on particular individuals a gender identity that combined male and female components, English and specifically Puritan conceptions of gender involved everyone adopting a range of gender roles and attributes in particular contexts.21
The performance of these gendered roles within Anglo-American society proceeded according to a complex and strictly regulated protocol. Whether colonists considered an individual’s adoption of male or female roles appropriate depended entirely on the context. Yet a clear commitment to order and regulation within early modern society should not blind us to the degree of flexibility in gender roles and categories that contemporaries used to make sense of their lives. Moreover, that “fluidity of self-perception” (to quote Phyllis Mack) framed all interactions because contemporaries used gendered and familial metaphors to describe social, political, and religious relationships. Puritans inhabited a world in which earthly bridegrooms could anticipate eagerly becoming heavenly brides, in which both men and women embraced a polymorphous sexuality through which they would bear “the babe of grace” even as they rejoiced in their phallic credentials as “members of Christ.” Thus, John Winthrop could refer to Christ as “my love, my dove, my undefiled,” praying that he might be “possesse[d]” by his savior in “the love of marriage,” and recommend that romantic union to his third wife, Margaret Tyndal, as a “pattern” for their own loving relationship. In ways that may seem bizarre and alien to us, Winthrop became both husband and wife, alongside his effusively loving friendship with William Spring.22
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A few months after Winthrop penned his letter of loving farewell to Spring, as the Puritan flotilla journeyed across the Atlantic, he revealed in a lay sermon that he delivered aboard the Arbella how central the ideal of “brotherly affection” was to his vision for a godly life and godly society. Just as a body would fall apart without the ligaments that held its bones together, he declared, so the members of a godly commonwealth would fall prey to contention and disorder unless “knit together” by “the sweet sympathy of affections.” It was that “fervent love” for one another and for Christ that had united the faithful throughout Christian history. Winthrop proposed that his audience take from scripture two models for that love between brothers and sisters in Christ, which he called “the bond of perfection.” The first of these was the relationship between Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, each eager for “nearness and familiarity,” sharing in each other’s sadness or distress, and happiest when the other was “merry and thriving.” Many generations later, the spirit of that first human relationship had been “acted to life” anew in another consummate expression of Christian love: the friendship between David and Jonathan. Winthrop described that friendship in a deeply affecting passage of his sermon: Jonathan loved David “as his own soul,” Winthrop assured his audience. Even when facing a brief separation, “they thought their hearts would have broke for sorrow, had not their affections found vent by abundance of tears.” Inspired by the example of these two men, New Englanders should “entertain each other in brotherly affection” and “love one another with a pure heart fervently.” Love between brethren would inspire love for Christ, who would then be “formed in them and they in him, all in each other knit together by this bond of love.” Relationships such as these were not limited to men: “other instances,” Winthrop noted, “might be brought to show the nature of this affection, as of Ruth and Naomi and many others.” Mutual love and devotion among faithful men and women, modeled on the first human marriage and loving same-sex friendships, would enable a truly redemptive society, preparing believers for union with Christ.23
Expressions of loving friendship suffused official statements and private correspondence in early New England. When Connecticut’s colonial assembly called in 1638 for a treaty of friendship between the northern colonies, urging that New Englanders should “walk and live peaceably and lovingly together,” it invoked the example of Jonathan and David, whose “love was great each to other” and who “made a covenant to perpetuate the same.”24 Winthrop’s son and namesake inspired effusive declarations of love from his brothers in Christ. “I do long for your company as much as the teeming earth for the rising sun,” wrote Hugh Peter. “Oh how my heart is with you.” Peter assured the governor’s son that he loved him “as mine own soul” and declared in one letter, “Oh that I were to die in your bosom.” Edward Howes, writing from England, addressed Winthrop Jr. as “charissime” (dearest one), “gaudium meae vitae” (joy of my life), and “optatissime amice optime” (best and most desired friend). Howes declared that Winthrop’s virtue had “kindled” in him “such a true fire of love” that “the great Western Ocean cannot quench”: “it shall be with you,” he assured his friend, “wheresoever you are.”25
For seventeenth-century New England Puritans, as for early Americans in general, context was everything. Male intimacy could nurture and reinforce or corrupt and undermine their commonwealth, depending on how it expressed itself. The year prior to John Winthrop’s celebration of “brotherly affection” in his sermon aboard the Arbella, “five beastly sodomitical boys” were exposed on the Talbot and subsequently sent back to England for punishment, so “foul” was their offense. As the scholar Michael Warner has pointed out, Winthrop’s glorification of male love “was thus delivered in the very space of the repudiation of sodomy, en route to the New Canaan.” Warner suggests that Winthrop and others may have feared sodomy as a warped version of the “brotherly affection” that, in Winthrop’s words, should unite New England’s citizens as “members of the same body.” The “bonds of brotherly affection” would provide the sinews of a godly commonwealth, but the distortion of that affinity could pollute and destroy it. To put this another way, though sex between men was illegal and denounced by religious leaders as an abominable sin, Puritans saw intense love between godly men—and, we might add, godly women—as decent, honorable, praiseworthy, and indeed indispensable to the success of a godly commonwealth.26
Puritans were by no means unique in stressing the importance of impassioned and loving friendship. Revivalists who took the colonies by storm in the mid-eighteenth century and Methodist preachers who traveled through the South in the early decades of independence adopted a similarly fervent tone in describing their feelings for one another.27 By no means all eighteenth-century Americans saw evangelical preachers as worthy role models. Yet throughout the century, men across the colonies and the new republic formed and often maintained over many decades loving friendships that were emotionally intense and physically affectionate. To give just two examples: In September 1763, 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 as follows: “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.” In December 1798, as Daniel Webster prepared to leave Dartmouth College on vacation, he dreaded the prospect of having to spend several weeks apart from his friend George Herbert. “The thought distracts my soul and fills me with dismay,” Webster wrote. “I go, but George, my heart is knit with thine.” Webster was convinced that he would “sink in dark despair” were it not for knowing that he and his friend would soon be reunited on his return to Dartmouth. “Roll on the hour,” the young man exclaimed in fervent anticipation.28
Many of these friendships lasted far beyond young adulthood and flourished alongside relationships with women, providing emotional support through
