ABSTRACT
This chapter defines the Adams-Sewall friendship with reference to scholarship and eighteenth-century friendship ideals. It hypothesizes that true friendship is a crafted alterity—an imagined state that nevertheless captures echoes of emotional intimacy and the lived experience of valued friendship. It finds that Adams and Sewall idealized their friendship in complementary ways as a heroic male friendship, imagining their friendship to be historically significant and judging their other friendships against their own “primary” bond. Such imaginings offer the possibility that Adams’s friendship with Sewall was as significant an influence in his political development as was that of his wife and confidante Abigail and his celebrated friendships with Founders Jefferson and Rush. While historians can never know the nuances and nexuses of friendship as fully as the friends who formed the bond, the Adams-Sewall friendship provides a rare opportunity to conduct a microhistorical case study of a friendship dyad on the eve of the American Revolution.
