Male Friendship and Masculinity in the Early National South: William Wirt and His Friends

Abstract

My dear Aminadab, wrote William Wirt to his friend Dabney Carr in 1804, I look to you as one of those few, well tried and dearly beloved friends, who will often relax my `brow of care', and checker with soft and genial light, dusky path of Dabney Carr was only one member of Wirt's closeknit of lawyers, relatives, and friends in early nineteenthcentury Virginia. In addition to William Wirt and Dabney Carr, group included Virginians St. George Tucker, Peachy Gilmer and his brother Francis Walker Gilmer, Billy Pope, John Coalter, William H. Cabell, Littleton Waller Tazewell, and Marylander Benjamin Edwards, who had served as Wirt's surrogate father. Intense, lifelong friendships were vital to these men's lives. Bound together by kinship and by a common profession, William Wirt and his friends also enjoyed lifelong ties of love and support similar to bonds that nineteenth-century women experienced in what Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has labeled a world of love and ritual.1 Letters written by men in this group offer important new evidence about male friendship and masculinity in early national South. First, they demonstrate that southern white men enjoyed close ties with each other. Second, they reveal that, for at least some men, male intimacy was important at stages of life. Finally, they suggest that male friendship could enable southern men to explore alternative models of masculinity. Although recent studies have demonstrated importance of male friendship to middle-class white men in Northeast, southern men's intimate relationships with each other have not yet received attention they deserve. Although their economic and political alliances-reinforced by kinship-have received some attention, studies of such power relationships rarely address personal rewards of male friendship-what St. George Tucker once referred to as all Ardor & Sincerity of Friendship. A close study of William Wirt and his friends, however, reveals that these southern men cherished warmth and affection of their friends and colleagues.2 E. Anthony Rotundo's recent research on manhood indicates that romantic friendships northern white men were limited to youth. According to Rotundo, most important distinction between female friendships and male friendships was that among males, romantic friendship was a product of one distinct phase in life cycle-youth. Although male friends, like female friends, shared their innermost thoughts and emotions and occasionally caresses, their friendships ended as they achieved manhood through a career and marriage. After a brief youthful period, mature men instead participated in the male culture of workplace, in which competition and cooperation replaced romantic intimacy. By contrast, Donald Yacovone's study of male abolitionists, Drew Gilpin Faust's study of a sacred circle of southern proslavery writers, and Samuel J. Watson's study of army professionals suggest that men who lived on margins of their society often fostered more enduring intimacy. This logic seems pertinent to men in this study. The constant flow of advice within this of upwardly mobile, urban-dwelling, wage-earning lawyers in a world dominated by elite plantation masters reveals tenuous grasp they had on public success and importance that they attached instead to love and friendship. As William Wirt signed a letter to Peachy Gilmer, a true friend was Yours through every vicissitude of life.3 For these southern men, friendship was vital at stages of life, from youth to old age. White southern men are understood primarily in terms of their relationships with their social inferiors: women, poor whites, and slaves. Planter-class males usually are described as ruling patriarchs of southern household and as social, economic, and political leaders of a region bound for secession and Civil War. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, in his influential study of male culture in Old South, portrays southern men as concerned, above all, with demonstration of their honor in political displays and public combat. …