I’m not a scholar of the bong, nor a horticulturalist, but I thought the main reason to cull the female from the male plants was because only the female plants produced “useful” levels of THC.
Well, hemp was big business back then. They were bringing in hemp seeds from all over the world trying to improve strains to improve yields, fiber quality and so on. If they are trying to cross one variety with another what they would do grow two plots separated as much as possible remove the males from the plot to be pollinated by another variety, and then pollinate the flowers with pollen from the other plot. There is really no evidence that our founding fathers were using “hemp” for medicinal purposes or as an intoxicant. If that really was going on we'd see writings about it, recipes and so on from that period. You will see this sort of thing from many decades later around the mid 1800s. It was stating to be used as a medicine here then and some people were using it for recreational purposes too. Most of this was all imported hashish at the time though. The hemp they were growing probably wouldn't get you high, just like the ditchweed still growing from our hemp production days won't get you high. They were breeding it to be a fiber crop.