in their lives that seemed, at least in retrospect, happy and carefree. In 1813, when the Philadelphia Quaker Henry S. Drinker came across a letter written by his dear friend Richard Thomas twenty years before, it still touched him deeply: “it spoke to my heart’s best feelings, as I well remember, and I now again read it with emotion.” At Drinker’s request, Thomas then unearthed the response that Drinker had sent to that letter. “How sweet to the heart is the interchange of such kindness,” Thomas now wrote, “such ‘flow of soul’ as melts in these letters.” Since his departure from Philadelphia, separation from his “favorite friend and brother” had resulted in “gloom” and “depression.” His chief pleasure in life now was correspondence with Drinker and other friends “whose hearts are susceptible of the sorrow and distress of others, and who are kind enough to allow me that intercourse.” In Drinker’s original response, he had celebrated “a social sympathy which heaven has implanted in the feeling heart, in mitigation of its own sufferings.”29
Loyalties associated with friendship seem for the most part to have complemented rather than clashed with those of blood and marriage. Early Americans took it for granted that loving relationships between men and between women could coexist with heartfelt love for a person of the opposite sex. Eighteenth-century male friends often referred to each other as brothers and so characterized their relationships as a form of kinship. Family incorporated biological kin, conjugal relatives, and friends with whom one felt a sense of affinity into one loving and supportive community. Describing friends as kinfolk was neither perfunctory nor merely honorary: it indicated a very real and meaningful connection between individuals. That conflation of kinship and friendship enabled a much more expansive network of personal association than that encompassed by blood or marital connection.30
Yet circles of friendship were generally exclusive and indeed explicitly exclusionary. Those who belonged to communities of faith might refer to one another as loving brothers and sisters in Christ, but they rarely characterized those who belonged to other denominations or faiths as part of their family. Literate, privileged young men celebrated their friendships with one another as cultivating social sophistication, sensibility, and learning, as well as religious faith; they generally assumed that similarity in temperament, background, and social status would draw potential friends together. In effect, this ethos operated as a form of class and gender solidarity. Though we know that less privileged white Americans were exposed to celebrations of friendship through sermons and newspaper articles (which they might hear read aloud even if they could not read themselves), we have no way of telling how they responded to such encomia. Some less privileged listeners may have thought of friendship as a kind of bond that people of all social classes could experience, but the culture of friendship most certainly did not encourage people to form friendships that traversed social classes, let alone racial boundaries. Though some antislavery activists in the late eighteenth century urged white Americans to recognize and embrace their fundamental commonality with African slaves as brothers and sisters in one great human family, few privileged white Americans were willing to contemplate welcoming even less privileged whites, let alone people of color, into a fictive brotherhood. Though representatives sent by royal governors, colonial assemblies, and later state and federal governments to negotiate treaties with Native Americans sometimes adopted Indian rhetoric that invoked loving brotherhood and friendship in order to grease the wheels of diplomacy, Americans of European descent had little interest in understanding Indian conceptions of friendship other than through a European lens. Nor did they intend to treat Indians as brothers and sisters in practice unless the exigencies of the particular situation demanded that they do so. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, as political thinkers stressed the importance of fraternal collaboration between citizens in making a republic feasible, that nationalized conception of brotherhood was intrinsically exclusive, defining carefully who had the right to citizenship and to which nations the United States would extend the hand of fraternal amity.31
Early Americans routinely asserted that ties between friends had a broad public significance, creating affective bonds between individuals that would then serve as the emotional sinews of a larger identity. They understood society not as an abstract entity but as the sum of individual and intensely personalized relationships. That legitimization and celebration of loving friendship as a public good acquired a particular and explicitly political significance for North Americans during the revolutionary period. Personal friendship became a way of encouraging empathy between citizens in a society that no longer cohered through shared loyalty to a monarch. Friends would encourage in each other a generosity of spirit that would then inform and enrich social and public interactions, creating a sympathetic and magnanimous citizenry. According to the scores of essays and poems celebrating friendship that appeared in newspapers and magazines in the late eighteenth century, male friends found personal happiness through these relationships and inspired one another in their pursuit of knowledge and virtue. Those qualities and accomplishments would then radiate outward and transform postrevolutionary society, encouraging citizens to look beyond their own selfish interests to comprehend and empathize with the interests and feelings of others.32
The postrevolutionary press actively encouraged and celebrated loving and sympathetic friendships between men as the quintessence of republican masculinity. One particularly vivid essay exemplified this idealization of male friendship and its tone of unabashed sentimentality:
Tell me ye of refined feelings—have you ever found pleasures equal to those derived from friendship? What can be more delightful to the eye of benevolence than the prospect of a connection where the sentiments and affections are sweetly united? Picture to yourself, reader, two young men mutually bound by a sacred friendship—a friendship established upon the experience of years. See them with interlocked arms walking the pleasant grove, reciprocally breathing forth, without reserve, the sentiments of their bosoms! Observe the essence of benevolence glowing on their cheeks, and the gleams of participated ecstasy sparkling in their eyes. View them sweetly seated at the enchanted shrine of their goddess—friendship—unbosoming every sensation, and even mingling heart with heart! Notice them saluting each other after being separated for a season by the calls of interest—with what cordiality—with what emotions of joy—with what exquisite delight they embrace.
Author after author emphasized the yearning for intimacy and support that brought men together, as well as the broad social benefits that such friendships produced. The sentimental friend figured, then, both as a personal good in his own right and as a means to a larger social good. Friendship also played an important role in reenvisaging the family as a model for society as a whole, shifting attention away from the hierarchical authority of paternal figures to the more democratic bonds that bound brothers together in service to the new republic.33
Much of that postrevolutionary conversation focused on male friendship as a foundation for enlightened male citizenship. Yet printed discussions of same-sex friendship often depicted the nurturing of love between friends as a duty and pleasure that men and women shared in common. Literate women wrote of their feelings for one another in letters that bore a remarkable resemblance to those passing back and forth between male friends. Indeed, some men were eager to learn about the experience and expression of sympathetic friendship from female relatives and neighbors. Because women living in the seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century colonies left behind them far fewer letters and diaries than did men and because male diarists and letter writers were for the most part from the upper ranks of colonial society, we know much more about elite male friendships in the colonial period than about those of women and less privileged men. But we can be confident that all Americans who had access to newspaper and magazine articles or sermons praising friendship (regardless of whether they could read them or heard them read aloud) would have been familiar with the notion that same-sex friendships played a central role in nurturing civic and religious society.34
