As a set of rhetorical and cultural conventions, this species of friendship was hardly new. It resembled earlier commercial relationships between Virginia planters and British merchants in the eighteenth century, and political relationships in New York before and after the Civil War.

T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of the Revolution (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985), 84-123.

Paula Baker, The Moral Frameworks of Public Life: Gender, Politics, and the State in Rural New York, 1870-1930 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), 31-39.