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By Root 1783 0

Young men in the mid–nineteenth century could be passionate in ways that some readers today find disorienting, driving modern scholars into endless—and probably irresolvable—debates over exactly where comradeship ended and sexuality began. They found nothing unorthodox in strolling arm in arm, addressing letters to “my dearest” or “lovely boy,” and sharing fond embraces in a common bed. In 1858, when his old college friend Harry Rhodes was away from Hiram, Garfield wrote to him: “Harry Dear, do you know how much I miss you? In the school—the church, at home, in labor or leisure—sleeping or waking, the want of your presence is felt. I knew I loved you, but you have left a larger void than I ever knew you filled.”

A few months later, he addressed the younger man even more passionately, quoting Longfellow: “I would that we might lie awake in each others arms for one long wakeful night and talk not in the thoughts or words ‘Of the grand old masters / Nor from the Bards sublime,’ but in that language ‘whose tone gushes from the heart.’ ” Four years later, while Garfield was a general in the Union army, Rhodes would write wistfully to him, recalling the “real physical delight—an acute pleasure almost” when the two roughhoused together (presumably naked) in the creek at Hiram.48

Far from being disparaged as a sign of effeminacy, such attachments were prized as evidence of what the antebellum generation called “manliness”: a quality that embraced strength, authenticity, independence, and a kind of romantic (or Romantic) intensity. To embody this quality fully was young men’s highest ambition, they often professed to one another. Indeed, scarcely could Garfield lift his pen to address any topic, whether personal or political, without referring to manliness or manhood. An 1859 letter he wrote to a college senior is a good example:

You are now about to conclude upon a profession in life and I hope you will take one in which your highest manhood will find scope, and I hope you will make it a rule that the rush of the world’s work shall not crowd out those pursuits which enlarge and enrich the soul. We see too many instances of those who have degenerated into mints to coin money in, and the fine medallion work of whose souls was defaced.… I know that you will always keep a fresh strong heart quick to the touch of friendship, whose portals fly open at a friend’s approach like the gates of Peter’s prison at the angel’s touch.49

When Garfield derided procompromise Republicans as “emasculates,” he also averred that the proper mission of the party was to “sustain … independent and manly truth.” Nor was he alone in this sentiment. Countless newspaper editorials from the period praised Lincoln’s (or other politicians’) “manly independence and honest, sturdy firmness” and the “firm and manly tramp” of the Wide Awakes. At the height of the secession crisis, a Republican paper in Massachusetts assailed the compromisers: “We need, at the North, to inculcate the principle of manly, personal independence, a principle that will enable a man to avow his real sentiments, and maintain them too, by his vote, his acts and his voice.”50

Like later generations, the men of the 1850s and 1860s expressed their ideals of masculinity through their physical appearance. Most noticeable, and revealing, was the astonishing profusion of facial hair that sprouted forth during those years, including on the previously smooth faces of Garfield and his friends. For a century and a half, American men (and most Europeans) had, nearly without exception, gone clean-shaven: it was a sign of gentility, civility, and restraint. (In the late eighteenth century, one Philadelphia woman considered it a matter of note that she had seen “an elephant and two bearded men” in the street that day.) This changed very suddenly. Most American historians, when they have considered the topic at all, have assumed it had to do with Civil War soldiers avoiding the inconvenience of shaving while in the field.

In fact, the phenomenon predated the war by a number of years—and was the subject