A history book often includes surprising discoveries. But none of my many books can compare to my experience in writing “The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers” (HarperCollins). From George Washington to James Madison, their lives are full of little known stories of women besides their wives whom they supposedly loved, almost married, or enjoyed in more clandestine ways.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Benjamin Franklin was 70 years old when he became America’s first ambassador to France. His age didn’t seem to stop him from enjoying the company of beautiful French women, with whom he frequently exchanged kisses and embraces. Soon John Adams and other American diplomats were writing to Congress with claims that Franklin was disgracing his high office.
Perhaps the best evidence of what was really going on can be glimpsed from a story told by Thomas Jefferson. When he arrived in Paris to become the next ambassador, the Virginian hurried to visit Franklin. He found him on the lawn outside his house, hugging and being hugged by a half dozen Frenchwomen.
Would it be possible, Jefferson asked with a grin, to transfer these privileges to the new ambassador? Franklin shook his bald head. “You are too young a man,” he said.
JOHN ADAMS
When he was a cash-short law student, John Adams came within inches of marrying sultry Hannah Quincy. At 23, Hannah had matrimony on her mind and was determined to get the idea into John Adams’ head.
One day in the spring of 1759, John found himself in the drawing room of the Quincy home, alone with Hannah. With her usual skill, she turned the conversation to the intricacies of love and marriage. She began talking about her cousin Esther Quincy’s engagement to John’s friend, Jonathan Sewall. John leaned toward Hannah, breathing her delicate perfume, lost in the liquid depths of her tantalizing eyes. The words of love and commitment were on his lips.
The study door crashed open and upon them burst Hannah’s cousin, Esther, and her fiance, Jonathan. The almost lovers recoiled to opposite ends of the couch and John rode back to his family’s farm in Braintree feeling as if he had narrowly escaped falling off the edge of the earth.
To his astonishment, John soon heard Hannah was engaged to one Bela Lincoln, a handsome militia captain. Adams found himself incapable of looking at a law book without seeing Hannah’s face on the page. He began to wonder if he were going mad. Not until he met earnest intellectual Abigail Smith did he finally find the woman who restored his equilibrium.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
On March 30, 1877, the New York Herald, one of the largest newspapers in America, printed a letter from George Washington to Sally Cary Fairfax, wife of his close friend and neighbor, George William Fairfax. The letter began with a confession that the writer was a votary of love and the lady in the case was known to her.
“I feel the force of her amiable beauties and the recollection of a thousand tender passages that I could wish to obliterate till I am bid to revive them,” he wrote four months after he become engaged to Martha Dandridge Custis, the richest widow in Virginia.
Ever since the letter’s appearance, historians have debated its meaning. Some have argued it is all a good natured if racy joke.
Others say it’s really a paean of praise for his fiance Martha.
Still others, including this writer, see it as boiling down to one anguished question: Do you love me as much as I love you? Sally’s answer has been lost but it was apparently evasive. Four months later, George married Martha and discovered a different kind of love, one that gathered power and depth year by year.