WORKS UNDER DISCUSSION
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
By Doris Kearns Goodwin
Simon & Schuster, 2005
“We Are Lincoln Men”: Abraham Lincoln and His Friends
By David Herbert Donald
Simon & Schuster, 2004
Lincoln’s Quest for Union: Public and Private Meanings
By Charles B. Strozier
Basic Books, 1982
“Gay Abe?”
By Charles B. Strozier
Review of The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln by C. A. Tripp
Illinois Times, February 10, 2005
“I have heard him [Abraham Lincoln] say over & over again about sexual contact. ‘It is the harp of a thousand strings.’”
— Henry C. Whitney to William H. Herndon, June 23, 1887
IT IS A TRUISM that Abraham Lincoln was incompetent with women. Scholars emphasize that as a young man, his awkwardness and shyness and uncouth appearance so embarrassed him that he avoided their company. He botched the niceties of courtship, tripped over himself, was almost a laughingstock. Lincoln in his twenties attempted to court a woman named Mary Owens whose verdict is widely cited in Lincoln literature: he was “deficient in those little links which make up the chain of woman’s happiness.”
Indeed, the eminent scholar David Herbert Donald raises the possibility that Lincoln’s cluelessness with women denied him a sex life prior to his marriage to Mary Todd at the late age of 33. In “We Are Lincoln Men” Donald discusses Lincoln’s relationship with Joshua Speed, Lincoln’s four-year bedmate and by authoritative accounts his most intimate friend. Donald writes, “Both of these young men thought they wanted to marry, but they had forebodings, probably related to doubts about sexual adequacy. Charles Strozier, the psychohistorian, believes it is possible that both were virgins.”
Strozier believes in the possibility of considerably more than that. In Quest for Union he speculates on Lincoln’s reaction to the end of his sleeping arrangement with Speed: “This separation apparently threw Lincoln into a panic that shook his fragile sexual identity [emphasis added]. In this state his fear of intimacy with a woman was revived, and he broke his engagement with Mary [Todd].” With this and other passages Strozier entered territory that no Lincolnist before him had dared to explore, the question of Lincoln’s sexual relationship with Speed. Strozier does not argue that Lincoln and Speed actually had sex during the years they slept together. He skirts around the issue, at times seeming to come close to an overtly sexual hypothesis but then retreating, theorizing instead that both Lincoln and Speed were terrified of sex with women. Strozier asserts quite solemnly that this formed the basis of their intimacy. Their shared fears, their shared bed, bound them together:
The period during which Lincoln slept with Speed began and ended with unconsummated female relationships, first with Mary Owens and then with Mary Todd. Speed provided an alternative relationship that neither threatened nor provoked Lincoln. Each of the two men found solace in discussing their forebodings about sexuality. Their intimate maleness substituted for the tantalizing but frightening closeness of women.
In other words, fear of sex with women made the bed a very special place. There Lincoln and Speed found in each other an “alternative relationship” to women. They shivered together under the covers, each dreading a female replacement of the other. But in that bed these two sex-starved individuals never, not once, spilled seed together. This view desexualizes Lincoln in a most startling way. It makes him a sexual ascetic from his teens all the way through to his early thirties. Is it possible that Lincoln remained celibate until his union with Mary Todd? Of course. Is it plausible? Not in the least.
Doris Kearns Goodwin does not suggest a virginal Lincoln at age 33. She writes on page 93 of her sprawling new book, Team of Rivals: “Before his marriage Lincoln enjoyed close relations with young women and almost certainly found outlets for his sexual urges among the prostitutes who were readily available on the frontier.” The “almost certainly” is very strong compared to what other biographers have had to say on the subject of Lincoln and prostitutes; the few stories of him seeking such services are either vague or, in the case of the one detailed story, so ludicrous as to suggest a Lincoln joke.
On the same page, Goodwin seems to contradict herself when she states, “His female friendships were mostly confined to older, safely married women.” This is quite true. Lincoln was great pals with a variety of women who were not looking for men, including the “safely married” Hannah Armstrong and Eliza Browning. Hannah was an illiterate resident of New Salem, Illinois, Eliza the more worldly wife of the future U.S. Senator Orville Browning in Quincy, Illinois. How Lincoln could have a great time with all kinds of “taken” women but become hopelessly awkward when available women approached, Goodwin does not explain.
At any rate, Goodwin echoes the standard line in describing Lincoln as incompetent with the eligible opposite sex. She hastens to add, however: “His awkwardness did not imply a lack of sexual desire.” Here she cuts to the chase. There’s a reason why the meticulous David Herbert Donald can entertain the idea that Lincoln remained a virgin until his marriage; a reason why Charles Strozier, a crackpot Freudian of the worst sort but a scholar with an impressive command of the evidence, can do the same; and a reason why Goodwin’s “almost certainly,” with regard to Lincoln and prostitutes, is unfootnoted. It is this: the record contains no credible evidence that Lincoln had any enthusiasm at all for the sexual or romantic pursuit of women.
Some mainstream scholars acknowledge that point, albeit with caveats. For an especially good discussion see Chapter Four, “Women,” in Douglas L. Wilson’s Honor’s Voice (1998). The basic conclusion has been around for a long time. The poet Edgar Lee Masters in his 1931 biography, Lincoln the Man, put it this way:
Lincoln was an under sexed man. That is the simplest way to express it. He liked to be with men when he liked to be with anyone. … He was one of those manly men, whose mind made him seek masculine minds. Marriage with him had the slightest sexual aim. It was rather taken for social reasons, or other self-regarding motives, all apart from romantic impulses. If the story of Ann Rutledge, and Mary Owens and Mary Todd do not prove this, nothing could.
So there it is. Lincoln was “under sexed.” This explains how he could have delayed having sexual intercourse until after he entered his middle age. Or to put it another way: Donald, the most distinguished Lincolnist of our time, believes that if Lincoln did not have sex with women until his marriage, up to that point he did not have any sex at all.
There is another explanation for Lincoln’s relations with women, for his lengthy bed sharing with Speed, and for why, in Lincoln’s case, “unconsummated female relationships” preceded and followed that period of time. Lincoln and Speed were not sexually attracted to women. They were sexually attracted to men and, in particular, to each other.
This hypothesis has horrified the Lincoln establishment. It is worth pointing out that a co-author of this essay, William Percy, played a key role in the late C. A. Tripp’s interest in Lincoln, which ultimately led to Tripp’s book, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln (2005). Percy organized a symposium, “Gay American Presidents,” at the 1993 convention of the American Historical Association. Charley Shively, a Harvard-educated professor of American history, presented his findings on Lincoln’s sexuality, which vastly expanded the earlier work of Jim Kepner, a pioneering gay activist (see Chapter Seven of Shively’s Drum Beats: Walt Whitman’s Civil War Boy Lovers, Gay Sunshine Press, 1989). Tripp, in the audience, was fascinated. Not long thereafter Tripp asked Percy to introduce him to David Herbert Donald. Percy did so, but pointed out to Tripp that any interest Donald might express in Tripp’s research would not be benign. Percy also warned Tripp that Donald would almost certainly prepare a preemptive strike to try to undermine Tripp’s findings. With “We Are Lincoln Men,” Donald did just that.
WHEN C. A. TRIPP looked at the Lincoln sexual record, he found it amazing that the heterosexual component should be so slight. In Tripp’s view—the polar opposite of Edgar Lee Masters’ intellectual heirs, Donald and Strozier, among others—Lincoln was an exceptionally “sex-minded” man.
This side of Lincoln’s personality does not figure in the iconic image, for reasons not hard to guess. But the fact that Lincoln loved to tell sexually explicit jokes and stories is a vivid component of the reminiscences of people who knew him. A telltale trait, Tripp believed. While some might argue that Lincoln’s bawdy sense of humor could have been a case of “all talk, no action,” Tripp, a trained sex researcher and a protégé of Alfred C. Kinsey, saw instead that Lincoln’s preoccupation with sex indicated a robust sex drive, one that required an outlet. Why didn’t he pursue sex with women, Tripp wondered, at least on an experimental basis? From the perspective of sex research one would expect to find at least a modicum of what Tripp called “heterosexual commitment.” The near-total absence of reliable evidence for this actually made him uneasy.
Doris Kearns Goodwin has recently been alerting the book-buying public to the fact that Lincoln was indeed “sexy.” She adduces this from a photograph of Lincoln. But she does not discuss more compelling evidence in contemporary accounts. Numerous observers commented on Lincoln’s ribald side, some lamenting it, others finding it a matter of wonder. Lincoln among his peers was infamous for spinning out off-color tales. They riveted his audiences, of necessity all-male because women in those days were deemed too tender to witness such performances. William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner and indispensable biographer, wrote that when Lincoln went to social gatherings he swiftly drew the men present off to one side to spare the ladies, then proceeded not only to mesmerize the gents with his bawdy jokes but also to laugh the hardest at them.
This raises two questions. First, how could a man with a “fragile sexual identity” so commandingly relish his own sexy wit? Second, if Lincoln was sexy, what did he do with his sex drive? Oddly, Donald and Strozier do not address the first question. As to the second, one does not find a convincing answer anywhere in mainstream Lincoln literature.
This puts the question of Lincoln’s “awkwardness” around eligible women in a new perspective. What truly is awkward are the attempts of establishment scholars to decipher that awkwardness. To conjoin the available evidence with what Percy calls their “presumption of heterosexuality” about Lincoln, they have had to resort to fancy footwork, of which Strozier’s is merely the most elaborate. All of the accounts under review here strain credulity. At best, they reflect naïveté; at worst, a cynical campaign to enhance book sales and/or academic stature. Either way, their portrayals of Lincoln have so far been quite successful. That probably will not last.
Consider the quote from Henry C. Whitney that heads this essay. Whitney met Lincoln in 1854, by which time Lincoln had achieved political and legal prominence. Whitney, age 23, was just beginning his own career as a lawyer. Almost immediately they hit it off. Lincoln mentored the younger man in the ways of the law. They “rode the circuit” together, traveling with a small band of other lawyers and a judge from courthouse to courthouse in towns throughout central Illinois.
It is not possible to divine what, exactly, Whitney meant when he told Lincoln’s biographer William Herndon that Lincoln “over and over again” characterized “sexual contact [as]the harp of a thousand strings.” But the statement is suggestive. First, the repetition indicates that this was no casual remark; evidently, Lincoln and Whitney had frequent discussions about sex. Second, the subject is sexual “contact,” a strikingly general word. Third, “the harp of a thousand strings” defies all convention in Victorian America, where sex was thought of as something that men did to women to create progeny within the confines of marriage, and very little else. Lincoln, it seems, had a more expansive view. Why would he repeatedly multiply—a thousand-fold—the prevailing conception of sex? Does it suggest that he himself had sexual experiences outside the norm? Was he advising a younger, unmarried man that surprises might await him when he took a wife? Was he putting into context a sexual experience of Whitney’s? Perhaps, his own seduction of Whitney?
Whatever Lincoln meant, it’s safe to surmise that the metaphor implies diversity, a broad range of experience, and, moreover, a kind of loveliness in the very fact of such diversity. In short, Lincoln’s vision of sex was quite sophisticated for a man of his time—a time before the post-Freudian fixation on “sexual identity.” We cannot of course infer that Lincoln’s harp with its thousand strings signified anything remotely close to this modern concept. He was talking, it seems, about the altogether more basic question of variety in sexual experience. Still, it stands as a remarkable recognition that sex is a case of different strokes for different folks.
Then there is Lincoln’s poem, the finale of a satirical piece, “The Chronicles of Reuben,” produced at age nineteen, in which two boys marry and have intercourse. It reads in part:
the egg it is laid but Naty[’]s afraid
the Shell is So Soft that it never will hatc[h]
Tripp identified the “egg” here as a “jelly-baby,” vernacular for the imagined result of anal sex between two men, a union that could not produce a baby. What to make of that? It is well to interpret the poem cautiously, not to read too much into it. At a minimum, however, it shows that Lincoln, even as a late adolescent, not only was aware of sexual diversity, in this case of male-male coupling, but also had enough self-assurance to write about it. One conclusion is inescapable: his understanding of sex was precocious as well as sophisticated. That does not accord with the record as construed by Donald and others, whose accounts portray Lincoln as a social and sexual naïf, a man with doubts about his “sexual adequacy.”
Tripp saw this as a profound misreading. Yes, Lincoln probably did find intimidating the prospect of sex with Mary Todd, particularly if, as the record suggests, he never before had gone to bed with a woman. And, yes, the young Lincoln did not display social competence as defined by upper-class parlor behavior—which fork to use at the dining table, what to say when courting belles.
Nonetheless, Lincoln possessed social skills of considerable power. Many of these are well known: his talent as a peacemaker, evident from an early age; his leadership abilities, also evident early on; his “political genius,” a trait Goodwin nicely lays out; his tenderheartedness, his boundless empathy, which is to say, perceptiveness coupled with feeling, perhaps the prime social grace; his imperviousness to insult and ridicule, founded on his confidence that, as his legal colleague Leonard Swett once put it, he would make “the wrath of his enemies to praise him” in the end. And another social skill deserves particular mention, one that every Lincoln scholar has noted: his ability to command the attention of males. With men, Lincoln was a performer of unmatched competence. He was sure-footed, poised, magnetic—in a word, irresistible.
But not with women, in the traditional scholarly view. There is, however, a problem here in the form of Mary Todd. A formidable socialite of distinguished breeding, the young Todd evidently found in Lincoln her best bet to achieve her ambitions, which, as she had often declared, included becoming the wife of an American president. How shrewd she was! Todd saw quite clearly that Lincoln was not a rube, destined to a life of obscurity. The record indicates that she wanted Lincoln, and wanted him fiercely. It also indicates that Lincoln did not reciprocate this ardor. Todd got Lincoln anyway, despite his best efforts—which had worked so well in the case of Mary Owens—to ward off Mary Todd with what might be called his “rube act.” The traditional view ignores the possibility that Lincoln did not want to be competent as far as social relations with women were concerned. In fact, Lincoln appears to have been content to let his perceived coarseness act as a defense against unwanted attentions from the “fair sex.”
Meanwhile, Lincoln’s true nature was far from coarse. Mary Owens wrote to biographer Herndon: “In many things he was sensitive almost to a fault.” Owens then told a story about Lincoln walking through the prairie in good clothes. He came across “a hog mired down” in a ditch. He walked by; then he looked back. The “poor thing seemed to say wistfully, ‘There now, my last hope is gone.’” Lincoln proceeded to wrestle the hog out of the ditch, thoroughly muddying himself. Other such stories abound. Lincoln climbed a tree to return fallen bird chicks to their nest, much to the derisive amusement of his companions. He issued stern edicts about the proper treatment of his cats.
Lincoln’s “sensitive” nature could have attuned him to the “little links which make up the chain of woman’s happiness,” as Mary Owens put it. But he did not have it in him. Why not? Probably because it would have been insincere. Owens no doubt sensed this, and perhaps Lincoln wanted her to sense it. The case can be made that Lincoln’s famous awkwardness with women did not derive from a lack of manners or from feelings of inadequacy but instead from another trait for which he’s famous: honesty.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN and Joshua Speed first met when Lincoln was 28 and Speed 22, on April 15, 1837. That date marked the beginning of their four-year bed sharing, in a room above a general store that Speed co-owned. Almost every Lincoln scholar has found the sleeping arrangement unremarkable.
Same-sex bed sharing was in fact common in 19th-century America—a matter of mattress scarcity, small homes, crowded hostelries. Historians have repeatedly pointed this out in the wake of Tripp’s Intimate World, which documents Lincoln’s sleeping arrangements and takes them as evidence that Lincoln had sexual relations with men. But as Jean Baker, the well-regarded biographer of Mary Todd Lincoln and the author of Intimate World’s Introduction, has noted, for two men with financial resources to share a bed for four years bordered on impropriety. It was unusual. The non-conjugal slept together when it was necessary; they did not do it by choice.
Michael B. Chesson, an award-winning historian of the post-Civil War era and a contributor to Intimate World’s Afterword, has pointed out that the Lincoln and Speed bed sharing might have begun as a matter of necessity, but in time became very clearly a matter of choice. The start of Lincoln’s sleeping arrangement with Speed coincided with the launch of Lincoln’s legal career in Springfield. As Kenneth J. Winkle notes in The Young Eagle (2001), “during his first year of [law]practice, Lincoln earned enough to buy two lots in Springfield.” Lincoln could have gotten his own digs as his practice grew. But he didn’t. He continued to sleep with Speed.
Furthermore, this bedroom contained at least one other bed. During portions of the Lincoln-Speed sleeping arrangement, Lincoln’s future biographer, William Herndon, and Charles Hurst, who later bought Speed’s share of the store, also slept in the bedroom. When Herndon and Hurst did not stay there—and, according to Donald, they spent their nights elsewhere for much of the four-year period—Lincoln and Speed could have slept apart. They preferred to sleep together. For warmth on winter nights? Perhaps, but that still leaves spring, summer, and fall. These fine points were ignored in the furor following the appearance of Intimate World. “Not enough beds!” commentators cried in a chorus, taking Tripp to task for failing to grasp so elemental a reality of 19th-century life.
Curiously, these commentators did not mention the extra bed in Springfield—or the multiple beds and bedrooms of the White House, where Lincoln shared his bed with David Derickson, the captain of Company K, the White House guard. Tripp cites two reports that Lincoln and Derickson occasionally slept together, at the White House and also at the Soldiers’ Home, the Lincolns’ summer retreat. Both mention that this happened when Mary Lincoln was out of town, which is a key point, overlooked by all of the authors under review. The Lincolns by this time maintained separate bedrooms, in part because Lincoln often received advisors in his bedroom at night. Donald writes in “We Are Lincoln Men”: “Suffering from insomnia, Lincoln sometimes talked with Derickson late into the night. I think it is hardly surprising that he may on occasion have asked the congenial captain to share his bed; in those days, it was not unusual for men to sleep together.” Well, yes, the generous Lincoln, who by credible accounts was very fond of the “congenial captain”—according to one report, he even lent Derickson nightshirts—could have invited him into bed for purposes of conversation. But why do so only when Mary Lincoln was absent? Evidently, Lincoln didn’t want her to walk in and find the captain in his bed.
We do not have conclusive evidence that Lincoln had sexual relations with either Speed or Derickson. The evidence is circumstantial. But consider the case that mainstream Lincolnists have made: various psychological or temperamental or class-related problems retarded Lincoln’s journey to sexual and romantic fulfillment. This explanation covers only a fraction of the probable truth. As we’ve seen, Lincoln vividly displayed both precocity and sophistication about matters sexual in ways that suggest deviation from the 19th-century norm. The evidence indicates that Lincoln may well have remained a virgin, heterosexually speaking, until his marriage. It also suggests that Lincoln understood his preferences at an early age and fulfilled them quite competently indeed.
In a discussion of Tripp’s Intimate World, David Herbert Donald proffers another theory about the sexuality of Abraham Lincoln, one just as implausible as the notion that young Lincoln was a sexual innocent. Beyond myopic, his interpretation is offensive. He again cites Charles Strozier:
The evidence is fragmentary and complex, but my judgment is strongly influenced by the opinion of Charles B. Strozier, the psychoanalyst and historian, who concludes that if the friendship [with Speed]had been sexual Lincoln would have become a different man. He would, Dr. Strozier writes me, have been “a bisexual at best, torn between worlds, full of shame, confused, and hardly likely to end up in politics.”
Strozier adds details to this judgment in a review of Tripp’s Intimate World he published in the Illinois Times: “We also must consider the telling psychological picture we have of Lincoln, who hardly presented as a homosexual. It matters when a friendship is sexualized, whatever the gender of the participants. The tensions that sometimes tormented Lincoln came in part from his repressions and in no small measure contributed to his greatness.”
“Hardly presented as a homosexual”? Lincoln’s “psychological picture” is apparently inconsistent with shame, confusion, and so on. If Abraham and Joshua had “sexualized” their friendship, Lincoln would not have repressed his “tensions,” whatever that means. Is Strozier saying that Lincoln’s chastity with Speed helped pave the way for his becoming our greatest president? Evidently.
The Freudian assumption that homosexuals are defective heterosexuals—cases that veered into the breakdown lane on the highway to heterosexuality—lost respectability a long time ago. Moreover, Strozier’s view that homosexuality is so emotionally debilitating that it precludes a career in politics betrays ignorance of the sexual predilections of many successful politicians past and present. Almost as bad, Strozier is projecting a dubious 20th-century sexual stereotype onto the mid-19th century. How far back into history are Strozier and Donald willing to extend their argument? Did Alexander the Great “present as a homosexual”? Julius Caesar, Richard the Lion-Hearted, Frederick the Great, William III of Orange, Eugene, Prince of Savoy? They all had sex with males. In Strozier’s view they would be “hardly likely to end up in politics.” Yet most of them were superb military leaders as well as political rulers. In Lincoln’s century, Presidents Garfield and Buchanan and Vice President William Rufus de Vane King were all apparently homosexual, as was Luigi Settembrini, the Italian senator who played a heroic role in his country’s unification.
It is surprising that so esteemed a scholar as David Herbert Donald can make the transparently homophobic case that Lincoln could not have been a great man if he had been, in Stozier’s sneering phrase, “a bisexual at best.” This betrays ignorance about both sexuality and history. It is redneck opinion. Also surprising are comments from two prominent reviewers of Intimate World, Richard Brookhiser in The New York Times and Christine Stansell in The New Republic. Both concede that the evidence Tripp presents indicates that Lincoln may well have found sexual fulfillment with men. But both end their pieces with the conclusion that this is not important.
Not important? Homosexuality barely registers in American history textbooks. Are Brookhiser and Stansell suggesting that this is a trivial fact? The removal of racist assumptions from history textbooks is an ongoing fight, but progress has been made. Young blacks no longer learn in classrooms that “Sambo was happy.” What do young people of any race or sexuality learn today if they have the misfortune of reading Donald’s “We Are Lincoln Men”? The homo “Sambo,” so to speak, was not happy. No, he was ashamed and confused, too much of a ditz to lead governments or to fight wars.
Leaders of the Christian Right and many others complain that positive portrayals of homosexuality constitute an alarming “agenda.” The more alarming agenda is that of highly credentialed homophobes who would have American history students believe that homosexuality is a condition that destroys any hope for success in politics.
Happily, history students can look to examples in recent decades that prove that idea wrong: U.S. Representatives Gerry Studds, Barney Frank, and Tammy Baldwin, to name but a few examples. Less happily, they can contemplate the careers of J. Edgar Hoover, Joseph McCarthy, and Roy Cohn, relics of a time when political success required not only the closet, but also, in their minds at least, that one viciously attack fellow homosexuals. Donald and Strozier’s claim that homosexuals in American history were “hardly likely to end up in politics” is preposterous.
Lewis Gannett assisted C. A. Tripp in the preparation of The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln. William A. Percy III, a senior professor of history at U. Mass.–Boston, is the author of Outing: Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence (1994).
