Doron S. Ben-Atar and Richard D. Brown. Taming Lust: Crimes against Nature in the Early Republic. Kelly A. Ryan. Regulating Passion: Sexuality and Patriarchal Rule in Massachusetts, 1700–1830.

Abstract

The American Revolution ushered in an era of experimentation in individualism, reason, and independence, but it simultaneously generated a counterrevolution that favored the continuing authority of local elites and the disciplining of the “free” citizenry. Both the Doren S. Ben-Atar and Richard D. Brown volume and Kelly A. Ryan's book examine elite efforts in the early republic to create and sustain an orderly society by taming Americans' lusts and passions. It seemed to many local leaders that the joys of liberty joined to sexual impropriety created a toxic mixture. They thought it necessary to resist people's libertarian urges in order to save traditional patriarchy and especially the traditional patriarchal family, the ostensible bedrock of a civilized nation. The books' authors make the same overall point but do so in very different ways. Ben-Atar and Brown ingeniously focus their study on two octogenarians in 1790s New England. These elderly men, in separate states, were indicted, prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to death for the crime of bestiality, which fell under the rubric of sodomy but more specifically referred to sexual relations with animals (such as canines and mares). Nearly everything about the two men and their cases was atypical. Few men lived into their eighties. The new state and local governments gave increasingly low priority to prosecuting and executing individuals for most sexual infractions after the revolution. And the few souls that governments did police for sexual misdeeds tended to be youths rather than old men. The authors set out to discern why officials revived their ancestors' harsh Mosaic code and employed more modern (and draconian) British common law punishments to police sex at that particular post-revolution moment.