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Richard Godbeer

In early 1630, as John Winthrop prepared to cross the Atlantic and join the Puritan settlement in New England, he bade farewell to friends and loved ones. Some, including his third wife, Margaret Tyndal, would remain in England for a time and then join him in North America. Others he would in all likelihood never see again. The latter included his “most sweet friend” Sir William Spring. Winthrop sent his friend a parting letter in which he declared as follows: “I loved you truly before I could think that you took any notice of me: but now I embrace you and rest in your love and delight to solace my first thoughts in these sweet affections of so dear a friend. The apprehension of your love and worth together hath overcome my heart and removed the veil of modesty, that I must needs tell you, my soul is knit to you as the soul of Jonathan to David: were I now with you, I should bedew that sweet bosom with the tears of affection.” In the past, Winthrop wrote, when one of them set off on a trip, their good-byes had been “pleasant” because they could look forward to a reunion in the near future, but now “this addition of forever” was “a sad close.” Winthrop confessed quite openly to Spring his “envy” of their mutual friend Nathaniel Barnardiston and of Spring’s wife, neither of whom would suffer the anguish of long-term separation from William. Of Barnardiston, Winthrop wrote, “he shall enjoy what I desire.” And as for Spring’s wife, Winthrop could not but resent “the felicity of that good lady.” Winthrop consoled himself with the hope that he and Spring would be reunited in heaven. Meanwhile, their mutual “prayers and affections” would “represent [them] often with the idea of each other’s countenance.” Winthrop prayed that Christ would bless their “bond of brotherly affection: let not distance weaken it, nor time waste it, nor change dissolve it.”1

Envious though Winthrop was of Barnardiston and Lady Spring, there was another loving companion to whom he could entrust his friend without any twinge of jealousy: that is, their mutual savior. “I know not how to leave you,” he wrote, “yet since I must, I will put my beloved into his arms who loves him best and is a faithful keeper of all that is committed to him.” Winthrop described the comfort that Christ would provide in language that was even more passionate and demonstrative than his declarations of love for William Spring. In common with other Puritans, male and female, Winthrop envisaged Christ as a prospective spouse and relished “the most sweet love” of his “heavenly husband.” Winthrop imagined himself as “the loving wife” in the Song of Solomon and addressed his spiritual husband-to-be in a rhapsody of romantic infatuation: “O my Lord, my love, how wholly delectable art thou! Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for his love is sweeter than wine: how lovely is thy countenance! How pleasant are thy embracings! My heart leaps within me for joy when I hear the voice of thee, my Lord, my love, when thou sayest to my soul, thou art her salvation.” Winthrop would have to wait for union with his savior until the afterlife, when he hoped to join other redeemed souls in marriage to the heavenly bridegroom; but meanwhile, in his sleep, he “dreamed that [he] was with Christ upon earth” and “ravished with his love . . . far exceeding the affection of the kindest husband.” On awakening after one such dream, he found that the experience “had made so deep impression in [his] heart” that he wept for joy and “had a more lively feeling of the love of Christ than ever before.” Now that he was leaving England and would no longer be able to “bedew” William Spring’s “sweet bosom with the tears of affection,” he would find solace in Christ’s love and imagine his friend in their savior’s embrace.2

Winthrop’s dreams of ravishment by a heavenly bridegroom would have neither surprised nor disturbed his contemporaries. He saw his loving relationships in this world—with three successive wives and with close male friends—as analogous to the love raptures of the world to come. In Winthrop’s mind, earthly and spiritual loves were equally real and symbiotic. Looking over some of the letters that he and his first wife had written to each other, Winthrop found himself in “such a heavenly meditation of the love between Christ and [himself] as ravished [his] heart with unspeakable joy”: “methought my soul had as familiar and sensible society with him as my wife could have with the kindest husband.” In later years, he hoped that the love he and his third wife shared would rouse them “to a like conformity of sincerity and fervency in the love of Christ our lord and heavenly husband; that we could delight in him as we do in each other.” Winthrop never referred to William Spring as a spouse (at least not in any of his surviving letters), but he did see their loving friendship as a foretaste of the bliss awaiting the redeemed in the life to come: “if any emblem may express our condition in heaven, it is this communion in love.” Spring evidently felt the same way, depicting his love for Winthrop and for Christ as parallel devotions: he wrote longingly of Winthrop’s “bosom, whither I desire to convey myself and to live there, as we may to [Christ] also that owns that place.” Winthrop saw marital love, loving friendship, love of Christ, and Christ’s love for the faithful as mutually reinforcing devotions that conflated the earthly and spiritual as well as love for men and women. He finished his letter of farewell to Spring by praying that Christ would bless their love for each other and unite them in love for their redeemer: “make us sick with thy love: let us sleep in thine arms, and awake in thy kingdom: the souls of thy servants, thus united to thee, make as one in the bond of brotherly affection.”3

***

It is difficult to make sense of this seventeenth-century romantic ménage using modern categories of sexual orientation or our own assumptions about what it means to be a heterosexual male. Puritan men like John Winthrop who considered themselves quite respectable did not hesitate to express passionate love for other men and for Christ, whom they hoped to marry on the Day of Judgment and by whom they hoped to be ravished in an everlasting ecstasy that they envisaged in literal and explicitly erotic terms. They were able to do so because they inhabited a world in which neither heterosexuality nor homosexuality existed as categories of identification. Early Americans had clear notions of what we now call sexuality and gender, along with strong opinions about what constituted appropriate and inappropriate behavior, but the ways in which they understood and evaluated love and desire were very different from and in some respects much more capacious than our own. This was not simply a question of using different vocabulary to describe universal emotions or drives: because their ideas and assumptions shaped how they processed internally their own feelings and those of others, their actual experience of sexual desire and love was different from ours.

Let me pause for a moment to unpack the last few sentences. Just over a quarter century ago, the scholar David Halperin pointed out in his now-classic essay entitled “One Hundred Years of Homosexuality” that the introduction of the words “homosexuality” and (shortly afterward) “heterosexuality” at the end of the nineteenth century marked “a major reconceptualization of the nature of human sexuality.” Previously, nineteenth-century medical experts had linked desire for members of the same sex to what they called “sexual inversion” (the adoption of feminine roles and traits by an anatomical man or of masculine traits and roles by an anatomical woman). But this new taxonomy shifted attention away from gender performance and focused entirely on the anatomical sex of those who were engaging in a sexual act: those who chose to have sex with persons of the same sex were homosexual, and those who chose instead members of the opposite sex were heterosexual, regardless of whether they seemed manly or effeminate. That paradigm of sexual orientation became the dominant framework used by twentieth-century Westerners to understand sexual attraction. Many people came to assume that this paradigm had a transhistorical validity, so that they could apply it to any cultural or historical setting. Yet Halperin argued that terms such as “homosexuality,” “heterosexuality,” and even “sexuality,” far from being “the basic building-blocks of human identity for all human beings in all times and places,” constitute “peculiar and indeed exceptional ways of conceptualizing as well as experiencing sexual desire” that would have made little sense to people living in the past (emphasis in original). Because people living before the late nineteenth century would not have described sexual desires and behavior using modern taxonomy, they would therefore have understood and even felt such desires differently. It follows that the assumptions embedded within words like “heterosexuality” present “a significant obstacle” to understanding sexual life in the past. Instead, we need to recover what Halperin called “the cultural poetics of desire,” that is, the formal ideas and informal assumptions that people drew on to classify and evaluate sexual desire and behavior, along with the ways in which contemporaries disseminated and enforced those ideas and assumptions.4

If we are to understand what we would characterize as gender and sexuality in the context of British America and the revolutionary period, we need to take seriously the profound implications of Halperin’s essay and recognize that “the cultural poetics of desire” during those periods looked and felt very different from anything we experience today. Colonists, in common with their contemporaries in early modern England and Europe, did not think about their sexual impulses in terms of a distinct sexuality that oriented men and women toward members of the same or opposite sex. Early Americans were taught to believe that all sex outside marriage—whether masturbation, casual fornication, premarital sex, adultery, or sodomy—was driven by innate moral corruption inherited from Adam and Eve; it expressed moral, not sexual, orientation. The most fundamental distinction that colonists made between licit and illicit sex depended on the marital status of those involved, not their biological sex. We know that there were men in British America who found themselves attracted to other men, and women who desired other women, yet the modern category of “homosexual” would have made little sense to them or their neighbors; they had their own conceptual frameworks through which to make sense of their urges and behavior.5

Early Americans understood erotic desires and acts as an expression of moral and social standing, not of intrinsic sexual identity. Consider the seventeenth-century Puritan New Englander who condemned any form of nonmarital sex as a “pollution” of the body that should be kept pure as a temple for the soul and who worried constantly about succumbing to “unclean” impulses; or the eighteenth-century southern planter who characterized sex as a demonstration of his cherished identity as a gentleman, referring to intercourse with his wife as a “flourish,” or courtly gesture, to extramarital sex as “promiscuous gallantry,” and to venereal infection as a “polite disorder.” The first individual categorized sexual acts as part of a larger moral and spiritual endeavor, the second in terms of social identity. Both gave meaning and value to sex using categories that were not themselves intrinsically sexual. Strictly speaking, men who practiced sodomy during this period did not engage in homosexual acts, any more than the planter who gave his wife “a flourish” was engaging in a heterosexual act.6

In addition, and crucially, early Americans experienced love and sexual desire in the context of gender roles that adhered less rigidly to either men or women than in a modern Western setting. As we will see, women and men assumed both feminine and masculine roles, depending on the context in which they found themselves. The expectation that men could assume a female persona in certain circumstances and women a male persona reveals a culture of intricate possibilities, including the ways in which colonists enacted gendered authority. The use of spousal imagery to describe relations between savior and saved, for example, reinforced a gender-based hierarchy within the family. But Christ was much more than a masculine role model for men, who developed a range of social capacities by relating to him as brides as well as emulating him in the role of bridegroom, just as women performed the role of husband in the absence of male spouses and adopted masculine characteristics in a spiritual context that would astonish modern Christians.

Setting aside our own assumptions about sexuality is not easy. Consider the insistence by many otherwise astute and careful scholars that we should read expressions of love between male friends living in the past (such as John Winthrop and William Spring) as at least implicitly homoerotic. These scholars assume that expressions of loving devotion must necessarily imply a desire for sexual intimacy or, to put it another way, that people who are in love with each other must want to have sex. That many modern readers would make this assumption is perhaps not surprising: the paradigm of sexual orientation teaches us that romantic feelings generally go hand in hand with sexual attraction and that sexual orientation impels most of us sexually and romantically toward members of the same or opposite sex. That paradigm has established a firm and tenacious grip on our hearts, minds, and bodies.7 Yet early Americans did not automatically conjoin romantic love with erotic desire, as would become the case once the paradigm of sexual orientation took hold. Equally important, their conception of how gender worked enabled them to embrace combinations of love and desire that would later become problematic. This essay uses two particular categories of romantic and erotic relationship in early America to illustrate how necessary it is for us to set aside our most deeply felt assumptions if we are to understand past men’s and women’s experiences of sexual desire and love.

***

Let us now visit briefly with another seventeenth-century New Englander in the happy grip of two symbiotic love affairs that defy, among other things, our persistent stereotypes of what it meant to be a Puritan. Edward Taylor, the young pastor at Westfield, Massachusetts, was about to be married. In September 1674, two months before his wedding to Elizabeth Fitch, Taylor sent his prospective wife a passionate love letter. “I know not how to use a fitter comparison to set out my love by,” he wrote, “than to compare it unto a golden ball of pure fire rolling up and down my breast, from which there flies, now and then a spark like a glorious beam from the body of the flaming sun.” Yet Elizabeth Fitch was not the only love on Edward Taylor’s mind, as the young man openly confessed. Love for a human spouse, however sincere and intense, must always be “limited and subordinate” to the devotion that united believers to Christ. The love that Taylor expressed for his savior was intimate, romantic, sensual, and often explicitly erotic. In poems written between the 1680s and 1720s, Taylor envisaged Christ as “a spotless male in prime” and addressed his savior in language of utter infatuation:

Thou art the loveli’st object over spread

With brightest beauty object ever wore

Of purest flushes of pure white and red

That ever did or could the love allure.

Lord make my love and thee its object meet

And me in folds of such love raptures keep.

Faith would prepare Taylor’s heart as a “feather-bed . . . with gospel pillows, sheets, and sweet perfumes” to welcome Christ the lover. The young pastor yearned for divine arousal of his spiritual “fancy” in vividly sexual terms. “Yea,” he wrote, “with thy holy oil make thou it slick till like a flash of lightning it grow quick.” Taylor’s poems leave no room for doubt that he anticipated union with Christ through the ecstatic experience of orgasm and penetration. According to Taylor, the soul was “the womb,” Christ “the spermadote,” and “saving grace the seed cast thereinto.” Once “impregnate[d]” by Christ, the soul was “with child” and in due course would produce “the babe of grace.” That infant was the fruit of matchless passion, conceived “in folds of such love raptures” as only Christ could provide.8

There was nothing unusual or unconventional about Edward Taylor’s dual passion for Elizabeth Fitch and his heavenly bridegroom. In early 1718, the Boston magistrate Samuel Sewall, a few months after the death of his first wife, was already contemplating another loving union. The prospective spouse about whom he enthused to his diary was not, however, one of the widows before whom he would later lay his suit: “I had a sweet and very affectionate meditation concerning the Lord Jesus; nothing was to be objected against his person, parentage, relations, estate, house, home! Why did I not resolutely, presently close with him! And I cried mightily to God that he would help me so to do.” That April, Sewall officiated at a marriage and wrote afterward, “Oh! that they and I might be married to CHRIST; and that our marriage might be known to ourselves, and others!” During the same year in which Sewall was contemplating Christ’s unimpeachable qualifications as a spouse, the influential minister Increase Mather published a sermon in which he described marriage with Christ as “the most desirable one that ever was or that possibly can be.” No “greater dignity” was imaginable than marrying “the only son of the King of Heaven,” no “greater felicity” than to have as a husband “the wisest and richest that can be thought of.” The bride of such a groom would be “made happy for ever.”9

Different Christian cultures have responded to biblical images of Christ as bridegroom and lover in various ways. Most modern Westerners downplay or ignore biblical passages that contain this imagery. Medieval mystics described union with Christ in terms of feelings and relationships that they shunned in an earthly setting: members of religious orders yearned for marriage with their savior and yet committed themselves to celibacy here on Earth as a prerequisite for sanctity. This reaffirmed the opposition of physical and spiritual realms as well as their belief that devotion necessarily involved transcendence of the body. New England Puritans, by contrast, welcomed the sensual possibilities embedded within such passages of the Bible. Eager to celebrate marriage and family life as an agent of grace and social order, they drew direct parallels between human marriage and the soul’s espousal to Christ. They hoped that the latter would provide a model for husbands and wives as they sought to build and sustain their relationships, just as human marriage would inspire believers to strive for union with their other, greater spouse. Marriage and marital sex became a foretaste of what the redeemed would experience when they joined their divine husband in heaven.10

Over the course of the seventeenth century, New England pastors became increasingly effusive in their evocation of Christ as an object of romantic, sensual, and erotic infatuation. Faced with the maturation of young men and women who had not chosen to live in a godly commonwealth and who would decide as adults whether or not to embrace orthodoxy, ministers sought to seduce youngsters into the community of faith by stressing the voluptuous pleasures that awaited them in the form of union with their savior. Pastors described the soul’s marriage to Christ in ever more elaborate detail, occasionally devoting entire sermons to the subject. In so doing, they acted not only as teachers whose duty it was to explicate a recurring scriptural metaphor but also as self-styled “friends of the bridegroom” who courted on Christ’s behalf. The days on which they preached became Christ’s “wooing days,” when the savior would “deck and array himself with all his glory and beauty,” hoping to bedazzle the objects of his love. Since pastors hoped to become brides in their own right, they served simultaneously as interpreters, advocates, and potential recipients of the redeemer’s advances.11

Ministers encouraged their flocks to feel Christ’s love as an intensely voluptuous experience. “Here he comes,” rhapsodized Samuel Willard, “to give us the caresses of his love, and lay us in his bosom and embraces. And now, oh my soul! Hast thou ever experienced the love of a saviour?” Edward Taylor was by no means alone in using sexual and reproductive metaphors to convey Christ’s bestowal of grace, which would “quicken” the believer’s spiritual womb, the same word used to describe the first stirrings of life in a physical womb. Christ’s gift, explained Willard, was as much “physical” as “moral”: “he withal puts in his finger, and makes a powerful impression.”12 Prayer also afforded an opportunity to enjoy “soul-ravishing communion” with Christ. Believers would emerge from such experiences “refreshed with those close embraces which he receives from him whom his soul loves.” Cotton Mather, admittedly idiosyncratic in many regards, confided to his diary the extravagantly sensual experiences he underwent during spiritual exercise, describing “the rapturous praelibations of the heavenly world” in which he was “swallowed up with the ecstasies of [Christ’s] love.” So “inexpressibly irradiated from on high” was Mather that he was sometimes unable “to bear the ecstasies of the divine love, into which [he] was raptured”: “they exhausted my spirits; they made me faint and sick; they were insupportable; I was forced even to withdraw from them, lest I should have swooned away under the raptures.”13

Early modern assumptions about gender made possible the acknowledgment and celebration of raptures such as these. Anglo-American settlers, in common with their contemporaries across the Atlantic, associated particular attributes and roles with masculinity and others with femininity, but they did not assume that those attributes or roles were or should remain attached only to one sex or the other: any man or woman could and indeed should embody both masculine and feminine attributes in appropriate contexts.14 Puritan men could thus cultivate a loving and passionate devotion to Christ, envisaging him as a prospective bridegroom, and meanwhile marry women on Earth, developing ardent relationships with their wives that prefigured eventual union with their male savior. In relation to their wives on Earth, they were functionally male, whereas in relation to Christ in the spiritual realm (which was to them very real), they became functionally female. In this world and the next, Puritans could find romantic and sexual fulfilment in a combination of passions that many modern Westerners would find incomprehensible.15

Just as men would become the brides of Christ, so godly women would adopt male attributes through spiritual redemption. Ministers assured their flocks that those who received God’s grace would become “members of Christ,” dedicated to his service and empowered by their regeneration. Contemporaries used the word “member” to denote a penis, and Puritans often wrote of their “spiritual ejaculations,” referring to spontaneous prayer but surely aware of the word’s double meaning. Thus, while the awakened souls of both men and women surrendered themselves to be penetrated and fertilized by their savior, they also became phallic and ejaculatory extensions of Christ. The repeated use of phallic images to denote spiritual power reminds us how dominant patriarchal conceptions were within Puritan culture and of the limits to gender fluidity. Yet women could assume masculine attributes and become correspondingly potent. A virtuous woman as much as any man had “the image of Christ and God upon her,” and on the Day of Judgment, her soul would “be marvellously changed into the likeness of the Lord Jesus Christ himself.”16

Meanwhile, images of the divine in clerical writings were sometimes explicitly maternal and reproductive. Willard referred to “the womb of providence” and spoke of the world as “a sucking infant depending on the breasts of divine providence.” Nehemiah Walter urged his readers to “lay” their “lips unto the breasts of the gospel” so as to take from it “spiritual food.” Clergymen, the congregations over which they presided, and the colleges at which they trained also assumed maternal, reproductive personas. William Adams referred to ministers as “travailling in birth with souls till Christ be formed in them.” Samuel Danforth, reminiscing about the early years of settlement, recalled the “pious care” taken of “sister churches, that those that wanted breasts might be supplied.” John Wise described Harvard College as “our dear mother,” producing “fair, and numerous offspring.” Contemporaries endowed body parts and the physical processes associated with them with clearly gendered attributes (the breast and womb representing maternal nourishment and fecundity, the penis connoting virility). Yet men, women, and even institutions could acquire male and female organs, along with their functions and the cultural significations that they carried.17

Men adopted a bride-like posture not only as Christians but also in other contexts. They made sense of situations in which they deferred to male-identified authority by assuming in those contexts a female persona. John Cotton, in whose Boston congregation John Winthrop was a member, declared that the relationship between rulers and subjects in a commonwealth was equivalent to that between “husband and wife in the family,” so that men who became empowered as voting citizens on election days should then defer to those whom they elected, as wives should obey their husbands.18 Meanwhile, women could assume masculine roles in particular circumstances and be treated as if male figures by men and women around them. If a husband was ill or absent, a wife could step into his shoes and expect male neighbors to engage with her as if they were dealing with her husband. As household mistresses, women routinely exercised authority over male servants and other dependents. Their doing so might seem incompatible with patriarchal assumptions, but as the historian Phyllis Mack reminds us, a subordinate male was “functionally feminine in relation to his female superior,” who in turn was “functionally masculine in relation to her apprentices or dependents.” By no means all women had the opportunity to embody patriarchal authority as household heads, but hierarchies of age and status routinely placed women in positions of precedence over men. Rank or status often outweighed biological sex in deciding who had authority in a given position; whoever had that authority became male-identified. Dominance and subjection found expression through gendered language, but social and political order rested just as firmly on male as on female submission to those placed above them. Gendered power operated more in terms of situation than with regard to the sex of those involved: it did not belong exclusively to any one sex.19

That measure of flexibility in gender roles depended in part on biological assumptions that made a much less absolute distinction between men and women than later conceptions of the body would claim to exist. Most contemporaries believed that four fundamental fluids or humors (blood, choler, melancholy, and phlegm), present in all human bodies, governed physical functions and emotions. The humors were in constant flux, which led to a never-ending struggle against disequilibrium. (Contemporaries believed that humoral imbalance caused disease, thus the use of bleeding and purging to restore a healthy balance between the four fluids.) Men and women differed from each other to some degree because they had a distinct combination of these four fluids; the physical and moral frailty of women resulted from their distinctive humoral makeup. Yet those differences between men and women were as unstable as the humors themselves. From this perspective, there could be no clear-cut distinction between the sexes. Equally significant in its implications for gender was Galen’s still-influential “one-sex” model of the body. This model assumed that female reproductive organs were nothing more than male organs inverted (the uterus an internal version of the scrotum, the ovaries resembling male testicles, and the penis appearing in women as the cervix and vagina). According to Galen, a failure of heat prevented female organs from thrusting outward, so that women, according to this model, were beings who had failed to develop fully into men. This denial of any clear-cut boundaries between male and female bodies, in humoral and one-sex models, would have legitimated and facilitated the flexibility of gender roles in early modern culture.20

That Puritans could envisage for each believer, including men, two intensely passionate marital relationships, one with an earthly spouse and the other with a heavenly bridegroom, was due, then, to specific conceptions of gender and even of anatomical sex that the colonists brought with them across the Atlantic. There is no evidence to suggest that Native American traditions and practices influenced English settlers’ understanding of gender or sexuality. Early reports from the New World had described a category of Native American men, often referred to by Indians as “half man / half woman,” who lived as women, dressed in female clothing, and engaged in sexual relations with other men. There were also Indian women who assumed male clothing and roles, though this phenomenon seems to have been less widespread. From a Native American perspective, the “half man / half woman” seems to have embodied and promoted a harmony that resulted from reconciling opposites within the physical and spiritual realms. The composite identity of these individuals enabled them to mediate between the polarities of male and female as well as between those of spirit and flesh. Yet European explorers and settlers neither understood nor respected the assumptions underlying Native American conceptions of gender: that Indians revered men who lived as women and who made themselves sexually available to other men in their communities exemplified for Europeans the immorality and savagery of Indian culture. Indeed, Europeans used the word “berdache” (an Arabic word meaning “male prostitute”) to describe such men. English and Indian conceptions of gender did share an assumption that men and women could combine male and female attributes, but whereas the “half man / half woman” tradition conferred on particular individuals a gender identity that combined male and female components, English and specifically Puritan conceptions of gender involved everyone adopting a range of gender roles and attributes in particular contexts.21

The performance of these gendered roles within Anglo-American society proceeded according to a complex and strictly regulated protocol. Whether colonists considered an individual’s adoption of male or female roles appropriate depended entirely on the context. Yet a clear commitment to order and regulation within early modern society should not blind us to the degree of flexibility in gender roles and categories that contemporaries used to make sense of their lives. Moreover, that “fluidity of self-perception” (to quote Phyllis Mack) framed all interactions because contemporaries used gendered and familial metaphors to describe social, political, and religious relationships. Puritans inhabited a world in which earthly bridegrooms could anticipate eagerly becoming heavenly brides, in which both men and women embraced a polymorphous sexuality through which they would bear “the babe of grace” even as they rejoiced in their phallic credentials as “members of Christ.” Thus, John Winthrop could refer to Christ as “my love, my dove, my undefiled,” praying that he might be “possesse[d]” by his savior in “the love of marriage,” and recommend that romantic union to his third wife, Margaret Tyndal, as a “pattern” for their own loving relationship. In ways that may seem bizarre and alien to us, Winthrop became both husband and wife, alongside his effusively loving friendship with William Spring.22

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A few months after Winthrop penned his letter of loving farewell to Spring, as the Puritan flotilla journeyed across the Atlantic, he revealed in a lay sermon that he delivered aboard the Arbella how central the ideal of “brotherly affection” was to his vision for a godly life and godly society. Just as a body would fall apart without the ligaments that held its bones together, he declared, so the members of a godly commonwealth would fall prey to contention and disorder unless “knit together” by “the sweet sympathy of affections.” It was that “fervent love” for one another and for Christ that had united the faithful throughout Christian history. Winthrop proposed that his audience take from scripture two models for that love between brothers and sisters in Christ, which he called “the bond of perfection.” The first of these was the relationship between Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, each eager for “nearness and familiarity,” sharing in each other’s sadness or distress, and happiest when the other was “merry and thriving.” Many generations later, the spirit of that first human relationship had been “acted to life” anew in another consummate expression of Christian love: the friendship between David and Jonathan. Winthrop described that friendship in a deeply affecting passage of his sermon: Jonathan loved David “as his own soul,” Winthrop assured his audience. Even when facing a brief separation, “they thought their hearts would have broke for sorrow, had not their affections found vent by abundance of tears.” Inspired by the example of these two men, New Englanders should “entertain each other in brotherly affection” and “love one another with a pure heart fervently.” Love between brethren would inspire love for Christ, who would then be “formed in them and they in him, all in each other knit together by this bond of love.” Relationships such as these were not limited to men: “other instances,” Winthrop noted, “might be brought to show the nature of this affection, as of Ruth and Naomi and many others.” Mutual love and devotion among faithful men and women, modeled on the first human marriage and loving same-sex friendships, would enable a truly redemptive society, preparing believers for union with Christ.23

Expressions of loving friendship suffused official statements and private correspondence in early New England. When Connecticut’s colonial assembly called in 1638 for a treaty of friendship between the northern colonies, urging that New Englanders should “walk and live peaceably and lovingly together,” it invoked the example of Jonathan and David, whose “love was great each to other” and who “made a covenant to perpetuate the same.”24 Winthrop’s son and namesake inspired effusive declarations of love from his brothers in Christ. “I do long for your company as much as the teeming earth for the rising sun,” wrote Hugh Peter. “Oh how my heart is with you.” Peter assured the governor’s son that he loved him “as mine own soul” and declared in one letter, “Oh that I were to die in your bosom.” Edward Howes, writing from England, addressed Winthrop Jr. as “charissime” (dearest one), “gaudium meae vitae” (joy of my life), and “optatissime amice optime” (best and most desired friend). Howes declared that Winthrop’s virtue had “kindled” in him “such a true fire of love” that “the great Western Ocean cannot quench”: “it shall be with you,” he assured his friend, “wheresoever you are.”25

For seventeenth-century New England Puritans, as for early Americans in general, context was everything. Male intimacy could nurture and reinforce or corrupt and undermine their commonwealth, depending on how it expressed itself. The year prior to John Winthrop’s celebration of “brotherly affection” in his sermon aboard the Arbella, “five beastly sodomitical boys” were exposed on the Talbot and subsequently sent back to England for punishment, so “foul” was their offense. As the scholar Michael Warner has pointed out, Winthrop’s glorification of male love “was thus delivered in the very space of the repudiation of sodomy, en route to the New Canaan.” Warner suggests that Winthrop and others may have feared sodomy as a warped version of the “brotherly affection” that, in Winthrop’s words, should unite New England’s citizens as “members of the same body.” The “bonds of brotherly affection” would provide the sinews of a godly commonwealth, but the distortion of that affinity could pollute and destroy it. To put this another way, though sex between men was illegal and denounced by religious leaders as an abominable sin, Puritans saw intense love between godly men—and, we might add, godly women—as decent, honorable, praiseworthy, and indeed indispensable to the success of a godly commonwealth.26

Puritans were by no means unique in stressing the importance of impassioned and loving friendship. Revivalists who took the colonies by storm in the mid-eighteenth century and Methodist preachers who traveled through the South in the early decades of independence adopted a similarly fervent tone in describing their feelings for one another.27 By no means all eighteenth-century Americans saw evangelical preachers as worthy role models. Yet throughout the century, men across the colonies and the new republic formed and often maintained over many decades loving friendships that were emotionally intense and physically affectionate. To give just two examples: In September 1763, Joseph Hooper, a recent graduate from Harvard College, sat down in Marblehead, Massachusetts, to compose a letter addressed to his former classmate Benjamin Dolbeare. He wrote as follows: “The sun never rose and set upon me since I parted from you, but he brought to my longing imagination the idea of my bosom friend; my faithful memory daily represents him in all the endearing forms that in his presence ever rose in my mind. My fancy paints him in the most beautiful colours, and my soul is absorbed in contemplating the past, wishing for a reiteration and longing to pour forth the expressions of friendship.” In December 1798, as Daniel Webster prepared to leave Dartmouth College on vacation, he dreaded the prospect of having to spend several weeks apart from his friend George Herbert. “The thought distracts my soul and fills me with dismay,” Webster wrote. “I go, but George, my heart is knit with thine.” Webster was convinced that he would “sink in dark despair” were it not for knowing that he and his friend would soon be reunited on his return to Dartmouth. “Roll on the hour,” the young man exclaimed in fervent anticipation.28

Many of these friendships lasted far beyond young adulthood and flourished alongside relationships with women, providing emotional support through various trials and reminding friends of an earlier phase in their lives that seemed, at least in retrospect, happy and carefree. In 1813, when the Philadelphia Quaker Henry S. Drinker came across a letter written by his dear friend Richard Thomas twenty years before, it still touched him deeply: “it spoke to my heart’s best feelings, as I well remember, and I now again read it with emotion.” At Drinker’s request, Thomas then unearthed the response that Drinker had sent to that letter. “How sweet to the heart is the interchange of such kindness,” Thomas now wrote, “such ‘flow of soul’ as melts in these letters.” Since his departure from Philadelphia, separation from his “favorite friend and brother” had resulted in “gloom” and “depression.” His chief pleasure in life now was correspondence with Drinker and other friends “whose hearts are susceptible of the sorrow and distress of others, and who are kind enough to allow me that intercourse.” In Drinker’s original response, he had celebrated “a social sympathy which heaven has implanted in the feeling heart, in mitigation of its own sufferings.”29

Loyalties associated with friendship seem for the most part to have complemented rather than clashed with those of blood and marriage. Early Americans took it for granted that loving relationships between men and between women could coexist with heartfelt love for a person of the opposite sex. Eighteenth-century male friends often referred to each other as brothers and so characterized their relationships as a form of kinship. Family incorporated biological kin, conjugal relatives, and friends with whom one felt a sense of affinity into one loving and supportive community. Describing friends as kinfolk was neither perfunctory nor merely honorary: it indicated a very real and meaningful connection between individuals. That conflation of kinship and friendship enabled a much more expansive network of personal association than that encompassed by blood or marital connection.30

Yet circles of friendship were generally exclusive and indeed explicitly exclusionary. Those who belonged to communities of faith might refer to one another as loving brothers and sisters in Christ, but they rarely characterized those who belonged to other denominations or faiths as part of their family. Literate, privileged young men celebrated their friendships with one another as cultivating social sophistication, sensibility, and learning, as well as religious faith; they generally assumed that similarity in temperament, background, and social status would draw potential friends together. In effect, this ethos operated as a form of class and gender solidarity. Though we know that less privileged white Americans were exposed to celebrations of friendship through sermons and newspaper articles (which they might hear read aloud even if they could not read themselves), we have no way of telling how they responded to such encomia. Some less privileged listeners may have thought of friendship as a kind of bond that people of all social classes could experience, but the culture of friendship most certainly did not encourage people to form friendships that traversed social classes, let alone racial boundaries. Though some antislavery activists in the late eighteenth century urged white Americans to recognize and embrace their fundamental commonality with African slaves as brothers and sisters in one great human family, few privileged white Americans were willing to contemplate welcoming even less privileged whites, let alone people of color, into a fictive brotherhood. Though representatives sent by royal governors, colonial assemblies, and later state and federal governments to negotiate treaties with Native Americans sometimes adopted Indian rhetoric that invoked loving brotherhood and friendship in order to grease the wheels of diplomacy, Americans of European descent had little interest in understanding Indian conceptions of friendship other than through a European lens. Nor did they intend to treat Indians as brothers and sisters in practice unless the exigencies of the particular situation demanded that they do so. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, as political thinkers stressed the importance of fraternal collaboration between citizens in making a republic feasible, that nationalized conception of brotherhood was intrinsically exclusive, defining carefully who had the right to citizenship and to which nations the United States would extend the hand of fraternal amity.31

Early Americans routinely asserted that ties between friends had a broad public significance, creating affective bonds between individuals that would then serve as the emotional sinews of a larger identity. They understood society not as an abstract entity but as the sum of individual and intensely personalized relationships. That legitimization and celebration of loving friendship as a public good acquired a particular and explicitly political significance for North Americans during the revolutionary period. Personal friendship became a way of encouraging empathy between citizens in a society that no longer cohered through shared loyalty to a monarch. Friends would encourage in each other a generosity of spirit that would then inform and enrich social and public interactions, creating a sympathetic and magnanimous citizenry. According to the scores of essays and poems celebrating friendship that appeared in newspapers and magazines in the late eighteenth century, male friends found personal happiness through these relationships and inspired one another in their pursuit of knowledge and virtue. Those qualities and accomplishments would then radiate outward and transform postrevolutionary society, encouraging citizens to look beyond their own selfish interests to comprehend and empathize with the interests and feelings of others.32

The postrevolutionary press actively encouraged and celebrated loving and sympathetic friendships between men as the quintessence of republican masculinity. One particularly vivid essay exemplified this idealization of male friendship and its tone of unabashed sentimentality:

Tell me ye of refined feelings—have you ever found pleasures equal to those derived from friendship? What can be more delightful to the eye of benevolence than the prospect of a connection where the sentiments and affections are sweetly united? Picture to yourself, reader, two young men mutually bound by a sacred friendship—a friendship established upon the experience of years. See them with interlocked arms walking the pleasant grove, reciprocally breathing forth, without reserve, the sentiments of their bosoms! Observe the essence of benevolence glowing on their cheeks, and the gleams of participated ecstasy sparkling in their eyes. View them sweetly seated at the enchanted shrine of their goddess—friendship—unbosoming every sensation, and even mingling heart with heart! Notice them saluting each other after being separated for a season by the calls of interest—with what cordiality—with what emotions of joy—with what exquisite delight they embrace.

Author after author emphasized the yearning for intimacy and support that brought men together, as well as the broad social benefits that such friendships produced. The sentimental friend figured, then, both as a personal good in his own right and as a means to a larger social good. Friendship also played an important role in reenvisaging the family as a model for society as a whole, shifting attention away from the hierarchical authority of paternal figures to the more democratic bonds that bound brothers together in service to the new republic.33

Much of that postrevolutionary conversation focused on male friendship as a foundation for enlightened male citizenship. Yet printed discussions of same-sex friendship often depicted the nurturing of love between friends as a duty and pleasure that men and women shared in common. Literate women wrote of their feelings for one another in letters that bore a remarkable resemblance to those passing back and forth between male friends. Indeed, some men were eager to learn about the experience and expression of sympathetic friendship from female relatives and neighbors. Because women living in the seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century colonies left behind them far fewer letters and diaries than did men and because male diarists and letter writers were for the most part from the upper ranks of colonial society, we know much more about elite male friendships in the colonial period than about those of women and less privileged men. But we can be confident that all Americans who had access to newspaper and magazine articles or sermons praising friendship (regardless of whether they could read them or heard them read aloud) would have been familiar with the notion that same-sex friendships played a central role in nurturing civic and religious society.34

Context and moral tone remained all-important. Eighteenth-century Americans worried that male rakes and profligates might corrupt other young men who kept company with them. Yet they also believed that men could influence each other for good, quelling their corrupt tendencies and appealing to each other’s potential for virtue—despite a new thread of anxiety about male desire that wove its way across the Atlantic. By the early eighteenth century, there had emerged in London a distinct subculture that catered to men seeking sexual intimacy with members of the same sex; such men could meet in specific parks or taverns, the latter known as “molly” houses because of the self-consciously effeminate and often cross-dressing men who frequented such establishments. Lurid descriptions of these gathering places appeared in printed accounts of police raids on such establishments and transformed sodomy from an indistinct threat, often associated with foreigners, to a much more immediate and concrete phenomenon. At the same time, the notion of sodomy as an immoral act that anyone might be tempted to engage in was giving way to the image of the sodomite, a distinct social category referring to a specific cadre of men consistently attracted to other men. Some scholars have argued that these developments made men much more reluctant to express affection that might be confused with sexual interest, so that by the middle of the eighteenth century, Englishmen were shaking each other’s hands rather than embracing and kissing each other.35

Yet no such discernible subculture had emerged in British America. A wide spectrum of city dwellers on the eastern seaboard were exposed to imported images of the homoerotic through accounts of police raids and prosecutions in London as well as through literary representations such as Lord Strutwell and Captain Whiffle, characters in Tobias Smollett’s popular novel Roderick Random. Yet American newspapers still depicted sodomy as an alien vice and more specifically as a prime example of British decadence; they generally kept silent about its possible occurrence in their own midst. Though descriptions of physical affection between men did occasionally suggest that untoward intimacies might be taking place, especially in attacks on groups that were otherwise suspicious, such as the Freemasons, contemporaries seem to have viewed these instances as aberrations. Male friendship enjoyed an almost entirely positive and respected place within colonial and postrevolutionary society.36

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 have led them to overlook the logic that framed relationships in the past echo David Halperin’s insistence that words like “heterosexuality,” “homosexuality,” and even “sexuality” constitute “a significant obstacle to understanding the distinctive features of sexual life in non-Western and pre-modern cultures” (emphasis added).44 A short essay such as this cannot hope to provide a comprehensive discussion of the challenges involved in recovering premodern conceptions of gender and sex, let alone a complete reconstruction of what that conceptual world may have looked like. But I do hope to have illustrated through a brief examination of two particular types of relationship, both endorsed enthusiastically by early Americans, just how unhelpful are our most fundamental assumptions and beliefs about what we now refer to as gender and sexuality in making sense of the past. The loving and passionate relationships that early American men were encouraged to develop with Jesus Christ and with one another, even as legal and religious codes condemned sex between men, can seem very bizarre to a modern Western sensibility, because our cultural wiring is so different from theirs. That wiring extends deep inside us. Because most modern Westerners have internalized the paradigm of sexual orientation, it is extremely difficult for us to wrap our minds around a world in which gendered expression and the relationship between love and sex operated according to a different logic. Even finding words that are not freighted with the baggage of modernity poses a huge challenge (as many of us who have tried to write about sexual cultures in the past will attest). Yet try we must. Otherwise, we will achieve little more than to project our sense of ourselves onto the past.45

That daunting yet exciting project of reconstructing the “cultural poetics of desire” by which people lived in the past has important implications for historians of modern sexuality. Scholars working on the experience, articulation, and policing of heterosexuality in the modern United States and Europe should consider that the rest of the world, including large numbers of migrants making their way into Western countries, do not necessarily think about sex in the same way (even as Western values seek to establish cultural hegemony across the globe). In an era of massive migration, the paradigm of sexuality that took hold in the twentieth-century West now coexists alongside very different models for making sense of love and desire. Meanwhile, alternative ways of understanding and evaluating sexuality articulated by theorists, evangelicals, and many young people who embrace a much more fluid sense of their sexual identities are creating an even more variegated and volatile cultural landscape. Heterosexuality is not only a recent and idiosyncratic phenomenon but may also turn out to be much more fragile and transient than we often assume.