Histories of Friendship in Early America: An Introduction

Abstract

Exploring friendship as a historical concept in early America poses a challenge. As both a public and private enterprise, friendship is not easily separated from the myriad relations in which it is often embedded: family, kin, and community, as well as connections based on social ties, political interactions, diplomatic alliances, military companies, economic exchanges, and religious practices. Furthermore, the words friend and friendship had multiple definitions in early America, from affiliation, association, and companionship, to emotional closeness and fellow feeling, as well as affinity and rapport, unity, and equality.1 Friendship was vital to indigenous cultures; it intersected with personal, familial, clan, village, and diplomatic relations. Likewise, early Euro-Americans used the term “friend” and “friendship” expansively. It was not unusual for siblings to consider each other their closest friends or for parents to define relations with their children as “friendly.” For many white Americans, an ideal form of friendship occurred within marriage. For enslaved blacks, friendships of interdependence bolstered emotional and economic survival. For free African-Americans in the slave south, the client/patron relationship remained critical to interracial friendships. In addition, the late eighteenth century emphasized the need for sympathy and sociability among Anglo-American friends, which, according to one scholar, became a means to “revolutionize” American society.2 As in earlier time periods, friendship was experienced by early Americans in connection with other relationships, and yet it was different from other emotional bonds. Teasing friendship out from these other relationships is necessary to contextualize and historicize this crucial cultural practice. As a historical phenomenon, friendship contains strong currents of both continuity and change over time. Capturing the often subtle but substantive alterations in the practice and significance of friendship is as important as demonstrating those aspects that remained the same.