"Betwixt the Hearts of Friends": Sentimental Friendship, Sympathy, and Male Virtue in the Early American Republic

Richard Godbeer’s paper (using material drawn from a book-length project on friendship between men in British North America and the Early Republic) examines the role played by sentimental love and sympathy in eighteenth-century male friendships, along with the political significance attributed by contemporaries to these friendships. In private correspondence between male friends, in orations celebrating male fraternities such as the Freemasons, and in newspaper articles on friendship, sentimental affection and sympathy featured as crucial to friendship between men, binding the friends together and inspiring them to virtue. Indeed, men were expected to embody emotional attributes perceived as “feminine” so as to nurture their potential as sympathetic and thus virtuous members of society. The beneficial impact of sentimental friendship would flow outward, contemporaries believed, and transform society as a whole, so that loving male friendship had a crucial role to play in fostering and sustaining the virtue of American citizens. Recent scholars have examined the post-revolutionary expectation that women as wives and mothers would nurture virtue in their husbands and sons (thus performing an important political role even as they were excluded from full political agency). This paper argues that men played a parallel role as friends: contemporaries worried that male rakes might corrupt other susceptible young men, but they took comfort in the possibility that virtuous men would provide each other with a more constructive and moral tutelage. Just as the republican wife and mother had a foil in the infectious prostitute, so the loving and virtuous friend had his undesirable foil in the libertine. But virtue would, hopefully, prevail. According to post-revolutionary writers, sentimental friendship and loving sympathy between male friends would bring out the best in American men. In tandem with marriage, male love would redeem the republic.