Modern readers often assume that loving friendships such as these must have included an element of sexual attraction, even if the men or women involved did not act on such desires. Physical affection assuredly did play an important role in many of these relationships. Male friends often referred to the pleasure that they took in touching and holding each other, delighting in the proximity of each other’s bodies. Daniel Webster recalled “press[ing]” Thomas Merrill’s hand and wrote that he wanted to pour the effusions of his “heart,” which was “now so full,” into his friend’s ear “till it ran over.” William Wirt, a Virginian lawyer who had established a close friendship with Dabney Carr in the 1790s as the two men traveled together in search of clients, later wrote, “O! That you were here. Am I ne’er to see you more?—I long for your hand—I hunger after your face and voice—can you not come down this winter, if not sooner?”37 Some male friends commented in their letters how much they enjoyed sleeping together. When Israel Cheever wrote to Robert Treat Paine complaining that he had “no sweet chum to confabulate with upon a bed of ease,” his turn of phrase was by no means metaphorical: he went on to declare how much he missed his “dear chum, with whom I have lain warm so many nights.” Wirt and Carr almost certainly slept together as they traveled looking for work, perhaps from choice as well as for practical reasons. Wirt recalled that period with “a swelling of the heart”: “gone forever,” he lamented, “are those pleasures!”38
But what exactly were those pleasures? Early Americans often shared their beds with visitors, including complete strangers. Few private homes or even taverns offering accommodation had enough space to allow for the kind of privacy that most modern Westerners take for granted. Because adult Westerners now generally invite people into their beds only if they are in a sexual relationship or having a more casual sexual encounter, they tend to read more into nocturnal companionship than people living in the past would have done. In some instances, sleeping together may have included erotic stimulation or even sexual activity; and there were doubtless cases in which society’s validation of same-sex affection provided a cover for erotic intimacies and instances of coercion. Yet early Americans would not have assumed that love, even an intense romantic love, included or implied erotic attraction, because their conception of sexuality was different from ours, so that they did not leap to the same conclusions as we would. Families and neighbors would hardly have encouraged the formation of close same-sex friendships if they thought they would lead to sexual intimacy, given that sex between men or between women was a criminal offense as well as denounced by ministers as a heinous sin. Yet they did encourage such relationships and often allowed their sons to spend the night together, because for them neither expressions of love nor physical affection automatically signified sexual attraction.39
Very occasionally, journals and letters that survive from the colonial and revolutionary periods do hint at the possibility of erotic attraction. The Virginian John Randolph wrote in a 1795 letter that he “burned with desire to see” his college friend Henry Rutledge, though he also celebrated their friendship as “pure affection between man and man.” Perhaps he wanted to distinguish his feelings from those of other men whom he suspected of being less “pure” in the expression of their love, or perhaps he sought to disown feelings within himself that he feared and condemned. One surviving letter that expresses nostalgia for nights spent in the past with a close friend is much more suggestive. Virgil Maxcy, who lived in Smithfield, Rhode Island, assured his “chum” William Blanding in Rehoboth, Massachusetts, that he missed sleeping with him: “I get to hugging the pillow,” he declared, “instead of you.” One night when a visiting stranger slept in the same bed with Maxcy, the stranger commented in the morning that Maxcy had “hugged him all night,” and indeed Maxcy remembered waking up several times to find his arms “tight around him.” Maxcy clearly enjoyed sleeping curled up with someone. We cannot know for certain if the physical intimacy that Maxcy missed had any sexual component to it, but he did make a very striking remark in that same letter. “Sometimes,” he wrote, “I think I have got hold of your doodle when in reality I have hold of the bedpost.” A “doodle” that could be confused with a bedpost was hardly in a state of repose, and Maxcy signed this particular letter, “your cunt humble.” This may have been a humorous reference to Blanding having had erections in his sleep that may or may not have had anything to do with attraction to his bedmate, even though Maxcy ended up as the butt (so to speak) of his friend’s nocturnal arousal. Young male adults often experience spontaneous sexual arousal and have wet dreams in the night. But perhaps Blanding really did lust after Maxcy, who perhaps welcomed his friend’s “doodle,” though this would have been a risky thing to acknowledge, even in private correspondence.40
Historians have often downplayed or suppressed evidence of sexual intimacy between men and between women in the past that they do not wish to acknowledge. Thankfully, a growing number of scholars are now giving that surviving material the careful attention that it deserves, as part of a much larger project to recover the lives and experiences of people previously erased from historical accounts.41 Yet in avoiding undue reticence or actual suppression of historical evidence, we should take care not to fall into the trap of seeing what we expect or want to see. Whether or not particular friendships did have a sexual component, declarations of love between men or between women would not automatically have suggested to relatives or neighbors that sexual relations were taking place. Indeed, most Anglo-Americans living in the colonial and revolutionary periods had no difficulty envisaging a passionate yet nonsexual love between two men or two women. Cassandra Good’s recent book on cross-sex friendships shows that eighteenth-century Americans distrusted male-female relationships, fearing that those involved would give way to physical attraction and become lovers. It is surely significant that contemporaries were much less anxious about loving same-sex friendships and happily made room for them as a personal, social, and political good.42
Only once we set aside our own assumptions and even our categories of analysis—no easy task—can we appreciate that sexualized love was just one possibility in a rich repertoire of possibilities open to premodern men and women as they expressed their feelings for one another. There must surely have been cases in which that spectrum of possibilities provided a cover for erotic intimacy that would otherwise have endangered the individuals concerned (not only because of the legal penalties for sodomy but also through social and self-inflicted stigma). Some friends may have explored the boundary between physical affection and erotic expression, perhaps occasionally venturing across that boundary and discovering something new about themselves. Yet as the historian Alan Bray has pointed out, “the inability to conceive of relationships in other than sexual terms says something of contemporary poverty; or, to put the point more precisely, the effect of a shaping concern with sexuality is precisely to obscure that wider frame.” The literary scholar Ivy Schweitzer makes a similar point: “Without denying the erotic and sexual potential of friendship,” we should recognize that “a very different logic guided its understandings in this period.” That logic “enabled an array of social and political relations that critics have frequently overlooked.”43
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Alan Bray’s characterization of modern sexual paradigms as obscuring instead of illuminating the past and Ivy Schweitzer’s argument that scholars’ own preconceptions