People who say that Hamilton invited Laurens to have a threesome with him and Eliza on their wedding night MAKE ME SO MAD. Like he DID NOT SAY THAT??? WHERE DID PEOPLE GET THAT BULLSHIT FROM IM CRYING
Hamilton writes:
"I would invite you after the fall to Albany to be witness to the final consummation. My Mistress is a good girl, and already loves you because I have told her you are a clever fellow and my friend; but mind, she loves you a l’americaine not a la françoise."
And he ends the paragraph with "Adieu, be happy, and let friendship between us be more than a name"
"...to be witness to the final consummation."
This basically means that Hamilton is inviting Laurens to watch as he and Eliza seal their marriage with sexual intercourse. This was very common, especially amongst Christians. NO WHERE does Hamilton tell Laurens to join.
"...she loves you a l’americaine not a la françoise."
Hamilton is telling Laurens that Eliza loves Laurens in the american way, aka as a FRIEND and not lover.
"Adieu, be happy, and let friendship between us be more than a name"
Note the friendship. FRIENDship.
This letter has no mention of a threesome and by definition and literature means that he wants Laurens to witness the seal of the marriage, a normal thing.
Laurens and Hamilton definitely had something beyond a friendship before, but Hamilton's "romantic love" for Laurens visibly dies down once he marries Eliza.
And btw, to the people who go around saying Laurens did not attend the Hamliza wedding because Lams love blablabla, THAT IS BULLSHIT. Laurens was literally a POW (prisoner of war) and he couldn't attend because of that.
It is true that a bedding ceremony was a historical practice where wedding guests saw the newly married couple off to bed with the expectation they would consummate their marriage (excerpt from Sex and the Church in the Long Eighteenth Century: Religion, Enlightenment and the Sexual Revolution by William Gibson and Joanne Begiato):
That being said, the practice of such a ceremony does not preclude the possibility of a double entendre in Hamilton's letter to Laurens. In the letter, the phrases "transgress," "final consummation," "a l’americaine," and "a la françoise" are all underlined. Hamilton does not just casually mention a bedding ceremony, he explicitly emphasizes the "final consummation," an inherently sexual act. Hamilton may have used the expectations of the time to hide a more suggestive meaning. "Transgress" could even have a double meaning here. Most obviously, Hamilton uses the word in a way that refers to crossing a boundary, as Laurens would have had to leave Pennsylvania (where he was confined as a POW) to attend the wedding in New York. However, "transgress" can also refer to the violation of a law or standard of moral character. Sodomy and sexual intercourse between multiple people/between unmarried people may have been considered types of sexual transgression. Furthermore, Hamilton clarifies that his soon-to-be wife Elizabeth Schuyler loves Laurens in the American way (i.e., as a friend), not in the French way (i.e., as a lover). If the mention of the "final consummation" was truly innocuous, why did Hamilton feel the need to make this point? While this line acknowledges that sex between the three parties would not realistically happen, it does add a sexual emphasis to the reading of this paragraph. There is no literal mention of a threesome, but there is a plausible interpretation that Hamilton was (facetiously) welcoming Laurens to the wedding night sex, if only Elizabeth loved Laurens in that way.
Sexual innuendo and underlined words with double meanings are used in other letters from Hamilton to Laurens, most notably in the April 1779 letter. In one line, Hamilton wrote, "To excite their emulation, it will be necessary for you to give an account of the lover—his size, make, quality of mind and body, achievements, expectations, fortune, &c." Again, the emphasized words (underlined in the original letter) suggest a sexual meaning. Hamilton isn't simply talking about his general stature - he's likely referring to the size of his penis and his experience in bed.
That being said, do I think this was a genuine invitation for Laurens to have sex with Hamilton and Eliza on their wedding night? Do I think a threesome would have occurred if Laurens had attended the wedding? No. Again, sexual teasing is seen in other Hamilton-Laurens letters. Hamilton was likely "lengthening out the only kind of intercourse now in [his] power with [his] friend", as he wrote in the April 1779 letter. And of course, these are all our interpretations. The only one who could tell us the true meaning of the letter is Hamilton himself.
Additionally, your reading of the word "friendship" to invalidate the love between Hamilton and Laurens is frustrating. The use of the word "friendship" does not mean that love is absent or that Hamilton views Laurens less affectionately because of his upcoming marriage. Hamilton often referred to Laurens as his friend, even in letters that predate Hamilton's betrothal to Eliza. In fact, Hamilton's famous April 1779 letter opens with the line, "Cold in my professions, warm in ⟨my⟩ friendships, I wish, my Dear Laurens, it m⟨ight⟩ be in my power, by action rather than words, ⟨to⟩ convince you that I love you" (emphasis mine). Additionally, it would have been unsafe for queer men in the 18th century to be explicit about the nature of their relationships in written letters. Your interpretation suggests that Hamilton would have used some word other than "friendship" in the September 16, 1780 letter if there was a deeply romantic or sexual nature to his relationship with Laurens. What word would he have used? "Adieu, be happy, and let buggery between us be more than a name"? This is also not an argument about whether Hamilton loved Eliza or Laurens more - his love for one does not negate his love for the other.
Also, a minor correction: while it is true that Laurens was a POW when Hamilton wrote the "final consummation" letter on September 16, 1780, Laurens was released in November 1780. He was not a POW when Hamilton and Eliza married on December 14, 1780. This is not to say that Laurens didn't attend the wedding for any reason related to his relationship with Hamilton - he likely did not attend due to his various duties in the ongoing war.
In regards to "friendship" I think it's important to remember that in the 18th century "friendship" was not considered innately platonic. It was not unusual for lovers to refer to their relationship as a "friendship". This is true both for lovers that may be relying on plausible deniability (in case a letter was intercepted) as well as lovers who had nothing to hide.
For example on the 3rd of July 1727 Lord Hervey wrote the following to his lover Stephen Fox:
I hope an empressement [impatience] to thank you for your letter will convince you of the pleasure it gave me, there is nothing I had not rather neglect than this opportunity of answering it. I am so used to be pleased with everything you say to me, but more particularly with any assurances of your friendship, that "tis needless to tell you the satisfaction I tasted in so warm a repetition of them.
(Rictor Norton (Ed.), "Love-Letters from Lord Hervey to Stephen Fox", Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England: A Sourcebook)
While Hervey may have chosen the word "friendship" for it's ambiguity the same can't be said of John Adams who frequently called his wife Abigail his "best Friend" or his "dearest friend". He writes her the following on the 3rd of December 1775:
Yours of Novr. 12 is before me. I wish I could write you every day, more than once, for although I have a Number of Friends, and many Relations who are very dear to me, yet all the Friendship I have for others is far unequal to that which warms my Heart for you. The most agreable Time that I spend here is in writing to you, and conversing with you when I am alone. But the Calls of Friendship and of private Affection must give Place to those of Duty and Honour, even private Friendship and Affections require it.
Seconded, thirded, co-signed, &c &c.
There was no name for passionate love and desire between men, such as the love that Shakespeare expressed in his sonnets, other than ‘friendship’.
O’Donnell, Katherine. ‘“Dear Dicky,” “Dear Dick,” “Dear Friend,” “Dear Shackleton”: Edmund Burke’s Love for Richard Shackleton’. Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 46, no. 3 (2006): 619–40.
...the friendship tradition provided socially empowered men with an established discursive venue in which to express, without social reproach, sentiments of passionate and mutual love for one another, and such passionate, mutual love between persons of the same sex is an important component of what we now call homosexuality.
Halperin, David M. ‘How to Do the History of Male Homosexuality’. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 6, no. 1 (1 January 2000): 87–123. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-6-1-87.
Throughout the late eighteenth century husbands were encouraged to be friends with their wives, to be as close to their wives as they had been to their intimate male friends. The effusive rhetoric of friendship was not modeled on that of romantic love, but rather romantic love took on the semiotics of friendship.
Tobin, Robert. Warm Brothers: Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt15sk9bt.
