice of flogging. Later Delaware brought back the pillory for convicted sodomites, harkening back to the seventeenth century. Only a few states retained capital punishment for sodomy until after the Civil War, including North and South Carolina. Many southern states applied differential harsher punishments for slaves than for free people. Despite its early liberalism, Virginia continued to define sodomy as a capital crime for slaves until the Civil War. Finally, with a few exceptions, the new states that entered the union after the Revolution punished sodomy through imprisonment.19
The lightening of statutory punishments for sodomy was matched by an easing of the laws’ application. During the early national era, prosecutions for sodomy were very rare, continuing a trend from the colonial era. Already by the 1760s, prosecutions for all sexual crimes were on the decline. The loosening of sexual regulations provoked anxiety on the part of many old- fashioned moralists, which may explain the two surprising capital sentences for bestiality handed down in New England during the 1790s, the first in the region for over a century. Neither sentence, however, was carried through. As Doron S. Ben-Atar and Richard D. Brown argue, these prosecutions proved to be the last gasp of the old order, not a sign of things to come. The Revolution’s expansion of personal liberties for free citizens had extended its reach to the sexual realm.
Both Mark E. Kann and Kelly A. Ryan have argued, however, that social regulation of sexuality picked up where legal regulations slackened. Ryan points to how elites in Massachusetts used strategies of wealth and race-based segregation to regulate sexuality within the family after the state’s laws relaxed. Popular seduction narratives contributed to the social regulation of sexuality by emphasizing the values of female purity and passionlessness. Kann argues that the same social regulation of sexuality for the preservation of patriarchy took place nationally.
Slaves and Natives20
The Revolution’s impact on the sexual lives of slaves and Native Americans does not fit well under the rubric of expanding personal liberty. Most contemporary historians of slavery agree that the Revolution ultimately strengthened American commitment to the institution by expanding access to lands that reinvigorated its profitability. Throughout the early national era, increasing numbers of women and men became subject to slavery and to the patterns of sexual
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exploitation that feminist historians have described as part of slavery’s burden. Most research has focused on free white men’s sexual domination of enslaved women through practices including rape, concubinage, and forced “breeding.” Yet there is also evidence that free white women’s abuse of female slaves could include erotic dimensions. Runaway slave Harriet Jacobs memoir of her sexual victimization by her master Dr. James Norcom, which offers one of the most lucid windows into this painful history, contains evidence of white women’s role in sexual abuse. When Norcom’s wife grew suspicious of her husband’s relationship to Jacobs, she began sneaking up to Jacobs’ bed at night and imitating her husband’s voice to whisper sexual propositions in Jacobs’ ear and judge the girl’s reaction. Jacobs experienced this treatment as a sexual violation on a par with Norcom’s own insistence on harassing her with sexual language.21
Scholars have been slower to explore the sexual abuse of male slaves. A recent article by Thomas Foster re-examines the research to call attention to the victimization of enslaved men by both white women and men. Testimony to the American Freedman’s Inquiry Commission, convened in 1863, suggests that light-skinned enslaved men were fetishized, like their female counterparts, as sexually desirable. And a small handful of sources, including Harriet Jacobs’ memoir, document white men’s use of rape as a means to dominate enslaved men. As John Saillant suggests, white abolitionists, though not guilty of sexual abuse, also sometimes utilized homoerotic undertones in their writings on the enslaved male body.
The source base offers no evidence for reconstructing volitional same-sex intimacies among enslaved people. Although such relations must have taken place, they were of little interest to the literate whites whose writings provide the majority of evidence about the history of the peculiar institution. White authors did express interest, on the other hand, in the role that same-sex sexuality played in indigenous societies across North America. This evidence of sexual savagery, as white observers understood it, became another rationalization for conquering na tive peoples and imposing white authority. The strengthening of the American state in the wake of the Revolution, and the consequent extension of control over ever greater stretches of native land between the 1770s and 1840s, entailed a loss not only of indigenous sovereignty but also of sexual expression.
Many of the native societies that American settlement overspread during these decades of vigorous western expansion permitted the expression of sexualities and gender identities that would be judged queer today, although they may have been normative within their own cul – tures. Historians have focused particular attention on the role of two-spirits (a modern term), or individuals whose social sex differed from their embodied sex. Two-spirits often took spouses of the same biological sex, a practice that generated repeated expressions of shock within settler accounts. While indigenous languages used many different words to describe two-spirits, Anglo – phone scholarship has often referred to native men who lived as women as berdaches, an archaic term derived from an Arabic word for a boy prostitute. No single English word was applied as consistently to native women who lived as men, suggesting that the disproportionate concern within settler society over sexual conduct between males, versus between women, extended outwards.
Source limitations have resulted in vigorous debates among historians about both the extent and meaning of two-spirit identities. For example, only one anonymous source from the 1820s explicitly records the presence of two-spirits within the Cherokee nation, producing an evi – dentiary puzzle that Gregory D. Smithers unravels in a 2014 article. Far more extensive sources record the presence of two-spirits among southwestern indigenous groups such as the Zuñi and Apache, but scholars debate whether they were figures of respect or ridicule.22
There can be no debate that settler cultures regarded two-spirits with disdain. After the Revolution, when the United States initiated a “civilization program” to force the acculturation
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of indigenous peoples living east of the Mississippi River, federal agents demanded that groups such as the Cherokee restructure their gender roles to conform to settler culture. Women, who farmed the land in Cherokee tradition, were directed to take up domestic production, like weaving. Men, who had hunted, were instructed to take charge of the fields. Unbeknownst to the putative civilizers, this shift had homoerotic overtones for the Cherokee. Historian Theda Perdue argues that prior to European settlement, “some evidence suggests that a kind of sexual reclassification occurred for men who preferred to farm and that these men functioned sexually as well as socially as women.”23 Despite this irony, the overall effect of the civilization program was to exert pressure on indigenous groups to eliminate queer gender and sexual expressions.
Indigenous groups experienced less direct pressure to transform gender and sexual roles from the settler-traders they encountered in areas not under the direct control of the federal gov – ernment during the antebellum era. Edwin Thompson Denig, who manned the American Fur Company’s post at Fort Union on the upper Missouri River (in contemporary North Dakota), bought skins from Woman Chief, a Crow woman who had taken on a warrior role and acquired wives to dress her furs.24 Likewise, Alexander Ross and David Thompson, two early nineteenth- century traders at Fort Astoria on the mouth of the Columbia River (in contemporary Oregon), recorded their profitable dealings with a Ktunaxa man who was female-bodied and had previously been known to them as a woman.25 Denig, Ross, and Thompson expressed the customary surprise at these queer encounters, but they continued with business as usual. Unfortunately, as the federal government exerted increasing control over the continent, western peoples would also experience pressure to abandon such gender-bending practices. Later in the century, federal agents on the Crow and Hidatsa reservations forced two-spirit women to cut their hair and assume male dress.26
Revolution’s End The mid-nineteenth century may have introduced tighter constraints on queer gender and sexual expression by settlers as well as natives.27 Prior to the Gold Rush, the frontier had served as a space of enlarged possibility for people like Charity Bryant, who found the newly settled town of Weybridge, Vermont, more hospitable to her masculinized femininity and woman-centered eroticism than was her hometown of North Bridgewater, Massachusetts, just outside Boston. As scholar Scott Larson has recently described, the Publick Universal Friend, a turn-of-the- century prophet who was born female but claimed reincarnation as a genderless spirit following a 1776 illness, dressing afterwards in a mixture of men’s and women’s clothing, settled a religious community on Iroquois land in western New York after encountering violent reactions in the east. Mother Ann Lee, who founded the celibate Shaker sect and was regarded as a female incarnation of Christ, also endured violence in long-settled areas of New England and built her first community in remote Niskayuna, New York, to avoid persecution.28
Following the onslaught of settlers to the far west in 1849, Clare Sears argues that states across the continent began passing new laws to control sexual and gender nonconformity. By 1900, thirty-four cities in twenty-one states had passed laws against cross-dressing.29 Just as women’s demands for expanded rights in the post-revolutionary era inspired a patriarchal backlash, as Rosemarie Zagarri argues, the queer possibilities of the frontier era may have prompted an attempt to reconsolidate the prewar sexual hierarchy. During the second half of the nineteenth century, medical and scientific discourse about same-sex sexuality increased in volume, newly categorizing same-sex attracted individuals and gender-benders as disciplinary subjects. This growth in discourse, of course, had unintended consequences as well— contributing to the formation of new sexual identities that would become a foundation for
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subsequent rights movements. The early national era may have been a revolutionary moment in the sexual lives of free American citizens, but it would not be the only such moment. Perhaps in the future, those revolutionary moments might even extend more broadly.
Notes 1 Noah Webster, A Collection of Essays and Fugitiv Writings (Boston, 1790), 93–97. 2 For the longer history of queer popular culture, see, in this volume, Sharon Ullman, “Performance
and Popular Culture.” 3 The Philadelphiad; Or, New Pictures of the City (Philadelphia, 1784), title page, 37. 4 Charles Brockden Brown, Ormond, or The Secret Witness, ed. Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro
(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Group, 2009), 154, 197. 5 Daniel A. Cohen, The Female Marine and Related Works: Narratives of Cross-Dressing and Urban Vice in
America’s Early Republic (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 20. 6 April Haynes, “Riotous Flesh: Gender, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice, 1830–1860,” PhD diss.,
University of California, Santa Barbara, 2009, viii. 7 Ellen Rothman Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America (New York: Basic Books, 1984);
Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Philip Greven, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).
8 Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller, Liberty, a Better Husband: Single Women in America: The Generations of 1780–1840. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984): 3–5.
9 Lisa L. Moore, Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 127–129.
10 Kathryn K. Kent, Making Girls into Women: America Women’s Writing and the Rise of Lesbian Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 21; Heather Love, “Gyn/Apology: Sarah Orne Jewett’s Spinster Aesthetics,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 55, no. 3–4 (2009): 305–334.
11 Susan E. Klepp, Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, & Family Limitation in America, 1760–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 6, 93, 190, 206.
12 John Gilbert McCurdy, Citizen Bachelor: Manhood and the Creation of the United States (Rochester: Cornell University Press, 2009), 193, 187. See also, in this volume, Richard Godbeer, “Colonial North America (1600s–1700s).”
13 Caleb Crain, “Leander, Lorenzo, and Castalio: An Early American Romance,” in Long Before Stonewall, 243; Richard Godbeer, The Overflowing of Friendship: Love Between Men and the Creation of the American Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 2, 58.
14 Martin Bauml Duberman, “‘Writhing Bedfellows’: 1826 Two Young Men from Antebellum South Carolina’s Ruling Elite Share “Extravagant Delight”,” Journal of Homosexuality 6, no. 1–2 (1981): 87–88.
15 Karen V. Hansen, “”No Kisses Is Like Youres”: An Erotic Friendship between Two African- American Women During the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” in Lesbian Subjects: A Feminist Studies Reader, ed. Martha Vicinus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 199–200.
16 Rachel Hope Cleves, Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 71–72.
17 For a discussion of criminalization of sexual and gender diversity from the colonial period to the present, see, in this volume, Andrea J. Ritchie and Kay Whitlock, “Criminalization and Legalization.”
18 B. R. Burg, “Sodomy, Masturbation, and Courts Martial in the Antebellum American Navy,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 23, no. 1 (2014), 60.
19 George Painter, The Sensibilities of our Forefathers: The History of Sodomy Laws in the United States, www.glapn.org/sodomylaws/sensibilities/introduction.htm (accessed January 27, 2015).
20 For discussions of queer history as it relates to enslavement and indigeneity, see, in this volume, Nayan Shah, “Queer of Color Estrangement and Belonging,” and Clare Sears, “Centering Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Queer History (1800s-1890s).”
21 Linda Brent [Harriet Jacobs], Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Boston: 1861), 54. 22 Richard C. Trexler, “Making the American Berdache: Choice or Constraint?” Journal of Social History
35, no.3 (2002): 613–636. 23 Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700–1835 (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1998), 37.
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24 Edwin Thompson Denig, “Of the Crow Nation,” Anthropological Papers 151, no. 33 (1953), 63. 25 O.B. Sperlin, “Two Kootenay Women Masquerading as Men? Or Were They One?” The Washington
Historical Quarterly 21, no. 2 (1930), 120–130. 26 Leila J. Rupp, A Desired Past: A Short History of Same-Sex Love in America (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1999), 66. 27 For more on shifts in gender and sexual diversity across the nineteenth century, see the following
chapter in this volume, Clare Sears, “Centering Slavery in Nineteenth Century Queer History.” 28 Stephen Stein, The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1992), 8, 72–75. 29 Clare Sears, Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 3.
Further Reading Ben-Atar, Doron S. and Richard D. Brown. Taming Lust: Crimes against Nature in the Early Republic.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Blauvelt, Martha Tomhave. The Work of the Heart: Young Women and Emotion, 1780–1830. Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2007. Bullough, Vern L. and Martha Voght. “Homosexuality and Its Confusion with the ‘Secret Sin’ in Pre-
Freudian America.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 28, no. 2 (1973): 143–155. Cleves, Rachel Hope. “ ‘What, Another Female Husband?’: The Prehistory of Same-Sex Marriage in
America.” Journal of American History 101, no. 3 (2015): 1–27. Diggs, Marylynne. “Romantic Friends or a ‘Different Race of Creatures’? The Representation of Lesbian
Pathology in Nineteenth-Century America.” Feminist Studies 21, no. 2 (1995): 317–340. Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance
to the Present. New York City: William Morrow, 1981. Foster, Thomas A. “The Sexual Abuse of Black Men under American Slavery.” Journal of the History of
Sexuality 20, no. 3 (2011): 445–464. Haynes, April. Riotous Flesh: Women, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice in Nineteenth-Century America.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Kann, Mark E. Taming Passion for the Public Good: Policing Sex in the Early Republic. New York: New York
University Press, 2013. LaFleur, Greta. “Sex and ‘Unsex’: Histories of Gender Trouble in Eighteenth-Century North America.”
Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 12, no. 3 (2014): 469–499. Larson, Scott. “ ‘Indescribable Being’: Theological Performances of Genderlessness in the Society of
the Publick Universal Friend, 1776–1819.” Early American Studies 12, no. 3 (2014): 576–600. Lyons, Clare. “Mapping an Atlantic Sexual Culture: Homoeroticism in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia.”
William and Mary Quarterly 60, no. 1 (2003): 119–54. Manion, Jen. “Transgender Children in Antebellum America.” http://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/trans
genderchildrenantebellum (accessed 10 March 2015). Moore, Lisa L. “ ‘Something More Tender Still Than Friendship’: Romantic Friendship in Early
Nineteenth-Century England.” Feminist Studies 18, no. 3 (1992): 499–520. Ryan, Kelly A. Regulating Passion: Sexuality and Patriarchal Rule in Massachusetts, 1700–1830. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2014. Saillant, John. “The Black Body Erotic and the Republican Body Politic, 1790–1820.” Journal of the History
of Sexuality 5, no. 3 (1995): 403–428. Shapiro, Stephen. “In a French Position: Radical Pornography and Homoerotic Society in Charles Brockden
Brown’s Ormond or the Secret Witness.” In Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America, ed. Thomas A. Foster, 357–383. New York: New York University Press, 2007.
Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America.” Signs 1, no. 1 (1975): 1–29.
Smithers, Gregory D. “Cherokee ‘Two Spirits’: Gender, Ritual, and Spirituality in the Native South,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 12, no. 3 (2014): 626–651.
Solomon, Samuel. A Guide to Health; or, Advice to Both Sexes: With an Essay on a Certain Disease, Seminal Weakness, and a Destructive Habit of Private Nature. New York: Robert Bach, 1800.
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Woodward, Samuel Bayard. Hints for the Young in Relation to the Health of Body and Mind. Boston: George W. Light, 1840.
Young, Alfred F. Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier. New York: Vintage, 2004.
Zagarri, Rosemarie. Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.
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Chapter 11
Sexual Desire, Crime, and Punishment in the Early Republic
Mark E. Kann
The American Revolution ushered in a “sexual revolution” that lowered restraints on sexual desire but heightened fears that youths would fail to exhibit republican virtue.1 One indicator of impending failure was the perceived growth of crime in cities such as Boston, New York, and Phila- delphia. Beginning in the 1780s, penal reformers argued that the primary means for preventing crime was to encourage people to discipline desire and the preferred method for curing criminality was to rehabilitate con- victs by incarcerating them for long periods. Importantly, disciplining de- sire meant restraining sexual desire and rehabilitation required enforcing prisoner sexual abstinence.
Penal reformers prided themselves on their enlightened advocacy of liberty and independence but they were uneasy about reduced restraints on sexual desire. They believed that excessive passion was the basis of many crimes, including sex crimes ranging from adultery and bigamy to prostitution and rape. They also identified excessive passion as the source of same-sex desire and sodomy—which they considered particularly sin- ful and subversive of the biological, social, and political order ordained by God, nature, and reason. Where individuals failed to discipline desire, their promiscuous, lawless behavior needed to be punished lest sexual im- punity undermine social stability.
Penal reformers’ recommended punishment was long-term imprison- ment in penitentiaries that were specifically designed to dampen men’s passions, enforce sexual abstinence, and teach redeeming self-discipline. Ideally, penitentiaries were designed so that the sexes were segregated; each man was isolated from other men; and panoptic systems of surveil-
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lance ensured that prison life was passionless. In reality, constant over- crowding in penitentiaries meant that men and women inmates occasion- ally found each other; and male inmates, boys and men, shared cells and beds with one another. Reformers’ main priority was to keep men and women apart, eventually, by calling for the creation of separate institu- tions for each sex. Furthermore, reformers feared that young male inmates were being seduced and raped by older men and, once fallen from virtue, these boys could never be rehabilitated. This fear gradually gave rise to a movement to protect delinquent boys from adult criminals by placing youths in their own facilities. Finally, although reformers complained about persistent sexual behavior among adult male prisoners, prison offi- cials had neither the logistical ability nor the political motivation to pre- vent it. Officials’ grudging toleration of same-sex behavior suggested that the state’s power over prisoners found its limits in same-sex desire.
The Context for Penal Reform
Dr. Benjamin Rush was an early leader in American penal reform. In his medical practice and public service, he dwelled on men’s sexual excesses. He wrote that the “solitary vice” of masturbation fixed “physical and moral evils . . . upon the body and mind.” Additionally, “The morbid ef- fects of intemperance in sexual intercourse with women” ruined male mental and physical health. Moreover, in schools where boys lodged to- gether and shared beds, “the venereal appetite prevails with so much force and with such odious consequences” that youths were permanently dam- aged. Rush claimed that male masturbation, promiscuity, and sodomy produced debilities ranging from insanity to criminality.2 His anxiety about same-sex experimentation among boys in boarding schools antici- pated later reformers’ apprehensions about the sexual vulnerability of young boys in adult prisons.
Rush joined other civic leaders and intellectuals to urge Americans to restrain sexual desire. In her literary study of the early Republic, Karen Weyler observes that fiction, advice literature, and education theory, along with medical writings, routinely prescribed “self-knowledge, self-disci- pline, and self-control.” Liberty had to be wed to self-restraint to sustain an orderly republic.3 Elites agreed that liberty led to licentiousness when- ever self-restraint failed to neutralize excessive desire. Religious realists and enlightenment idealists long recognized that a degree of sexual licen-
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tiousness was predictable. But was it tolerable? The American answer was mixed. In colonial New England, for example, officials legislated capital punishment for sexual deviancy but rarely hanged men convicted of sod- omy. Magistrates even allowed some exhibitions of same-sex desire. Nich- olas Sension’s sexual aggression toward other males was well known to his seventeenth-century Connecticut neighbors, but it did not diminish “the general esteem in which he was held.”4 Overall, post-Revolution officials scaled down the practice of prosecuting sexual offenses. Quiet adultery was usually allowed. Bigamy, often a product of self-divorce followed by remarriage, was rarely prosecuted. Prostitutes plied their trade with little fear of arrest. Sexual offenses sometimes generated less official concern than public gambling and drunkenness.5
Still, civic leaders and leading citizens were ambivalent. They supported individual rights but retained doubts about sexual license. Penal reform- ers fed their doubts by condemning men’s lack of sexual self-discipline as a cause of crimes, ranging from rape and sodomy to theft and murder. They urged public officials to prosecute sexual criminals, particularly those who flaunted sexual improprieties. Such open wrongdoing under- mined respect for law and set a bad example for youths. Urged on by penal reformers and other moral reformers, civic leaders waged culture wars against “sporting-male” youths, who made unregulated sex their “categori- cal imperative.” These licentious youths were most visible in New York City, where they “patronized gambling and animal blood sports, billiards, brothels, gangs, aggressive volunteer fire brigades, political clubs,” but their passions and crimes also wreaked havoc in villages and small towns across the American landscape.6
Thomas Jefferson epitomized this ambivalence. Like other enlightened thinkers, he encouraged self-discipline and civic virtue as the primary means for restraining individual desire and maintaining social order. Fur- thermore, he supported the liberalization of punishments. He advocated the elimination of the death penalty for most crimes, including sex crimes such as sodomy. Simultaneously, Jefferson doubted men’s ability to disci- pline desire, especially sexual desire. Thus, he supported replacing the death penalty with castration for men found guilty of “rape, polygamy, or sodomy with man or woman.” Public vengeance apparently demanded cutting off the member rather than curing the criminal.7 Like many re- formers, Jefferson spoke the language of rehabilitation but nevertheless suspected that men who were moved by excessive sexual desire were more incorrigible than salvageable.
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Passions and Crimes
In the early Republic, ministers and magistrates began to construe crime less as a by-product of innate wickedness than as a result of excessive de- sires unleashed by adverse circumstances. They reported that wrongdoers’ powerful passions first surfaced in childhood. The typical criminal began his career of mischief “as an unfilial child, who throws off the yoke of pa- rental guidance to pursue willfully vicious courses, usually involving sex- ual promiscuity or precocity.”8 For Dr. James Mease, biology was the basis of childhood vice. Criminals sired children “destined to succeed to the hereditary vices of their parents.” Most commentators attributed child- hood offenses to adverse circumstances, particularly bad parenting. John Griscom blamed “the profligate example of parents.” Francis Lieber espe- cially reproached the mother “given to intemperance” or to “violence and immoral conduct” for bringing up “as many vagabonds and prostitutes as she has male and female children.”9 Even in childhood, passion, sex, and crime seemed to come wrapped in a single package.
Whether the source was nature or nurture, children’s unruly passions matured into adults’ criminal tendencies. Philadelphia’s William Bradford claimed that men sometimes experienced “a violence of temptation” that drove them to crime. Thomas Eddy, a leader in New York penal reform, felt that otherwise innocent men could be “blinded by passion” or “allured by present temptation” only to fall “into the depths of vice and criminal- ity.” Reform warden Gershom Powers felt that “moments of frenzy” moti- vated many crimes. Edward Livingston, who drafted a major revision of Louisiana’s criminal code, attributed numerous offenses to the individual who sought to “gratify the strongest passion of his soul” during an “intox- icating moment.”10
Convicts commonly confessed that intoxication was a catalyst for their crimes. Johnson Green blamed “drunkenness” for his wrongdoing. John Dixon warned spectators at his execution to avoid “hard drinking” lest they end up like him. Counterfeiter William Stuart observed, “All rogues drink. Every vicious man loves rum. Every gross, vulgar man loves the bot- tle. A rogue cannot persist in roguery without it.” Former inmate John Reynolds claimed that a ban on alcohol would leave “half the rooms in our prisons . . . without an inhabitant.” Religious reformers also linked liquor to crime. Quaker Thomas Eddy wrote that “the greater number of crimes originate in the irregular and vicious habits produced by intoxica- tion, and by the idle, low, and dissipated practice encouraged in taverns
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and tippling-houses.”11 The Reverend Nathan Strong was convinced that the overabundance of “tippling houses and dram shops” fostered crime. He wanted “habitual drunkards” confined and liquor sales limited.12
More often than not, penal reformers resisted efforts to decriminalize sexual offenses lest individuals’ inner desires generate outer disorders. For example, Edward Livingston worried that if lawmakers did not punish adultery, “the injured party will do it for himself.” A husband who discov- ered his wife’s infidelity would be driven by rage to seek vengeance by “as- saults, duels, assassinations, [and] poisonings.” Should the husband kill his wife’s lover, most juries would acquit the husband. Livingston argued that outlawing adultery and attaching a modest punishment to it would avert the disorders associated with private vengeance.13 Historian Hendrik Har- tog reports that a man’s “right” to kill his wife’s lover was generally judged by the state of his passions. If a husband discovered another man with his wife and killed him immediately, in the heat of passion, the husband could expect to be exempted from a murder charge.14 Tapping Reeve, a domestic law scholar in the early Republic, argued that the husband’s inflamed pas- sions did not affect his culpability but should mitigate his punishment. He ought to get prison time, not the noose.15
William Bradford applied a similar logic to rape and sodomy. Rape was a crime that arose from “the sudden abuse of a natural passion” and was “perpetrated in a frenzy of desire.” A rapist experienced a momentary lapse in reason, not “irreclaimable corruption.” Sodomy, the “crime against nature,” also stemmed from such excessive sexual desire. Its perpetrator was so enslaved by his passions that he was in no mind to think clearly or reflect on the terrible consequences of his actions. Had he done so, “the infamy of detection” would have been as sufficient a deterrent as the threat of capital punishment. Ultimately, sex criminals acted out of inflamed passions rather than malicious calculation or incorrigible viciousness. They should be punished with prison time rather than with hanging. In prison, Bradford suggested, they should be rehabilitated and reclaimed for law-abiding society.16
The growing belief that “the greater part of crimes against persons are acts committed in rashness” enabled penal reformers to argue that nearly all criminals, including men convicted of sex crimes, could be rehabili- tated to citizenship if they were taught to discipline desire.17 This focus on rehabilitation through education enabled reformers, legislators, and other public officials to rethink the purposes of punishment. They began to claim that it was unrepublican to view punishment as a mode of
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vengeance; it was enlightened to use punishment as a means to teach self- restraint to immature men who had failed to harness their passions suffi- ciently. Reformers began to design penal institutions and punishment reg- imens that would encumber criminals with values and habits conducive to self-restraint. And although reformers rarely spoke openly about the need to teach criminals to tame sexual desire, they did address that need in two ways. First, they used the language of “filth” to speak the unspeak- able. Second, they designed penal institutions and punishment regimens to dampen convict passions by enforcing sexual abstinence among them.
Speaking the Unspeakable
Colonial ministers often employed the language of filth to discuss men’s inability to control sexual desire (lest they suffer debasement to the level of beasts). The Reverend John Cotton referred to deviant sex as “unnatural filthiness.” The Reverend Samuel Danforth described a convicted sodom- ite as a man of “carnal uncleanness” who committed “abominable filthi- ness,” including the “self-pollution” of masturbation.18 Similarly, secular writers tied filth to sexual wrongdoing, for example, by referring to a pros- titute as a “dirty venereal trollop.” The early Republic anticipated a Victo- rian prohibition against explicit public sex talk. In the 1810 case of Davis v. Maryland, for example, the court referred to sodomy as “that most horri- ble and detestable crime (among Christians not to be named).” Justice Nicholson wrote in his commentary, “The crime of sodomy is too well known to be misunderstood, and too disgusting to be defined, farther than by merely naming it.”19
Michel Foucault points out that such reticence to speak about sex did not mean a suppression of expression. Jody Greene explains why civic leaders and public officials in England felt compelled to express their disgust for acts of sodomy. On the one hand, they considered sodomy a crime not to be named or mentioned because it was infectious. Merely speaking about it or drawing attention to it would inflame the passions of audiences. On the other hand, same-sex desire and sodomy had to be de- nounced publicly and made known objects of punishment lest men in- dulge excessive desire with impunity. Sodomy became what Greene calls a “public secret”: officials expressed grave reservations about uttering the word but they then proceeded to do just that.20
Many penal reformers and officials in the United States expressed their
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public secret indirectly, using the language of filth to allude to illicit sex. New York’s Society for the Prevention of Pauperism declared, “Every per- son that frequents the out-streets of this city must be forcibly struck with the ragged and uncleanly appearance, the vile language, and the idle and miserable habits of great numbers of children” engaged in drinking, theft, promiscuity, and prostitution. Street urchins grew up into “uncleanly” delinquents. Reformers wanted a clean republic. Rush announced, “Too much cannot be said in favor of cleanliness as a physical means of pro- moting virtue.” Cleanliness fostered self-discipline and sexual integrity, whereas “uncleanness” signified the “unrestrained passions” that generated social grime and public crime.21
Sending criminals to filthy jails was no solution. Reformers complained that New Hampshire’s jails exposed inmates to “lasciviousness.” Many jails were “half-way houses of drunkenness and ill fame.” In New York City’s municipal jail, individuals awaiting trial, vagrants, and petty offenders re- sided in a state of filth and intoxication. Inmates suffered an exacerbation of “bad passions,” rendering them “an hundred-fold more vicious and un- tractable.”22 In a Pennsylvania jail, inmates included “the disgusting object of popular contempt, besmeared with filth from the pillory—the unhappy victim of the lash, streaming with blood from the whipping post—the half naked vagrant—the loathsome drunkard—the sick suffering from various bodily pains.” A former convict described the accommodations in one Connecticut jail in this way:
The rooms were only lighted with a small heavily grated window pane,
overstocked with lice, fleas and bed bugs, and the floor five inches deep of
slippery stinking filth. . . . Loathsomeness and putridity, united with billions
of entomological living specimens, shower the senses of a man uninured to
filth, and he instinctively feels that in such cases nothing but fire can act
successfully as a purifier and health preserver. . . . Armies of fleas, lice and
bed bugs nightly covered every inch of this polluted prison.23
Boston’s Prison Discipline Society reported an instance “in which an old negro, who was covered with sores, whose clothes were filthy rags, and on whom were seen afterwards swarms of vermin, was thrust into . . . prison, and locked up, night after night, and week after week, in a narrow and filthy dungeon, with blacks and whites, old and young, and made their constant companion.”24 Traditional jails were physically and morally un- healthy. They caged men but uncaged men’s most pernicious passions.
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Reformers were particularly dismayed to discover men and women co- habiting and fornicating in jails. A 1787 Philadelphia County Grand Jury denounced the “general intercourse between criminals of the different sexes” in the local jail. It also condemned the prostitutes who plied their trade inside that facility. The Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons demanded that this “mixture of the sexes” be remedied. Reformers succeeded to make the separation of the sexes a typical expectation but not a pervasive reality. In the 1820s, Boston reformers reported several cases “in which men and women have been found in the different prisons confined in the same apartment, whose guilty countenances indicated their character and habits.” In one jail in Charleston, South Carolina, “The necessities of nature must be done by both sexes in the presence of each other.” Some reformers promoted the separation of female inmates from male guards, who were prone to abuse and prostitute the women.25
On rare occasions, penal activists expressed concerns about young ser- vant and slave girls who were confined by their masters and mistresses only to be “seduced from their original innocence” by “the most aban- doned of the sex.” Reporting that young female inmates were being cor- rupted by older female felons, New York’s Society for the Prevention of Pauperism condemned the women’s quarters at Bellevue as a “great school of vice.” This condemnation more likely indicated reformers’ concern for girls’ fall from virtue rather than grave anxiety about their seduction or rape by older women.26
More frequently, reformers vocalized agreement with the Chief Magis- trate of Massachusetts who, in 1827, examined the presence of “unnatural crime” in the state’s penitentiary system and found that the “horrible offense is here committed between wretches, who are alike destitute of moral sentiment, and without the reach of physical restraint. Nature and humanity cry aloud for redemption from this dreadful degradation.” The same year, commissioners appointed by the Connecticut legislature ob- served “that in some of our penitentiaries, if not all, in which the convicts are placed in large numbers together in the cells, the crime of sodomy has been perpetuated, in numerous instances, with entire shamelessness and notoriety.” Commissioners attributed this “shamelessness and notoriety” to “hoary headed convicts condemned to long imprisonment . . . whose passions and principles have been corrupted and degraded to the lowest point of debasement, and who are at night, in numbers from four to thirty-two persons, locked together in cells which are not subject to offi- cial inspection.”27 These reports indicated that officials recognized same-
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sex desire as a problem for prison administration, blamed older convicts for instigating sodomy in prisons, but identified overcrowding as the main obstacle to eradicating same-sex encounters and enforcing abstinence be- hind bars.
Penitentiaries and Punishments
From the 1780s onward, penal reformers persuaded legislators to replace traditional punishments such as hanging, whipping, and detention in jails with long-term incarceration in penitentiaries—with new institutions specifically designed to encourage and teach inmates to restrain their pas- sions. Penitentiaries were expensive. New York built its first penitentiary in 1799 for $208,846, the state’s largest expenditure. Pennsylvania’s Eastern Penitentiary, which opened in 1829, was the most expensive structure in the nation.28 These institutions were costly for two reasons. First, they had to accommodate growing numbers of inmates serving long prison sen- tences. Second, they were designed to keep inmates separated from one another. Traditional jails housed many men in a single cell; the new peni- tentiaries were to house one man in each cell.
Reformers demanded clean penitentiaries. South Carolina’s Robert Turnbull praised Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Prison, where cleanliness was “a very principal physical cause in correcting the vices of [prisoners].” Thomas Eddy, who ran New York’s first penitentiary, claimed that the ef- fect of cleanliness on physical health was well understood “but its less striking but equally certain effect on the mind has been nowhere more fully experienced than in this prison.” Cleanliness tended to “soften the temper, meliorate the disposition, and produce a regard to temperance, order, and industry and . . . conduce to [prisoners’] future amendment.” Dissipated, sickly inmates became sober, healthy men. Boston’s Prison Discipline Society praised the New York State Prison at Auburn for being “a specimen of neatness from the gate to the sewer.” Penitentiaries in Con- necticut and Maryland prided themselves on housing inmates who exhib- ited “cleanliness in their persons, dress, and bedding.”29
Enforcing physical and mental hygiene demanded extensive control over inmate lives. Incarceration prevented male inmates from experienc- ing further corruption from bad parents, vicious friends, and fallen women as well as vices associated with taverns, theaters, gambling halls, and brothels. Warden Gershom Powers felt that sequestering inmates in
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penitentiaries forced them “to reflection and communion with their own hearts.” Enforced silence helped. Inmates who were “free from the sound of a human voice” were also free from the crude language that inflamed men’s passions. Ideally, penitentiaries were stripped of “everything calcu- lated to inflame the passions and sharpen the evil propensities of men.”30
To this end, Sean McConville writes, officials sought to control “every as- pect of daily life: sleeping, eating, working, associating with others, read- ing—and in religion, dress, and exercise.”31 Every aspect of daily life in- cluded sexual desire and behavior.
Reformers’ implicit theory was that male convicts could learn to re- strain sexual desire if they were shielded from sexual stimulation. The first rule for managing prisoner sexual desire was to separate male and female inmates. This rule appeared to be relatively easy to administer because America’s first penitentiaries housed few women. The early Republic had few female felons and, often, they were kept out of penitentiaries because, as William Torrey explained to New York State Prison inspectors in 1814, women prisoners were “very refractory.”32 Worse, their sexuality and filthy language had an unsettling effect on male inmates. Nevertheless, some women resided in most penitentiaries. Officials confined them to isolated quarters to prevent all contact with male inmates. The Massachusetts State Prison locked women in a single room. The New York State Prison at Auburn enclosed them in an attic above the kitchen “to prevent any com- munication with the men.”33 During religious services, the women sat “be- hind wooden grates” to remain unseen by men. Some reformers argued for separate women’s penitentiaries. In 1828, New York Governor DeWitt Clinton called for a state prison for women and, a decade later, the state constructed the nation’s first women’s prison.34
The second rule for managing prisoner sexual desire was to separate male inmates from each other. Although reformers were rarely explicit about male inmates’ same-sex relations, Foucault’s description of eigh- teenth-century secondary schools applies with equal force to early Ameri- can penitentiaries:
On the whole, one can have the impression that sex was hardly spoken of at
all in these institutions. But one only has to glance over the architectural
layout, the rules of discipline, and their whole internal organization: the
question of sex was a constant preoccupation. The builders considered it
explicitly. The organizers took it permanently into account. All who held a
measure of authority were placed in a state of perpetual alert, which the fix-
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tures, the precautions taken, the interplay of punishments and responsibili-
ties, never ceased to reiterate.35
American penal reformers’ constant warnings against mutual contamina- tion among male prisoners and their extraordinary efforts to keep male prisoners separated from each other suggest a concerted strategy to elimi- nate opportunities for sodomy.
Penal reformers regularly complained about the “promiscuous associa- tion” of men incarcerated together in large jail cells. Hardened criminals were able to corrupt the untried prisoners, witnesses, debtors, vagrants, disorderly persons, misdemeanants, and young, first-time offenders resid- ing among them. These jails were “high schools of iniquity,” where a “mas- ter” trained the untutored and plotted “diabolical purposes” with them. Corrupted youths became “intimately acquainted with the arts of villainy,” hastening their graduation from vagrancy to felony. The promiscuous as- sociation of inmates initiated youths “to scenes of debauchery, dishonesty, and wickedness of every sort.” These “scenes of debauchery” likely in- cluded the filth associated with same-sex desire, sodomy, and sexual abuse among male inmates.36
Reformers developed two primary systems of penitentiary architecture and discipline, both aimed at isolating male prisoners from each other. Under the Pennsylvania system, all inmates were confined in solitary cells for the duration of their sentences. Their only human contact was with guards and chaplains. Pennsylvania reformers believed that solitude was the best means to eliminate contact and corruption among vicious men. Under the Auburn system, prison officials isolated prisoners in single cells at night and then enforced (with a whip) total silence when the inmates congregated for work and meals during the day. Separation and silence were meant to prevent all communication and contact, including sexual contact, among the men.37
Reformer rules for managing sexual desire worked better in theory than in practice. The goal of separating men and women housed within the same penitentiary and preventing contact among male inmates was nearly impossible to achieve. Overcrowding defeated virtually all attempts to separate inmates. Men and women inmates devised ways to engage each other. Investigating committees reported that “the means of communica- tion are not entirely cut off between the males and females.” Stories about prison romances were common. Boston’s Prison Discipline Society noted a liaison at the New Hampshire State Prison where, somehow, a male and
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female occupying opposite ends of the building “formed an acquaintance and carried on a courtship.” Occasional pregnancies among long-term fe- male prisoners belied assertions of successful sexual segregation.38
Filth made its way into the cleanest institutions. Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Prison became an international showcase of enlightened punish- ment but visitors still found “idle, some dirty, and some ragged” inmates in the facility. Warden Gershom Powers sought to keep his Auburn peni- tentiary spotless but complained that new arrivals brought in “filth and vermin” from local jails. Meanwhile, reformers understood that clean bod- ies did not necessarily produce clean minds and good behavior. Prison overcrowding meant that two men often shared a bed. Thomas Eddy com- plained that this unfortunate practice produced poor health and immoral behavior among inmates. Indeed, “the separation of criminals from each other during the night is a matter of so great importance that it is desir- able that an immediate improvement should be made”—regardless of the added expense.39 Overcrowding urged superintendents to assign top pri- ority to prisoner discipline and prison-labor revenues, give lip service to prisoner rehabilitation, and tolerate deviant behavior that did not directly threaten good order or revenue streams.
Where full-time solitary confinement kept men from having sex with each other, the “self-pollution,” “secret vice,” or “solitary vice” of mastur- bation was a concern. Seen as a by-product of “excessive sensuality” and “filthiness,” masturbation was thought to produce physical debility, im- morality, insanity, and death. Decades of warnings resulted in the “mas- turbation scare” of the 1830s. Writers published anti-masturbation tracts that “began by an announcement ritual in which each author proclaims that, moved by a sense of righteous calling, he or she will speak the un- speakable” because the evil was so enormous.40 If inmates indulged sexual desire in solitary confinement, their chances of learning sexual self-re- straint and achieving rehabilitation were reduced if not lost.
Prison chaplain Barrett Gerrish suggested that the problem was not so much solitary sexual activity as it was lascivious thoughts. He explained, “Much the greater portion of convicts are not only ignorant but extremely groveling and sensual. Their prevailing sentiments are sexual and these are extremely gross. They spend hours in the silence and solitude of their cells, forming in their minds pictures of these acts of sin.”41 Rather than dampen men’s sexual desires, solitude invited sexual fantasies. In A Lecture to Young Men, health reformer Sylvester Graham warned that “lascivious daydreams” and “amorous reveries” were sources of “debility, effeminacy,
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disordered functions, and permanent disease, and even premature death” as well as a “current of crime.”42
Knowing that male and female prisoners found each other, male in- mates had sex with each other, and masturbation and sexual fantasies per- sisted, reform wardens devised surveillance regimens aimed at “unceasing vigilance.” They directed architects to design cells “in such a manner as they can be inspected while the prisoner is ignorant of the fact that he is under inspection [and] the keeper can inspect the convicts without be- ing himself inspected.” In some prisons, guards wore socks or moccasins at night, enabling them to move silently, observe inmates, and note in- fractions. The Massachusetts State Prison strategically placed sentinels to “hear a whisper from the most distant cell” and ascertain that “all is order and silence.” Some reformers wanted a matron to supervise female prison- ers because, they believed, a woman would be better able to exercise “un- ceasing vigilance” over female prisoners, perform “a constant inspection,” and communicate to the women that they were always “under her eye.”43
Prisons officials tried to enforce sexual abstinence by enforcing segrega- tion and eliminating privacy.
Sodomy in Prisons
The logistical reality in persistently overcrowded prisons was that men could not be separated from one another and no amount of surveillance could stop the practice of sodomy among inmates. Beginning in the 1820s, the Reverend Louis Dwight, founder and leader of the Prison Discipline Society of Boston, became the nation’s most vocal critic of sodomy behind bars. He treated sodomy as a public secret. It was a “crime which is not fit to be named among Christians” as well as a subject “so revolting that we should gladly omit the further consideration of it.” However, because it stood “above all” evils that occurred in prisons, it was necessary to “meet the evil and remove it [and] give our attention to the facts.”44 He chose to speak the unspeakable.
Dwight certainly condemned “the crime of sodomy” when committed among the immoral “wretches” and hardened felons who filled the cells in most state penitentiaries. However, he was especially concerned about the victimization by seasoned prisoners of the young males with whom they shared quarters. Dwight reported, “Children have been found in some of our prisons under twelve years of age . . . intimately associated with the
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most profligate and vile of the human race. The loathsome skin, the dis- torted features, the unnatural eyes of some of these boys, indicate, with a clearness not to be misapprehended, the existence of unutterable abomi- nations, which it were better for the world if they had been foreseen and avoided.” These unfortunate youths were “attentive pupils of old villains by day” and “their injured companions by night.” To make matters worse, when “old offenders corrupt juvenile delinquents,” the next step was for “vicious youths of seventeen [to] corrupt innocent boys of eight or nine.” Like Benjamin Rush before him, Dwight worried that the same spiral of sexual corruption took place in boarding schools, where “impurity” found its beginnings in night chambers occupied by two to five unsupervised boys. There, “idle, profane, and vicious youths” took advantage of the op- portunity to introduce younger boys to sexual vice.45
Still, Dwight’s greatest apprehension was reserved for man-boy sex in prisons, where “Sodom is the vice of prisoners and boys are the favorite prostitutes.” Older, hardened prisoners attempted to seduce and rape one another but they fought especially viciously and violently over a new boy with “a fair countenance.” These “grey headed villains” used bribery and force to get young boys “into the same room and into the same bed.” They fought to keep the boys for themselves or they traded boys as if they were sexual commodities. Dwight reported that it was difficult, if not impossi- ble, for boys to retain their sexual innocence in penitentiaries. He re- counted the story of a former inmate who had witnessed boys so bru- talized that they came to “glory in every species of abomination” and constantly engage in sodomy. Dwight implied that a boy, once sexually corrupted by a man, was forever stained with sin and lost to rehabilitation. That was why it was so urgent to legislate the complete separation of “ju- venile delinquents from hardened offenders.” Only complete separation could prevent the “unnatural crime” of man-boy sex and its terrible, en- during consequences.46
For the first three decades of nationhood, penal reformers repeatedly advised public officials to separate older male criminals from youthful wrongdoers. A 1786 Pennsylvania law directed that “the old and hardened offenders be prevented from mixing with and thereby contaminating and eradicating the remaining seeds of virtue and goodness in the young and unwary.” This injunction was explicitly intended to prevent delinquents from becoming felons; it also was likely meant to thwart sexual relations between men and boys. It was not until the early 1820s that reformers were sufficiently concerned and convinced that incarcerated boys could not be
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protected from adult prisoners unless they did something about it. John Griscom crusaded to save delinquents from further contamination by at- tacking the penitentiary as “an unhallowed abode,” where boys’ innocence was destroyed by “old and fearless offenders.” He led New York’s Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents, which made the recommen- dation to legislators that only a separate institution for juvenile delin- quents, a house of refuge, could protect delinquent boys from older, pred- ator inmates.47
Several states heeded the recommendation, built houses of refuge, and gave administrators broad discretion to detain and retrain at-risk children. New York State delegated to refuge managers the authority to take custody of destitute, abandoned, vicious, vagrant, and convicted children. Once in- side the house of refuge, boys remained wards of the state until age 21, girls until age 18. Refuge records indicated that police and commissioners of the poor regularly committed boys for vagrancy and suspicion of theft. Occasionally, refuge managers were proactive. They wanted to take cus- tody of “a young female, who, though well known in the haunts of vice, had never rendered herself absolutely amenable to the criminal laws.” They asked that the police “have her secured and placed in the house of refuge as soon as they could find a lawful occasion.” The police soon found, or manufactured, such an occasion. Reformers’ impulse toward preventive incarceration was strong. Between 1826 and 1829, Boston’s House of Reformation detained 192 children. Few had been convicted of a crime. Forty-nine were committed “for being stubborn and disobedient,” twenty-nine for being vagabonds, eleven for leading idle lives, and four for lascivious conduct.48
Prescribed methods for rehabilitating juvenile delinquents were virtu- ally identical to prison regimens for rehabilitating adult convicts. Youths were removed from free society and sequestered in controlled environ- ments. Males and females were separated. Strict rules about personal hy- giene were followed, with the children being “marched in order to the wash-room where the utmost attention to personal cleanliness is required and enforced.” Solitude, labor, and schooling combined with surveillance were instituted to promote self-discipline, industry, and obedience. A ma- tron supervised female delinquents. She was to “endeavor to unfold to those under her charge the advantage of a moral and religious life.” Phila- delphia’s house of refuge also appointed “twelve judicious females to assist . . . by imparting advice to the youth confined therein and by bestowing their attention and care upon the domestic economy of the establish-
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ment.” Lady visitors tried “to excite in the girls a sense of virtue and piety.” The likelihood of their success was enlarged by the “soothing and persua- sive language which so peculiarly belongs to their own sex.” The authentic female voice was both passionless and regenerative.49
Juveniles remained in custody until placed in apprenticeships. Refuge managers sought placements conducive to virtue. A boy might be sent to the countryside to learn farming or be bound to a whaling ship, where he “is abstracted from his bad associates and has no opportunity of returning to his former habits.” Long voyages and shipboard discipline were to has- ten a boy’s journey “to manhood.” Managers did not allow boys to be ap- prenticed to tavern keepers or distillers of spirits and denied girls place- ments with single men or in boarding houses.50 They did not want to put delinquents into sexually charged environments, where they would be vul- nerable to temptation or abuse.
The practice of apprenticing boys to seagoing vessels was curious. On the one hand, rigid taskmasters “who demanded disciple, obedience, and even sobriety” governed ships. In theory, such discipline would deny boys the opportunity for indulging sexual desire. On the other hand, middle- class citizens perceived whalers and sailors as “exemplars of vice and de- viance.” At sea, they constituted an all-male subculture with “older and more powerful men initiating sexual relations with younger subordinates.” Ashore, they were given to “whoring, drinking, and drifting about.”51 Re- formers’ willingness to place boys on ships raises a question about how anxious they were about eradicating sexual desire and same-sex relations among delinquent males. Unlike Louis Dwight, who feared that same-sex experiences in prison forever ruined a boy, the child-savers who ran houses of refuge may have felt that illicit sex at sea was rare and, when it did occur, it was situational and therefore temporary. Regardless, refuge officials could not have overlooked the practical reality that placing boys on ships opened up space for new admits to their institutions.52
Passionless Penitentiaries?
Penal reformers believed that undisciplined sexual desire was a primal force that directly or indirectly drove men to crime. They argued that long sentences carried out in passionless penitentiaries offered hope for reha- bilitating criminals to self-control and law-abiding behavior. Officials sought to dampen inmate sexual desire and promote sexual self-restraint
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by requiring sexual abstinence. This requirement was enforced by inmate separation and guard surveillance. The segregation of the sexes, the isola- tion of men from each other by day and especially at night, and proposals to build separate penal facilities for female felons and for at-risk youths and delinquents were part of a systematic strategy to manage sexual desire among the inmates of state penal institutions.
Although the white, middle-class penal reformers who advocated pas- sionless penitentiaries hoped to rehabilitate wayward white males to virtue and citizenship, they had little to say about the disproportionately lower- class, black, and immigrant men who filled penitentiaries in the early Re- public. For the most part, reformers considered these marginal Americans slaves to sexual desire and virtually incorrigible.53 Simultaneously, white middle-class reformers began to elevate the significance of freedom from sexual desire. They attached this freedom to idealized middle-class women, whose exemplary passionlessness served as “the archetype for human mo- rality.”54 Accordingly, penal reformers who demanded that marginal men be sentenced to spend years in passionless penitentiaries, where they would be “forced to be free” from sexual desire, condemned inmates not only to sexual abstinence but also to emasculation and feminization.
Reformers’ commitment to passionless penitentiaries encountered three problems. First, to the extent that officials succeeded to create chaste penal environments, they failed to prepare the prisoner for the moment when he would be released back into free society—where desire, temptation, and corruption were ubiquitous. Reporting on the typical American peniten- tiary prisoner, Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville noted, “He was dead to the world, and after a loss of several years he reappears in so- ciety, to which, it is true, he brings good resolutions, but perhaps also burning passions, the more impetuous, from their being the longer re- pressed.”55 Prison rehabilitation was a false promise to the degree that penitentiaries exacerbated rather than reduced a man’s passions. It was only a matter of time before excessive desire fueled by intoxication and ad- verse influences would again set him on a pathway to crime.
Second, reformers encountered critics who pointed out that tradi- tional punishments such as hanging and beating (which reformers consid- ered cruel and suitable only for monarchies) were in some respects more enlightened, humane, and republican than incarceration. Hangings were quick affairs. Beatings were over in minutes. Neither a hanged man nor a beaten man had to cope with long-term exposure to prison fevers, the psychological terrors of prolonged solitude, or draconian and arbitrary
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prison discipline. Furthermore, traditional punishments did not inflict on wrongdoers long-term sexual deprivation and emasculation enforced by constant surveillance.
Third, by their own reckoning, penal officials never succeeded to create passionless penitentiaries. With constant prison overcrowding, men and women found each other; same-sex relations and relationships persisted; masturbation was unstoppable; and sexual fantasies formed in prisons continued to have unknown but unsettling effects on discharged prison- ers. Reformers and officials lowered their expectations about prisoner re- habilitation and began to develop implicit priorities in managing prison- ers’ sexual desire. Their foremost concern was to separate women and men in prison. Their second concern, emerging in the 1820s, was to remove de- linquent boys from the sexual reach of older inmates by moving them into houses of refuge. Ultimately, preventing sodomy and masturbation within prisons became a tertiary concern. On the one hand, there was not much officials could do to stop sodomy in overcrowded prisons. On the other hand, officials were more interested in maintaining prison order and en- hancing prison revenues than in policing same-sex desire.
This relative neglect of same-sex desire among adult prisoners probably stemmed from a combination of post-Revolution tolerance, lowered ex- pectations, and political paralysis. American ministers and legislators of- ten supported draconian punishments for what they considered deviant sexual acts, but American citizens and officials tended to tolerate discreet expressions of illegal sexuality such as fornication, adultery, bigamy, pros- titution, and sodomy. If Americans did not decriminalize sodomy as some continental European nations did, neither did they emulate the English by vigorously prosecuting sodomy.56 It appears that American prison officials mostly tolerated expressions of same-sex desire among male prisoners and could do so because the new walled-in penitentiaries, like discreet houses of prostitution, were not accessible to public viewing.
Furthermore, the first wave of penal reformers in the 1780s and 1790s, who expressed remarkable optimism about prisoner rehabilitation, gave way to a new generation of reformers with lower expectations. The later group was less likely to expect prisoners to be rehabilitated in their souls and more apt to settle for prisoners’ good behavior upon their discharge. Good behavior could mean being discreet by practicing one’s vices in pri- vate rather than flaunting them in public.57
Finally, reformers faced a political challenge that made it imprudent for them to problematize and publicize same-sex desire in prisons. Reformers’
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argument to legislators and taxpayers was that they should support the expensive new penitentiaries because these institutions provided a clean, controlled environment that would rehabilitate criminals, deter would-be criminals, and thereby prevent future crime. This made imprisonment seem palatable in an otherwise liberty-loving republic. However, reform- ers would have had difficulty promoting the image of clean, passionless penal institutions if they publicized the fact that the men within them en- gaged in “filthy” sex. This might explain why Louis Dwight’s efforts to publicize sodomy within prisons attracted few followers.
Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville observed during their 1831 travels, “While society in the United States gives the example of the most extended liberty, the prisons of the same country offer the spectacle of the most complete despotism.” Inmate memoirs from the early Repub- lic agreed that stripping men of liberty, incarcerating them, and destroying their privacy constituted despotism. Henry Tufts “incessantly pined after that liberty of which . . . I saw myself so totally divested” and W. A. Coffey “ardently sought a restoration to liberty.” If inmate regrets over lost liberty were in good measure a function of the deprivation and degradation they suffered within penitentiaries that sought to enforce sexual abstinence, it was penal reformers’ obsession with what Michael Meranze calls “the threat of sexual contact”—which “transgressed disciplinary limits and ex- pressed [prisoners’] ungoverned desires”—that encouraged and perpetu- ated despotism but also limited it. Penal despotism could not be complete as long as transgressive, ungoverned same-sex desire persisted and prison personnel were compelled to tolerate same-sex behavior among adult male inmates.58
n o t e s
1. Richard Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); see also John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 44–45, 49–50.
2. Benjamin Rush, Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind (New York: Hafner, 1962 [1812]), 32–33, 347, 351; Benjamin Rush to David Ramsay, March or April 1788, in Benjamin Rush, Letters of Benjamin Rush, ed. L. H. Butterfield, 2 vol. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), 1:454.
3. Karen Weyler, Intricate Relations: Sexual and Economic Desire in American Fiction, 1789–1814 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004), 33.
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4. Rudi C. Bleys, The Geography of Perversion: Male-to-Male Sexual Behaviour Outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination, 1750–1918 (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 68–69; Richard Godbeer, “ ‘The Cry of Sodom’: Discourse, Intercourse, and Desire in Colonial New England,” in this volume, 95; see also D’Emilio and Freedman, 30; Leila J. Rupp, A Desired Past: A Short His- tory of Same-Sex Love in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 31–32.
5. Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 30, 38–40; Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Uni- versity Press, 1990), 89, 97–98; Michael Stephen Hindus, Prison and Plantation: Crime, Justice, and Authority in Massachusetts and South Carolina, 1767– 1878 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 52.
6. Lawrence M. Friedman, Crime and Punishment in American History (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 201; Howard P. Chudacoff, The Age of the Bachelor: Creat- ing an American Subculture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 35–36; Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 23, 27–28; Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York: Norton, 1992), 99, 115.
7. Thomas Jefferson, “A Bill for Proportioning Crimes and Punishments,” in Thomas Jefferson, Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of Amer- ica, 1984), 355–56.
8. Richard Slotkin, “Narratives of Negro Crime in New England, 1675–1800,” American Quarterly 25, 1 (March 1973): 7.
9. James Mease, Observations on the Penitentiary System and Penal Code of Pennsylvania with Suggestions for their Improvement (Philadelphia: Clark and Raser, 1828), 29; John Griscom, “The Memorial of the Managers of the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents in the City of New York to the U.S. Con- gress [1826],” in John H. Griscom, ed., Memoir of John Griscom, LL.D. (New York: Robert Carter, 1859), 189–90; Francis Lieber, “Translator’s Preface,” in Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville, On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France, tran. Francis Lieber (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964 [1833]), 8–9, 14.
10. William Bradford, An Enquiry How Far the Punishment of Death is Neces- sary in Pennsylvania, [1793] in Reform of Criminal Law in Pennsylvania: Selected In- quiries, 1787–1819 (New York: Arno Press, 1972), 8–9; Thomas Eddy, An Account of the State Prison or Penitentiary House in the City of New York (New York: Isaac Col- lins and Son, 1801), 51; Gershom Powers, A Brief Account of the Construction, Man- agement, and Discipline &c. &c. of the New York State Prison at Auburn (Auburn: U. F. Doubleday, 1826), 49; Edward Livingston, A System of Penal Law for the State of Louisiana (Union, NJ: Lawbook Exchange, 1999 [1833]), 23.
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11. Johnson Green, “The Life and Confession of Johnson Green [1786],” in Daniel E. Williams, Pillars of Salt: An Anthology of Early American Criminal Narra- tives (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1993), 259; John Dixon in “The American Bloody Register [1784],” in Ibid., 251; William Stuart, Sketches of the Life of William Stuart: The First and Most Celebrated Counterfeiter of Connecticut (Bridgeport, CT: W. Stuart, 1854), 13–14; John Reynolds, Recollections of Windsor Prison; Containing Sketches of Its History and Discipline (Boston: A. Wright, 1834), 174; Eddy, 59.
12. Daniel A. Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674–1860 (New York: Ox- ford University Press, 1993), 97.
13. Livingston, 173. 14. Hendrik Hartog, Man and Wife in America: A History (Cambridge: Har-
vard University Press, 2000), 218–19, 224–26. 15. Tapping Reeve, The Law of Baron and Femme (New York: Source Book
Press, 1970 [1816]), 300. 16. Bradford, 21, 29. 17. Lieber, 23. 18. John Cotton, “Unnatural Filthiness,” in Jonathan Katz, ed., Gay American
History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 20; Samuel Danforth quoted in Ronald A. Bosco, “Lectures at the Pillory: The Early American Execution Sermon,” American Quarterly 30, 2 (Summer 1978): 156–57; See also Godbeer, “The Cry of Sodom,” 284; Thomas Foster, “Antimasonic Satire, Sodomy, and Eighteenth-Century Masculinity in the Boston Evening-Post,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., 60, 1 (January 2003): 178.
19. Clerk quoted in Godbeer, Sexual Revolution, 321; Rush, Medical Inquiries, 353; Davis v. State, 3 H & J 154; 1810 Md. Lexis 31.
20. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, tran. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 3–35; Jody Greene, “Public Se- crets: Sodomy and the Pillory in the Eighteenth Century and Beyond,” The Eigh- teenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 44, 2–3 (June 2003): 203–32.
21. Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, Report of a Committee Appointed by the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism in the City of New York on the Expedi- ency of Erecting an Institution for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents (New York: Mahlon, Day, 1823), 7; Benjamin Rush, “An Enquiry into the Influence of Physical Causes upon the Moral Faculty,” in Benjamin Rush, Two Essays on the Mind (New York: Brunner/Mazel Publishers, 1972), 22.
22. Reports of the Prison Discipline Society of Boston, 6 vol. (Montclair, NJ: Pat- terson Smith, 1972 [1855]), 1:438–39; Eddy, 62.
23. Roberts Vaux, Notices of the Original and Successive Efforts, to Improve the Discipline of the Prison at Philadelphia and to Reform the Criminal Code of Pennsyl- vania: with a Few Observations on the Penitentiary System (Philadelphia: Kimber and Sharpless, 1826), 13–14; Stuart, 165–66.
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24. Reports of the Prison Discipline Society of Boston, 1:10–11. 25. The Pennsylvania Gazette, September 26, 1787, quoted in Negley K. Teeters,
The Cradle of the Penitentiary: The Walnut Street Jail at Philadelphia, 1773–1835 (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Prison Society, 1955), 132; Memorial No. 2, “Describes the Terrible Conditions Existing in the Walnut Street Jail, January 12, 1789,” in Ne- gley K. Teeters, They Were in Prison: A History of the Pennsylvania Prison Society (Formerly The Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons), 1787–1937 (Chicago: Winston, 1937), 29–30, 449–50; Reports of the Prison Discipline Society of Boston, 1:11; 37, 64; Report on South Carolina jail conditions quoted in Friedman, 50.
26. Society for the Prevention of Pauperism managers cited in Estelle B. Freed- man, Their Sisters’ Keepers: Women’s Prison Reform in America, 1830–1930 (Ann Ar- bor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), 7.
27. Chief Magistrate and Commissioners quoted in Reports of the Prison Disci- pline Society of Boston, 1:64–65.
28. Mark Colvin, Penitentiaries, Reformatories, and Chain Gangs: Social Theory and the History of Punishment in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: St. Mar- tin’s Press, 1997), 42, 55, 80; Scott Christianson, With Liberty for Some: 500 Years of Imprisonment in America (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), 96, 133; Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th-Century American South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 34–35; see also William Crawford, Report on the Penitentiaries of the United States (Montclair, NJ: Patter- son Smith, 1969 [1835]), xi.
29. Robert J. Turnbull of South Carolina, A Visit to the Philadelphia Prison (Philadelphia: James Phillips and Son, 1797), 19–20, 22; Eddy, 53; Thomas Eddy to Patrick Colquhoun, June 5, 1802, in Samuel L. Knapp, The Life of Thomas Eddy (New York: Arno Press, 1976 [1834]), 179; Reports of the Prison Discipline Society of Boston, 1:100–01, 348; Crawford, Appendix, 72, 95.
30. Powers, Brief Account, 1–2, 16; Society for the Prevention of Pauperism in the City of New York, Report on the Penitentiary System in the United States (New York: M. Day, 1822), 46, 58–59; “A View of the New-York State Prison,” in William Roscoe, Observations on Penal Jurisprudence and the Reformation of Criminals [1819], in Reform of Criminal Law in Pennsylvania: Selected Inquiries 1787–1819 (New York: Arno Press, 1972), Appendix, 40; Eddy, 36; Gershom Powers, Letter of Gershom Powers, Esq. in Answer to a Letter of the Hon. Edward Livingston in Rela- tion to the Auburn State Prison (Albany: Croswell and Van Benthuysen, 1829), 16.
31. Sean McConville, “Local Justice: The Jail,” in Norval Morris and David J. Rothman, eds., The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 276.
32. William Torrey to the Inspectors of the [NY] State Prison, February 12, 1814, in Roscoe, Observations on Penal Jurisprudence and the Reformation of Crimi-
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nals [1819], in Reform of Criminal Law in Pennsylvania, Appendix, 71; “Visiting Committee of the Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons Report, January, 1799,” in Teeters, They Were in Prison, 59; see also Orlando F. Lewis, The Development of American Prisons and Prison Customs, 1776–1845 (Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1967 [1922]), 263.
33. W. David Lewis, From Newgate to Dannemora: The Rise of the Penitentiary in New York, 1796–1848 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965), 162.
34. Powers, Brief Account, 15; Reports of the Prison Discipline Society of Boston, 1:261–62; Beaumont and Tocqueville, 188.
35. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, 27–28. 36. Beaumont and Tocqueville, 48; Memorial No. 2, “Describes the Terrible
Conditions Existing in the Walnut Street Jail,” in Teeters, They Were in Prison, 29– 30; Eddy, 62; Reports of the Prison Discipline Society, 1:11, 61–66; Stephen Bur- roughs, Memoirs of the Notorious Stephen Burroughs (New York: Cornish Lamport, 1852), 177; Memorial No. 5, “A Petition for a Bridewell for Vagrants, January 25, 1803,” in Teeters, They Were in Prison, 454; Vaux, 29.
37. For an early comparison of Pennsylvania and Auburn systems, see Beau- mont and Tocqueville, ch. 2.
38. Crawford, 18, Appendix, 95; Reports of the Prison Discipline Society of Bos- ton, 1:101–02; Livingston, 695.
39. Powers, Brief Account, 4; “The Visiting Committee of the Society for Allevi- ating the Miseries of Public Prisons Report, January, 1799,” in Teeters, They Were in Prison, 59–60; Eddy, 38.
40. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Vintage, 2003), 86, 94, 100.
41. Reports of the Prison Discipline Society of Boston, 1:11; Barrett Gerrish quoted in Lewis, The Development of American Prisons, 185.
42. Sylvester Graham quoted in Horowitz, Rereading Sex, 97. 43. Powers, Brief Account, 3, 7; Reports of the Prison Discipline Society of Boston,
1:7, 243, 297, 336–37; Crawford, 10, 16; Livingston, 697, 705; see also Michel Fou- cault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, tran. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), 201.
44. Reports of the Prison Discipline Society of Boston, 1:37; Louis Dwight, “The Sin of Sodom is the Vice of Prisoners,” in Katz, 27.
45. Reports of the Prison Discipline Society of Boston, 1:11–12, 64, 66, 289–90. 46. Dwight, “The Sin of Sodom is the Vice of Prisoners,” in Katz, 27–28. 47. Law quoted in Harry E. Barnes, The Evolution of Penology in Pennsylva-
nia: A Study in American Social History (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1927), 119; Griscom, Memoir, 167, 169; Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents in the City of New York, “Second Annual Report,” in Documents Relative to the House
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of Refuge, Instituted by the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents in the City of New-York, in 1824 (New York: Mahlon Day, 1832), 76; “Third Annual Re- port,” in Ibid., 132.
48. Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents in the City of New York, “First Annual Report,” in Documents Relative to the House of Refuge, 47, 57; “Second Annual Report,” in Ibid., 89, 93–95; “Fourth Annual Report,” in Ibid., 175; “Fifth Annual Report,” in Ibid., 187; “Sixth Annual Report,” in Ibid., 240; Reports of the Prison Discipline Society of Boston, 1:245.
49. Griscom, Memoir, 165; Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents in the City of New York, “First Annual Report,” in Documents Relative to the House of Refuge, 45–46; “Second Annual Report,” in Ibid., 83, 85, 107–08; “Third Annual Report,” in Ibid., 138–41; “Seventh Annual Report.,” in Ibid., 253–54; Livingston, 714–16; Crawford, Appendix, 150, 154; Reports of the Prison Discipline Society of Boston, 1:297.
50. Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents in the City of New York, “Fifth Annual Report,” in Documents Relative to the House of Refuge, 189; “Sixth Annual Report,” in Ibid., 217, 229–30; Beaumont and Tocqueville, 149–50; “Rules of the House of Refuge in Philadelphia,” in Crawford, Appendix, 153.
51. Margaret S. Creighton, “Fraternity in the American Forecastle, 1830–1870,” The New England Quarterly 63, 4 (December 1990): 531–32; Rupp, A Desired Past, 20–21.
52. For a discussion of the concept of “situational homosexuality” in prisons, see Regina G. Kunzel, “Situating Sex: Prison Sexual Culture in the Mid-Twentieth- Century United States,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8, 3 (2002): 253–70.
53. See Mark E. Kann, Punishment, Prisons, and Patriarchy (New York: New York University Press, 2005), ch. 9; Rupp, 41.
54. Nancy F. Cott, “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ide- ology, 1790–1850,” in Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth H. Pleck, eds., A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 165.
55. Beaumont and Tocqueville, 84. 56. See Bleys, 68–69, 81; A. D. Harvey, “Prosecutions for Sodomy in England at
the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century,” The Historical Journal 21, 4 (December 1978): 939.
57. See Kann, ch. 8. 58. Beaumont and Tocqueville, 79; Henry Tufts, The Autobiography of a Crimi-
nal (New York: Duffield, 1930 [1807]), 284; W. A. Coffey, Inside Out; or An Interior View of the New-York State Prison (New York: J. Costigan, 1823), iii, 67, 92, 98; Mi- chael Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760–1835 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 184.
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Foster, T. A. (Ed.). (2007). Long before stonewall : Histories of same-sex sexuality in early america. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from psu on 2020-01-16 14:20:55.
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