“Under These Classic Shades Together”:

Abstract

Across American colleges and universities during the late antebellum period, young men associated outside the classroom in literary, social, and fraternal clubs, all-male spaces highly conducive to the formation of strong friendships. Strong male relationships developed in which such terms as “intimacy,” “fraternal love,” and the “after life” were fundamental tenets of a shared experience. Unlike the collective world found in the public sphere of adult men, the antebellum college setting differed precisely because the young men quite frequently lived and dined together in dormitories, boarding and rooming houses, and fraternities, often secretly organized, in the towns and cities in which their colleges were located. Their lives were marked by dynamic uncertainty: not yet fully independent adults, but no longer completely dependent for support on their families.1Since at least the 1970s, historians have debated the possibilities of same-sex intimacy among women, the terms of which have often centered on their timing and their prevalence in early American society.2 Only recently, however, have men as gendered subjects become an area for scholarly inquiry, with the so-called New Men's History.3 Historians have demonstrated numerous instances of same-sex intimacy among males, including among college students, though the challenge of finding concrete sources for such intimacy has made definitive assessment difficult in all cases.4 Some historians have concluded that college friendships were mostly platonic products of early manhood and highly dependent on the environment in which they were formed.5 Other scholars have argued persuasively that same-sex attractions and intimacies, and not simply intimate friendships, were also distinct possibilities for college men.6 This article argues that the students themselves defined the boundaries of intimate friendships in an uncertain period prior to full adulthood. In the antebellum college, for the first and perhaps only time in their lives, young men formed strong friendships in an individual, intimate, and perhaps homoerotic world, one unregulated by parents, kinsmen, or neighbors. Inherently a fragile and temporary world—rife with the tensions created by sectional conflict, the responsibilities of impending adulthood, and societal expectations to marry—young men grappled to make meaning of the fleeting nature of their intimate friendships formed with fellow classmates, even as they hoped to maintain them beyond college.Of all the institutions of higher learning in late antebellum America, the College of New Jersey (officially renamed Princeton University in 1896) was unique in its near equal mix of young white men, from North and South and from middling and elite backgrounds.7 While most young men initially sought friendships with those from similar cultural backgrounds, over time friendships formed that integrated competing ideas about manhood, northern and southern, into a new collegiate form. For southerners, a new kind of emotional language was made available to them, one not easily accessed at southern colleges. For northerners, further contact with others from their region, as well as those from farther afield, served to widen the scope and increase the variety of possibility in the construction of their young manhood. Much as in other contexts where the bonds of party trumped those of section, at the College of New Jersey the bonds formed by young northern and southern men seem to have overcome the anxieties and dichotomies of a fraught nation, forming what one historian has called “a distinctive social regime.”8 For these young men, their friendships reflected their conceptions of manhood, coalesced around the shared experiences of living and studying together, and aimed toward an elite national education and, by extension, future in the citizenry.9To understand male friendship, the possibilities of same-sex intimacy, and the composite nature of student culture at the College of New Jersey, this article proceeds along two different paths. The first section will consider how students constructed friendships with each other in fraternities, literary societies (notably the American Whig Society and the Cliosophic Society), and on campus more broadly, through an examination of their college autograph books. If the particularities of section and class had animated their lives before college, in the crucible of the college environment the intimate friendships formed with their classmates prevailed and often superseded their previously held predilections. The second section will explore the students' relationships to parents, surrogates, and siblings through family letters, arguing that intimate friendships, along with the vicissitudes of college life itself, helped to reshape the nature of their relationship to family members at home. No longer were these young men fully dependent on their parents for the emotional and affectionate bonds that had previously sustained them. New friendships and experiences also meant changing conceptions of family and, by extension, a growing awareness of the lives expected and required of them in the future.Students' hopes for the future were never clearer than in their words to one another, and the records of those words are most numerous in the period immediately preceding graduation. In the spring of 1852, students at the College of New Jersey prepared to graduate with the usual mixture of heady elation and heartfelt despondence that characterize seniors on the eve of commencement. They also carefully prepared to write farewell words to one another that would reflect the significance of the past four years of college life.One such student, Pennsylvanian Benjamin Chase Dorrance, anxiously wrote to Charles Colcock Jones Jr., a Georgian and a fellow member of the Cliosophic Society (Clio) in the class of 1852: When once we have left these “Classic Shades,” circumstances must determine whether we shall ever meet again. Should these be adverse … may this page serve to remind you of one whose heart will ever cherish with emotions of delight the remembrance of the many pleasant hours we have spent together here. Most likely, the two men did not meet again after graduation. Charles Colcock Jones Jr., son of one Princeton graduate and brother to another, became the mayor of Savannah in 1860, a Confederate officer, and a noted historian of the South. His publications numbered more than one hundred, but at this moment in 1852 all that was in the future, one made uncertain by the impending change brought by graduation. Indeed, no one knew what the future held. As it turned out, circumstances for Benjamin Dorrance were less kind: he died in 1859, not having yet reached age thirty.10Two years earlier and under similar circumstances, another Pennsylvanian, Edward Payson Heberton, also used the occasion of graduation to write to his classmates. Heberton, a member of Clio, reflected on the meaning of his college experience and the special friendship he had formed with one such young man, Robert Bolling, a Whig and a fellow member of the class of 1850: Here we have been companions together for two years—lying side by side under these classic shades together, dipping from these sparkling fountains, the brimming cup of science. In lazy ease, we have leaned back [in] good easy chairs and puffed away in contentedness—in a perfect cloud of smoke, which always appeared to make one's head a little softer—the tongue a little more glib—and us a good deal happier. Yes, Bob, we have realized the joys of college life—but now it's all over for us. The joys of college life may have ended, but both Heberton and Bolling sought postgraduate degrees from Princeton, the former in the seminary. For his part, Heberton completed his degree, married, and served as an assistant paymaster in the U.S. Navy during the Civil War; about Bolling less is known.11Significantly, Heberton, Dorrance, and dozens more like them wrote in their classmates' autograph books, bound volumes that allowed each member of the class to sign his name and to write a short departing note. From the 1850s onward, autograph books were typically “gold-stamped or blind-stamped brown, dark blue, or red imitation leather over hard covers with approximately 125 gilt-edged leaves of white or light paper.”12 The imitation leather of the book's cover reflected students' pecuniary limitations, while the gilt-edged leaves and gold stamping on the book's cover conveyed the importance of the contents, both to those who inscribed inside the book and to those who might read the entries later in life. Although better constructed than the unbound scrapbooks, autograph books lacked the elegant construction of society guest books or family registers. The students' intense efforts in filling autograph books belied their poor construction. Some of the title pages, for instance, are beautifully lettered with illustrations and poetry.13In the 1850s autograph books were “all the rage,” and the students of Nassau Hall used their autograph books to “collect not only the autographs of classmates, but also good wishes, bits of favorite verse, letters of farewell, or reminiscences of shared events during undergraduate years.”14 By the middle 1850s, some autograph writers included ambrotypes or tintypes with their entries. Compared to diaries, autograph books were by no means private, as they circulated widely among classmates. Yet, autograph writing was itself an intimate experience, in which the writer possessed in his hands the compiled memories of a shared friendship. In their messages to each other, young men transformed their “college days” into “the happiest days” of their lives. They are at once an admixture of shared personal reminiscences and a public statement about the meaning of friendships at a particular moment in their lives.15For many students, the words written in autograph books marked the deepest intimate emotional experience in their lives to date. Another student in the class of 1850 and a member of Clio, the New Jersey native William Henry Canfield, composed an entry in Robert Bolling's autograph book in the days before graduation, describing his feelings for their shared friendship: FIGURE 1:Reproduction cover of autograph book of Ewing Graham McClure, 1861. Courtesy Princeton University Archives, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.Never, no never shall the recollection of the spring of 1850 depart from my memory—its glorious opportunities—its happy hours and blessed reunions—its inestimable results—these distinguish the close of our collegiate career as a period of greater interest than any other in our lives. Canfield, who would later become a seminarian and tutor at Princeton, continued his recollection of his friendship with Bolling, resorting to emotional and florid language. “The scenes in which we have been permitted to engage,” he wrote, “the events which we have witnessed in all their stages—are not only of a character infinitely beyond human estimate, but of such a nature that they surely cannot be recalled to mind without exciting emotions which language would fail to express.”16The Canfield autograph, even more so than those of Heberton and Dorrance, reveals how college students found emotional intimacy with other men and formed different conceptions of manhood in the process. Canfield's autograph underscored the notion that the young men themselves understood the transitory nature of their experience together and nevertheless found it the most formative part of their lives. In recalling the scenes of past intimacy, Canfield failed to find the words to capture the “exciting emotions” of those shared moments. This failure of language perhaps reflected the unspeakable nature of homoerotic intimacy itself, and, at the very least, such a failure complicates the meanings and possibilities of close relationships between two men.The construction of intimacy through shared experiences and emotions was a treasured aspect of these young men's lives. In the autograph books, despite limitations on privacy, students found ways to reveal the memory of the intimacy that they shared with each other. “I believe it is a much harder task to write in the autograph book of a very intimate friend,” James Addison Henry of New Jersey declared to fellow Whig and member of the class of 1857, the Pennsylvania native Wallace DeWitt, “than in the book of one to whom you are not so warmly attached. In the case of the former you are anxious to refer to some little scene or incident which you may suppose will give him much pleasure to remember in after years. In the case of the latter however we are apt to write the first-thing that comes into our heads.”17 As Henry suggested, the autographs composed with a “little scene or incident” in mind were tied to long walks, social occasions, and the details of conversation—the intimacy of shared encounters together. Both men hoped to remember such “incidents” for many years to come, and indeed both men maintained strong connections to Princeton in the years after graduation.18Autograph books were not only records of intimate experiences; they were also meant to be reminders, almost memorials, of the past. For New Jerseyan John Thurman Gilchrist Jr. of the class of 1855, the impending departure of his friend and fellow Clio Frederick Cox Roberts, a North Carolinian who later became a notable lawyer and served as a Confederate cavalry captain in the Civil War, was most lamentable because of the intimacy the two had shared as friends while boarding at the “room of Mrs. Moore.” “The friendship formed at first has gradually ripened into intimacy,” Gilchrist wrote, “[a]nd now when we are in its full enjoyment, we are called upon to part.” But Gilchrist also hoped to be remembered by his friend. Employing the trope of advice-giving common to autograph books, Gilchrist composed a bit of original verse by which to be remembered: Far away 'neath a warmer sky Has fortune cast your lot— Still as of'n as your thoughts may fly, Or memory turn a moistened eye, To dwell on scenes long since gone by,Or think of friends that Northward lie, May I not be forgot— Like many of the other autograph writers, Gilchrist understood intimacy to be possible between two men. He hoped to memorialize the intimacy of their friendship, if only in the autograph book of his departing southern friend.19Intimacy and another concept, fraternal bonds, were often closely associated and enabled through newly formed social fraternities.20 By recasting each other as brothers in an extended family, students formed friendships that gained a sense of permanency, perhaps even more so than the relationship of biological brothers. The bonds of fraternity also corresponded, in large part, to sectional identities, a fact worrisome to faculty observers. Class of 1850 graduates William Canfield and Robert Bolling joined with other northerners in Sigma Chi Fraternity, while southerners were more likely to solidify fraternal bonds at Delta Kappa Epsilon. The sectional alignment was also the case with literary society membership. Whig Club members had a higher prevalence of southerners than its rival, the Cliosophic Society, though friendships were possible both across section and literary society.21 While debate and rhetoric claimed nominal significance at literary societies and fraternities, as one historian has written, “the real concern of each fraternity was to create within the larger college a small group of compatible fellows for friendship, mutual protection, and good times.”22 The compatibility of such groups often depended, not surprisingly, on shared cultural backgrounds.Departing students often wrote of the “after life,” referring to the future after Princeton as if it were equivalent to the Christian afterlife. Virginian George William Ford wrote his fellow Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity brother, Frederick Cox Roberts: “In after-life when looking over these small mementos of your college friends, if your eye should ever rest on this page let it recall to your memory one of your best friends and one who will ever remember you with affection.”23 Georgia native George Mercer likewise revealed his feelings of sadness parting with fellow fraternity brother and southerner George Ford. “I cannot tell you how sad my heart is at the thought of our separation,” Mercer averred, adding, “I have known you long and well—have shared with you my feelings—have told you of my hopes and prospects—have always made you my intimate friend.” In 1851 Charles Phillips, who never graduated, hoped that Frederick Henry Quitman, a Mississippian from a prominent family, would be able to enjoy a happy married life. Neither Phillips nor Quitman wished for a continuation of the college living arrangement. Instead, Phillips's autograph and those like it acknowledged the perceived inevitability of future marriage and wished their fellow classmates the best.24For some young men, the friendships formed at college included intensely passionate emotions and experiences. George Mercer recalled for George Ford many such moments spent together: I can never forget our pleasant rambles in the woods—our sittings round the stove, and the many tales of the woods and streams that used to take us back to the loved solitudes of our Southern homes. If I live till my head is white and my frame feeble, the recollection of those stirring talks will send the blood coursing through my veins.25 The visceral image of blood coursing through veins evokes the erotic passion of sexual life. One may question if those “pleasant rambles in the woods” with his fellow fraternity brother Ford included a homoerotic element as well. At the very least, George Mercer was sharing the intimacy of past events and, in so doing, also invoked a connection to their shared southern heritage. Likewise, Mercer, along with John Gilchrist and many others, hoped the memories—if not the physicality of the friendship itself—with George Ford would continue long past graduation.Women were undoubtedly a regular topic of discussion among college students, yet the autograph books were largely devoid of any mention of them. In his autograph to William Krebs Falls, the irascible William Alexander Henry, son of a Princeton professor, joked, “Now my dear boy, all that I have to say is take care of yourself, and Mrs. Falls (i.e., of course when she is about).”26 Henry's acknowledgment that a “Mrs.” was an inevitable and desirable part of young men's futures hinted at the importance of marriage, but most autograph books have little else to say about women. Experiences with women, romantic or platonic, were not relevant to saying farewell to those students with whom had been created the greatest intimacy of their lives.While most students likely expected to marry women, they participated in a marriage of a different sort at college. In their unpublished book, College as It Is: Or, the Collegian's Manual in 1853, James Buchanan Henry and Christian Henry Scharff noted the students' custom “to have their Daguerreotypes taken for the College Picture Gallery,” which featured portraits of classmates, one seated next to the other, and hung in framed composites inside Nassau Hall. “We think this a very pretty and interesting custom for an alumnus returning on a visit to Princeton years after graduation,” the authors opined, “[and] has the satisfaction of once more seeing the familiar faces of all his classmates, and of perhaps showing to his pretty wife how he himself used to look when a collegian.”Henry and Scharff's Manual transformed the student daguerreotype composites from a memento of an all-male past into a quaint relic to show the “pretty wife” of the future. In doing so, the authors diminished the significance of the college friendships themselves, viewing them as a mere idle curiosity along the path toward traditional marriage. Yet, this “very pretty and interesting custom” can also be seen as a kind of fraternal, college marriage, and one that unsettles traditional marriage more generally. In seating one man next to the other, rather than picturing each student individually as was done with faculty portraits, the student daguerreotype replaced the union of man and woman with that of man and man. The daguerreotypes of dozens of young men paired next to their classmates, when combined and framed into a composite, becomes a visual representation of life without women and an ambiguous remnant of past same-sex relationships for future viewers.27As even Henry and Scharff's reading of the daguerreotype composites suggest, womanly companionship was mainly a matter for the future. Without women as an everyday part of their lives, young men struggled to delineate the limits of fraternal affection within the all-male college environment. The process was further complicated by the necessity of southern students to leave the College of New Jersey to serve in the Civil War, and the growing sectional tensions were reflected in the autograph book entries. Florida native Andrew Anderson focused his autograph to New Jerseyean John Runkel Emery on the lack of intimacy in their friendship. “Although I have never been intimate with you,” Anderson admitted, “yet had circumstances thrown us together I've no doubt we would have been very good friends.”28 John Peter Jackson Jr., another New Jerseyan, confessed to Frederick Cox Roberts, “I have always regretted [we] could not have been more intimate,” which was perhaps unsurprising given that the two men did not share similar fraternity or literary society connections. While entries such as Jackson's were more likely to come from northerners than southerners, young men from both sections still shared a great deal of camaraderie over cards, drinking, or both, through the start of the war.29The approach of the war also brought southern students closer together. Hugh Martin Coffin, a Tennessean with roots in New England, wrote a touching note to his friend Ewing Graham McClure, another Tennessean in the class of 1862. Both Coffin and McClure were leaving college to fight in the Civil War, and even though McClure was not graduating in the spring of 1861, he still chose to circulate an autograph book to his classmates. In his autograph to McClure, Coffin hinted that the nature of their friendship had been quite intimate: “Let me assure you, my dear fellow,” he wrote, “that my friendship for you has almost ripened into affection; if such a thing is possible between male and male, it has quite done so.” Five months later, while on campaign near Centreville, Virginia, Coffin wrote his mother a poignant letter. In it he described meeting a “classmate of mine,” who was “a N. Carolinian and belongs [to] the Regt. of cavalry from that sight. Of course it does me good to meet up with those who were my friends and classmates.” The bonds of affection formed at college between Hugh Martin Coffin and his classmates proved to be most intimate of his short life—he died on December 5, 1861, in service of the Confederate army.30Like so many of the autographers, Coffin was testing his feelings with McClure and revealing unusual emotions for another man. Richard S. Van Dyke, a Tennessean who served as a Confederate cavalry officer, also wrote to McClure about his deep affection for him: “Mac, there is no use trying to get around it, I ‘like’ (I won't say love for that belongs to the tender sex) you.” Perhaps in recognition of the peculiarity of his confession, Van Dyke felt compelled to add, “To lay all joking aside and no flattery either, I can assure you, Dear Mac, that no one occupies a nearer place in my heart than yourself.” Van Dyke was killed near Darksville, Virginia, in 1863, not yet past twenty-five. Much like his fellow southerner Hugh Coffin, the most intimate relationship of Van Dyke's life may very well have been the friendship he formed in college with Ewing Graham McClure.31The possibility of continuing friendships beyond college was a very real one for many students. In 1862, Samuel Stanhope Stryker, who would later serve as a medical aide during the Civil War and become a noted physician, lamented the impending parting from his friend John Tyler Haight, even as he hoped for future intimacy. Stryker and Haight had prepared together at the Lawrenceville Classical and Commercial High School in New Jersey before entering Princeton, where their friendship grew even stronger. “We came to Princeton,” Stryker recalled, “and here again our old friendship revived until it culminated in those bonds of fraternal love which under no consideration should be severed.”32 Stryker, a member of Whig, acknowledged the time for parting had come from Haight, a Clio, but he offered his hope that their friendship would continue past college: “There always is a time when the best of friends must part, when the strong ties of friendships must be broken, but John I feel far differently in parting with you situated as we are than I would under ordinary circumstances, there are stronger bonds between us than those of mere friendship and on these I put my reliance that you will ever remember your old friend.”33 Stryker's invocation of fraternal love lent credibility to his desire for a continued relationship, one “beyond mere friendship,” and offered the possibility that instead of mere play-acting, he hoped to solidify their friendship further than it had developed at college.Even in the midst of the Civil War, the possibilities for intimate friendships did not diminish. Both New Jerseyans, both Clios, and both of the class of 1862, John Cochran and John Tyler Haight had a relationship that evinced one such example: “For three years we have been classmates and firm, strong friends. We have lived and loved together during this time. We entertain similar opinions on a great many things.” In his autograph to Cochran, Samuel Stryker likewise recalled the intimate connections shared with his fellow classmate. “Those Jack were halcyon days,” Stryker reminisced, “the only time when mortal man can truly enjoy himself is just between the years of fifteen and twenty, and as that period of my life has been in a great measure associated with you (and you being a jolly good fellow as we all know), of course I must have in a great degree received my highest enjoyment at your hand.”34 The friendships of young men like Cochran, Haight, and Stryker relied to a great deal on being jolly fellows, which implied a good deal of drinking, carousing, and practical joking. Perhaps, as some autographs suggest, they include a measure of superficiality that the young men could not recognize for themselves.35Most students espoused fond memories of Princeton and recognized that their friendships would not have been possible without their “alma mater.” Yet in his autograph to Wallace DeWitt, the Tennessean Calvin Morgan Christy revealed ambivalence about his college experience. Christy, who was a member of Delta Phi Fraternity and the Cliosophic Society, nevertheless did not find the strong connections that so many of his classmates had enjoyed. While “very anxious to leave this place … [to] be with my relations and entirely free from restraint,” Christy admitted, “yet there are cords which bind me to our common ‘alma mater’ and at times make me loath to go.”Even Christy, eager to part ways with Princeton, could not resist, in retrospect, the value of his experience there. He cited his friendships with much fondness: “Among her children are my much intimate—and devoted friends…. To leave these—for whom I have the highest regard, is a painful but unavoidable duty. Though I cannot always be with them, still, I can think of them as the companions of my early days.” For his part, Christy acknowledged the end of his daily contact with Wallace DeWitt, but not the end of their emotional relationship. “And Wallace,” he continued with a final effusive outpouring, “if we separate for aye, never, for one moment, believe that I can forget you—Oh no! We have been too much together and know one another too well to fear such a result. Often shall I call you to mind in reviving college pleasures and college friends.”36 In later life, Christy achieved success as a business executive in the Christy Fire Clay Company of St. Louis, and perhaps because of this distance from the middle Atlantic states, he does not seem to have stayed connected to the college that restrained him. Whether he ever saw Wallace DeWitt again is not known.37What did the intimate language used in autograph books by young men such as Payson Heberton, Richard Van Dyke, Samuel Stryker, and Calvin Christy mean in the context of nineteenth-century America? In one sense, their autograph book entries were not particularly unusual. The description of their friendships, with their many shared experiences together, and the lamentation at parting can be read as a fairly typical, if nostalgic, evocation of an idyllic past, common to autograph books of the period (and of later such entries in high school and college yearbooks). Yet, the entries were unusual for young men in the antebellum period in three distinct ways. First, young men reflected on the common set of shared experiences, formed through their several years together, which had come to inform their notions of the nature of close male friendship, a relationship that they had never before known. As their futures remained uncertain, the fluidity of domestic arrangements in the college environment represented a fleeting moment, destined for the most part to be replaced by more traditional family settings, often undergirded by the bonds of marriage. The autograph book entries helped to quell those future anxieties through the backward glances taken together in friendship.Second, the language of autograph books formed part of a