Sluts and the Founders (Online)
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I got the idea for the essay below around 2017, when I was researching my George Washington biography, but I wrote it this month, while doing research on my forthcoming John F. Kennedy book. The primary sources could not be more different. Washington’s handwriting was beautiful, and most of his letters have been transcribed by experts, but I much prefer Kennedy’s archives. I know what he looks like at every age. I’ve seen him walk and dance and laugh. I’ve heard his voice change over the years. But the material I love most is oral history. It’s also, on occasion, the only primary source that fills me with personal regret.
Today is my birthday. For the first 22 years of my life, I shared it with my grandfather. “You were the best present I ever got,” he used to say. I wish I could listen to his stories, but no one ever interviewed him. I’d love to have recordings, but I know I’d also find them frustrating to listen to now. Inexperienced oral historians tend to interrupt and miss cues, especially when speaking to their own family members.
And that’s why I accepted a sponsorship offer from Tales.com, a service that allows you to hire professional interviewers to record your loved ones and edit the audio so that it sounds like a podcast produced by NPR. You can listen to six samples here or use this link, which tracks back to SMK, to explore Tales. And if you do sign your family up, please send me your favorite clip!
"A lady who has been seen as a sloven or slut in the morning will never efface the impression she then made with all the dress and pageantry she can afterwards involve herself in,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to his daughter Patsy, then eleven, in December 1783. “Nothing is so disgusting to our sex as a want of cleanliness and delicacy in yours. I hope therefore the moment you rise from bed, your first work will be to dress yourself in such a stile as that you may be seen by any gentleman without his being able to discover a pin amiss, or any other circumstance of neatness wanting.”
It’s safe to say that “gentle parenting” enthusiasts wouldn’t approve of his approach, but Martha, Patsy’s mother, may have. When Jefferson wrote those words, he was less than a year into grieving her. Martha’s own mother died when she was two, and by the time she was twelve she had buried two stepmothers. Historians know little about her relationships with them, but we do know she wanted to protect her children from a similar fate. As she lay on her deathbed, witnesses—including Sally Hemings, Martha’s enslaved half-sister who would go on to have six of Jefferson’s children—would remember her making an astonishing request:
When she came to the children, she wept and could not speak for some time. Finally she held up her hand, and spreading out her four fingers, she told him she could not die happy, if she thought that her four children were ever to have a stepmother brought over them. Holding her hand, Mr. Jefferson promised her solemnly that he would never marry again. And he never did.
As Annette Gordon-Reed writes in The Hemingses of Monticello, “That Jefferson at age thirty-nine promised not to do so extraordinary.” But as Gordon-Reed brought to light, he didn’t spend the rest of his life alone.
In the 1800s, the Richmond Recorder often mentioned Sally Hemings in essays attacking Jefferson. In one column, Hemings is described as “a slut as common as the pavement.” (Yes, people knew about Jefferson and Hemings during his lifetime.) She was a completely undeserving target, as is always the case when the word is hurled as an insult. It was used in a way someone born in the 20th century would immediately recognize. That’s not always the case. When Jefferson warned Patsy against appearing like a slut, he wasn’t referring to the immoral behavior I understood the word implied. (At least, not in that instance.) He was thinking of the definition that appeared in Samuel Johnson’s first dictionary: “A dirty woman.”
The use of “slut” in Early America, however, isn’t limited to women who are dirty or promiscuous. The word returns seven results when you search it on the National Archives' Founders Online, which allows anyone with Internet access to view thousands of historical documents from the era. I first discovered this while reading a 1798 letter that Frederick Kitt, who had been a steward in the President’s House, wrote to George Washington about Hercules, an enslaved man who had escaped bondage. (He would never be caught.) At the end of the letter, Kitt writes: “My Wife joins me in respect to you Mrs Washington and Miss Nelly—and desires to inform your Lady that our little Slut died in the Straw.” I only had to wonder at his meaning for about two seconds, because Founders Online had done the work for me. “This is one of a number of hints in GW’s correspondence that Mrs. Washington was particularly fond of dogs,” the notes under the letter explained.
I knew that a dog could be called a “bitch,” but “slut” was new. So I took to the Internet. A Google search for “dog slut,” apparently a popular porn query, didn’t offer me much, but John Stuart Skinner’s 1845 book, The Dog and the Sportsman, satisfied my curiosity:
The second use of “slut,” to imply disorder, appeared in another letter to Washington. The British prisoners were being treated fine, Brigadier General William Smallwood wrote in 1778, but winter brought certain grim realities. A captain in the Continental Army had “had the skin taken off his hands by the Frost.” Like the British prisoners, “many of Soldiers in common shared with them, from the severity of the Wearther, & unavidably getting their Feet & legs wet in Landing, the shore being very slutty & muddy.” Captain Smallwood did not write a Revolutionary War memoir, but if he had, Slutty and Muddy would’ve been a great title.
Another great title: “Celia’s an artful little slut.” That line comes from a poem the editors at the Alexander Hamilton papers believe he submitted to the Royal Danish American Gazette. “I am a youth about seventeen, and consequently such an attempt as this must be presumptuous,” wrote “AH,” but “if, upon perusal, you think the following piece worthy of a place in your paper, by inserting it you’ll much oblige Your obedient servant,” he wrote. The last two stanzas:
Cœlia’s an artful little slut;
Be fond, she’ll kiss, et cetera—but
She must have all her will;
For, do but rub her ’gainst the grain
Behold a storm, blow winds and rain,
Go bid the waves be still.
So, stroking puss’s velvet paws
How well the jade conceals her claws
And purs; but if at last
You hap to squeeze her somewhat hard,
She spits—her back up—prenez garde;
Good faith she has you fast.
Founders Online includes Abigail Adams because, while not technically a founder, she dependably spilled the tea. She used “slut” twice in letters the site has digitized. (I’m sure there are more instances, but such a query seemed like a terrible use of Sara Georgini’s time.) The first instance applies to Patience Lovell Wright, the mother of Joseph Wright, an artist, whom Abigail met during a sixteen-day sea voyage. In a 1784 letter to one of her sisters, Abigail offers the following description of Mrs. Wright:
Her person and countanance resemble an old maiden in your Neighbourhood Nelly Penniman, except that one is neat, the other the Queen of sluts, and her tongue runs like, Unity Badlams.
In the 1800s, Abigail called another woman a “slut” in a letter to her daughter Abigail Amelia Adams Smith.
Sausy Susan says, sighs and groans, as much as if she was a young Girl—for the slut got her Letters to me and read them. You know she is too knowing in some things for her years.
As it turns out, the word’s origin isn’t clear, but the earliest known uses applied to men. In 1386, Chaucer described a lord as “sluttish.” Around 1450, the hard knots of dough in bread were called “slut’s pennies.” (Also a NSFW Google search.) By the 17th century, it seems to have been applied exclusively to women, but it wasn’t yet exclusively negative. “Our little girl Susan is a most admirable Slut and pleases us mightily, doing more service than both the others and deserves wages better,” the English diarist Samuel Pepys wrote. Today, it seems to have less diverse applications. It is an insult, mostly against women, or the insult is reclaimed, mostly by women. Will that always be the case? It no longer has as many meanings as it did during the founding era, but in 2022, it isn’t limited to one meaning. One is positive, one is negative, and they are in conflict and conversation, which means the word’s temporal possibilities have yet to be realized.
Slut is still on its word journey. I don’t know what it could eventually mean, but based on what it did, I’m doing my part. “Oh, what a sweet little slut,” I exclaimed when a friend showed off a barking puppy over Zoom.
ON A RELATED NOTE:
Jefferson’s letters were full of mandates and advice. A month earlier, he had suggested a daily schedule for Patsy. She should practice music from 8am to 10am, followed by three hours of dance or drawing. The following hour, if she had danced, should be spent drawing, and if she drew, she should write a letter. He understood that she wasn’t fond of her French tutor, but she had a dictionary and time, so he expected her to spend it reading French. After that, she should return to music, but only for an hour, followed by reading and writing until bedtime. He wanted frequent updates. “I expect you will write to me by every post. Inform me what books you read, what tunes you learn, and include me your best copy of every lesson in drawing… Take care that you never spell a word wrong.”
And then, the kicker: “I have placed my happiness on seeing you good and accomplished, and no distress which this world can now bring on me could equal that of your disappointing my hope. If you love me then, strive to be good under every situation and to all living creatures, and to acquire those accomplishments which I have put in your power, and which will go far towards ensuring you the warmest love of your affectionate father.”
See you in February! In the meantime, you can find me on Twitter and Instagram and my books, as well as others mentioned on SMK, on Bookshop, Amazon, and your local bookstore or library. If you’d like me to sign or personalize my books, purchase copies from Oblong. If you have a question or comment, send it to studymarrykill@gmail.com.
Parenting notes from all over.
Good one!