28. Joseph Hooper to Benjamin Dolbeare, September 4, 1763, Dolbeare Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston; Daniel Webster to George Herbert, December 20, 1798, in The Writings and Speeches of Daniel Webster, ed. J. W. McIntyre, 18 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1903), 17:71.
29. Richard Thomas to Henry S. Drinker, October 1, 1793; Drinker to Thomas, October 8, 1793; Drinker to Thomas, March 18, 1813; Thomas to Drinker, April 19, 1813; all in Drinker and Sandwith Papers, vol. 4, file 67, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
30. See Anya Jabour, Marriage in the Early Republic: Elizabeth and William Wirt and the Companionate Ideal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 5; and Jabour, “Male Friendship and Masculinity in the Early National South: William Wirt and His Friends,” Journal of the Early Republic 20 (2000): 83–111. See Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Godbeer, Overflowing of Friendship; and Anne S. Lombard, Making Manhood: Growing Up Male in Colonial New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2003), 54.
31. For examples of abolitionists invoking brotherhood as a justification for emancipation, see Godbeer, Overflowing of Friendship, 170. For Cherokee conceptions of friendship in the eighteenth century and the role that friendship played in relations between the Cherokee and British officials along with Anglo-Americans, see Gregory D. Smithers, “‘Our Hands and Hearts Are Joined Together’: Friendship, Colonialism, and the Cherokee People in Early America,” Journal of Social History 50 (2017): 609–29.
32. For a fuller version of this argument, see Godbeer, Overflowing of Friendship, chap. 5. Republican thinkers also accorded women crucial roles as wives and mothers in fostering a virtuous male citizenry. See Ruth Bloch, “American Feminine Ideals in Transition: The Rise of the Moral Mother, 1785–1815,” Feminist Studies 4 (1978): 101–26; Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980); Ruth Bloch, “The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America,” Signs 13 (1987): 37–58; Jan Lewis, “The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic,” William and Mary Quarterly 44 (1987): 689–721; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Daughters of Liberty: Religious Women in Revolutionary New England,” in Women in the Age of the American Revolution, ed. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989); Rosemary Zagarri, “Morals, Manners, and the Republican Mother,” American Quarterly 44 (1992): 192–215; and Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America, chap. 8.
33. Cumberland Gazette, November 9, 1789. For loving male friendships in colonial North America and the early republic, see Caleb Crain, “Leander, Lorenzo, and Castalio: An Early American Romance,” Early American Literature 33 (1998): 6–38; Crain, American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); Jabour, “Male Friendship and Masculinity”; Ivy Schweitzer, Perfecting Friendship: Politics and Affiliation in Early American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Godbeer, Overflowing of Friendship; Smithers, “Our Hands and Hearts Are Joined Together”; and Janet Moore Lindman, “‘This Union of the Soul’: Spiritual Friendship among Early American Protestants,” Journal of Social History 50 (2017): 680–700. See also Allan Silver, “Friendship in Commercial Society: Eighteenth-Century Social Theory and Modern Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology 95, no. 6 (1990): 1474–1504.
34. See Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow, 1981); Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Knopf, 1985), 53–76; Carol Lasser, “‘Let Us Be Sisters Forever’: The Sororal Model of Nineteenth-Century Female Friendship,” Signs 14 (1988): 158–81; and Joan R. Gundersen, “Kith and Kin: Women’s Networks in Colonial Virginia,” in The Devil’s Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South, ed. Catherine Clinton and Michele Gillespie (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 90–108.
35. See Alan Bray and Michel Rey, “The Body of the Friend: Continuity and Change in Masculine Friendship in the Seventeenth Century,” in English Masculinities, 1660–1800, ed. Tim Hitchcock and Michele Cohen (New York: Longman, 1999), esp. 80. Bray discusses the emergence of this subculture in Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982), chap. 4; see also Rictor Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England, 1700–1830 (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1992). Randolph Trumbach argues that the emergence of the adult effeminate sodomite as a “third gender” had profound implications for the ways in which other men perceived and enacted their own versions of manhood as they sought to distinguish themselves from this new effeminate persona; see his Sex and the Gender Revolution: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
36. See Thomas A. Foster, “Antimasonic Satire, Sodomy, and Eighteenth-Century Masculinity in the Boston Evening Post,” William and Mary Quarterly 60 (2003): 171–84; and Clare A. Lyons, “Mapping an Atlantic Sexual Culture: Homoeroticism in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” William and Mary Quarterly 60 (2003): 152.
37. Daniel Webster to Thomas Merrill, May 1, 1804, in Writings and Speeches, 17:166; William Wirt to William Pope, August 5, 1803, Wirt Papers, Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore; Wirt to Dabney Carr, April 1, 1810, Wirt Papers; Wirt to Carr, June 10, 1814, Library of Virginia, Richmond. Anya Jabour discusses Wirt’s friendships in “Male Friendship and Masculinity.”
38. Israel Cheever to Robert Treat Paine, July 27, 1749, in Papers of Robert Treat Paine, ed. Stephen T. Riley and Edward Hanson, 3 vols. (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1992), 1:58; William Wirt to Dabney Carr, March 19, 1802, Wirt Papers.
39. William Benemann castigates Anya Jabour for holding back from the conclusion that the language used in letters written by the southern lawyer William Wirt and his male friends “imply actual sexual relations.” Jabour does acknowledge that a few of these letters “contained erotic overtones,” but as she points out, the letters between these men “give no indication that their prized reunions included sexual intimacy” (“Male Friendship and Masculinity,” 93). Benemann goes on to declare that Jabour’s “reticence stems from a reluctance to make definitive statements about the past which are unsupported by surviving evidence” and that “proper interpretation of ambiguous language” is the only alternative to leaving the subject of male-male intimacy