Not Your Founding Father

“The mind thrills to imagine a genderless prophet among the brocades and buckskin breeches of Revolutionary America, weirding out the normies, sticking a flower in the barrel of a musket, and goading the new nation to let its hair down—literally.” —Harper’s Magazine

The astonishing true story of the Public Universal Friend—a genderless minister whose radical vision of freedom challenged the promises—and limits—of the American Revolution.

Early in the morning of October 10, 1776—in the small farming community of Cumberland, Rhode Island, in a house surrounded by cherry trees—twenty-three-year-old Jemima Wilkinson died, and the Public Universal Friend was born.

Old Cherry Wilkinson’s children had already gained a reputation for scandal. Two of his boys had been dismissed from the local Quaker meeting for joining the colonial militia, while a girl was expelled for having a baby out of wedlock. Now, here was another Wilkinson child, riding about the countryside, claiming to be a genderless messenger of God.

Yet something about the Public Universal Friend set war-ravaged New England ablaze. The young minister seemed to embody the possibilities offered by the new nation, especially the right to total self-determination. To authorities, however, the minister was “the devil in petticoats,” a threat to the men who sought to keep America’s power for themselves.

And so the Public Universal Friend ventured west to create an Eden on the frontier, a place where everyone would have the right to not only life, liberty, and the pursuit happiness, but also peace and shared prosperity. But into every Eden comes a snake. And soon, financial scams, contested wills, adultery, plagiarism, allegations of murder, and murmurs of another war with England would threaten to destroy this new American utopia.

A thrilling celebration of a forgotten early American renegade, Not Your Founding Father reconsiders just how radical the American experiment could have been.