Hello!
How are you?
Hope life is treating all of you well…

I don't understand (at all) the term "sheet fellows". It appears in the context of the confrontation of Irish-American pro-slavery Repealers and Daniel O'Connell's abolicionist stance. In 1843, the Cincinnatti Repealers wrote a letter to their coleagues in Dublin, and O'Connell refuted their allegations. I include a piece of reading for a clearer understanding of the matter:

Quote :

I [Theodore  W.  Allen] have chosen to present the exchange in the form of a series of the Cincinnati Repealers’ “Allegations” and O’Connell “Rebuttals.”
Allegation 1: The abolitionists have caused the treatment of the Negro to become more harsh. Rebuttal 1: Not true. But if it were true, it would add to the indictment of the slaveholder, who would punish an innocent person for the offense of a third party. Allegation 2: The great majority, in a country where the majority rules, favors slavery. Rebuttal 2: If public opinion rules then, as “Irishmen ought to do,” they should work to influence the public mind in favor of the oppressed!” instead of lauding “the master as generous and humane.” Allegation 3: The aristocrats in England would more readily accept laborers as “sheet fellows,” than would “whites” of any social class in the United States consent to accept Negroes “on terms of equality.” “[H]owever much humanity may lament it, we make no rash declaration when we say that the two races cannot exist on equal terms under our government and our institutions.” The Negro is naturally inferior to the “white.” Rebuttal 3: How, where it is a crime to teach even a free Negro to read, can one presume a “natural inferiority” of those so deprived? Finally, on this point, there are Negro Catholic priests in Brazil, and in Rome, and one of their number delivered a sermon before Louis Philippe, King of France. “To judge properly of the negro you must see him as educated, and treated with the respect due to a fellow-creature, uninsulted, by the filthy aristocracy of skin.”

I am sure you'll lit my lantern, because I am blind here.

A zillion thanks in advance, as ever, because you're an oasis in a bleak desert…



[Could it be "bed fellows…"?]

Yes, I take it to mean somewhat like the English expression to be 'bed fellows', that is someone you could figuratively 'get into bed with' or in common usage someone you trust enough, or at least be so closely of the same thinking and ideas, that you could ally with them and work together side-by-side. But maybe there's more to it than that in this case?

Hi, Meles meles,
I think you are right… There was an album of a "progressive" rock group responding by Greenslade —back in the Jurassic era, so you'll have no notice of it— which harbored a song (or was it the LP title? —can't be sure) called "bed manners are extra" (probably cracking a joke with "bad manners"), and yes, one normally may say that accepting someone in one's bed is a sign of confidence or no rejection (counterexamples are always findable for everything, but if we were to be deterred by anyone of them it would be almost impossible to even talk about a single little thing in this world… No certainties, certainly (not even that, because at least one is for sure, or more if you dig…).
OK, all this to say that this must be the meaning… I was blinded by the "folio" connection of "sheet" and carving hard my brain to make the paragraph meet with something associated to paper, bureaucracy, official dispatches and whatnot…

Thanks a lot Meles meles…
Take care

Best wishes,
CM

Agree with MM. I think "sheets" were often mentioned instead of "bed". In Othello, Iago, sensing the disapproval of Cassio as he speculates on what is likely to happen the first night Othello spends with Desdemona, changes tack and says: "Well, happiness to their sheets". Sounds odd, but means "to their marital bed".