Histories of Friendship in Early America: An Introduction

Exploring friendship as a historical concept in early America poses a challenge. As both a public and private enterprise, friendship is not easily separated from the myriad relations in which it is often embedded: family, kin, and community, as well as connections based on social ties, political interactions, diplomatic alliances, military companies, economic exchanges, and religious practices. Furthermore, the words friend and friendship had multiple definitions in early America, from affiliation, association, and companionship, to emotional closeness and fellow feeling, as well as affinity and rapport, unity, and equality.¹ Friendship was vital to indigenous cultures; it intersected with personal, familial, clan, village, and diplomatic relations. Likewise, early Euro-Americans used the term "friend" and "friendship" expansively. It was not unusual for siblings to consider each other their closest friends or for parents to define relations with their children as "friendly." For many white Americans, an ideal form of friendship occurred within marriage. For enslaved blacks, friendships of interdependence bolstered emotional and economic survival. For free African-Americans in the slave south, the client/patron relationship remained critical to interracial friendships. In addition, the late eighteenth century emphasized the need for sympathy and sociability among Anglo-American friends, which, according to one scholar, became a means to "revolutionize" American society.² As in earlier time periods, friendship was experienced by early Americans in connection with other relationships, and yet it was different from other emotional bonds. Teasing friendship out from these other relationships is necessary to contextualize and historicize this crucial cultural practice. As a historical phenomenon, friendship contains strong currents of both continuity and change over time. Capturing the often subtle but substantive alterations in the practice and significance of friendship is as important as demonstrating those aspects that remained the same.

Scholars of Western antiquity have analyzed the philosophy and discourse of friendship from Aristotle's three pronged definition to Cicero's discussion of amicitia. These researchers have documented many of the attributes of friendship that would persist in the centuries to come: friendship based in family, kinship, patronage, politics, commerce, and civic life; friendship founded on mutuality, generosity, and complementarity; friends as alter egos or "virtual doubles"; and friendship sustained by "mutual exchange and choice."³ The interlocking nature of friendship continued into the medieval and early modern period. European historians have investigated the cultural, social, religious, legal, economic, and political meanings of friendship from household and domestic relations, to monasteries and feudal manors, to social networks, political organizations, and commercial interests, as well as neighborhoods and communities.⁴ A particularly active focus of study in the history of friendship has been its relationship to sexuality, especially the homosocial and homosexual aspects of same sex friendships.⁵

Scholarly interest in literary friendship has attracted substantial research. English literary scholars have produced several monographs examining the meanings of friendship to early modern writers and playwrights.⁶ Likewise, scholars of American literature have scrutinized friendship in relationship to novels and their authors.⁷ In early American literature, two notable books have argued for the importance of friendship. Ivy Schweitzer traces friendship and affiliation as central tropes in early American literature and asserts that scholars have failed to recognize the political, social, and literary significance of friendship in early American culture. Caleb Crain explores romantic friendship between men in the creation of popular works in the early nineteenth-century American literary canon. He explains the sympathy and emotion male writers felt for one another. He argues that, unlike marital or filial relationships, these romantic friendships were egalitarian and "more congenial to republican ideology."⁸

For their part, early American historians have just begun to broach the history of friendship.⁹ Richard Godbeer demonstrates that men in early America had passionate friendships founded on intense affection, romance, emotion, and intimacy. Sentimental friendship occurred among soldiers, politicians, ministers, and students, who all benefited from the male camaraderie instituted by brotherly love. However, he avers that romantic feelings did not translate into homoerotic relations. Widely accepted by society, Godbeer declares that these intense male friendships were central to the formation of America's political and social fabric: "[e]arly...