Evangelical Male Friendships in America's First Age of Reform (Regional Issues) (Essay‪)‬

When Signs published its first issue, back in 1975, it led with an article by a young historian named Carroll Smith-Rosenberg. (1) That article was "The Female World of Love and Ritual," and the claims it made, that the friendships of nineteenth-century women were particularly passionate and that the boundaries between passion and homoeroticism were by no means distinct, inevitably prompted a closer look at male friendships. Before long and without very much digging, historians were able to find men who were just as passionate about their male friends. (2) Longfellow had his Sumner, Garrison his May, Emerson his Gay, Daniel Webster his Bingham, Henry Ward Beecher his Newell and then his Tilton. And thanks to the efforts of historians like E. Anthony Rotundo, it is now clear that Smith-Rosenberg also read too much into the intimacies that characterized so many same-sex friendships of the time--the kisses, the weeping, the mawkish declarations of love, the nights spent in the same bed. But for all the attention same-sex friendships have attracted in recent years, very little is said about a dimension that mattered a great deal to nineteenth-century Americans: experiential religion. Nancy Cott comes closest to the mark when she brings up the examples of girls whose friendships were heightened by having participated in the same religious revival. (3) Joyce Appleby alludes to the same phenomenon in Inheriting the Revolution. (4) Appleby also tells us that religiosity was an important factor in female friendships for the simple reason that religion mattered more to women than to men. The impression has been reinforced by a strong selection bias in the literature on male friendships, which is to say that it is top-heavy with men from the Unitarian intelligentsia. Based on this group alone, one might indeed conclude that religion was incidental to most male friendships, and that such charms as it had were of the bookish variety. Garrison and his inner circle could talk about religion and friendship in the same breath, but their attempt to blend the two in their own lives was not based on shared religious experiences: it was based on a highly romanticized notion of how the early Church operated. (5)