Vulgar History - Sex Scandals of an American Founding Father

00:00:00.000 Hello, and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women's history comedy podcast. My name is

00:00:17.300 Anne Foster. And this season, we've been looking at various revolutions from the 18th century.

00:00:22.440 We've talked about the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution.

00:00:27.040 and today we're talking about a person whose life kind of I would say straddled and I mean

00:00:33.120 straddled maybe in a sexy way because you'll hear why I said that soon but both the French

00:00:38.640 Revolution and the American Revolution and we've talked before in this season on this podcast about

00:00:44.160 some other people who were going in between America and France people like Lafayette,

00:00:48.660 Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings and this is a name I had never heard of before but he was also going

00:00:54.140 back and forth. And I know I had never heard this name before because it's a really specific

00:00:58.940 and interesting name. His name is Gouverneur Morris. We talk about this in the episode you're

00:01:05.420 about to hear. He was, if you look in the all-encompassing way, who were the founding

00:01:10.260 fathers of America, he was one of those guys. He's in the room where it happens. He's not in

00:01:14.940 the musical Hamilton, but I think that's just because if he was, there'd be too much competition 0.97

00:01:18.820 for who is the biggest, horniest dirtbag. And in that musical, Hamilton himself has to take over. 0.80

00:01:24.140 that role, which is also why Aaron Burr is represented the way he is in the musical.

00:01:28.460 We talk about this all in the episode. I just want to give you some heads up information who

00:01:32.680 we're talking about. Guvu Nur, we explain why that's his name as well. And I do want to give

00:01:39.040 a shout out to a listener of this podcast whose name is Kim, who I met when I was doing a meetup

00:01:43.660 in Florida a bit ago. The people at the meetup, I was just sort of trying to think about some

00:01:48.900 spoilers, some teases about some episodes that are coming up. And I mentioned I was going to

00:01:52.400 do this one with Gouverneur Morris, specifically because I was interested how many American people

00:01:56.960 have heard of him. And Kim shared that actually when she was going to school, I think middle

00:02:01.260 school, everyone in the class was assigned a person from this revolutionary age to research

00:02:05.980 and she was assigned Gouverneur. So maybe some other people out there were forced to learn about

00:02:11.140 this guy. And the context of the conversation I'm having with today's guest, today's guest is

00:02:17.100 Cassandra Good. She's a historian. Her expertise is in American history. And she has a new course

00:02:24.300 that's just come out. You can go, as soon as you listen to this podcast, go and subscribe to it

00:02:28.900 right away on The Great Courses. And it's called Early American Sex Scandals, which there's a lot

00:02:36.700 of, as much as I'm Canadian for context, but so much of what I have experienced about the way

00:02:44.160 that many american people consider their past is that the the founding fathers and their wives were

00:02:50.800 all like really upright moral cool just like ethical people and it's like actually they were

00:02:55.540 all kind of like we'll talk about in the episode um we'll we'll get into to what they're really

00:03:01.580 like but guvuner you know sometimes there are people in history and it's i'm always kind of

00:03:06.900 sad to hear that their diaries were destroyed by their later descendants but guvuner's diaries

00:03:12.580 were not destroyed by his descendants. And that's how we know a lot about the sexy secrets.

00:03:18.060 And this is also, if you've been listening to other episodes of this podcast recently,

00:03:21.400 we talk about dangerous liaisons. We talked about that movie a bit ago, but what was Gouverneur's

00:03:27.820 connection to that book and to the way that people behaved in that book? But also he interacts with

00:03:32.240 several of the people from the American Revolution that you've probably heard of too. And he was in

00:03:38.180 Paris, he went to Paris in the midst of the French revolution, which is like a real choice

00:03:43.920 because a lot of, a lot of people were fleeing Paris, but he just kind of showed up there with

00:03:48.300 his sexy peg leg and just like, you'll hear, you'll hear what he did. And I will give a trigger

00:03:55.620 warning for the cause of death of him because spoiler, this person who lived several hundred

00:04:01.900 years ago is dead. The cause of death makes me cringe every time I hear it. So just like,

00:04:09.460 just know that. Just know that. Anyway, I'm so happy to share with you this conversation I had

00:04:15.600 with Cassandra Good about Gouverneur Morris.

00:04:25.080 So I'm joined today by Cassandra Good, who is a historian of how would you describe your usual

00:04:30.680 history research, just American history, colonial American history? I would say early American

00:04:35.880 cultural and gender history. So I've written about friendships between men and women,

00:04:41.580 and I've written a sort of family history biography, and now I'm working on a project

00:04:46.460 on women in politics. So a lot about relationships and politics and gender.

00:04:52.720 And what you're looking at is kind of the, is it social history necessarily? Like you're looking

00:04:58.680 at kind of the lives, you're not looking at like, here's the battle and here's the strategies. Like

00:05:02.680 you're looking at who are the people and what were their relationships like and what did they live

00:05:07.120 like? Yeah. So it's interesting when I was in grad school and I had the option of taking either

00:05:13.300 cultural history or social history. And I was like, well, what is the difference?

00:05:17.200 And at the sort of technical level, social history tends to be more bottom up, especially

00:05:22.360 people who are not elites type history and cultural history more often is elite people,

00:05:29.100 artwork, letters. So that's why I tend to say cultural history, but like in a general sense,

00:05:36.200 social lives. Yes. No, that's interesting. That's not a distinction I had heard before

00:05:41.300 because the closest I've found to my research interest is social history because I like

00:05:45.360 learning about people and what their lives were like and whether they were like a more wealthy

00:05:50.040 person or not. Like, I find that interesting. But I guess that's kind of both because it's kind of,

00:05:53.940 yeah. Well, and so cultural history comes out of a moment in mostly the 1980s when historians

00:05:59.460 started reading anthropology a lot and particularly worked by this guy Clifford Geertz. And he talked

00:06:06.940 about this idea of webs of meaning. And so the way I think about what I'm doing is kind of

00:06:12.300 ethnography of the past, trying to understand people's relationships and lives and values

00:06:20.440 and looking at that as if, you know, the past is a foreign country. These people live, even though

00:06:26.000 they're speaking the same language, I can't assume that the words even always mean the same thing

00:06:30.240 then as they do now. And so cultural history pays a lot of attention to things like that. Like,

00:06:35.640 what does this symbol mean in the context of the time? So I think you're doing some of that.

00:06:42.300 I think I'm doing kind of both, maybe.

00:06:46.400 So what we're talking about today, well, we're specifically talking about a man from

00:06:51.720 American history who went to Paris during the time of the revolution.

00:06:55.600 And we'll talk about why he did that, because people were fleeing and he just arrived.

00:06:59.860 But this is in the larger context of a course that you have available.

00:07:03.600 Can you explain what the overall course is about so people understand?

00:07:07.200 Sure.

00:07:07.460 So it's a course from a partnership with The Great Courses, which has a lot of video

00:07:13.480 courses and also Audible courses, and then with Audible.com.

00:07:17.860 So it's a six-part audio series called Early American Sex Scandals.

00:07:22.980 And so each one focuses on, sometimes it's just one person.

00:07:28.440 Sometimes I have one episode that's also on seduction novels.

00:07:32.300 So it's all centered on late 18th through 19th century America.

00:07:37.460 And so you talk about one of the other stories, not what we're talking about today, but you do get into Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, which we've talked about on a previous episode. So Thomas Jefferson spent time in Paris, but so did this other person. And can you explain who this person is and why he has the name he has?

00:07:56.360 Yes. So Gouverneur Morris. And, you know, there's debate about pronunciation of his name. I generally just go with Gouverneur, but I've heard multiple different options there. And this is one of those strange names that come from using his mother's maiden name is his first name. So there are multiple people in early America where they did this. The first name is something strange sounding as a first name because it was actually a last name.

00:08:23.260 You know who else is like that? Beyonce. That's her mother's maiden name.

00:08:28.100 Oh, interesting.

00:08:29.400 Fun fact. And the reason that she, her mother just wrote a memoir, and that's how I know this.

00:08:34.120 But the reason that her mother, like she knew she's having a girl and she's like,

00:08:37.020 no one in my family's having sons. Like this last name is going to die out. So I'll give my child.

00:08:41.080 And her husband was like, you're calling her child Beyonce? Like she's going to tease. This

00:08:45.140 is such an unusual name. And now it's like, how famous is that name?

00:08:48.100 Yeah, yeah. Well, and so his mother was Sarah Gouverneur from New York, from a Dutch family that was New York was the old original Dutch colony in North America.

00:08:58.480 So is that the same sort of thing, like you give the child the mother's maiden name as sort of a tribute to her?

00:09:03.320 You know, I don't know exactly what the decision making was with this. I'm trying to think whether

00:09:11.260 it's usually, you know, something like a second son versus, because often a first son is going

00:09:16.220 to be named with the same name as the father, not always. So I'm trying to think. So his father's

00:09:21.560 name was Lewis. That would have been much easier to pronounce to just say Lewis Morse. But his name

00:09:27.940 is yeah like it looks like governor but it's gouverneur so when you got that extra it has

00:09:32.900 to use in it so yeah so when i first saw the name i thought oh governor morris that's his title but

00:09:38.760 what's his first name no his his name is gouverneur and it's not like like the name gouverneur it's

00:09:44.560 i just want to emphasize this to people that was the mother's surname a dutch surname it's not like

00:09:50.080 how you know people sometimes give their child an aspirational name like king or majesty to be like

00:09:56.000 this is going to elevate my child and, you know, inspire them. They weren't like, one day our son

00:10:00.360 will be a governor. And in fact, he wasn't a governor, was he? He was not. But he was very

00:10:06.260 important in American history, despite the fact that most people have never heard of him, because

00:10:10.220 he was in charge of making the Constitution's wording sound good. And he pretty much wrote

00:10:16.900 the preamble to the Constitution. So he actually is quite an important person in U.S. history.

00:10:22.220 Is he technically a founding father or not?

00:10:25.740 Well, it depends how you define founding father.

00:10:28.860 Please define it for me.

00:10:30.900 I think for some people, founding father is any of the people involved in the Constitutional Convention or in the American Revolution.

00:10:41.720 Some people are looking at like a fairly narrow set of people when they're talking about founding fathers.

00:10:48.460 So they're thinking really of like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams.

00:10:55.220 But there's a whole group of people there that is involved.

00:10:58.960 Somebody like Benjamin Rush is somebody on the edges who is basically a founding father.

00:11:04.300 He's involved in the founding and very influential, but not very well known.

00:11:11.340 So, I mean, as smart as, you know, the guys were that we know of, there's also these other people, including also, I would say, women.

00:11:18.320 I talk about a lot of women in this period who I think are influential and, you know,

00:11:23.000 really part of the founding.

00:11:25.200 So the project that publishes, there's an online platform for all of the presidential

00:11:30.320 papers from this period that have been published and some non-presidential, and they just call

00:11:34.180 it Americans of the Founding Era.

00:11:36.380 Okay.

00:11:37.160 But Founding Fathers is basically a 20th century term.

00:11:41.080 For me as a Canadian person who mostly encountered the concept of the Founding Fathers from like

00:11:46.980 an episode of, you know, Family Matters where they had to do a school report or like Sesame

00:11:52.020 Street or something. I'm just like, I'm learning this against my will. So to me, it's like George

00:11:56.300 Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin. And then since the musical, Hamilton. Hamilton,

00:12:01.380 yes. To me, those are the guys. Those are kind of the core guys. I will also say for anybody who

00:12:06.460 is familiar with the Hamilton musical, one of the episodes I have in this course is on the

00:12:11.340 Reynolds affair. And the big spoiler alert is that Hamilton may not have had an affair with

00:12:17.320 Mariah Reynolds. He might have been using that as a cover story for actual financial misdeeds,

00:12:22.520 which were much more serious than just paying off the husband of a woman he was having an affair with.

00:12:28.540 That's that. I love that historians find things like this where it's like, well, this was the

00:12:33.920 story and then let's research the story. But then when you dive a bit deeper, like, oh, that's what

00:12:37.740 he wanted us to think. But what was really happening, that's where historians are kind of

00:12:42.320 detectives. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I mean, this was not my own detective work. There was a

00:12:47.400 documentary editor meeting somebody who worked on publishing presidential papers who really dug

00:12:51.800 deep on this and noticed that the letters, so there's, we don't have originals of the Mariah

00:12:56.920 Reynolds correspondence. There's just the pamphlet with the published version, but the wording in

00:13:01.660 them is off in certain ways. And so he thinks Hamilton made them up.

00:13:07.740 And these guys are just, these are just like messy, messy people who are, again, to me as a Canadian, held up as these like saintly, flawless figures. And I love the people like you were out there doing the history to be like, well, let's just look at them as people. What were they actually like?

00:13:23.200 Yeah, and it makes it more relatable. And I mean, the other thing I say about this to my students often, because there's people that are uncomfortable with the idea of showing that the founders were flawed people, to me, it shows that, you know, we are all flawed people. We know about our own flaws. That doesn't mean we cannot do great things if these flawed people did great things. So to me, it's actually very encouraging that they were not perfect.

00:13:48.580 and again i've been helped a lot by my american friends to understand american history just when

00:13:55.200 i when i finally had to learn about all of this unavoidably because of the topic of my podcast

00:13:59.960 but it was presented to me the concept that and i think where you said your students are

00:14:03.900 uncomfortable with this idea of them being flawed is when you think of the people of the founding

00:14:08.120 era it's kind of like and they created this country and so it's like to find a flaw in them

00:14:14.280 is like to find a flaw in the country

00:14:16.140 because they're so related to it.

00:14:18.300 So it's like insulting America

00:14:20.800 to insult one of these guys.

00:14:23.400 And I'd say my students actually

00:14:24.740 are fairly comfortable with this.

00:14:26.320 It is, I think, an older generation

00:14:28.200 of people in the country

00:14:29.520 who had grown up revering the founders,

00:14:33.180 which was very much part of like

00:14:34.360 a 1950s and Cold War moment. 0.97

00:14:37.880 And I think they are the ones

00:14:40.980 much more than a younger generation

00:14:42.420 who was concerned about this.

00:14:44.280 Yeah. So, like, just, you know, spoiler for listeners. We're going to talk about this guy and his sex life, which was chaotic.

00:14:55.560 And he was very close friends with Alexander Hamilton.

00:14:58.400 Just a bunch of guys, just like locker room talk, really.

00:15:03.060 So, Governor Morris. So he's a wealthy person in America at the time of the revolutionary era.

00:15:11.580 He was on the side of the revolution, presumably.

00:15:14.940 Yes, he was.

00:15:15.320 He's a lawyer, right?

00:15:17.180 He has legal training, but he basically is also a sort of financier, does a lot of financial

00:15:24.420 stuff.

00:15:24.900 He did an important financial report during the revolution.

00:15:27.600 And then the reason he goes to France in 1788 is to make business deals.

00:15:33.180 Right.

00:15:33.620 And so can you explain to people, because we've talked a bit about on other episodes,

00:15:37.660 the back and forth of France and America.

00:15:39.740 So at the time of the revolution, France was supporting the revolution side, mostly because that meant screwing over England and England and France were always at odds.

00:15:48.980 So it was not unusual for American businessmen to be like going back and forth to Paris.

00:15:53.600 And I would think especially where his mother was European, maybe he felt some sort of draw to the continent, too.

00:15:58.160 I don't know.

00:15:58.620 So I'm not sure that I think his mother was actually born in the US.

00:16:01.260 She was just Dutch ancestry.

00:16:04.220 And the Dutch, like the Dutch weren't actually in New York that long, but left a big impact. 0.92

00:16:08.360 But yeah, Americans, you know, it's not a pleasant boat journey back then to go across the Atlantic, but they did it a surprising amount given how unpleasant it was. And, you know, the fact is, the colonial America was completely dependent on trade with Europe. And after the revolution, that's the case, too, after the American Revolution.

00:16:31.620 And France is a really important ally for the new United States.

00:16:37.860 And so, you know, it makes sense to go to where there's a lot of money to go make trade deals.

00:16:44.100 That's true, because it's this young country and they need to, like, really solidify themselves as a financially stable place that can continue on and be a country.

00:16:53.620 So he goes over to Paris the first time and you said 1788.

00:16:59.940 1788.

00:17:00.340 Yeah, so he's not going with the government. He's just going on his own at that point. And Thomas Jefferson is the ambassador at that point. So they're hanging out together in Paris.

00:17:09.000 Yeah. So that's what I was thinking, the Sally Hemings episodes. I remember Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings left Paris just before the 1789, the Storm of the Bastille and everything, both because the weather was really cold and also because it was getting a little tense to be there.

00:17:25.740 But he is gouverneur arrives on the precipice of the French Revolution.

00:17:30.340 But at this point, and correct me if I'm wrong, there was not just people going back and forth between Paris and the U.S., but also there's inspiration of like, wow, America had this revolution.

00:17:41.720 Maybe France can too.

00:17:43.100 We can all be the new Rome.

00:17:45.040 Republicans are like small R.

00:17:47.380 Let's do a republic.

00:17:48.520 like the vibes were like they were inspiring each other with their sort of pamphlets and brochures

00:17:53.860 and philosophy. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the French Revolution is very much inspired

00:17:59.600 by the American Revolution. And, you know, again, for people who've seen Hamilton, you know,

00:18:04.960 that there's debate over how much America should support France, given that, you know,

00:18:09.900 they had signed a treaty of alliance during the American Revolution. And I think that the

00:18:16.640 revolution went down a path in France that really scared a lot of people in America.

00:18:22.420 And certainly the Federalists, which is the party Gouverneur Morris is part of, and also Hamilton

00:18:28.020 and Washington, they become fairly anti-French in part because of what happens with the revolution.

00:18:36.400 And so at the beginning, this is where it's like things change so quickly in terms of the French

00:18:40.580 Revolution and just kind of who's in charge and what's going on. But at first, like Thomas

00:18:45.660 Jefferson, I think they were people in France were writing sort of like documents being like

00:18:50.600 declaring the rights and stuff. And Thomas Jefferson is like, oh, I can help you write

00:18:54.260 that. Like I wrote something like that myself. And it's very idealistic at the beginning. And

00:18:58.460 I feel like that's where Gouverneur shows up when it's in this idealistic phase of like, yes,

00:19:02.980 power to the people. Like, let's do this. Let's be like the Romans and no idea of how bananas

00:19:08.620 it's going to get. But that's the situation he walks into. He's not walking into the middle of

00:19:12.380 the terror. Right. But he's there during the terror. He stays. Oh, well, we will get to that

00:19:18.040 because that was a question I had. So he shows up and he's hanging out with Thomas Jefferson.

00:19:23.660 Presumably he would have seen Sally Hemings, who was there. Her brother would have made them food,

00:19:27.460 macaroni and cheese, potentially. But he's there doing business deals. He's not there for political

00:19:33.140 reasons as of yet. Yeah. And they're doing a bunch of diplomatic dinners because he's American. He

00:19:40.680 does seem to have been pretty good at speaking French. But, you know, fairly early on, he's

00:19:45.960 observing the kind of relationships that men in Paris, men and women, are having. And he's kind

00:19:53.360 of uncomfortable with it. And, you know, he's not intending to be part of that whole scene

00:19:59.800 at the beginning because he keeps a diary. We are very lucky that he keeps a diary while he's there

00:20:05.480 that is extremely detailed, including entire conversations he has. And so he says at the

00:20:13.660 beginning of his time there that this guy at a dinner, this French guy, wants to know who

00:20:19.220 Morris's lovers are. And Morris is like, so his quote is, I have none and I'm not like to have

00:20:25.460 any besides that I dare not hazard offending a virtuous woman. And the guy just laughed and was

00:20:31.260 like, yeah, the women here will not be offended. This is the most French thing I can possibly

00:20:36.280 imagine. I feel like if you go there today and you meet someone, they're like, tell me about

00:20:39.860 your lovers. How many are they? That just feels like, that's just what France is like.

00:20:43.920 Yeah. I mean, the attitude is totally different, especially there among the very high elite people

00:20:50.220 because the very high elite people in Paris and London are going pretty wild.

00:20:55.800 and they have been for a while and so this is we were talking about this a bit before we record it

00:21:01.700 but sort of the cultural difference at this point is that america well explain to me how you explained

00:21:06.980 it to me before like they really wanted to be like ancient rome and very like ethical and moral and

00:21:11.700 france was just like whoa like whatever who cares effectively right so there's a lot of rhetoric

00:21:16.900 in America at this point about forming a democratic republic, and they're especially

00:21:25.960 interested in reading ancient Roman stuff. And that is their inspiration for a republic,

00:21:32.620 their inspiration for architecture, and one big value in Latin virtus or virtue,

00:21:40.240 the idea that you needed to be virtuous to have a republic. And this makes some sense. If you're

00:21:44.120 going to be ruled by the people. If the people are all corrupt and immoral, how are they going

00:21:50.320 to rule the country? And I mean, John Adams even wrote at a certain point, he was worried that

00:21:54.520 Americans were not virtuous enough to sustain a republic. And so they're really kind of obsessing

00:22:00.540 over being virtuous. And what that means for them in terms of sexual morals is they're not going to

00:22:10.500 sleep around the way the elites in England and France do. And frankly, middle-class people in

00:22:16.560 those places are not really doing that either. And in fact, in England, when George III becomes king,

00:22:23.040 he's very much into the same kind of morality that the Americans are talking about. He doesn't have

00:22:28.100 affairs. His ancestors, George I and II, those people had affairs. But George III is like, no,

00:22:35.660 I'm centering my family. We're going to be a virtuous family. And he was, as far as we know,

00:22:40.240 faithful to his wife. So yeah, it's not just like America was super moral and England and France

00:22:46.040 weren't. It's a little more layered, but in terms of the impression Americans had,

00:22:52.180 they certainly looked at Europeans as being much looser.

00:22:58.200 And yet, can we talk about Gouverneur? Before he went to Paris, he was known as a bit of a

00:23:06.240 ladies' man in America. Talk about his peg leg. Yes. So the peg leg, what is so fascinating to 0.99

00:23:12.340 me is that that peg leg survives and it is at the New York Historical. You can actually look it up

00:23:18.120 online. I don't know if it's on display currently or not, but basically he had a carriage accident

00:23:23.660 and his left leg was amputated below the knee. And so he had a peg leg. The joke among multiple

00:23:32.200 people back then in his lifetime was that he had heard his leg jumping out a window after

00:23:39.560 hooking up with a lover. So even, you know, his reputation sort of goes along with the peg leg.

00:23:46.860 And it is interesting that, you know, it did not slow him down. He rode on horseback, he walked,

00:23:53.060 he danced. It did not seem to really affect his life that much. I want to say in terms of like

00:23:59.940 disability history, it made him sexier, I think, because it made him seem kind of dangerous, I 1.00

00:24:05.620 think. Yeah, I don't know. Tom Foster has written an article from a disability history perspective 1.00

00:24:11.380 on Gouverneur Morris and his sexuality and the peg leg, if anybody wants to look that up. But

00:24:17.400 Morris himself didn't really talk about it. So, you know, unless you know that about him, if you're

00:24:22.580 reading his diary and stuff, you'd have no idea. And the other thing, he also had a disfigured arm

00:24:27.860 from spilling boiling water as a teenager on his arm.

00:24:31.420 But, you know, he's over six feet tall.

00:24:33.780 He smiles a lot.

00:24:34.760 He's super charming.

00:24:36.320 And I mean, clearly he was attractive to women

00:24:39.200 because he's not necessarily

00:24:41.360 just throwing himself at women.

00:24:42.820 Women are throwing themselves at him, 0.52

00:24:44.360 at least if we believe him.

00:24:46.180 I'm just looking at a portrait of him

00:24:47.860 because I like to confirm

00:24:48.920 when I hear about someone in history was hot,

00:24:50.940 I'm like, were they really?

00:24:52.460 And I feel like for him,

00:24:53.260 it must've been a real charisma thing

00:24:54.920 because he looks pretty average.

00:24:56.420 But these are him as an older person.

00:24:58.820 Right.

00:24:59.160 If you see him older, it's, you know, I mean, Hamilton, if you look at Hamilton, even on

00:25:04.360 the $10 bill, it's very attractive.

00:25:07.320 Well, and I think, too, if he was, you know, in this era, if you're six feet tall, I think

00:25:10.880 that just gets people's attention in general.

00:25:13.140 A surprising number of the founders were that tall.

00:25:15.860 Washington and Monroe, and I think Jefferson, all were that tall.

00:25:18.920 I think Jefferson was tall as well.

00:25:19.680 Yeah.

00:25:19.860 And that's why they got in charge, because people looked up to them, literally.

00:25:24.220 So he has this reputation, I just want to say.

00:25:27.780 Before he gets to Paris, he has a peg leg. 0.73

00:25:29.880 It's like, oh, it's because of his sexual adventure.

00:25:31.900 So he's showing up there.

00:25:32.680 He's not coming out of a monastery.

00:25:35.520 Right.

00:25:36.320 And he's like, oh my God, France, what? 1.00

00:25:38.480 These loose women? 0.97

00:25:39.900 But he gets into it pretty quickly.

00:25:41.480 Yeah, it's kind of surprising to me that he even...

00:25:43.560 I wonder how much he's playing up his morality 0.87

00:25:46.160 because he thinks that French people will expect Americans to be like that. 0.66

00:25:51.080 certainly anybody who knew John Adams from his time there might think Americans were going to

00:25:57.200 be pretty straight-laced. You know, Jefferson, not as much, but certainly did not go wild in the way

00:26:04.300 that Gouverneur Morris did. But he's still there as a businessman. He's not there in an official

00:26:09.100 capacity. But again, he got—so it's such an interesting thing because we now, looking back,

00:26:15.180 know the French Revolution, how it's going to carry on and be this thing. But the wealthy at

00:26:20.940 the time don't know that the guillotine is about to be invented and what's going to happen to them.

00:26:24.600 So he's in this kind of higher class echelon. Meanwhile, the market ladies are on the street

00:26:30.600 writing about flour. And he's just like, you know, I'm going to hang out here for a while.

00:26:34.100 This seems like a cool place to be. Yeah, he does not really talk about

00:26:37.640 how challenging things are. And even when things go bad, really bad, there just aren't that many

00:26:44.380 entries in his diary. His diary is mostly covering who he's calling on, who he's having dinner with,

00:26:49.540 some of the conversations he has, and then who he's sleeping with.

00:26:54.520 And this is like an interesting addition to this season or these episodes I've been doing on the

00:27:00.180 podcast because to the people on the streets, like the women I've been talking about, the

00:27:03.840 revolution was everything. It was every waking minute, like you were in that. But him and the

00:27:07.920 people he's hanging out with, these higher class French people, it kind of shows like

00:27:10.660 this wasn't really affecting them at all really at this point when he first gets there yeah i think

00:27:16.180 by the time he becomes ambassador in 1792 i assume it was enough worse that it was affecting

00:27:22.920 his life noticeable noticeable at that point yeah so he's there and he's writing these diaries and

00:27:30.080 like in anything in history it's like well these are his diaries so we're gonna take him at his

00:27:34.500 word basically because what else can we do it's better than taking somebody else's description of

00:27:39.780 And he's talking about the women he's involved with.

00:27:43.140 So who is the first woman we know that he took up with?

00:27:46.000 The main person, really, his main lover for a fairly long period of time is this woman that he calls Adele.

00:27:54.280 And I'm probably going to butcher the pronunciation of her last name.

00:27:58.760 Her full name was Adelaide or Adele.

00:28:01.140 and her husband had the Comte de Flau, but I will just call her from now Adele so that my

00:28:11.680 French does not offend anybody. Her husband was keeper of the king's gardens and they had an

00:28:18.480 apartment in the Louvre. So they're in this upper echelon, but they don't have a lot of money

00:28:23.400 actually. So there's some sense that she may be using Gouverneur Morris. He's never totally sure

00:28:30.200 whether she's completely genuine. But they start a relationship in the summer of 1789. And he writes

00:28:41.040 in, you know, a fair amount of detail, especially we don't usually see sources in this level of

00:28:47.500 detail about sex from this period. And part of that is because we have to assume that some of

00:28:54.880 that stuff got destroyed and this diary was saved. But part of it is I don't think it was as common

00:28:59.760 for people to write about it.

00:29:02.480 Which is interesting because this is also the same time

00:29:04.840 I've talked in some recent episodes

00:29:07.240 and some episodes coming up about it was

00:29:09.060 the first woman to write about the act of breastfeeding

00:29:11.980 or something.

00:29:12.640 It's just kind of like these body things

00:29:14.720 were not being written about widely

00:29:16.020 by a lot of people at the time.

00:29:18.460 Yeah, I mean, to even say that a woman was pregnant,

00:29:21.560 it's like, oh, you did not really mention that.

00:29:25.400 I mean, even women in letters to each other

00:29:26.760 would talk about like, they expect it to be confined

00:29:29.740 meaning like they were going to have a baby and have their period of so-called confinement where

00:29:38.460 they stay in bed for a while after having the baby i mean they never come out and say pregnant

00:29:43.520 which is interesting because if we can just like sidestep into what another one of the episodes of

00:29:48.960 your course is about the seduction novels right so books like dangerous liaisons which came out

00:29:54.740 1782, were talking very frankly about sexual matters. So the fact that these novels were

00:30:00.340 saying these things when people weren't talking about it, I can see how those novels are even

00:30:03.600 more scandalous. Oh yeah. Dangerous Liaisons was not something most Americans were reading. It was

00:30:08.020 considered far too scandalous. So the seduction novels are much less explicit. It's sort of

00:30:13.000 implied that sex has occurred because the woman ends up getting pregnant. So there's not actual

00:30:20.080 scenes describing anything. And The Coquette is the name of the most famous of these novels,

00:30:28.140 but they were very, very popular. And there are ways in which those also

00:30:34.320 spoke to the need for virtue, right? That if you have premarital sex, then, you know, we might say, 0.84

00:30:42.000 oh, this person gets pregnant. That's not a tragic outcome. Well, in these novels, it is because

00:30:46.080 then the woman dies. So it is, you know, if you are not careful enough with men,

00:30:53.380 you're going to get pregnant and die. Yeah. They're like titillating cautionary tales, 1.00

00:30:59.140 not unlike the films of Tyler Perry today. So he's writing Gouverneur. He's with Adele and

00:31:06.560 they're having sex. This is in your course. People can listen to it because he sent me the script 0.99

00:31:12.000 all over the place. In public, they seem to delight in almost being caught. They are going

00:31:19.420 at it in a real Fifty Shades of Grey level. They're into it, they're doing it, and he's

00:31:25.500 writing about it. And yeah, Gouverneur, he got over his reticence quickly.

00:31:32.800 And the interesting thing about Adele is that she is a useful person to have an affair with 0.99

00:31:38.340 because she's also, so she's married 0.97

00:31:40.300 and then she has two lovers. 1.00

00:31:42.520 And at a certain point, she even has a third one.

00:31:44.600 But one of her other lovers is an important figure

00:31:47.360 in the French government, Talleyrand.

00:31:50.660 And so she is sort of, she can be a go-between

00:31:53.980 once Morris, you know, is trying to,

00:31:57.000 even before he's ambassador,

00:31:58.080 once he's sort of interested in political affairs,

00:32:01.060 having an affair with Adele is useful politically.

00:32:05.460 I just want to also, because this just occurred to me,

00:32:08.340 in the most recent episodes about various women who were scapegoated and then executed during

00:32:14.860 the French revolution. They were often denigrated as being like, well, they're whores. They're 0.99

00:32:21.280 not faithful. Like they're sleeping with all these men and that makes them terrible. And that's why

00:32:24.460 we should execute them. Meanwhile, the whole, the upper echelon is just like, you're saying it's 0.96

00:32:29.380 like, well, she's married and she has these two other lovers and this is the other lover. And

00:32:32.160 everyone's clearly cool with this situation. So the fact that the poor women are just being 1.00

00:32:37.100 falsely accused of what upper-class women are just doing.

00:32:41.340 Well, and I mean, to the extent in other countries, certainly in England and America, 1.00

00:32:46.620 they blame the upper-class women's corruption. 1.00

00:32:51.060 Basically, the reason the French Revolution goes wrong, according to plenty of people 1.00

00:32:54.660 in Britain and America, is that all these fancy Sillenier French ladies are sexually 1.00

00:33:01.200 loose and that that is coupled with political corruption. 0.99

00:33:04.920 so they tie these things together they're not saying they should be guillotined but they're

00:33:11.080 saying it is their fault that things went wrong so you know clearly they're they're having affairs 0.95

00:33:18.180 with men and people are not complaining that the men are slutty but uh you know the women get the 0.95

00:33:25.260 blame here well and speaking of the guillotine um i'm just looking through the notes and i noticed 0.76

00:33:30.880 that Adele's husband eventually was guillotined.

00:33:33.420 Yes. Yeah. And he, Gouverneur Morris helps Adele and her son escape so that they're safe. And he

00:33:39.960 also helps the Marquis of Lafayette's wife get out.

00:33:44.860 We did two episodes about Marquis of Lafayette. Him and his wife, as a podcast community,

00:33:50.080 we ship it. We love the two of them together. They were, I like those two.

00:33:54.320 Well, and you know, Lafayette is big in the U.S. right now because he came,

00:33:58.960 We're at the 200th anniversary of his tour of America in, because he came in 1824 to 25.

00:34:06.460 And it was a huge deal.

00:34:08.280 And so there's actually been all sorts of festivities all over the U.S. celebrating the anniversary of Lafayette's visit.

00:34:15.480 And he's such a, just speaking with people who are going back and forth Paris to America, like he threw out, like he was one of those people.

00:34:23.100 And now for a quick advertising break.

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00:37:10.320 But so by the time Adele's husband is guillotined, this is the point.

00:37:13.460 So that was, I'm not sure what, but Gouverneur Morris was named American ambassador to France in 1792.

00:37:20.400 That's around the time of like Robespierre really taking over, like the terror is kind of going to get going.

00:37:27.600 Why do they need an ambassador at that point when everything is kind of the purge?

00:37:34.520 Well, America, I'm not sure that they discussed not having an ambassador.

00:37:39.160 I'm trying to think. I mean, I haven't looked in detail at the correspondence over the naming of Morris as ambassador.

00:37:45.800 There was some pushback to it, but not that I know of because of what was going on in France, more because Morris was considered to be a monarchist.

00:37:54.620 He definitely believed in a strong executive and did not love what was going on with the French Revolution.

00:38:01.120 But as far as I know, the Americans still believed that they needed to have diplomatic contact with France.

00:38:07.320 it's just interesting to me to say like he was appointed french ambassador i just didn't

00:38:12.480 i have trouble i forget that there's still a government who's like passing laws and like

00:38:18.420 having meetings while on the streets are like it's described as like rivers of blood where it's

00:38:23.440 like yeah but we still need to like have this meeting and who's going to take the minutes today

00:38:26.780 like that stuff's still going on but eventually he is they were they requested that he be replaced

00:38:32.300 his ambassador. Right. Because they know that he's not a big fan of what is going on. And they think

00:38:39.500 of him as a monarchist, which many Americans do too. And so then, but it's not like then they're

00:38:45.160 like, okay, and we're not going to have another ambassador. Then they send James Monroe. So they

00:38:50.520 send another six foot tall American who actually, in this case, he comes over with his wife and kids.

00:38:57.480 So, but even the fact, the fact that he's American, I guess, Gouverneur, they weren't like,

00:39:01.400 we don't like you as ambassador. They weren't like to the guillotine. They were just like,

00:39:04.460 we're just going to replace you as ambassador because he's not a French person.

00:39:07.680 Well, they have to say to the Americans, I mean, the Americans ultimately get to decide

00:39:11.060 who the ambassador is. George Washington is president at this point. So he's the one that

00:39:16.580 names the ambassador. And actually, I mean, interestingly, Monroe gets called home and

00:39:23.520 basically goes after George Washington and writes this whole report about very critical

00:39:30.300 of George Washington. So I imagine, you know, Morris, Morris and Washington would not have

00:39:36.060 been big fans of Monroe after that. There's a lot of, it's interesting to hear about historical

00:39:42.080 people having these feuds with each other. I mean, famously in the musical Hamilton,

00:39:46.320 we see a lot of those, but just kind of picturing that the founding fathers weren't just all like,

00:39:49.620 hey, we're the guys, we're all a good team. It's like, no, these are men with huge personalities,

00:39:54.500 huge men with huge personalities. So of course they got into fights a lot.

00:39:58.580 Well, and this matters actually more than you might think in terms of American politics, because people often today will say, well, the founders believed this, or this is how the founders wanted things to be. And it's like, no, which founders? Because these guys disagreed vehemently with each other all the time. And even sometimes they changed their positions on things over the course of their political careers.

00:40:22.340 So do you mean what did James Madison think when he was writing the Constitution or what did James Madison think when he was president? It changed.

00:40:30.620 no that's such a good point too because it's again if we picture these kind of like saintly

00:40:35.800 people who are just stuck in amber at one like that painting i've seen of like all the men in

00:40:41.320 the room signing the document uh it's just kind of like those guy it's like yeah but they lived

00:40:46.200 before that and they lived after that and they came together and signed that document together

00:40:49.800 but right away i'm sure they're fighting about things they weren't oh yeah i mean political

00:40:53.220 factions developed very quickly after the constitution so i mean george washington tried

00:40:59.860 to stay above party. But even George Washington got a lot of really ugly criticism in his second

00:41:05.660 term. There was even a pamphlet that described guillotining him that was published in America.

00:41:11.880 He was not thrilled about this. And so, I mean, it got pretty ugly very fast.

00:41:17.880 So after Gouverneur is replaced as ambassador, he didn't go back to the U.S. He went around

00:41:25.780 Europe and with his peg leg and his handsomeness and just kind of like,

00:41:32.140 and he wrote all the details of his diary, just taken up with a new woman.

00:41:35.660 Yes. Yeah. He had additional affairs. I don't think it was,

00:41:39.500 he ever had a relationship like the one he had had with Adele, but he certainly,

00:41:45.100 you know, was happy to hook up with whatever women he met in various European cities.

00:41:50.300 And then he doesn't go back to the U.S. until 1798.

00:41:54.420 I do want to mention one of the women he had an affair with was Adele's niece.

00:41:57.900 Yeah, that's a little troubling.

00:42:01.180 Yeah, it reminds me of Thomas Jefferson taking up with his dead wife's teenage half-sister.

00:42:07.360 Yeah, I do want to say, though, in slight defense of Gouverneur Morris, not on that

00:42:11.740 in general, but that especially compared to some other men at the time, he, if we are

00:42:19.040 to believe his diary, respected intelligent women and liked intelligent women. And, you know,

00:42:27.180 so he's not, you don't get the sense from his diaries that he is seducing or taking advantage

00:42:31.940 of women. It's possible that he's shaping things in a way to make himself sound better, but given

00:42:38.960 how open he is about all sorts of things, I get the sense of him. And certainly the person who

00:42:44.660 edited his papers and other biographers of him have said like this is somebody who seems to have

00:42:50.420 really respected smart women well and also like the way you described that he was writing this

00:42:55.320 maybe to make himself sound better like at this time i don't think anyone would have thought

00:43:00.240 anyone who is reading his sex diary well they would have been like oh my gosh but like if he

00:43:05.800 wrote in there about like yeah and then like you know i went to the and i to the docs and then i

00:43:09.580 picked up this sex worker whatever it's like people he could have written that and people

00:43:14.180 wouldn't have thought that badly of him compared to what he's talking about so the fact that he's

00:43:17.300 writing this it's like well and it's his diary right yeah so it's it's his private writing but

00:43:23.660 even if you look at some of his you know public papers you do get the sense that he's somebody

00:43:29.020 who got along well with intelligent women which we i passed over this part but i wanted to mention

00:43:35.840 because we're going to talk about her later but germaine de stale apparently tried to to hit it 0.99

00:43:41.300 off with him and he was not interested. We're going to talk about her later. She had better

00:43:44.600 luck with numerous other men. Yeah. No, I mean, he was meeting all of the famous people 0.89

00:43:50.120 in Paris at the time. I will say, I have this book coming out next year about Carolina Brunswick,

00:43:57.220 her husband, George IV. It kind of reminds me of him a bit in the sense of he was really drawn to

00:44:04.780 very intelligent, accomplished women as well. That's who he would pursue. That's who he took

00:44:10.380 as his mistress is and it's like to his very slight credit like he wanted he wanted to have

00:44:15.840 somebody who like he could like have a good conversation with you know like yeah and i mean

00:44:21.440 if you look at then morris's later life when he goes back to america um he had some sort of

00:44:30.120 relationship not clear what with the author sarah apthorne morton and she in fact um her sister was

00:44:38.540 part of a sex scandal that became a novel, a seduction novel. But, you know, this is, she's

00:44:45.040 a very, she's a talented writer. She publishes poetry. And then the woman he ends up marrying

00:44:51.820 later on, you know, is also a reasonably intelligent woman, although that's not necessarily

00:45:00.440 what he's praising her for, if you look at why he says he married her.

00:45:05.000 um i think we need to to step back because i do want to talk about that situation um so he

00:45:11.400 hangs out in europe takes various lovers and then eventually he's like so 1798 he returns to the

00:45:18.300 united states right do you know why he returned just he's like okay i i've done this i've done

00:45:23.200 europe i've done the women of europe i'm gonna go back or did he run out of money or like you know

00:45:29.480 I'm not sure what pushes him to go home at that point.

00:45:35.400 I mean,

00:45:35.940 he certainly wouldn't have thought that his political career was over

00:45:39.340 forever either.

00:45:40.180 So if you wanted to have other political positions,

00:45:42.220 he'd need to go home.

00:45:44.180 And you know,

00:45:46.680 he had been out of the country for like 10 years.

00:45:49.160 So he still did have family in the United States,

00:45:52.400 although he's not going home with the thought like, okay,

00:45:54.120 now I'm going to settle down and get married.

00:45:55.440 That is not why he's going.

00:45:57.240 That's not his vibe.

00:45:58.180 That's never been his vibe.

00:45:59.160 He could have gotten married at any point by now, and he still hasn't.

00:46:04.360 So he went back to America.

00:46:06.460 This is, and then you're saying, so Sarah L. Apthorpe, Morton, you're kind of involved.

00:46:12.400 He's in America for the next 10 or so years.

00:46:17.600 He still doesn't get married until he does.

00:46:22.200 And so who is Nancy Randolph? 1.00

00:46:25.140 Yeah, Nancy Randolph is a very interesting woman because she also had been involved in a sex scandal. And basically, she had been accused of having a child out of wedlock with her brother-in-law and then conspiring with him to kill the baby after it was born. 1.00

00:46:47.560 And there was a trial. They were putting him on trial, not her, but it pretty much ruined her reputation. And then another brother-in-law basically kicks her out of the house. Years later, though, it is not clear exactly why. She floats around for a while. She ends up in New York in 1809. Morris had met her when she was much younger.

00:47:08.460 unclear how he knows what's going on with her now but he writes her this letter and he's like how

00:47:14.100 would you like to come run my household as like my head housekeeper but I needed to have like

00:47:19.840 um in this era who is it there's somebody else I talked about in America it was someone Thomas

00:47:25.220 Jefferson I think who didn't have a wife but somebody had to run the household so it's like

00:47:29.220 Thomas Jefferson it was like his sister-in-law or somebody or his cousin I think his daughter did

00:47:35.020 for a fair amount of time yeah martha jefferson randolph which actually related to like the

00:47:40.420 randolphs and the jeffersons are related to each other these oh fair yeah so we have in virginia

00:47:44.820 something called the ffvs the first families of virginia we still have this they're still

00:47:48.900 descendants of these people around um so you know like the lees the randolphs the custises

00:47:54.760 the washington's the jeffersons like a lot of these people intermarried over the years

00:48:00.060 so there was a thing about like you had to have if you were a man without a wife like someone had

00:48:04.140 to run the house. Someone had to do the job of like hosting the dinner parties and stuff. So

00:48:07.520 this is part of where Gouverneur is like, I need someone to take that job. But this is usually you

00:48:12.820 have a female relative that you are not paying. He's literally hiring her to do this, which is a

00:48:19.560 little strange. And he says to her, FYI, like I might hit on you, but I'll be respectful.

00:48:27.900 You know what? You know what? At least he prepared her for that. Yeah.

00:48:30.960 Right. It's a little strange. So yeah, he invites her. She, you know, is probably not, she doesn't have a lot of great options at this point. So she moves to his house in 1809 and eight months later, they get married.

00:48:48.820 so she moves there for the job but then at some is that they have a child does the child come

00:48:55.260 right away is this why they get married no no they don't have the child until um they've been

00:49:01.020 married for several years so it is it's not about that and i mean it's really interesting too that

00:49:06.340 gouverneur was not in the country when the whole infanticide scandal trial with the randolphs

00:49:13.520 happened. So he actually writes to somebody he knows that had been the Richard Randolph's lawyer,

00:49:21.140 the brother-in-law. And that the man who was his lawyer was John Marshall, who became

00:49:25.360 Supreme Court Chief Justice, another Virginian. And basically, he says, the object of this letter

00:49:31.520 is to ask of you, frankly, the reputation Miss Randolph left in Virginia. He's basically like,

00:49:36.400 I sort of know what happened, but, you know, what do you think happened? And John Marshall writes

00:49:42.080 back saying, it's not really clear, but, you know, it must not have been that bad if she stayed

00:49:49.580 living with her sister and her sister's family for the next 12 years after that. So Morris decides,

00:49:58.440 okay, this is okay. He's like, I don't know, everything you're describing, I'm just like,

00:50:03.880 he's kind of an open-minded guy. Yeah. And I think, you know, part of the fact that he's willing to

00:50:10.040 marry a woman who has that kind of sexual reputation? Because it does seem, I think

00:50:15.440 she told him basically like, yeah, I had a kid out of wedlock, not with that brother-in-law,

00:50:21.900 a different, the brother of that guy, Richard Randolph's brother, Theodoric, who she was

00:50:29.300 engaged to. And so she does, you know, admit to this to him, but given the women he's known in

00:50:35.960 France, this should not really bother him. Yeah. That kind of opened his eyes maybe a bit,

00:50:40.640 but he was already sort of this ladiesman. But I would think, yeah, like the stuff with Adele,

00:50:44.400 she had a husband and kids. He's just kind of like, okay, cool. And I don't know. Actually,

00:50:48.840 I just mentioned that he seems like kind of an okay person. He was also anti-slavery.

00:50:54.340 Yeah. He actually legitimately was. Like Hamilton, it's harder to make that argument.

00:50:58.020 Morris was. So in terms of the founding fathers who I've heard about, I'm just like, he's edging

00:51:03.740 his way up in terms of my estimation. I mean, he also believes that the president should have a

00:51:09.000 whole lot of power to a point that makes people very uncomfortable at the time. So that's usually

00:51:13.880 where people don't like him. But, you know, if and it's it's we also shouldn't assume that just

00:51:21.760 because he was against slavery that he wasn't a racist because most white people had pretty

00:51:26.340 negative views of non-white people at the time. But, you know, I always think, too, of like John

00:51:33.920 Adams, who is against slavery and is an incredibly morally grounded person. He is a deeply ethical

00:51:43.300 person. And he's not great as the president. And, you know, I don't think he's a very effective

00:51:51.600 president, he can be kind of a jerk to people, including his wife and his best female friend, 0.99

00:52:00.320 Mercy Otis Warren. He writes her nasty letters after she writes a book that's critical of him. 1.00

00:52:05.540 So it's, yeah, these people, as we've said, they're very complicated.

00:52:08.960 Multi, multifaceted people. In terms of Gouverneur being anti-slaver, did he own

00:52:13.080 slaves? I don't believe that he did. I mean, people in New York.

00:52:17.660 Because he was from New York, right. And that was like not a slave owning place at that time.

00:52:20.840 When he was born, it was. And there were there would have still been enslaved people. They had a gradual end to slavery there. There would have still been enslaved people around in New York when he was there. But I am not aware that he ever owned anyone.

00:52:36.280 Okay. So just so we have more of a fuller picture of what's up. So he marries Nancy knowing what her reputation is, having investigated it a little bit. And I mean, what do we know about their time together?

00:52:52.580 he doesn't live that much longer he's a fair amount older than she is when they get married

00:52:59.880 and then um they seem to have had you know reasonably happy marriage even though randolph

00:53:05.900 that had basically kicked nancy out of the house years before comes to visit them and then writes

00:53:10.740 this super nasty letter trying to slander nancy and i mean okay this line is incredible randolph

00:53:19.640 says of Nancy that she was a vampire that after sucking the best blood of my race has flitted off 0.95

00:53:27.340 to the North and struck her harpy fangs into an infirm old man. I mean, it's, yeah. 0.63

00:53:34.160 That's a good line though.

00:53:35.680 It's good. Yeah. Randolph was, he, he was erratic. If you look up his portrait, he's interesting. He

00:53:43.000 had some kind of illness that seems to have like arrested his development. He probably couldn't

00:53:48.140 have children. He had a fairly high voice. He looks like a teenager if you look at the portrait

00:53:53.100 of him even as an adult. Wait, what's his name? I want to look at it. John Randolph. So he's John

00:53:57.500 Randolph of Roanoke. And he is a very powerful member of the House of Representatives. And he's

00:54:05.260 fairly widely disliked. 10 years old? He's permanently 10 years old? Yeah, he looks very

00:54:09.740 young, right? He's calling someone else a vampire? Yes. And he looks eternally 10 years old? Okay.

00:54:15.780 He's also a complicated person, definitely a complicated person. And yeah, so he's trying to go after Nancy after she has married Gouverneur Morris. And he's basically trying to publicly smear her. And she writes back a 40-page reply and then also sends this to multiple people back in Virginia, including James Monroe, to try and get them to defend her.

00:54:41.380 but wait is it is it published or is it just a letter like is this a pamphlet or just no I don't

00:54:47.000 believe that it's actually published but he's sending it to he's spreading it around and

00:54:53.380 Gouverneur Morris himself is just kind of like yeah you know I I know what her story is yeah

00:55:02.960 yeah he's like this is not news to me thanks guys but like I'm cool yeah yeah I have a visceral

00:55:11.100 reaction every time I read about the manner of his death. Yes, this is, so there are two famous

00:55:16.180 things among early American historians about Gouverneur Morris when, you know, it probably

00:55:20.220 should be like key drafter of the, you know, key craftsman in the constitution, but it is,

00:55:26.940 he had a peg leg and that his death resulted from an infection from trying to clear a blocked

00:55:35.960 urethra with a whale bone yeah it's pretty cringy it's just like like i can't my eyes are closed

00:55:44.640 i'm just like my god you know medicine at this time was just like leeches for all no one really

00:55:52.240 knew there was not a lot of medical knowledge in america at this time or france or england

00:55:56.860 the places that i've read about but like my god yeah i mean so he was 64 when he died he's not

00:56:04.620 particularly, I mean, a lot of the other founders lived to older than that. So,

00:56:10.360 you know, this is. How is that manner of death known? I would have thought you would hide that

00:56:16.480 information from the world. I'm trying to think how we actually know that that is what happened.

00:56:21.300 My guess is that his wife must have said something about this. I mean, and I think

00:56:28.880 the other interesting thing about Nancy Randolph Morris is that she doesn't burn these diaries.

00:56:34.620 And we think she probably did censor them because the surviving copies of them, which are at the Library of Congress, have heavy black ink over certain passages.

00:56:48.420 Like intentionally or like, oh, no, I just dropped a blob of ink.

00:56:51.140 Oh, no, no, no. Intentionally blacked out passages.

00:56:53.200 and so even the stuff that we can read that's fairly dirty you know didn't the fact that

00:57:04.020 that much got through is kind of amazing we have no idea what is under that black ink they tried

00:57:08.460 at the library of congress to use technology to read through and they couldn't it is the same

00:57:14.240 ink that he wrote it with so apparently you can't really distinguish and um so there is

00:57:20.440 the most up-to-date publication of the diary is through this database, the American founding era

00:57:26.360 database through UVA Press, which you have to have a subscription or go to a library that has

00:57:30.880 one to see this. But what they did, there's an edition of the diary that was published

00:57:35.000 in 1939 by a descendant who did put a lot of the sort of stuff that had been cut out of earlier

00:57:43.140 editions back in. And then they've also noted anywhere that's illegible because it was covered

00:57:49.440 in ink so that you can have a clear sense of what was censored.

00:57:57.740 And there are some places where they were able to find wording that they added back

00:58:02.480 in that that 1939 edition had left out.

00:58:06.960 But I think it's, we have to both be thankful that Nancy Randolph Moore saved this diary

00:58:13.280 and then frustrated that she probably censored it

00:58:17.340 to a degree that we can't know everything.

00:58:21.960 And that's interesting.

00:58:25.460 I'm grateful that she saved the diary

00:58:27.200 because a lot of people's diaries were destroyed.

00:58:29.660 But also what would she have thought was worth censoring

00:58:32.180 is interesting to think about.

00:58:34.220 That she kept in so much of the stuff that she kept in.

00:58:37.580 Yeah.

00:58:37.920 So it's like, well, what?

00:58:39.280 And maybe it was, I don't know,

00:58:41.840 financial crimes maybe it wasn't even something sexy but i assume if you look at the context

00:58:47.900 around the places that the words are illegible or um because they've been or a whole line has

00:58:57.280 been blocked out yeah it seems okay it's sexy yeah yeah that's so fascinating this is i had

00:59:05.420 never ever ever heard of this person how well known is he to like the average american who

00:59:12.420 knows about the founding era okay so average the average american knows almost nothing about the

00:59:18.140 founding era but for the people who do i think even he's not that well known among even people

00:59:24.820 who know about the founders if you've got like the tiers if tier one is like george washington

00:59:28.980 john adams thomas jefferson like if that's them tier two is where i would put hamilton burr because

00:59:34.900 I had never heard of them until the musical, personally.

00:59:38.160 I've heard of the other ones from, like, sitcoms.

00:59:41.260 Yeah, he's probably that tier.

00:59:43.580 Okay.

00:59:44.540 And then, like, so one of the most expensive signatures to purchase from the era is this

00:59:51.980 guy, Budden Gwinnett from Georgia, who signed the Declaration.

00:59:55.520 And, you know, we don't know that much about him, but it's an interesting name and people

01:00:00.100 collect the signatures.

01:00:01.020 So that's like a level down.

01:00:02.860 Budden Gwinnett?

01:00:04.220 Yes. 0.97

01:00:04.900 It's a good name.

01:00:05.860 Yes.

01:00:06.520 That sounds not like a person from then.

01:00:08.660 That sounds like the name of actually a politician from today, probably.

01:00:13.600 But Budden Gwinnett, it just makes me happy when someone's not called John or Martha.

01:00:19.140 No.

01:00:19.420 So there are all sorts of people who were involved in the founding that, you know, we

01:00:23.600 don't know that much about or most Americans haven't heard of.

01:00:27.180 I think other than the Hamilton musical, I would put like Hamilton, Burr, Morris around

01:00:32.320 the same level.

01:00:33.980 Yeah.

01:00:34.360 And I do want to just mention, so everybody knows, that Nancy and Gouverneur did have

01:00:38.500 a son, and he was, in fact, called Gouverneur II, right?

01:00:41.840 And they had descendants who then, it was a granddaughter first published, or published

01:00:48.560 an edition of the diary in 1888, and then the great-granddaughter published a less-censored

01:00:53.180 version of it in 1939.

01:00:55.100 So I presume that there are still descendants out there.

01:00:59.380 And I'm sure that a lot of them have the middle name Gouverneur.

01:01:02.960 Probably.

01:01:04.160 just how do they pronounce it? Who's to say? I live in a mostly English speaking Canadian city

01:01:10.740 and the way, although I grew up on the East coast where there's like more French influence

01:01:15.280 and the way that people here pronounce French words is phonetic, I would say, and shocking to

01:01:23.060 me. So I could see that somebody might just call, if someone has this name today, they might call it

01:01:28.280 governor. Who knows? And I tend to wonder how people pronounced French names in America back

01:01:34.820 then too, given that most people didn't speak French. I mean, Gouverneur Morris did, but

01:01:38.160 most people didn't. Yeah. I was fascinated at first when I realized that his gouverneur was

01:01:45.340 his name and not his job title. And then just kind of like going through like, well, who is

01:01:48.740 this person? I'm like, oh my God. And then I got to the end. I'm like, oh no. Yes, he came to a sad

01:01:54.240 end. He came to a sad and cringing sort of Saw movie franchise adjacent. But so you have a whole

01:02:04.840 episode that's just about this whole thing, what we've just talked about, right? Right. Yes. And

01:02:09.140 then what are the other episodes of your course? So the other episodes, there is an episode on

01:02:15.380 The Reynolds Affair with Alexander Hamilton. There is an episode on seduction novels,

01:02:20.480 including the coquette which i mentioned then the morris episode there's an episode on aaron burr

01:02:28.480 who i didn't know was kind of on a gouverneur level of just kind of like i would say i would

01:02:35.780 say worse because i mean he also kept a diary while in europe about 20 years later and he was

01:02:43.920 mostly with prostitutes from what he's saying and it's um kind of gross to read i i was disgusted by

01:02:51.580 him uh i want to say with aaron burr um i guess in the musical hamilton where they're really putting 0.71

01:02:58.140 the the two on the opposite sides like hamilton and burr so if hamilton is kind of this guy who

01:03:02.120 like is kind of sexy and dangerous and like has affairs it's like you have to make burr seem very

01:03:07.880 upstanding and uptight. Yeah, that's not Burr. Yeah, so that's fascinating to me.

01:03:12.660 I mean, even as I explained in the episode, like the woman he married, they started dating when

01:03:17.300 she was married to somebody else who was fighting for the British in the revolution. So, you know.

01:03:24.000 It's funny that Burr, to someone like me, is I just think like, oh, he's like the upstanding,

01:03:28.780 kind of like almost boring, conventional. It's like, no, no, they are all dirtbags. 0.97

01:03:33.900 Yes. Then I have an episode on presidential sex scandals, which includes Sally Hemings. But interestingly, in terms of what were public scandals at the time, that was less of a scandal than this white woman that he tried to force himself on at some point. 0.97

01:03:51.020 And then also talk a little bit in that episode about Andrew Jackson, who's got his own scandals involved.

01:04:02.220 And then I finish up, this is only very loosely early America, but I just had to include this with something called the Beecher-Tilton scandal, which is in the 1870s.

01:04:12.160 And it was probably the most famous sex scandal of the 19th century in America.

01:04:17.180 It was covered widely in newspapers. It was a big trial about an affair involving famous people who

01:04:25.680 were famous at the time. And it's a pretty wild story itself. And so how can people acquire or

01:04:34.560 learn these things from you? How do you get this course? Where is it? Yes. So it will be on the

01:04:38.420 great courses and Audible websites, which I guess you can get to through Amazon as well,

01:04:45.220 the Audible content. And so if you already have an Audible membership, I think this falls under

01:04:52.920 that. Otherwise, you can purchase it individually for the six episodes. I also did an earlier course

01:04:58.760 for them called America's Founding Women. And there's all sorts of other history courses

01:05:04.460 on there by professional historians. And then if people are interested in learning more

01:05:10.540 beyond this, I have two books that if you want to go to bookshop.org or your local

01:05:17.220 independent bookseller, those are my preferred ways of buying books. And my second book was

01:05:24.400 actually with the same publisher your book is coming out with, Hanover Square, and it's called

01:05:29.040 First Family, George Washington's Heirs and the Making of America. And before that, founding

01:05:35.040 friendships, friendships between men and women in the early American Republic.

01:05:38.980 I appreciate, like I do this podcast, but also my like day job is I work in the acquiring books

01:05:45.880 for a public library. And we all, there's so many books always published about American presidents

01:05:52.120 and I'm, and people in Canada are not that interested in it, but I included myself, but I

01:05:58.980 like that your books are about the other people and kind of like what the world was like and what

01:06:02.360 life was like like I think that's more interesting to the average person than just kind of like here's

01:06:07.680 a great man and what he did like there's so many books like that so I like that your books are

01:06:11.160 kind of like filling in the gaps of like the women and what were other people doing yeah I

01:06:15.660 mean in terms of what I enjoy reading reading people's personal letters I find a lot more fun

01:06:20.720 than reading you know official records war strategy plans yeah that I mean I live in an

01:06:29.680 area of the U.S. with a lot of Civil War battlefields. And honestly, it just doesn't

01:06:36.820 totally excite me. Yeah, I think this is an important reminder to me and probably to other

01:06:41.940 people, too, that American history is not just the study of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

01:06:47.720 There's lots of other people and other things to think about. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much

01:06:53.640 for talking with me today. I had such a good time. Thanks so much for having me.

01:06:59.680 so cassandra has some books that you can read as well as this course she has coming out so she's

01:07:08.200 written a book called first family george washington's heirs and the making of america

01:07:12.040 she's also done a previous course on audible called america's founding women and of course

01:07:17.180 the course that she was here of course the course that she is here specifically talking about right

01:07:22.200 now is early American sex scandals. So you can learn more about Gouverneur and his shenanigans,

01:07:31.080 as well as things like the Alexander Hamilton Reynolds affair. All the sexy scandals of the

01:07:39.460 founding fathers. And you can learn more about Cassandra. She has a website, which is

01:07:45.580 CassandraGoodHistorian.com. She also has a book called Founding Friendships, which is about

01:07:52.460 friendships between men and women in the early American Republic. And I'm so gratified that

01:07:56.720 people like her are doing this work because there's one zillion, I think that's the technical

01:08:02.440 and actual number, biographies of like Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, but it's like,

01:08:06.940 who else was there? And like, how do we flesh out this time and place with all the people and like

01:08:11.840 their weird lives they were living. And she's doing this research. And I think that's fabulous.

01:08:17.600 So this podcast is called Vulgar History. My name is Anne Foster, and I'm going to be having an

01:08:23.780 in-person meetup like I did in Florida, where listener Kim revealed to me that she had heard

01:08:29.580 of Gouverneur Morris before. I'll be having an in-person meetup for listeners of this podcast

01:08:34.180 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on Sunday, July 20th. And if you would like to go, I will tell you where

01:08:40.900 and when we're meeting. If you just fill out the, just give me your email address, basically just

01:08:44.840 the RSVP is at vulgarhistory.com slash meetup, vulgarhistory.com slash meetup to RSVP for this

01:08:52.520 Toronto. Hang, we're going to be doing on Sunday, July 20th. I also have written a book. That's

01:08:59.820 actually how I first connected with Cassandra because her books have been published through

01:09:05.140 the same publisher that I'm working with, Hanover Square Press. And so my book is called Rebel of

01:09:10.500 the regency the scandalous saga of carolina brunswick britain's uncrowned queen and it's

01:09:15.380 also a sexy story about a time period where a lot of people often just think you see a portrait of

01:09:21.960 somebody from this era and you're like oh that's just kind of like a person who's like a statue

01:09:25.660 they were just sort of like a boring oldie times person no everyone back then was a straight up

01:09:31.740 mess um in england as much as in everywhere the gouverneur went that we talked about today

01:09:36.760 so carolina brunswick the heroine of this non-fiction biography rebel of the regency

01:09:41.500 she was married to george the fourth who was the regent that's what the regency era is named after

01:09:48.300 and she was german she arrived in england and she was treated like a total outsider by the royal 0.98

01:09:54.900 family who all bitches to her and she wasn't going to take that and so she just kind of went 0.96

01:10:00.660 off and had her own sexy adventures and it's a really fun story of a woman who not a lot of 1.00

01:10:05.280 people know about, but I think you'll enjoy learning about her as much as I enjoyed writing

01:10:09.820 about her. My book Rebel of the Regency comes out February, 2026, which is a ways away, but like not

01:10:17.100 that far away. And it's close enough that you can pre-order it by going to any of the major online

01:10:23.880 book selling websites, as well as to your local independent bookstore. It's called Rebel of the

01:10:29.300 Regency by Anne Foster. And if you do happen to order it early, or as we call pre-order,

01:10:36.000 then I can give you some nice treats. So go to rebeloftheregency.com and you can upload a

01:10:41.440 picture of the receipt to prove that you have pre-ordered my book. And I will see that. And

01:10:45.380 then you can check off which of the free treats you want. Like you can get a free membership to

01:10:49.420 my Substack, a free membership to my Patreon, or an incredibly cute paper doll inspired by the book.

01:10:55.420 because this is the sort of book that gets its paper doll vibes, basically. It's kind of like

01:11:01.180 if you ever read The Royal Diaries, the children's books from a bit ago, what, 25 years ago? It's

01:11:09.140 like that, but for grownups, basically. It's a fun, girly time. Anyway, my book is called Rebel

01:11:13.780 of the Regency. If you pre-order it, go to rebeloftheregency.com and upload your little

01:11:18.820 receipt. And you can also add it to your TBR, your to-be-read list on Goodreads and on Storygraph.

01:11:23.900 i do want to clarify that at the moment you can only order it if you're in canada or the united

01:11:28.720 states but i as soon as i have news about people in other countries and how you can order it i will

01:11:33.040 share that as well hopefully i'll also have news about the audiobook coming up soon for people who

01:11:38.120 like to listen to things like you obviously listen to this podcast right now or someone who is like

01:11:42.580 that anyway thank you all for listening to vulgar history my name is ann foster and until next time 0.97

01:11:52.020 keep your pants on and your tits out vulgar history is researched scripted and hosted by 0.96

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Vulgar History - June 17, 2025

Sex Scandals of an American Founding Father

Episode Stats

Transcript