“Under These Classic Shades Together”: Intimate Male Friendships at the Antebellum College of New Jersey

Across American colleges and universities during the late antebellum period, young men associated outside the classroom in literary, social, and fraternal clubs, all-male spaces highly conducive to the formation of strong friendships. Strong male relationships developed in which such terms as “intimacy,” “fraternal love,” and the “after life” were fundamental tenets of a shared experience. Unlike the collective world found in the public sphere of adult men, the antebellum college setting differed precisely because the young men quite frequently lived and dined together in dormitories, boarding and rooming houses, and fraternities, often secretly organized, in the towns and cities in which their colleges were located. Their lives were marked by dynamic uncertainty: not yet fully independent adults, but no longer completely dependent for support on their families.¹

Since at least the 1970s, historians have debated the possibilities of same-sex intimacy among women, the terms of which have often centered on their timing and their prevalence in early American society.² Only recently, however, have men as gendered subjects become an area for scholarly inquiry, with the so-called New Men’s History.³ Historians have demonstrated numerous instances of same-sex intimacy among males, including among college students, though the challenge of finding concrete sources for such intimacy has made definitive assessment difficult in all cases.⁴ Some historians have concluded that college friendships were mostly platonic products of early manhood and highly dependent on the environment in which they were formed.⁵ Other scholars have argued persuasively that same-sex attractions and intimacies, and not simply intimate friendships, were also distinct possibilities for college men.⁶ This article argues that the students themselves defined the boundaries of intimate friendships in an uncertain period prior to full adulthood. In the antebellum college, for the first and perhaps only time in their lives, young men formed strong friendships in an individual, intimate, and perhaps homoerotic world, one unregulated by parents, kinsmen, or neighbors. Inherently a fragile and temporary world—rife with the tensions created by sectional conflict, the responsibilities of impending adulthood, and societal expectations to marry—young men grappled to make meaning of the fleeting nature of their intimate friendships formed with fellow classmates, even as they hoped to maintain them beyond college.

Of all the institutions of higher learning in late antebellum America, the College of New Jersey (officially renamed Princeton University in 1896) was unique in its near equal mix of young white men, from North and South and from middling and elite backgrounds.⁷ While most young men initially sought friendships with those from similar cultural backgrounds, over time friendships formed that integrated competing ideas about manhood, northern and southern, into a new collegiate form. For southerners, a new kind of emotional language was made available to them, one not easily accessed at southern colleges. For northerners, further contact with others from their region, as well as those from farther afield, served to widen the scope and increase the variety of possibility in the construction of their young manhood. Much as in other contexts where the bonds of party trumped those of section, at the College of New Jersey the bonds formed by young northern and southern men seem to have overcome the anxieties and dichotomies of a fraught nation, forming what one historian has called “a distinctive social regime.”⁸ For these young men, their friendships reflected their conceptions of manhood, coalesced around the shared experiences of living and studying together, and aimed toward an elite national education and, by extension, future in the citizenry.⁹

To understand male friendship, the possibilities of same-sex intimacy, and the composite nature of student culture at the College of New Jersey, this article proceeds along two different paths. The first section will consider how students constructed friendships with each other in fraternities, literary societies (notably the American Whig Society and the Cliosophic Society), and on campus more broadly, through an examination of their college autograph books. If the particularities of section and class had animated their lives before college, in...