BOOK REVIEWS 735 which figures prominently in the political and constitutional thought of African Americans such as Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Barbara Jordan, Thurgood Marshall, and Barack Obama, un- derscores a related point, the sum of what Bernstein wants us to understand: that the founding fathers’ most valuable legacy was a belief in the possibility of improving government and society. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/82/4/735/1792040/tneq.2009.82.4.735.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021

Charles F. Hobson, editor of the Law Papers of St. George Tucker at the William and Mary School of Law, is the author of The Great Chief Justice: John Marshall and the Rule of Law (1996).

The Overflowing of Friendship: Love between Men and the Creation of the American Republic. By Richard Godbeer. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Pp. xiv, 254.$35.00.) Anyone who has read correspondence from the eighteenth cen- tury has likely stumbled upon those curiously affectionate letters sent from one man to another. Effusive in emotion, they read like love notes exchanged by courting couples, except that they are written by men—such as Alexander Hamilton—whose marriages and extra- marital affairs made their heterosexuality all but certain. What does one do with these letters? For years, historians explained them away as rhetorical flourish or simply ignored them. Then, with the sexual revolutions of the 1970s, historians such as Jonathan Ned Katz sug- gested that they were part of a gay American history. Yet no one has attempted to take these letters seriously and situate them in the historical moment. No one, that is, until Richard Godbeer. With The Overflowing of Friendship, Godbeer begins by address- ing the most titillating question: Are these letters evidence of ho- mosexuality at the birth of the United States? He deftly navigates this minefield by explaining how erotic attraction did not determine identity in the eighteenth century. Men often shared beds and on occasion dreamed of each other naked or got hold of another’s “doo- dle” (p. 58), but sex between men was taboo and so even if they were having it, they didn’t write about it. Yet all this is beside the point for Godbeer, who is interested in love between men. In essence, Godbeer argues that deeply affectionate friendships between men were well accepted during the Revolutionary era. Beginning with twenty-seven-year-old Philadelphian John Mifflin (1759–1813), Godbeer demonstrates how young men strove to find companions with whom they could share their most intimate feelings. 736 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

For Mifflin and his friend, this meant spending idyllic afternoons in a pear grove, exchanging locks of hair, and celebrating anniversaries. “Life seems to stagnate unemployed in friendship,” Mifflin once con- fessed (p. 21). That such lovesick displays were normal is evidenced by the openness with which Mifflin and his friend conducted themselves. Godbeer observes that affection could be transferred from one friend Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/82/4/735/1792040/tneq.2009.82.4.735.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 to another—Mifflin had at least two such intense relationships—and that homosocial bonds often complemented heterosexuality. Friends routinely discussed courtship, and many continued their friendships long after they became husbands and fathers, writing love letters from across the miles until death. Having fleshed out a specific example, Godbeer goes on to place the friendships in their historical context. From Mifflin, he moves on to more familiar names like Daniel Webster and William Wirt, both of whom also maintained loving relationships with their friends. He cites newspaper articles valorizing friendship, noting how contemporaries praised sentiment and sympathy as the marks of a real man. Godbeer also backtracks a bit to demonstrate that fictive brotherhoods were vital to seventeenth-century Puritans and the evangelists of the Great Awakening. Yet Godbeer’s true interest is the creation of the republic. As such, he spends the final chapters exploring how friendship became the basis for American citizenship. Many of the soldiers who fought for independence exchanged letters as emotive as anything Mifflin wrote, and this helped them imagine a new political order. “In the past,” writes Godbeer, “familial imagery had been used most commonly and conventionally to evoke the authority exercised by fathers and husbands, but American revolutionaries were much more interested in the ties of brotherhood” (p. 143). Thus, after the war, they built a nation knit together by brotherly love. An accomplished historian of sexuality and culture in early America, Richard Godbeer is the ideal historian to write this book. He under- stands the subtleties at work and therefore is able to complicate our understanding of manhood by arguing for the fluidity of gender in the eighteenth century. When men wrote love letters to their chums, they were consciously performing female roles. This was acceptable because premodern notions of gender allowed “both masculine and feminine attributes within the same person” (p. 11). Consequently, Alexander Hamilton could portray himself as a seduced damsel, play- fully indicting John Laurens for stealing “my affections without my consent,” without forfeiting his masculine power (p. 128). This and BOOK REVIEWS 737 other insightful observations of the intimate world of the founders make The Overflowing of Friendship a clear asset for students of gender in the founding era. At the same time, given Godbeer’s expertise, one might have ex- pected a more ambitious project. His sources are largely traditional (letters, diaries, and newspapers), as are his subjects (elite white men). Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/82/4/735/1792040/tneq.2009.82.4.735.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 He also paints with a broad brush and as a result passes over intrigu- ing contradictions without explanation. For example, he claims most men had several close friends but notes that William Wirt placed all of his affection on one man. Similarly, his claim that homosocial friend- ship and heterosexual marriage were complementary is challenged by revolutionary aide-de-camp William North, who longed for his army buddies well after his wedding. Most unsettling, Godbeer asserts that “not all men chose to embrace” intimate friendships but does not explain why some men participated and others did not (p. 11). A richer work might have more thoroughly explored the varieties of male friendship. Ultimately, Godbeer’s work will be judged for what it says about the sexuality of the founders. Larry Kramer’s 19 May 2009 article in the Huffington Post suggests that gay activists will be disappointed by the book’s timidity—while those at the other end of the ideological spectrum will no doubt deride it for painting the founders as mincing fops. Godbeer tries to move past this debate by rightly placing the focus on love instead of sex and reminding us how much the meaning of love has changed in two hundred years. For this reason, however, it is unfortunate that he does not connect love between men to a larger history of emotion. In Marriage, A History (2005), Stephanie Coontz explains that the eighteenth century witnessed a “love rev- olution” during which affection and intimacy became the sole basis for marriage, displacing economic and political considerations. This transition no doubt affected male friendships, and it would have been interesting had Godbeer explored these connections. That said, The Overflowing of Friendship is a sophisticated analysis of sources that have long confused historians. Offering a thoughtful window onto the world of early American men, it demonstrates that sympathy and affection were important qualities for the founding fathers.

John Gilbert McCurdy, Assistant Professor of History at Eastern Michigan University, is the author of Citizen Bachelors: Man- hood and the Creation of the United States (2009).