Present at the Founding

Chapter 0

On the Fourth of July we tell a story about who was there at the start. This exhibit widens that story. Queer people were present at the birth of the United States, drilling its army, writing its letters, preaching on its roads, fighting in its ranks, and the same era's laws were written to punish them. Both of those things are true, and we tell both.

You have probably heard the tabloid version: a whispered claim that this or that Founding Father was secretly gay. That is not this exhibit. We do not out the dead on a hunch, and we do not repeat a good story just because it is a good story. Instead we go to the documents, the letters in their own hands, a court-martial order, a church record, and we tell you exactly how much weight each one can bear.

Here is the honest frame, stated at the door. The people in this exhibit lived before the words we use for ourselves today existed. "Homosexual" was not coined until 1868. Applying our labels to them as if they had claimed them would be a kind of fiction. So would erasing the plain tenderness and defiance in what they left behind. We hold both cautions at once, and we tell you which is which.

Baron von Steuben

Prussia to Valley Forge, 1730 to 1794

The exacting Prussian officer who turned a starving, ragged army into a disciplined force, and whose deepest bonds were with the young men he made his heirs.

Chapter I

Start anywhere. Each chapter carries its own sources and its own confidence tags. Where the honest answer is "we cannot know," we say so.

Chapter I

The drillmaster

February 1778 · Valley Forge, Pennsylvania

The Continental Army that limped into Valley Forge in the winter of 1777 to 1778 was cold, hungry, and barely an army at all. The man who changed that arrived in February with a huge dog, almost no English, and a title grander than his real rank. His name was Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben.

Steuben built a model company, drilled it himself on the frozen ground, cursing in German and French while an aide translated, then had those men train the next, and the next. Congress made him Inspector General in May 1778. He wrote the drill manual, the famous "Blue Book," that the United States Army would use into the War of 1812. When the army marched out of Valley Forge and held its own at Monmouth that June, it was in no small part his doing. It is not an exaggeration to say the Revolution might have failed without him.

Steuben never married and had no children. The closest bonds of his life were with two young officers on his staff, Benjamin Walker and William North, whom he made the heirs to his estate and treated, in the language of the time, as his family. Of the moment he met Walker at Valley Forge, he wrote:

"If I had seen an angel from Heaven I should not have more rejoiced." Steuben on first meeting Benjamin Walker, preserved in Friedrich Kapp's 1859 biography

To Walker, later, he wrote of awaiting him "with the impatience of a lover for his mistress." In the same breath, in other letters, he wrote to Walker about women with a wink. The record is warm and it is human, and it does not resolve into a single tidy answer.

One shadow followed him from Europe. In 1777, as he sought his fortune, a letter circulated accusing him of having "taken familiarities with young boys." It was anonymous in origin, never proven, and never tested in any court, and it is the documented reason he looked to America in the first place. We report it because it is in the record, and we are careful about what it is: an unproven accusation, not evidence of who he loved, and certainly not the same thing as the devoted adult bonds that defined his life.

How we hold this

The leading modern scholarship, Paul Lockhart's biography chief among it, treats Steuben's homosexuality as plausible and widely believed but not conclusively proven. Period specialists reject the popular label "openly gay" as an anachronism: a man in his world could not have been open in the way we mean it. What we can say plainly is that he was a lifelong bachelor whose deepest documented attachments were to younger men who became his heirs. What his private life held beyond that, the record does not tell us, and we will not invent it.

Verified his military role, the Valley Forge training, the May 1778 appointment, the Blue Book, and that Walker and North were his heirs. Corroborated the quoted letters, preserved in the 19th-century biographies. Debated his sexuality, plausible and widely believed, not proven.

Sources: George Washington's Mount Vernon and the American Revolution Institute (military record, the Blue Book); Paul Lockhart, The Drillmaster of Valley Forge (2008); Friedrich Kapp (1859) and John M. Palmer (1937), preserving the correspondence and the 1777 accusation; the Museum of the American Revolution. Full citations are held in the museum's research record.

Chapter II

"I love you"

April 1779 · The correspondence of Alexander Hamilton and John Laurens

They met on General Washington's staff, two brilliant young aides-de-camp in their early twenties. Alexander Hamilton would help design the republic. John Laurens, a South Carolinian who hated slavery, was pressing a startling plan: to raise a regiment of enslaved men who would earn their freedom by fighting. Between them ran the most intense friendship of Hamilton's documented life.

In April 1779, with Laurens away, Hamilton wrote him a letter that has been read and argued over ever since. The manuscript is damaged at the edges, so historians supply the bracketed words. One passage is not damaged. It was deliberately crossed out, later, by Hamilton's own son as he edited his father's papers, with a note: "I must not publish the whole of this." What it said, no one now can read.

"Cold in my professions, warm in [my] friendships, I wish, my Dear Laurens, it m[ight] be in my power, by action rather than words, [to] convince you that I love you. I shall only tell you that 'till you bade us Adieu, I hardly knew the value you had taught my heart to set upon you." removed

Alexander Hamilton to John Laurens, April 1779. The shaded block marks words struck from the original. Their content is lost.

In the very same letter, Hamilton half-jokingly asked Laurens to find him a wife, and reeled off his requirements: "young, handsome (I lay most stress upon a good shape)," sensible, "chaste and tender," and, he added, "As to fortune, the larger stock of that the better." Read one way, that undercuts a romance. Read another, it is a man displacing feeling he cannot say plainly. Historians genuinely disagree, and we are not going to pretend they do not.

One reading

The biographer James Flexner "detected homoerotic overtones," and the historian Jonathan Ned Katz reads the letters as real evidence of same-sex intimacy. The censored line, the ardor, the phrase "I love you," together they suggest something more than friendship.

Another reading

Ron Chernow, Hamilton's major biographer, warns that 18th-century letters "could be quite florid, even between men," and notes Laurens's replies were "warm but proper." He calls it "something like an adolescent crush," and says whether they were lovers cannot be known.

Laurens did not live to see the republic he helped win. He was killed on August 27, 1782, in a small, almost pointless skirmish at the Combahee River in South Carolina, after the war was effectively over. Hamilton, hearing of it, wrote to General Greene of "a friend I truly and most tenderly loved, and one of a very small number." That grief, in his own hand, is not in dispute.

What we will not claim

That Hamilton and Laurens were lovers, we do not know, and no honest source says otherwise. That the words struck from the letter were "sexual," we do not know either, they are simply gone. And a caution about a story you may have read: the famous 2018 discovery that recovered hidden lines in a Hamilton letter using special imaging was a letter to Eliza Schuyler, his future wife, not to Laurens. We keep those two things separate. What is certain is that the letters are authentic, that they say what is quoted here, and that this was the closest male bond of Hamilton's recorded life.

Verified that the letters are authentic and say exactly this, that a passage was deliberately excised, and that Laurens died at the Combahee River on August 27, 1782. Debated the nature of the relationship. Unknown the content of the censored words.

Sources: The Papers of Alexander Hamilton and Founders Online (the April 1779 letter and the October 1782 letter to Greene, verbatim); Jonathan Ned Katz, Love Stories (2001); Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (2004); the South Carolina Historical Society and the American Battlefield Trust (Laurens's abolition plan and death). Full citations are held in the museum's research record.

Chapter III

The Friend

October 1776 · Cumberland, Rhode Island

Months after the Declaration of Independence, a young Rhode Islander named Jemima Wilkinson fell gravely ill with a fever and, by the account that followed, died. Then the body rose, and announced that Jemima Wilkinson was gone. What lived now was a genderless spirit sent to preach, and it would answer only to one name: the Public Universal Friend.

The Friend refused the birth name for the rest of a long life, signing legal papers with an X rather than write it, and asked not to be spoken of with "he" or "she." The Friend dressed in a way that belonged to neither expectation of the time: long clerical robes, a man's cravat knotted at the throat, a broad-brimmed hat, never the woman's cap that custom demanded. And the Friend preached, across Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, then west into New York, drawing followers into a whole religious society.

This is not a modern person in old clothes. The Friend made a claim that was religious, not political: to be neither man nor woman but an "indescribable being," a spirit in a borrowed body. We honor how the Friend and the Friend's own community spoke, and use no gendered pronouns here. When the Friend died in 1819, the community's record kept it simply:

"25 minutes past 2 on the Clock, The Friend went from here." The Society of Universal Friends' Death Book, July 1, 1819

A New England thread

The Friend was born in Cumberland, Rhode Island, in 1752, and was formed in the Quaker meeting there before being expelled from it in 1776. The early ministry ran straight through southern New England, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, before the move west. Rhode Island sits at the doorstep of our own South Coast, and the Providence Public Library keeps the Friend in its record of the region's LGBTQ+ history.

How we hold this

Historians today, notably Scott Larson and Paul Moyer, place the Friend within the long history of people who have lived outside the gender binary in America, and some read the Friend as an ancestor of transgender and non-binary history. We present that as scholarly interpretation, offered with respect, not as a label the Friend claimed. The Friend's own word was "genderless." We also note honestly that while the Friend and the inner circle avoided gendered pronouns, many followers still wrote "he." The record is a mix, and we show it as one.

Verified the 1776 rebirth, the rejection of the birth name and of gendered pronouns, the genderless dress, the Rhode Island origin, and the 1819 death. Interpretation the framing of the Friend within transgender and non-binary history is modern, and offered as such.

Sources: Paul B. Moyer, The Public Universal Friend (Cornell University Press, 2015); Scott Larson, "Indescribable Being" (Early American Studies, 2014); the Society's own Death Book and 1784 "Advice" pamphlet; the New York Public Library, the Museum of the American Revolution, and the Providence Public Library. The hostile 1821 Hudson biography is set aside as unreliable. Full citations are held in the museum's research record.

Chapter IV · On the South Coast's doorstep

Robert Shurtleff

May 1782 · a Massachusetts enlistment

Deborah Sampson was born in Plympton, Massachusetts, in 1760, just up the road from our own South Coast, and bound out as an indentured servant in Middleborough before she was grown. In 1782, wanting a soldier's pay and a soldier's freedom, she bound her chest, put on men's clothes, and enlisted in the Continental Army as "Robert Shurtleff."

She was not caught for a year and a half. She served in the light infantry of the 4th Massachusetts, marched, stood picket, and was wounded near Tarrytown. The best-known story, that she dug a musket ball from her own thigh to keep a doctor from discovering her, comes to us through an unreliable 1797 biography and should be held loosely. What is documented beyond doubt is that she did it twice: an earlier attempt, as "Timothy Thayer," was recognized and undone; the second, as Shurtleff, held. This was deliberate, and repeated.

Her own church in Middleborough recorded her, in its plain minute-book hand, with disapproval:

"...accused of dressing in men's clothes, and enlisting as a Soldier in the Army... and for some time before behaved verry loose and unchristian like, and at last left our parts in a suden maner." First Baptist Church of Middleborough, church record, September 3, 1782 (spelling original)

She was discovered in 1783 while sick with a fever in Philadelphia, and honorably discharged. She later married Benjamin Gannett, raised a family in Sharon, fought the government for the back pay and pension she was owed, with Paul Revere writing letters on her behalf, and went on a lecture tour, sometimes appearing in her old uniform, one of the first American women to earn money speaking from a stage.

Whose history is she?

Deborah Sampson is claimed, honestly, by two traditions. Women's history tells her as a woman who broke every rule to claim a citizen's place. Transgender and gender-nonconforming history reads her life as a study in living across gender. Both are looking at the same documented fact: for a year and a half she lived and served as a man, and she chose it more than once. We do not put a modern word in her mouth. She left no statement of an inner identity, and her reasons, money, patriotism, freedom, are all in the record together. We tell you what she did, and we let the debate stand as a debate.

Verified her birth in Plympton, the two enlistments, the service as "Robert Shurtleff," the church record, the discharge, and the pension fight. Corroborated the wounding and the later lecture tour. Debated how to read her gender across her life; unreliable the dramatized details from the 1797 biography.

Sources: the Massachusetts Historical Society (Paul Revere's 1804 letter); the First Baptist Church of Middleborough record; Alfred F. Young, Masquerade (2004), the standard scholarly account; the National Women's History Museum and Mass.gov; OutHistory. Herman Mann's 1797 The Female Review is treated as embellished and flagged wherever it is the only source. Full citations are held in the museum's research record.

Chapter V

The law's other face

March 1778 · the same winter, the same camp

A museum that only told the warm half of this story would be lying by omission. The founding era did not merely tolerate queer people in silence. Its laws named them, and punished them. And the clearest example happened at Valley Forge in the very winter Steuben arrived.

On March 14, 1778, weeks after Steuben rode into camp, General Washington signed the general orders confirming the court-martial of Lieutenant Gotthold Frederick Enslin, found guilty of attempting sodomy with a soldier. The order is blunt:

"His Excellency the Commander in Chief approves the sentence and with abhorrence and detestation of such infamous crimes orders Lieutt. Enslin to be drummed out of camp... never to return." George Washington, General Orders, March 14, 1778

Enslin was marched out of the army the next morning to the beat of every drummer and fifer in camp. His is the earliest documented dismissal from the American military for homosexuality, a line that runs, unbroken in spirit, all the way to "don't ask, don't tell" two centuries later. We set two facts side by side, and we let you feel the distance between them:

Feb 1778 Baron von Steuben, whose closest bonds were with young men, arrives to save the army.

same camp
same winter

Mar 1778 Lieutenant Enslin is drummed out of that same army "with infamy" for sodomy.

We link these two men only by place and season. There is no evidence they knew each other, and we imply none.

The law behind that order was everywhere. Every one of the thirteen states carried sodomy on its books as a crime, and in most it was, on paper, a capital one, an inheritance from colonial statutes like the Massachusetts Bay code of 1641, which prescribed death and cited Leviticus. In practice, executions for consensual acts between adults were rare, historians document fewer than ten in all of 17th-century New England, and most of those involved assault. But the death sentence sat in the statute books like a loaded threat.

Even reform was brutal. In 1779 Thomas Jefferson drafted a Virginia bill that was meant to be humane, reducing punishments and sparing lives. For sodomy, his proposed mercy was this:

"Whosoever shall be guilty of Rape, Polygamy, or Sodomy with man or woman shall be punished, if a man, by castration..." Thomas Jefferson, A Bill for Proportioning Crimes and Punishments, 1779

To Jefferson, castration was the merciful option, because it replaced the gallows. The bill did not even pass; it failed, reportedly by a single vote. That is the founding era's other face: an age that could hold a man's genius and his cruelty in the same hand, and write them into the same page.

Verified the Enslin court-martial and Washington's March 14, 1778 order; the Jefferson bill's verbatim clause and that it was not enacted; the Massachusetts Bay 1641 capital statute. Corroborated the rarity of executions and Enslin as the earliest documented case.

Sources: Washington's General Orders, March 14, 1778 (Founders Online; Fitzpatrick, Writings of George Washington); Jefferson's Bill 64, 1779 (Founders Online; the University of Chicago's Founders' Constitution); Louis Crompton, "Homosexuals and the Death Penalty in Colonial America" (1976); Jonathan Ned Katz, OutHistory. Full citations are held in the museum's research record.

Chapter VI

Myth and evidence

Because we ask you to trust our facts, we owe you a look at how we throw one out. Here is a story we will not tell you as history, and exactly why.

For three hundred years, one of the most repeated "queer" tales of colonial America has been that Lord Cornbury, the royal governor of New York and New Jersey in the early 1700s, paraded around in women's gowns, and that a famous portrait of a man in a dress is him. It is a vivid story. It is almost certainly not true.

"Lord Cornbury, the governor, dressed in women's clothes, and here is his portrait to prove it."

What the evidence shows: The historian Patricia Bonomi traced the cross-dressing claim to Cornbury's political enemies, a smear against an unpopular royal governor, resting on almost no credible eyewitness account. The "man in a gown" portrait was only tied to his name by a label added around 1867, roughly 150 years after his death, and experts now call the sitter most likely just "a rather plain woman." The museum holding it has itself questioned the identification.

We include Cornbury precisely because it is tempting, and false. A history that will believe anything flattering to its own cause is not a history, it is a wish. Our promise is the opposite: we would rather hand you a smaller, true story than a bigger one we cannot stand behind. When the evidence is a smear dressed as a scandal, we say so, and we move on.

Debunked, leaning the Cornbury cross-dressing story; disputed the portrait's identification. We present it only as a cautionary tale, never as fact.

Sources: Patricia U. Bonomi, The Lord Cornbury Scandal: The Politics of Reputation in British America (1998); Edmund S. Morgan, "The Governor in Drag?", The New York Review of Books (1998); Jonathan Ned Katz, OutHistory. Full citations are held in the museum's research record.

Chapter VII

The silences

Look again at the people in this exhibit. A Prussian baron, a founding statesman, a preacher who could read and write, a soldier whose church kept minutes. They share something besides the era. They left records, because they were the kind of people the era let leave records.

That is the last, and maybe the most important, thing we have to tell you. The archive of the founding is not a neutral window. It was kept by the wealthy, the literate, the white, and the free. Everyone else appears in it faintly, or as property, or not at all. Their silence is not proof they were not here. It is a measure of who held the pen.

Some of the most important things about this era we cannot know, and the reason we cannot know them is itself part of the history. Everyone else's silence in this archive is a measure of power, not proof they weren't here.

The enslaved. The intimate lives of enslaved people were recorded, when at all, by the people who owned them, in ledgers built to uphold slavery. We cannot responsibly narrate a specific enslaved person's same-sex love from that record. We can name the silence, and name its cause.

Native nations. Many Indigenous nations held, and hold, honored roles for people beyond a two-gender system, in their own languages and ceremonies. But the umbrella phrase you may know, "Two-Spirit," is not an old word; it was chosen in 1990 as a modern act of reclamation. To stamp it onto specific 18th-century Native people, or to blur distinct nations into one, would repeat exactly the flattening that Native scholars warn against. Where we lack a nation's own sources and voice, we hold the space open rather than fill it with a guess.

Women. Women's inner lives at the founding survive far less often than elite men's, and for the same reason: who was allowed to write, and whose papers were saved. It is why this exhibit holds more men than women. We name that imbalance rather than invent women to smooth it over.

A standing invitation

These silences are not the end of the work; they are its next chapter. As documents surface and as communities tell their own stories, the record grows. If your family's history touches any of this, we would be honored to listen. Help us recover the story.

Verified the documentary imbalance and its cause; that "Two-Spirit" is a modern (1990) pan-Indigenous term, not an 18th-century one. Unknown, and named as such the specific queer lives the archive did not preserve.

Sources: Megan E. Springate, ed., LGBTQ America: A Theme Study (National Park Service, 2016); Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives (2016); the Wabanaki Two-Spirit Alliance and the Indian Health Service on the term's 1990 origin. Full citations are held in the museum's research record.

Chapter VIII · Reference

Words we use, and where to read more

A museum is responsible for its language and its sources. Here is how we use a few key terms in this exhibit, and where you can read further. Where the record is contested, we say so.

Words we use, and how we use them

Romantic friendship

A documented 18th-century form of intense, tender, publicly accepted love between friends, often in effusive language ("I love you," "my dear," "bosom friend"). How we use it: as essential context for reading letters like Hamilton's, a caution against both erasing the intimacy and over-reading it as proof of a sexual relationship. [Verified as a historical category]

"Homosexual" (the word)

Not coined until 1868, by Karl-Maria Kertbeny, and only later in English. How we use it: as the reason we do not label founding-era people "gay" or "straight" as if they claimed those identities. The categories did not yet exist for them. [Verified]

Sodomy

A legal charge, not an identity. Founding-era statutes named an act, and often lumped several unrelated acts together, rather than a kind of person. How we use it: we quote it only as the law's own word, in cases like Enslin's, and never as a synonym for "gay." [Verified]

"The closet"

A 20th-century idea. How we use it: we avoid it for the founding era. Calling Steuben or the Friend "closeted" would impose a frame they never lived inside. We describe what the record shows instead. [Method]

Two-Spirit

A modern pan-Indigenous English umbrella term, chosen in 1990 as an act of reclamation. How we use it: we explain its recent origin and do not apply it backward to specific 18th-century Native people, whose nations had their own distinct terms and roles. [Verified]

Present at the Founding