Not Your Founding Father: How a Nonbinary Minister Became America's Most Radical Revolutionary

"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.