Sexuality of Abraham Lincoln

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The sexuality of Abraham Lincoln is a topic of dispute. His relations with women were either problematic or distant, while those with a number of men were extremely warm. It has been argued that he may have been bisexual, or fundamentally homosexual.

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[edit] Relationships with women

The comment of Lincoln's stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln, that Lincoln "never took much interest in the girls" was repeated in various forms by many others, while other comments by his contemporaries suggest a strong but controlled passion for women.[1] While Lincoln was devastated over the death of Ann Rutledge, whether he loved her is much disputed.[2] An anonymous poem about suicide published locally exactly three years after her death is widely attributed to Lincoln.[3] His courting of Mary Owens was diffident. Around the time she rejected his handwritten, dutiful marriage proposal, Lincoln wrote to a friend: "I knew she was oversize, but now she appeared a fair match for Falstaff."[4] His relationship with Mary Todd, his wife, with whom he had four children, was stormy. Mary was imperious and intemperate, but some have gone so far to suggest she was psychopathic. To be generous, both Todd and Lincoln had difficult characters.

[edit] Relationship with Joshua Speed

Lincoln met Joshua Fry Speed in Springfield, Illinois, in 1837. They lived together for four years, during which time they shared a bed and developed a friendship that would last until their deaths. Joshua Speed married Fanny Hennings February 15, 1842, and the two men seem to have consulted each other about married life. Despite having some political differences over slavery, they corresponded for the rest of their lives and Lincoln appointed Joshua's brother, James Speed, to his cabinet as Attorney General.

At the time it was not unusual for two men to share a bed due to financial or other circumstances, without anything sexually being implied. However, it has been argued by Katz[1] and others that such cozy sleeping arrangements did reflect a distinct emotional landscape for men, and they were sometimes part of homoerotic and homosexual desire, i.e. while what is considered sexual changes greatly over time and within different cultures, human sexual desire remains unchanging. Certainly, correspondence of the period, such as that between Thomas Jefferson Withers and James Hammond, provides clear evidence of a sexual dimension to some same-sex bed sharing.[5] The fact that Lincoln was open about the fact that they had shared a bed is seen by some historians as an indication that their relationship was not romantic. Lincoln shared beds with several other men during his life, both earlier in his New Salem days, during his days riding the legal circuit in Illinois and Indiana, and later while president.[citation needed]

[edit] Relationship with David Derickson

Captain David Derickson was Lincoln's bodyguard and intimate companion between September 1862 and April 1863. They shared a bed during the absences of Lincoln's wife, until Derickson was promoted in 1863 [6]. Derickson was twice married and fathered ten children, but whatever the exact level of intimacy of the relationship, it was definitely the subject of gossip. That their sleeping arrangements raised eyebrows at the time is indicated by the reaction of Elizabeth Woodbury Fox, the wife of Lincoln's naval aide. After hearing the rumor, she wrote in her diary for November 16, 1862, "Tish says, Oh, there is a Bucktail soldier here devoted to the president, drives with him, and when Mrs. L is not home, sleeps with him. What stuff!"[7]

[edit] Depression

When Speed left Lincoln and returned to his native Kentucky in 1841, on the eve of Lincoln's marriage to Mary Todd, Lincoln is believed to have suffered something approaching clinical depression. Lincoln's Preparation for Greatness: The Illinois Legislative Years by Paul Simon has a chapter covering the period that Lincoln later referred to as "The Fatal First," which was January 1, 1841. That was "the date on which Lincoln asked to be released from his engagement to Mary Todd." Simon explains that the various reasons the engagement was broken contradict one another and it was not fully documented, but he did become unusually depressed, which showed in his appearance, and that "it was traceable to Mary Todd, the socially prominent young lady he had been courting." Simon argues that Lincoln was never a "ladies' man," and that his prior unhappiness in courtship had never affected him so much as on this occasion. Various issues in Lincoln's young life at that time included politics, his law firm, Joshua Speed's moving away, and Mary's relatives disapproving of their relationship. Some local people said at the time that he "went crazy," and a letter written to one of Lincoln's colleagues stated, "We have been very much distressed, on Mr. Lincoln's account; hearing that he had two Cat fits and a Duck fit since we left." Another account said that Lincoln was "having some 'painful' experiences in his romantic life." Lincoln still attended sessions of the Illinois House of Representatives on a regular basis, and even worked at his new law firm during this time. But his work suffered greatly and he described himself as "the most miserable man living," and said "I must die or be better, it appears to me." During this time, he avoided seeing Mary, causing her to comment that he "deems me unworthy of notice."

[edit] Lincoln's poem

When he was twenty, Lincoln penned a comic poem about a boy marrying a boy:

I will tell you a Joke about Jewel and Mary
It is neither a Joke nor a Story
For Rubin and Charles has married two girls
But Billy has married a boy
The girlies he had tried on every
But none could he get to agree
All was in vain he went home again
And since that is married to Natty
So Billy and Natty agreed very well
And mama's well pleased at the match
The egg it is laid but Natty's afraid
The Shell is So Soft that it never will hatch
But Betsy she said you Cursed bald head
My Suitor you never Can be
Beside your low crotch proclaims you a botch
And that never Can serve for me.

The poem shows that Lincoln was well aware of homosexuality as a young man.

[edit] Historical interpretation

Discussion of Lincoln's sexuality has a long history.

Carl Sandburg in The Praire Years (1926), part of his six volume biography of Lincoln, made a clear homosexual allusion when he wrote that Lincoln and Speed had "a streak of lavender, and spots soft as May violets."

Charles Shiveley in Calamus Lovers: Walt Whitman's Working-Class Camerados and Drum Beats: Walt Whitman's Civil War Boy Lovers (Gay Sunshine Press) and Jonathan Ned Katz in Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality (University of Chicago Press, 2001) discuss the issue at length.

The book that brought the issue to public notice was C.A. Tripp's The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln (Free Press, 2005). Tripp, who died in 2003, was a sex researcher, protégé of Alfred Kinsey and author of The Homosexual Matrix (1975). This assembles a great deal of material that had previously been either overlooked or purposely ignored. However, many of Tripp's findings come from finely argued circumstantial deductions.

Tripp began writing the book with Philip Nobile (who had written his own unpublished book suggesting that Lincoln was bisexual), but they fell out. The New York Times quoted Mr. Nobile saying "Tripp's book is a fraud". Nobile wrote a critical review of Tripp's book in the Weekly Standard, in which he accused the Tripp book of plagiarising his own work, of relying heavily on Shiveley without proper attribution, and of distortion.

Tripp's book includes an afterword by historian and Lincoln biographer Michael Burlingame, in which he states, "Since it is virtually impossible to prove a negative, Dr. Tripp's thesis cannot be rejected outright. But given the paucity of hard evidence adduced by him, and given the abundance of contrary evidence...a reasonable conclusion..would be that it is possible but highly unlikely that Abraham Lincoln was 'predominantly homosexual.'"

Tripp has many detractors but also many supporters. David Herbert Donald disputes the findings, but Jean H. Baker, a student of David Herbert Donald and author of Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography (ISBN 0-393-30586-4) wrote the introduction to Tripp's book and supports Tripp's claims. Michael B. Chesson, professor at the University of Massachusetts and another student of David Herbert Donald wrote the afterword and also supports the book's thesis.

Uncovering the Real Abe Lincoln, Time Magazine, July 4, 2005
Enlarge
Uncovering the Real Abe Lincoln, Time Magazine, July 4, 2005

Time magazine also addressed the book in a prominent cover article by Joshua Wolf Shenk, author of Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness. However Shenk dismissed the allegation by dint of, "for men to share beds in the mid-19th century was as common and as mundane as men sharing houses or apartments in the early 21st."

Critics of the hypothesis that Lincoln was bisexual or homosexual note that Lincoln married and had four children (even though it was not uncommon for gay men to have monogamous sexual relationships with women and father children at that time). They claim Lincoln as a young man displayed heterosexual behavior. Lincoln scholar, Douglas Wilson, in his book entitled Honor's Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln, notes the following: according to James Short, a friend of Lincoln's from his New Salem days, Lincoln used to enjoy telling this story about himself:

"Once when Mr L was surveying, he was put to bed in the same room with two girls, the head of his bed being next to the foot of the girls' bed. In the night he commenced tickling the feet of one of the girls with his fingers. As she seemed to enjoy it as much as he did he then tickled a little higher up; and as he would tickle higher the girl would shove down lower and the higher he tickled the lower she moved. Mr L would tell the story with evident enjoyment. He never told how the thing ended."

In 1990, the American Historical Association presented a panel entitled "Gay American Presidents? -- Washington, Buchanan, Lincoln, Garfield."

Gay activist Larry Kramer has claimed that he has uncovered new primary sources which shed fresh light on Lincoln's sexuality. This includes a hitherto unknown Joshua Speed diary and letters in which Speed writes explicitly about his relationship with Lincoln. These items were supposedly discovered hidden beneath the floorboards of the old store where the two men lived, and are now are said to reside in a private collection in Davenport, Iowa. The Capital Times newspaper of Madison reported some alleged quotes of the Speed material from a public reading Kramer gave: "He often kisses me when I tease him, often to shut me up. He would grab me up by his long arms and hug and hug," and "Yes, our Abe is like a school girl." Kramer has yet to publish any of this material for critical evaluation.

It is unlikely the exact nature of Lincoln's sexuality will ever be either confirmed, no matter how much evidence is accumulated on either side, and it will likely remain an issue of interest and contention as long as Lincoln's name is remembered.

[edit] References and footnotes

  1. ^ a b Jonathan Ned Katz, Love Stories: Sex Betwee Men Before Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). On Lincoln and Speed see chapter 1, "No Two Men Were Ever More Intimate," pages 3-25. For more on Lincoln and sexuality see the notes to this chapter.
  2. ^ http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jala/11/simon.html Lincoln and Anne Rutledge
  3. ^ http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?040614ta_talk_shenk New Yorker article
  4. ^ Library of Congress source document and commentary
  5. ^ Martin Duberman, "Writhing Bedfellows": 1826 Two Young Men from Antebellum South Carolina’s Ruling Elite Share "Extravagant Delight," in Salvatore Licata and Robert Petersen, eds., Historical Perspectives on Homosexuality (New York: Haworth Press & Stein & Day, 1981), pages 85-99.
  6. ^ Tripp, C.A. : The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln (NY, 2005), p.1
  7. ^ Tripp, Ibid

[edit] External links

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