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Day 7<br />

Reconnect with an Old Friend<br />

I’ve recently been reading the book Team of Rivals, about the men Abraham<br />

Lincoln picked for his cabinet. As I was reading it, I was struck by this<br />

passage concerning the friendship between the future Secretary of State,<br />

William H. Seward, and his friend David Berdan:<br />

“Together, the young men attended the theater, read poetry, discussed books,<br />

and chased after women. Convinced that Berdan would become a celebrated<br />

writer, Seward stood in awe of his friend’s talent and dedication. All<br />

such grand expectations and prospects were crushed when Berdan, still in<br />

his twenties was “seized with a bleeding at the lungs” while sojourning in<br />

Europe. . . The illness took his life…Seward was devastated, later telling his<br />

wife that he had loved Berdan as “never again” could he “love in this world.”<br />

Such intimate male attachments as Seward’s with Berdan, or, as we shall see,<br />

Lincoln’s with Joshua Speed and Chase’s with Edwin Stanton, were a “common<br />

feature of the social landscape” in the nineteenth century America, the<br />

historian E. Anthony Rotundo points out. The family-focused and community-centered<br />

life led by most men in colonial era was transformed at the<br />

dawn of the new century into an individual and career-oriented existence.<br />

As the young men of Seward and Lincoln’s generation left the familiarity<br />

of their small communities and traveled to seek employment in fast-growing,<br />

anonymous cities or in distant territories, they often felt unbearably<br />

lonely. In the absence of parents and siblings, they turned to one another for<br />

support, sharing thoughts and emotions so completely that their intimate<br />

friendships developed the qualities of passionate romances.”<br />

We have previously discussed the ardent friendships of the 19 th century,<br />

and the interesting history of male friendship in general. And while much<br />

has changed in our world since Lincoln’s day, are we not still a society where<br />

we head from our hometowns to far flung locations in pursuit of career or

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