The Traumatic Colonel. Ed White

for a range of different inflections—for example, the significant gendering and sexualization of the Founders evident in allusions to Jefferson’s cowardice. If Hamilton, in 1792, was already privately writing that Jefferson and Madison “have a womanish attachment to France and a womanish resentment against Great Britain,” it was works such as Smith’s that established this semiotic code firmly in public discourse.⁴⁵ It is equally worth noting that Hamilton (with whom Smith was in agreement) has only the vaguest contours in Smith’s pamphlet—it was through the corresponding attacks on Hamilton that his positive and negative qualities themselves coalesced. Again, when contemporary works of Founders Chic excitedly declare that the great Founders were subject to vicious personal attacks, they obscure the very role of such attacks in creating the Founders as a system—it is not despite such personalized insults that the great Founders emerged but in part because of them.

      We may now spell out the constellation that emerged over the 1790s. Washington, who was originally a figure of executive restraint in contrast to George III, now took on partisan inflections—from a Federalist viewpoint, cautious, nonaligned government-building, or from a Republican viewpoint, Anglophilic passivity exploited by underlings. Franklin, originally a figure of republican illumination in contrast to Lord Bute, now emerged as a marker of radical cultural mobilization, either deluded or virtuous, depending on one’s party. (The competition between these inflections, we may note, heuristically guides the attempts, in today’s scholarship, to locate a figure such as Franklin politically—such attempts continue the posthumous constellational work of the 1790s.) These two positions could then generate two new positions using the semiotic material associated with the Jefferson and Hamilton portraiture. The former emerged as the embodiment of action rendered as knowledge—Doing becoming Knowing. He was the Philosopher-President, associated, increasingly, with the Declaration of Independence, the Virginia Constitution, Notes on the State of Virginia, the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, and eventually the forming of the Library of Congress and the University of Virginia. Ensconced in his hilltop plantation estate of Monticello, he pursued governance through retreat, again with positive or negative variants. For Republicans, he was the theorist of democracy who withdrew from the Washington (and later Adams) administrations, to direct an opposition through ideas. For Federalists, he was the coward of 1781 (the famous flight from the British), now ridiculously theorizing racial difference while exploiting slave labor, then shuffling about in his slippers playing with his inventions. Hamilton, meanwhile, embodied the reverse movement, as the enactor of intellectual mastery through active programs—Knowing becoming Doing. Thus, he was then known (and still is) as the builder of national institutions (the Federalist Party, the Treasury, banking, the military, tax policy, infrastructure, etc.). Far from withdrawing to bucolic isolation, he was a figure of the city and the office, commemorated for work as Washington’s right hand and the behind-the-scenes orchestration of the Constitutional Convention. For Federalists, he was the very force of visionary energy itself, while for Republicans, he was the manipulative schemer. And we can see here how the Jefferson-Hamilton pair, generated from the reconfigured Washington-Franklin pair, fed back into the revision of the latter. From the Federalist perspective, Hamilton combined the intellect of Franklin with the achievements of Washington; from the Republican perspective, Jefferson combined the enlightened democratic commitments of Franklin with the careful restraint of Washington. And so too the reverse: for Federalists, Jefferson combined Washingtonian passivity and delay with Franklinian heterodoxy and immorality, while for Republicans, Hamilton pursued a conniving Franklinian system-building with a combination of Washington’s Anglophilia and militaristic aggression.

      In the Revolutionary moment, the Washington-Franklin pair emerged from a royalist cultic system to address and explore the question of political resistance, the affective combinatorics of republicanism. In the 1790s situation, still defined by the sense of republican intellectual hegemony, the problem was governance, not the challenge to government, and the consequent parsing of the problem took different shape. Because this symbolic system was not first and foremost about political positions but about affective fantasy, it matured in ways that paralleled other imaginative media of the time. We might note that the constellation of the ’70s

      had more in common with the characterological portraits of heroic historiography (from which it drew and which it fed), whereas the configuration of the ’90s inevitably drew more on the novel, in which women were often, if not always, central figures. Thus, the ’90s witnessed a dual gendering and sexualization of the Founders, already prefigured in Judith Sargent Murray’s portrait of the republican mother as commonwealth president—a female Washington. Again we may draw on our seemingly trivial and nonacademic knowledge of the Founders to sketch out their respective positions. Washington could emerge as the Father of the Nation not despite his apparent sterility and childlessness⁴⁶ but precisely because of it, a position affirmed by the complementarily vague status of Martha Washington: cautious and reluctant action found its sexual manifestation in surrogate parenting. By contrast, the “knowing” Franklin emerged as a figure of sexual activity, with his wife receding into the shadows, obscured by the more prominent William, the bastard son who became the royalist governor as a marker of sexual excess. The Jefferson and Hamilton positions played out these masculine variants—the Jeffersonian scandals of the day stressed his widower status but also his illicit sexual relationships (first the assault on Elizabeth Walker, his neighbor’s wife; later the liaison with Sally Hemings). He was not quite masculine in a solid sense but still sexually active, and his nonpromotable heirs (slaves) signaled a variant of the childless Washington and Franklin’s bastard. Meanwhile, Hamilton was himself the bastard son, and his tremendous intellect could not prevent him from entanglement with Maria Reynolds and her husband. In each instance, the gendered and sexual characterization rounded out the political portrait: Washington’s restraint meant that his citizens (or, in some variants, his slaves) were his “children”; Franklin’s ideological tendencies became manifest in excessive sexuality; Jefferson’s focus on reflexive theorization meant that he produced not a solid republican family but property to be analytically assessed; and Hamilton’s focus on aggressive masculine enactment led to a spectacularly self-destructive affair.