Everything you need to know about the Founding Fathers' sex lives

Historian Thomas Foster knows all about what happened when our Founding Fathers knocked boots with their wives, mistresses, slaves, and maybe other men. Foster's book, Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past employs the salacious subject of sexy times during the Revolutionary War to explain modern American society and its expectations, prejudices, and preferred identity.

Over at The Daily Beast, Eric Herschthal breaks down Foster's latest offering, which focuses not just on the sex lives of the great men who created the United States of America, but also on how the generations of Americans in the centuries since have consumed, interpreted, spun and rationalized what they've come to learn about the romantic lives of the Founding Fathers.

Was Hamilton gay? Was Washington impotent? Is it reasonable to suggest that Jefferson was romantic with Sally Hemings, even though he was her "owner" and 30 years her senior? And what does any of that have to do with current Americans and their ability to relate to the Founding Fathers?

By the early 20^th century, Freudian ideas began changing attitudes toward intimacy. Increasingly, sex and its corollary, romantic love, were seen as a healthy part of a relationship. This stood in contrast to the chaste 19^th century, when marriage, rather than romance, was the main topic of interest. In consequence, biographers frequently discussed Washington's actual relationship with Martha, almost always casting it in blissfully romantic terms. "First crushes suddenly become important," Foster said.

In more recent times, one's "sex life" has become a popular public topic. And Foster even sees hints of this in the way contemporary biographers write about Washington's childlessness. Almost no biographer considers it possible that Washington was impotent. The reason, Foster argues, is that impotence implies a lack of virility, a lack of manliness. Thus, despite having no evidence to support it, they cite sterility as the more likely explanation.

Neither has the lack of evidence stopped people from arguing that Alexander Hamilton was gay. Foster highlights the recent interest that some LGBT activists have taken in homoerotic letters Hamilton wrote to John Laurens, a fellow soldier in the patriot army. One of them reads: "I wish, my dear Laurens, it were in my power, by actions, rather than words, to convince you that I love you."

Herschthal's summary of Foster's examination into the, ahem, private lives of our Founding Fathers includes bits about "foxy grandpa" Benjamin Franklin and the forgotten Founding Father with the missing leg, Gouverneur Morris. It will likely be the most interesting thing you'll read today.

Long before the modern sex columnist, there was Benjamin Franklin. In a column from 1745 titled "Advice on the Choice of a Mistress," Franklin advised bachelors to seek out older women: They "hazard no children," he wrote, and "are so grateful" for a young man's attention. "Regarding only what is below the girdle," he added, "it is impossible…to know an old from a young one."

Franklin wasn't the only Founding Father whose libido was a frequent topic of conversation. Thomas Jefferson's political opponents published inflammatory cartoons "outing" his relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings. Alexander Hamilton publicly apologized for an extramarital affair, two centuries before Bill Clinton. [The Daily Beast]