Friendly Relations: Situating Friendships Between Men and Women in the Early American Republic, 1780–1830

Abstract

He was, Abigail Adams wrote, 'one of the choice ones on earth'. He, in turn, teased that she was a real-life goddess. They saw plays together during their time in Paris, disagreed over parenting matters and shared an open and warm relationship. He was not Abigail's husband, John, but Thomas Jefferson. 1 Abigail Adams is well known for her loving relationship with her husband, whom she addressed as 'dearest friend', but she also had warm friendships with men such as Thomas Jefferson. For all the historiographical focus on marital, familial and sexual relations, there was another category of relationships available to elite Americans in the early republic: friendships between men and women.While the ideal of friendship in early America, as in classical literature, imagined a pair of male friends, friendships like that between Jefferson and Abigail -and John -demonstrate a more complicated reality. 2 Friendships occurred across genders, between individuals and couples and were embedded in larger social circles. The ideal of friendship as a dyad was impractical in a society where people lived their lives enmeshed in families, marriages and networks of friends. 3 Friendships were not entirely private, then; friends had to consider how the relationship looked to, and fitted in with, those around them. Men and women who became friends, in an era rife with fears of seduction and exaltation of marriage, needed to position themselves 'vis-à-vis those who would threaten the relationship with rumors and accusations' in order to 'orchestrate social perceptions of their relationship '. 4 In attending to how friends positioned their relationships, we are looking at the public rather than private dimension of friendships. 5 Whether observed together in public or the subject of prying eyes in personal letters, friends were always under the watchful gaze of their neighbours. Women had to be careful how they interacted with men at social gatherings, which men escorted them in public and how they conducted correspondences with men. As small a sign as a seal on a letter could set off local gossips. Eliza Slough reported to her friend Fielding Lucas that since his letters with his distinctive 'L' seal 'pass through several hands before they are delivered into mine, the good People here have determined that you are my Beaux'. She advised him to stop using the seal to quiet her chattering neighbours. 6 C 2012 Blackwell Publishing