Chapter 6

Perfect Confidence and Love

Rebecca Primus and her family were active members of the Talcott Street Congregational Church, the first Black Congregational church in Connecticut. The congregation, pictured here circa 1922, was known for its fierce commitment to abolitionism and public education for Black children. Rebecca Primus stands in the second row, seventh from left.

When Alonzo Choate wrote a letter to his friend Hubbel Pierce in the late summer of 1865, Alonzo’s sister Hannah added a postscript. She called Hubbel “my brother’s old woman,” and urged him to write back soon. “When you send your Wife your picture,” Hannah added, “you can send his sister one if you please.” Alonzo and Hubbel had met in the late spring of 1864 as soldiers in Battery B of the First Michigan Light Artillery; Hubbel was then sixteen, Alonzo a year or two older. Battery B spent weeks marching to Atlanta, enduring what Alonzo called “the perils and dangers of a soldiers life.” Their company reached the city shortly before Gen. William Sherman captured it. After a year of war, Hubbel and Alonzo were back in Michigan. They said their farewells when Battery B mustered out. Hubbel gave Alonzo a ring.¹

Their letters traversed the twenty-odd miles that separated their families’ farms. Alonzo called Hubbel “My Dear beloved Husband” in one letter and “my good Old Woman” in another. They teased each other about their marriage-like bond even as they pursued marriages to women. News in the fall of 1865 that Hubbel was engaged to a cousin named Mary prompted Alonzo to congratulate his friend in a jesting letter: “Well Hub you haven’t got married yet have you. I think you had better wait until you get a divorce from your Old Man, if you don’t I tell your wife what times we used to have sleeping together.” They joked about their sexual familiarity even as family members read and commented on their missives.²

Alonzo and Hubbel never formally named their relationship or their lust. They did not know the words “homosexual” or “bisexual,” nor did anyone else at the time. In fact, their use of conventional marital terminology to describe intimacy, combined with their normatively manly appearance (as soldiers and, later, homesteaders), helped their bond appear ordinary. Gender variance was part of the world they knew; Confederate and Union soldiers alike wrote home about the wild cross-dressing performances that soldiers staged for one another, some of which inspired liaisons between officers and appealing “boy-girls.” But neither Hubbel nor Alonzo understood himself as a separate kind of person based on his gender identity, nor did they or their relatives assume that any sexual intimacies they shared marked them as categorically different sorts of people. Marital conventions helped them naturalize their love for each other as men.³

Alonzo and Hubbel expressed their affections during one of the last moments of the nineteenth century when two men could do so without attracting scorn or risking arrest. Until then, talk of love and marriage did not raise suspicions of immorality or criminality. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most states replaced colonial-era laws that defined sodomy and buggery as capital crimes with new laws that punished “crimes against nature” with lengthy prison sentences. (North Carolina and South Carolina were exceptions, not jettisoning the death penalty for sodomy or buggery until 1869 and 1873, respectively.) According to the criminal statutes of the day, sodomy meant penetration of the anus; oral-genital contact between two people assigned male at birth was often treated with disgust but not (yet) criminally prosecuted. (Pennsylvania passed the first criminal statute for oral-genital sex in 1879.)⁴

As in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, early nineteenth-century law and popular press associated these crimes with aggression, not with effeminacy or an innate condition. The “sodomite” was a man who engaged in a “crime against nature,” not a man who loved another man, and definitely not a woman who had sex with another woman. (There was no criminal category for women’s erotic acts with other women in the nineteenth-century United States because lawmakers believed that, in order to be sexual, an act must involve penetration by a penis.) None of these laws specifically dealt with gender variance nor presumed that gender nonconformity was proof of a sexual identity. Americans of the time condemned specific sexual acts, and sodomy especially. But although the law continued to prohibit sex of any kind outside of marriage, same-sex and otherwise queer expressions of desire were common and mostly unpunished.⁵

Health reformers of the 1830s worried about excessive sexual interest, including girls’ desires that “polluted” their female friends, but a moderate amount of passion aroused little concern. One advice manual warned young women that “kissing and caressing of your female friends should be kept for your hours of privacy, and never indulged in before gentlemen.” Others recognized that young women might have passionate feelings for each other but that those desires must “be buried and come to life again” as love for their husbands. Women who did not seem to need or desire to have men in their lives, at any point, incited far more consternation than girls or women who kissed each other. Frederick Hollick, one of the most outspoken health reformers to name women’s desires in the 1850s, characterized masculine women as of “doubtful or double sex,” sexual “monstrosities” with pathological drives. Women who loved women otherwise experienced relative freedom. (Chapter 8 considers cisgendered women’s relationships with gender-nonconforming individuals at length.)⁶

Within a few decades, a new science of sex (sexology) would introduce categories of “perversion” and illness to describe desires between people of the same sex or with gender-variant people. Sexology, as it came into focus in the 1880s and thereafter, viewed gender variance as evidence of “homosexual” or “lesbian” identity. Law enforcement followed close behind, with police forces newly insistent on arresting “sex deviants” (usually men and gender-variant people) on mere suspicion of illegal activity.

Until then, ambiguity nurtured possibility. Outside of courtship and marriage, people loved and lusted after one another without a distinct vocabulary to name their desires. Unencumbered by categories of sexual identity, same-sex and genderqueer friendships could be loving without the presumption of being sexual. Prior to marriage, many young people engaged in same-sex or queer erotic play without facing accusations of immorality. Novels, books of poetry, stories published in high-circulation magazines, and biographies discussed same-sex couples unabashedly, with a candor that would seem inconceivable by the early twentieth century. Some individuals were tormented by the possibility that they were committing sinful acts by engaging in nonmarital sex, but they rarely thought of themselves or their lovers as sexual deviants.⁷

Marriage was the framework for sexual love that Alonzo and Hubbel best understood. For Rebecca Primus and Addie Brown, two Black women who found love with one another around the same time, friendship and sisterhood also provided metaphors of intimate belonging. For both pairs of lovers, an ideal of conjugal affection simultaneously enticed and eluded them. Lacking a pathway to public recognition of their relationships, such individuals tried to stake out a compromise. Some formed marriage-like households. Others expressed their affection by penning love letters to the people they could only dream of living with as future female husbands or male wives, identities that recognized the interplay of gender and sexual desires in ways that the law did not. It is not surprising that same-sex desires and queer relationships existed in the nineteenth century. What may surprise is just how common same-sex and otherwise queer desire was, before it was named, categorized, and distinguished from the norm.

Hubbel and Alonso found warmth and companionship in Union Army tents, but it did not take a war to bond men to one another. A twenty-two-year-old Thomas Jefferson (“Jeff”) Withers queried his former bedmate, nineteen-year-old James (“Jim”) H. Hammond, in 1826, to “learn whether you yet sleep in your Shirt-tail, and whether you yet have the extravagant delight of poking and punching a writhing Bedfellow with your long fleshen pole—the exquisite touches of which I have often had the honor of feeling?” Withers teased Hammond for jabbing his bedmates with “the crushing force of a Battering Ram,” in language that mingled jokes about penis size with metaphors of aggressive penetration. Withers again asked Hammond about his “fleshen pole” a few months later, wondering if his friend was “charging over the pine barrens of your locality, braying, like an ass, at every she-male you can discover.” After making this disparaging comment about a genderqueer or transfeminine person, Withers then shifted abruptly in his letter to a consideration of early marriage and relationships with women. Even as Withers mocked Hammond about the latter’s desire for a gender-nonconforming lover, he displayed an uncomplicated awareness of their concurrent plans to marry women. They viewed their sexual play with each other as an acceptable part of the transition from innocent boyhood to the adult obligations of marriage.⁸

Lust and arousal figured in many men’s friendships. Men who had every intention of marrying and having sex with women mutually masturbated with their boyhood friends, exchanged passionate kisses with male companions, and cozied up in bed. Abraham Lincoln formed his closest emotional bond with his friend Joshua Speed. The two men became bedmates in 1837. Speed, then twenty-four, was the proprietor of a general store. Within minutes of their acquaintance, he invited the twenty-eight-year-old Illinois legislator to share his wide bed. They slept side by side for years. Based on stories that Speed told late in life, the two men may have visited the same sex worker, a practice that was fairly common among working- and middle-class male friends at the time. Once separated, they wrote to each other about their engagements and marriages to women, but their friendship held special meaning. Perhaps Speed and Lincoln needed morally pure women for marriage, sex workers for sex, and men for love. What’s clear is that their intimacy fit easily within their era’s norms.⁹

Sailors at sea often engaged in mutual masturbation (going “chaw for chaw,” in sailors’ slang) and, less often, in anal sex. According to the mid-nineteenth-century diary of a United States Marine, sex acts involving an adult sailor with a boy or youth were especially common. Marines called these pairings “chickenship,” when an older, higher-ranking adult gave a boy clothes, money, and protection in exchange for sex. The U.S. Navy did not formally outlaw sodomy; when John Adams wrote the first rules for the new organization in the 1770s, he copied much of the Royal Navy’s regulations but, for unknown reasons, omitted a prohibition against sodomy, which the Royal Navy had defined as a capital crime since the 1660s. The U.S. Navy charged a marine with sodomy for the first time in 1805. The brief proceeding concluded without a conviction. The next naval sodomy trial was thirty years later, and it resulted in a not-guilty verdict. In the latter case, a boy said he had “frigged” (masturbated) a lieutenant. A contemporaneous account of British sailors described men on prison ships in Bermuda paired up with partners that they referred to as their spouses. Most of these men never faced criminal charges, but during the Civil War, the U.S. Navy prosecuted several sailors for “improper indecent intercourse.” While officially prohibited, queer sex among sailors was pervasive and, occasionally, romantic.¹⁰

The predominantly male mining camps of the California Gold Rush also nurtured queer intimacies. After the United States claimed California in 1848, thousands of Americans traveled west to land they felt entitled to dominate. Heroic tales of western conquest portrayed a barren landscape where white men fought Indians and seduced white women, but the region was remarkably diverse, if disproportionately male. Foreign-born people (mostly Mexican, Chilean, and Chinese men) joined the local population of Miwok Indians. Some men had sex with other men; Jason Chamberlain and John Chaffee, both white, sailed from Boston to San Francisco (via Cape Horn) in 1849, and lived together in a mining town for more than fifty years. In the domestic spaces of the mining camps, many white men performed conventionally female tasks, cooking and caring for each other. Some Mexican, French, and Miwok women married white miners, but others supported themselves by selling sex in the mining camps’ brothels, saloons, and dance halls. The rough-and-tumble American West was distinctly queer. Men at a camp along the Tuolumne River in California gave the name “Sister Stilwell” to a young person (assigned male at birth) who had a “fresh complexion, lack of beard, and effeminate appearance.” As fiddlers played at the miners’ raucous balls, anyone wearing what one diarist memorably described as “a patch on a certain part of his inexpressibles” danced the ladies’ parts.¹¹

Bedsharing did not always lead to sex, not all sex was romantic, and, of course, not all nineteenth-century friendships were erotic. James Blake and Wyck Vanderhoef, both engineers, met in 1848 while they were in their twenties. In his diary, Blake wrote of the emotional and physical intimacy he found with Vanderhoef: “Long have I desired a friend, one whom I could trust myself with upon this journey of life . . . [It is] a beautiful thing . . . [to] retire from the cold selfish arms of the world, and receive the pure embrace of friendship.” They shared a bed, and this “pure embrace” was not mere metaphor. Blake described a night they spent together: “We retired early, but long was the time before our eyes were closed in slumber, for this was the last night we shall be together for the present, and our hearts were full of that true friendship which could not find utterance by words, we laid our heads upon each other’s bosom and wept, it may be unmanly to weep, but I care not, the spirit was touched.” The ambiguity of their relationship was a consequence, in part, of the flowery prose of these nineteenth-century romantics. What is clear is how ardently many nineteenth-century men felt about their male and gender-nonconforming friends, and how eager they were to express that love.¹²

This acceptance of queer desire between friends, sailors, and schoolmates coexisted with animosity toward men who appeared to enjoy sex with men to the exclusion of all other sexual practices. In her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs included the story of Luke, an enslaved man mistreated and, she implied, sexually assaulted by his master. She described the master as “a mere degraded wreck of manhood,” a “cruel and disgusting wretch” who demanded that Luke “submit” to acts “too filthy to be repeated.” Abolitionists depicted male enslavers who pursued sex with enslaved men as “loathsome,” an adjective that emphasized their larger argument about the inherent depravity of slavery. In 1885, writer F. S. Ryman noted in his diary that his friend “Fuller” was “a ‘C—sucker’ & that he loves & enjoys that d—d custom so revolting to every right minded person . . .” The absence of the word “sodomy” in Ryman’s private journal reflects the pervasive use of euphemisms to describe allegedly disreputable sex acts. It is also possible that Ryman’s disgust was a response to his friend’s preference for oral-genital sex, a practice associated with sex work.¹³

Lawyers and judges tended to portray men accused of sodomy as “assaultive, ungodly, and monstrous.” When William S. Davis was charged with assault and “attempting to commit Sodomy” in 1810 in Baltimore County, Maryland, prosecutors described his intended sex act as the “most horrid and detestable crime, (among Christians not to be named,) called Sodomy.” Even as the details of penis-vagina sexual intercourse proliferated in Fanny Hill and midwifery texts, sodomy remained largely unutterable. The Whip, one of New York City’s gossip papers, inaugurated a series of articles in January 1842 ridiculing those “who follow that unhallowed practice of Sodomy.” Warning that a sodomite’s breath was “death to inhale,” the paper depicted same-sex desire as a contagion “foreign to our shores,” an un-American deviation. Newspapers portrayed sodomites as middle-aged or older men who sought out young men or gender-variant people for sex, occasionally by paying them for it. One was not necessarily born a sodomite, however; sodomy was viewed, instead, as a communicable disease that any man might catch.¹⁴

A considerable portion of the American population nevertheless appears to have tolerated queer sex, depending on the circumstances. Men known for their exclusive pursuit of sex with other men might get a reputation for moral depravity or “loathsome” behavior. But people at the time would not have recognized any commonality between those “sodomites” and other men who engaged in queer sex play in their youth or while living far from the company of women. And no one at the time identified an overarching category akin to “homosexuality” that would encompass both men and women who enjoyed queer sex.¹⁵

Addie Brown stayed up late writing to Rebecca Primus, telling her that their nights together set her body aflame. “If you was a man what would things come to they would after come to something very quick,” Addie wrote at the end of a long day’s labors. Self-educated and orphaned, she spent her days scrubbing floors, washing dishes, and caring for white people’s children in Waterbury, Connecticut, a short distance from Rebecca’s family home in Hartford. They lived a world apart in terms of class and opportunity. Rebecca was a high school graduate, the child of Holdridge, a small businessman, and Mehitable, a seamstress. The Primuses were active members of the Talcott Street Congregational Church, known for its fierce commitment to abolitionism and to public education for Black children. The family rented rooms to Black workers like Addie and ran an informal employment service for white families seeking domestics. Perhaps Addie and Rebecca met at church or when Addie came to the Primus home to seek work. However they first encountered each other, by late summer 1859 their bond was such that Addie insinuated that a comparable degree of physical affection with a man might get her pregnant.¹⁶

Theirs was a love story. Addie treasured her visits with Rebecca. In Hartford, Mehitable welcomed Addie as a member of the family, and the young women shared Rebecca’s bed. In the first of Addie’s surviving letters to Rebecca, dated August 2, 1859, she thanked Rebecca for sending her a long-awaited letter, and added a postscript: “one sweet kiss.” She wrote again a few weeks later, having returned to her employer in Waterbury after a visit to Rebecca’s home: “Dearest Dearest Rebecca my heart is almost broke I don’t know that I ever spent such hours as I have my loving friend . . . it seem to me this very moments if I only had the wings of a dove I would not remain long in Waterbury although we cant allway be together O it tis hard.” Addie’s letters to Rebecca conveyed an intense desire for intimacy.¹⁷

Addie’s trysts in Rebecca’s bed were not her only experiences of sex. She wrote occasionally of difficulties in her employer’s home: “Rebecca don’t you think I am very foolish I don’t want anyone to kiss me now I turn Mr Games away this morning no kisses is like yours.” Did Mr. Games often make sexual advances on her? While Addie reassured Rebecca that Mrs. Games was kind to her, offering her some sewing work for additional income, she also alluded to wanting a new place of employment. Mainly, she wanted to live closer to her beloved Rebecca. Her punctuation and unconventional spacing of words conveyed urgency: “Rebecca my Dearest love could any one love a person as Love you I cannot I cannot stay here any longer with out you I must I must be near you.”¹⁸

Addie wrote these words in defiance of a culture that presumed that women’s sexual desire lay hidden, like a bulb planted in the fall, awaiting the warmth of a man’s interest to sprout and bloom. Few people would have imagined that Rebecca and Addie shared anything other than friendship. If it was men’s insistent demands that provoked women into sexual activity, what erotic act could possibly occur when two women shared a bed?¹⁹

It is somewhat ironic, then, that Addie’s letters to Rebecca, far more than Alonzo’s letters to Hubbel, provide details. Addie’s grammar reveals a breathless longing to be with Rebecca. “I dreampt of you last night,” she wrote in October 1861. “I thought I was seting on your lap with my head on your bosom other things connected with it. I will not tell you at present. When I wake up in the night and found it was all a dream I was so disappointed.” By 1861, Addie lived with and worked for a Black family in New York City that operated a restaurant and bar. She wrote Rebecca: “your most Affec letter to me was like pieces of meat to hungre wolfe I will not tell how often I pursue the contents of it this eve for the first time since I left that I gave vent to tears O Dear Dear Rebecca no one knows the heart of your Dear Friend . . . Dear Rebecca if I had the energy of the dove how swiftly I would fly to the arms of my love.” The voracious wolf and the peaceful dove: Addie may not have had any formal education, but she was a poet.²⁰

Interspersed among mundane descriptions of her daily labors, Addie professed her love with words of kinship: “Think my Dearest Sister,” she wrote in March 1862, “I am near the breathing the same air with your arm gently drawn around me my head reclining on your noble breast in perfect confidence and love.” They were too often apart, and their separations pained her: “But alas the dream is over the charm is broken I alook to the stern realities of my position but to find myself alone of what would I not give at this moment to be with or near you my longs for it ask for it . . .” Familial terms seem to have given Addie and Rebecca ways to express their devotion. They called each other “beloved sisters.”²¹

Addie’s daydreams often returned to the possibility of a home with Rebecca. In a letter from September 1861 she asked, “do you ever think that we will live together anymore or live within two or three miles of each other is it possible that we are not able to clasp each other in our arm but once a year . . .” She thought very little of most men: “what they say goes in one ear and comes out the other sometimes when I get to thinking about different things in particular the fact I almost hate the site of a man.” Addie viewed marriage principally as a way out of domestic service. Twenty years old in 1861, she was courted by a Mr. Lee she met in New York. “I like him as a Friend and nothing more then that but Dear Rebecca if I should ever see a good chance I will take it for I’m tired roving around the unfriendly world.”²²

Forming a household with another woman was an unlikely but not impossible goal. In 1807, Sylvia Drake and Charity Bryant began living together in a rented house. Two years later they built a one-room home in Vermont and opened a tailoring business. For more than forty-four years, Bryant and Drake spent every night in the same bed, toiled side by side as skilled seamstresses, worshiped together in their Congregationalist church, cared for their nieces and nephews, and nursed each other through injury, illness, and loss. Bryant assumed the masculine privileges of the husband (privileges widely acknowledged within their community), with Drake performing the wife’s domestic chores. No formal bonds of matrimony united them, of course, but their neighbors considered them husband and wife. Bryant’s gender nonconformity—her manly gait, habit of pipe smoking, and assertive business acumen, even as she continued to identify as a woman—was more controversial than her public union with Drake. Because they lived according to contemporary expectations for marital respectability and operated a successful business, they earned some local toleration and privacy.²³

Some couples cohabited and wed when one partner, assigned female at birth, lived as a husband. Gender-variant people formed queer households often enough that stories of their “discovery” became their own genre. The figure of the “female husband” recurred in British and U.S. newspapers, court cases, and popular narratives. British author Harry Fielding had popularized the phrase with his 1746 pamphlet, The Female Husband, a “true” story of George/Mary Hamilton, who married multiple women and crossed the Atlantic in an unsuccessful attempt to evade punishment. This and other reports of female husbands, which became especially popular by the early nineteenth century, offered tales of disguise, cunning, and sexual escapades. Newspaper reporters expressed disbelief upon the revelation of a female husband’s “true sex,” but the sheer number of exposés suggests that many more people assigned female at birth lived long and unremarkable lives as men who pursued and often married women. Female husbands and their wives thought of themselves as conventional marriage partners.²⁴

Other couples lived openly as two people of the same sex, as Bryant and Drake did. By the late nineteenth century, some elite white women formed “Boston marriages,” a phrase that drew upon the relationship between two female characters in The Bostonians (1886) by Henry James. James likely based the characters on his sister Alice James and her romantic partner, Katharine Peabody Loring. Often the partners in these unions had professional occupations or found success as writers, actors, or artists. Others inherited wealth. Economic self-sufficiency was nearly impossible for nineteenth-century women to achieve through wage-earning, but it was essential to the formation of women’s same-sex households.²⁵

Americans remained ambivalent about intimacies between women, but unconventional gender, more than sexual acts, could mark a person as perverse. In Louisa May Alcott’s 1870 novel, An Old-Fashioned Girl, the characters Rebecca Jeffrey and Lizzie Small “live together, and take care of one another in true Damon and Pythias style.” But Alcott, who never married or expressed any romantic interest in a man, and whom family members called “Lou,” had another character call these lovers a “different race of creatures” who were, thankfully, not “mannish and rough.” Decades before sexologists named the lesbian and the invert as pathological sexualities, Americans attuned to the experience of queer desire recognized it both as a source of comfort and a potential danger.²⁶

By the fall of 1865, Rebecca had moved to Royal Oak, Maryland. An emissary of the Hartford Freedmen’s Aid Society, she raised funds to build a schoolhouse and stayed until 1869, enduring threats and harassment from local whites. Addie imagined that if they were legally married, she would have been able to accompany Rebecca on her mission to educate formerly enslaved people: “What a pleasure it would be to me to address you My Husband and if so do you think for one moment you would be where you are with out me? . . . you say absence strengthens friendship and our love will not grow cold mine never will I will always love you and you only if you were to remain there how pleasant it would be for me to come there too . . .” When her descriptions of male suitors provoked Rebecca’s jealousy, Addie was quick to reassure her: “Dear Rebecca no ones know the love I have for you I have tried to tell you but have not any more than I do and you are the only that I love or ever try to love nobody will come between us in love . . .” Truly, she wrote with unmistakable passion.²⁷

Even so, Addie teased Rebecca that other girls were in hot pursuit. In 1867 she was employed at Miss Porter’s, an all-girls (and overwhelmingly white) boarding school in Connecticut. Apparently, several students wanted to share Addie’s bed with her. Like many girls’ schools and women’s colleges, this one afforded plenty of opportunities. As Addie wrote to Rebecca, “The girls are very friendly towards me. I am either in they room or they in mine every night often and sometime just one of them wants to sleep with me. I am not very fond of White I can assure you.” Rebecca responded with a teasing suggestion: Perhaps Addie’s breasts attracted these new bedmates. Addie replied, “If you think that is my bosom that captivated the girl that made her want to sleep with me she got sorely disappointed enjoying it for I had my back towards her all night and my night dress was button up so she could not get to my bosom. I shall try to keep you favorite one always for you.” Had Rebecca designated one of Addie’s breasts as her favorite? They appear to have shared a tender, teasing, and mutually gratifying intimacy.²⁸

Addie Brown does not appear in census records, city directories, or any other surviving sources that document her life beyond what she wrote in her letters to Rebecca. In the late 1860s she left Miss Porter’s and moved to Philadelphia, where she married a man named Joseph Tines. And then she was gone, her death at age twenty-eight revealed only by Rebecca’s handwritten note on an envelope: “Addie died at home, January 11, 1870.” Sometime between 1872 and 1874, when Rebecca was at least thirty-six years old, she married Charles Thomas, a man she knew from Maryland. He became the doorman for the Connecticut State Senate, a highly regarded occupation for a Black man in an era of explicit workplace segregation. They did not have any children. Rebecca died in 1932, at age ninety-five, her accomplishments celebrated in an obituary in the Hartford Courant.²⁹

In her later years, Rebecca arranged for the disposition of her belongings. Her remarkable family and her acclaimed career as an educator drew the interest of a local historical society. Sorting through decades of correspondence, she decided which items should be preserved for posterity. Social attitudes toward unmarried women’s passionate friendships had shifted drastically by the 1920s and 1930s, as law enforcement and mental health professionals began to describe a woman’s sexual interest in another woman as proof of deviant desires and mental illness. Other women burned diaries or letters that implicated them in same-sex relationships. Rebecca refused to be ashamed. She stacked Addie’s letters neatly and included them among the records she sent to the historical society, a final act of love.

Alonzo and Hubbel called one another husband and wife, even if they did not imagine the possibility of marriage to one another. In a letter Alonzo wrote in the fall of 1866, reflecting on Hubbel’s upcoming wedding, Alonzo winked at the bond he enjoyed with his wartime friend: “I am fully aware of the affections of a good and true woman, having enjoyed them for over a year.” A year later, at last newly married himself, Alonzo lamented that he had lost Hubbel’s ring: “I was real sorry for it always reminds me of you and of the times we used to have together in the army.” And then he promised to send Hubbel a photograph of him and his wife just as soon as they could have one taken.³⁰

By then, he would have known that Hubbel didn’t end up marrying Cousin Mary. After the engagement ended, Hubbel had taken up with Viola Keyes, an ambitious young woman who had attended boarding school in New York. She had exchanged letters with a few men, Hubbel among them, throughout the war years. Viola saved Hubbel’s letters, including the twenty he received from Alonzo between 1865 and 1868. It was she who preserved a record of the affection he shared with his wartime companion, if not with her.³¹

Hubbel and Viola’s marriage was long, childless, and unhappy. In 1879, Viola prepared to follow Hubbel to the homestead he was establishing in the Dakota Territory. Hubbel sent her letters with detailed information about what to pack, his need for cooking and farming implements, and the weather. The only words of affection in these otherwise mundane dispatches concerned another man, Frank. The two men lived together when they first arrived in the Dakota Territory, before their wives joined them. “I like him ever so much he is as good as he is big. He says he will tell you how I perform when you come. We have pretty pleasant times planning whether our wives will like it here.” The letter is at once tantalizing and frustrating: What did he mean, “how I perform”? Hubbel and Viola were burdened with debts and troubled by Hubbel’s precarious physical and mental health. He complained of his stomach; Viola worried about his “nerves.” Viola and Hubbel both died in the flu pandemic of 1918–1919 when they were in their early seventies, after more than fifty years of marriage.³²

Same-sex and queer companionship met within narrow beds and in pledges sealed by rings and kisses. Suspicions about what “really” went on in those beds might occasion gossip, but same-sex and queer relationships of the eighteenth and nineteenth century were generally tolerated so long as they were not “flaunted” or disruptive to neighbors. Many people in same-sex or queer relationships did not classify their desires, let alone themselves. Neither law nor language yet set these relationships apart, nor fully included them. Instead, marriage, kinship, and friendship all provided metaphors of intimate partnership for such couples. Hubbel and Alonzo called each other husband and wife; Addie wrote to her “beloved sister.” Yet we should not allow this familial language to fool us into questioning the erotic intensity of these romantic friendships.