The Overflowing of Friendship: Love between Men and the Creation of the American Republic

Introduction

introduction It was September 4, 1763, and Joseph Hooper, a recent graduate from Harvard College, sat down in Marblehead, Massachusetts, to compose a letter addressed to his former classmate, Benjamin Dolbeare. He wrote: The sun never rose and set upon me since I parted from you, but he brought to my longing imagination the idea of my bosom friend; my faithful memory daily represents him in all the endearing forms that in his presence ever rose in my mind. My fancy paints him in the most beautiful colours, and my soul is absorbed in contemplating the past, wishing for a reiteration and longing to pour forth the expressions of friendship, and receiving those that would calm the gloom, soften the horrors, and wholly extirpate the distractions that your absence creates—but I must have done and have scarce time to tell you how much I am your friend.1 More than twenty years later, on September 13, 1786, John Mifflin, a Philadelphian lawyer in his late twenties, noted in his journal that this was the birthday of his neighbor James Gibson, currently an undergraduate at Princeton and known to his friends as Lorenzo: Serene was the sky and the sun shone bright upon the natal day of Lorenzo—I had scarcely awoke when I recollected it and I congratulated myself on the anniversary of the happy day on which so dear, so affectionate, and so amiable a friend came into existence—I felt a thousand good wishes for him and I thought I could not express them better than in the lines of Pope, “Oh be thou blest with all that Heaven can send, Long health, long youth, long pleasure, and a friend.”2 Farther south, two Virginians, William Wirt and Dabney Carr, first became acquainted in the 1790s as eager young lawyers soliciting for clients . Riding together from courthouse to courthouse, they laid the foundation for a friendship that would last throughout their lives. William 1 later reminisced about those early years of their friendship with “a swelling of the heart.” When Dabney penned for him a “rhapsody on life, and love, and friendship,” William wrote in response, “How grateful are such effusions, how grateful to my mind and to my heart—They make me proud of your friendship—Ah! My dear Dabney, it is at such moments that my soul flies out to meet yours—and as they mix and commingle I feel myself exalted and refined.” William rejoiced in the “intimacy and consciousness which seem[ed] to subsist between [their] hearts and understandings .” His friend’s letters “always spread such a sweet glow through [his] breast” and their relationship, he declared, was “among the purest and sweetest sources of happiness” that he had “upon this earth.”3 When I first encountered declarations such as these in letters and journal entries written by eighteenth-century American men, I was moved and also intrigued. Indeed, their emotional intensity was so striking and they prompted so many questions that it seemed impossible to pass them by. How common were such expressions of love between men during this period? What did loving friendship mean to these men as a part of their personal and social identities? In what ways, if at all, did male friends express physically or even sexually their feelings for one another? How did relatives and other friends or acquaintances react to such relationships? Did men who developed loving friendships with other men enter into marriages with women and, if so, how comfortably did these two kinds of relationship coexist? How did loving friendships between men fit within contemporary models of manhood? What did ministers and other religious spokesmen have to say on the subject of friendship and love? Why did celebrations of male friendship appear so frequently and prominently in post-revolutionary writings? And what roles did these authors envisage for friendship in the creation of an independent and republican nation? Before I knew it, I was hooked, and this book is the result. Figuring out what these romantic friendships meant to people living in the eighteenth century involves setting aside modern assumptions about love between members of the same sex. Perhaps it would be helpful to begin by acknowledging those assumptions and discussing the challenges that they pose if we want to understand a world very different from our own. When I read declarations of love such as those quoted above to my students or friends, they usually either squirm in discomfort or wriggle...