Male Friendship

Colonial and Nineteenth-Century America

The premodern social conditions of colonial America, in which society consisted of small, homogenous, stable communities, were conducive to the formation of lifelong friendships between men. Defining manhood in terms of one's role in his community and reliability to his neighbors, and considering strong social interdependency essential to community welfare, colonial men typically, and necessarily, formed strong social bonds. Still, while a man might have many friends in this environment, the actual intensity of individual attachments may have been limited by the culture's powerful emphasis on the well-being of the whole community and on one's relationship to God.

During the nineteenth century, several modernizing transformations in American life altered the nature and meaning of male friendships. Urbanization and the market revolution resulted in increased mobility and a new emphasis on competitive individualism, both of which tended to reduce the number of a man's friendships. The increasing primacy of the individual over the community, a growing valuation of emotional expression, and—some historians argue—a diminished role of God-centered devotion prompted the elevation of romantic love between a man and a woman to a new significance in people's lives. These developments may also have made those friendships more psychologically intense, making male friendships an important component of masculine identity.

Indeed, it appears that sometimes there was little division between romance and friendship for men in nineteenth-century America. With men and women frequently living in largely homosocial worlds until––and even in some respects during––their marriages, the object of one's “romantic” attention was often a member of one's own sex. In an era when male expressions of sympathy and sentimentality were prized––and before the concept of homosexuality had been developed and the practice stigmatized––American men were free to speak endearingly to each other and to have what some historians have characterized as “romantic friendships.” Daniel Webster, for instance, a U.S. senator from Massachusetts and one of antebellum America's most renowned public figures, usually began letters to one friend with the salutation “Lovely Boy” and closed letters to him with “accept all the tenderness I have.” Webster and Abraham Lincoln were among the countless American men of their era to frequently share a bed with a male friend, testimony as much to the extent of unselfconscious intimacy as to the relative shortage of beds.

Some historians have argued that this pervasive intimacy between men in nineteenth-century America was largely confined to young adulthood, before a man would marry (as most eventually did), while others suggest that the intimacy was much more than merely a phase on the way to a man's union with a woman. Additionally, while some scholars have maintained that virtually all of the romantic friendships were nonsexual, others have insisted that the terms of endearment suggest that sexual activity between men of the period was widespread.

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