The Case Is Far from Closed
HISTORIANS Bill Percy and Lewis Gannett had an article called “Lincoln, Sex, and the Scholars” in The Gay & Lesbian Review last year [March-April 2006]—another part of the ongoing effort by Bill and others to annoy heterosexuals by cheekily suggesting that some American idols were actually on our team. As agitation it’s superb, but by historical standards it’s grade B.
They have no direct evidence, of course: no one in Lincoln’s lifetime seems to have suggested that he had sexual desires for men. What Gannett and Percy have is a lot of circumstantial data, some consisting of Lincoln’s own words, some reports of his nonsexual behavior. They then show, rather like the old projects in Boy’s Life, how you can assemble this evidence to construct a picture that will outrage your uncle Elmer and his whole American Legion chapter. Which is all good wholesome gay amusement, but my training as a historian has led me to worry about what actually happened or didn’t happen, especially when it involves my gay brothers. When it’s a question of interpretation, context is critical.
Percy and Gannett lead with their strongest point, which is incontrovertible: Lincoln did not like women. As a rule, he avoided contact with them when possible; he took no initiative in relationships with women; and he had a spectacularly bad marriage. This being the case, there is every likelihood that at some point in his youth he experimented with sex with other men. But this conclusion is too vague for Gannett and Percy, along with Charley Shively and C.A. Tripp, upon whose research their article rests. They want names and stories, preferably from his adult years, so that they can argue a continuing taste for male-male sex. They don’t get quite as detailed as Shively, who asserted that Lincoln was “clearly an ass rather than a crotch man”; but they try to weave together a number of facts, as Shively did in Drum Beats: Walt Whitman’s Civil War Boy Lovers (1989), to make a gay man’s story. Unfortunately, the facts don’t weave, at least not to anyone familiar with 19th-century America, and they end up instead with a lot of loose fiber.
Take Lincoln’s fondness for dirty jokes. He knew an incredible number of them, and at social gatherings he would entertain other men with them. Percy and Gannett make much of his “sexy wit,” which to them suggests a man eager to talk about sex with other men. But, in fact, this practice wasn’t principally about either sex or wit, but male sociability. Lincoln didn’t make up his sex stories; we have testimony from men who knew him well that he just picked up the best jokes in circulation and passed them on. He was a raconteur, not a wit. And he used them the way a good raconteur uses them: not to express his own interest in sex, not to arouse his listeners, but to get a laugh. As a lawyer and local politician, Lincoln had a métier that depended on sociability with voters and jurymen—exclusively other males. Dirty jokes were, and are, a common coin of male socializing. This pattern is reasonably common now and was equally so in the 19th century. A friend of James Garfield talked of working for a man who told dirty jokes all the time. Telling stories other men enjoy hearing isn’t presumptive evidence of being homosexual.
The authors make much of Lincoln’s telling a friend that sex was “the harp with a thousand strings,” as though he meant to say something about diverse sexual tastes. In point of fact, “the harp with a thousand strings,” a phrase out of an Isaac Watts hymn and easily found in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, was one of the favorite clichés of the Victorian era. Watts used it to evoke the complexity and sensitivity of the human body. From there to sex is a short step, which many Americans made. An 1862 letter between two young men in the Berry Family Papers at Cornell University mentions the chance of sex with a girlfriend: “I would make her feel like her ass was a harp with a thousand strings all going at once.” These aggressively straight guys would have agreed with Lincoln’s verdict and understood the phrase as a reference to exquisite pleasure, not a thousand varying techniques.
A poem probably of Lincoln’s composition in his Indiana teenage years supplies more fuel for the authors’ theorizing. It was part of a composition called “The Chronicles of Reuben,” which ridiculed a local family with whom Lincoln was feuding. In it, one of the boys of the family gets rejected by his sweetheart because of his “low crotch” (hernia?) and ends up marrying another boy. The product of their union is an egg that “never will hatch.” This poem, they assert, shows that Lincoln’s “understanding of sex was precocious as well as sophisticated.” But surely this assertion misses the point. The teen-age Lincoln was trying to hold the Grigsbys up to ridicule, in other words, make them look silly in the community’s eyes. To have used kinky or outlandish, or even unusual, examples would have spoiled his purpose. He had to stick to concepts the community understood. If he was “precocious and sophisticated,” so was all of Pigeon Creek—male and female, for the only extant version of the poem came from an old woman who said she heard him recite it.
But the centerpiece of the Gannett-Percy article, at least to the editor of The Gay & Lesbian Review, is the question featured on the cover of that issue: “Why did Abe Lincoln share his bed with men?”—a question that should provoke suspicion in 21st-century readers, whether gay or straight. The short answer is that Lincoln was a 19th-century American man with business interests. For men to share beds in an impersonal, business context was so routine that it raised no eyebrows at the time. Peter Duponceau, who came to America during the Revolutionary War, has an amusing story in his memoirs about a Frenchman who put a sexual interpretation on the practice. Probably the best place to get a complete overview of American men’s sleeping habits in the era before modern conveniences is Michael Quinn’s Same-Sex Relations in 19th-Century America, which focuses on the Mormon West. Among other things, Quinn points out that Mormon district leaders traveling from church to church were expected to sleep with the local church leaders, who relocated their wives for the night. The purpose was a thorough review of local church problems; business trumped marital relations.
Men on business could get physically close in bed without raising suspicion of hanky-panky. Isaac Roberts, a young professor at Iowa State College, was touring the state with his dean in the 1860’s speaking to raise money for their institution. They customarily slept together, and in one especially cold bedroom, the dean said, “Roberts, I think we shall have to ‘spoon’”—sleep in close physical contact, as Civil War soldiers did, to keep warm. (Presumably they were fully clothed to keep the cold out.) Roberts recounted the tale as an example of early semi-frontier hardship but found nothing otherwise remarkable about it.
Claude Hartland, the pseudonymous gay author of The Story of a Life, recounts a years-long affair with a local man, a violinist, when he was in his teens in the late 1800’s in the Mississippi Valley. They regularly slept together and masturbated each other. But, in this context, the interesting part is the cover story they used. Hartland explained to his family that he was so busy studying during the day that the only time he and his friend could “visit”—i.e., talk—was in bed after dark. The story would probably not convince a parent today, but as Jonathan Ned Katz points out in Love Stories, it convinced Hartland’s God-fearing family. That young men should sleep together in order to talk seemed perfectly natural to them.
Elsewhere, Percy has expressed the idea that straight young men wouldn’t want to share a bed, given the possibility of wet dreams or other nastiness, but that judgment, again, sounds like imposing 21st-century fastidiousness on 19th-century people. Men at that time put up with lumpy mattresses and bedbugs at night; why not with semen on the sheet? Jeff Withers of the University of South Carolina in the 1830’s complained jokingly about his roommate and bedmate Jim Hammond’s continually poking him with his erection during the night. When Martin Duberman found Withers’ letter, he assumed, as any modern American gay man would, that it referred to sex; but both Withers and Hammond were emphatically straight. Even the subtle historian Graham Robb reads the letter (which was preserved by Hammond’s descendants) as straight adolescent badinage. Quinn notes that many a traveling Mormon was turned off by the body odor of local leaders that he slept with, but put up with it as a matter of business.
Given all these considerations, it seems arguable that Lincoln and Joshua Speed shared a bed because they enjoyed each other’s company, and that if they were not sleeping they were talking. There is no question they liked being together and missed their companionship when it ended, but to read this relationship as sexual because a lot of it took place in bed is to misunderstand how 19th-century American men behaved. In his autobiography, William Allen White describes with great pleasure a similar arrangement in Kansas City in the 1880’s involving five young men in two beds, but there is no sense of a sexual confession.
What we’re finally left with is a pleasant ramble through the male culture of Victorian America, but nothing convincing to hang on Lincoln in particular. Which is okay with me. Gay American history has lots of ballsy early heroes, from Whitman to Charles Warren Stoddard, from Henry Gerber to Marsden Hartley. Let the straights have Lincoln.
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Hendrik Booraem’s most recent book is Young Hickory: Andrew Jackson and His World, 1767–1788.
Follow the Sex Talk
HENDRIK BOORAEM has published extensively on the early lives of a number of American presidents, including James Garfield, whose homosexuality he discusses. This is a scholar with credentials. I therefore find startling the errors and misinterpretations in his commentary on my article, with Bill Percy, about Abraham Lincoln.
Booraem contends that because “Lincoln did not like women … there is every likelihood that at some point in his youth he experimented with sex with other men.” This logic suggests that Lincoln’s dislike for women might have led him to have sex with men throughout his life, contrary to the gist of Booraem’s argument. The fact of the matter, however, is that Lincoln liked any number of women very much—Hannah Armstrong, Elizabeth Abell, and Eliza Browning come to mind. As David Herbert Donald, C. A. Tripp, and Percy and I have pointed out, Lincoln avoided the company of available women. Armstrong, Abell, and Browning all were married when Lincoln first met them. There was no possibility of romance. With that problem out of the way, Lincoln could befriend these women and indeed become the best of buddies with them. The point here is simply that Lincoln, wanting nothing to do with courtship ritual, precluded it by keeping his distance from women looking for men. To suggest that he was a misogynist, as Booraem seems to do, is offensive and deeply misinformed. Lincoln was open to giving women the right to vote!
Lincoln “was a raconteur, not a wit.” What? Booraem should consult “Lincoln, Mary Owens, and the Wilds of Lincoln Wit,” Chapter Five of Tripp’s The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln. There he will find much evidence of wit, with a particularly choice turn on page 104. But this is ridiculous. Lincoln among his friends was prized for his wit. “Lincoln didn’t make up his sex stories.” How on earth could Booraem make such a statement when he devotes a full paragraph to the most important surviving Lincoln sex story, “The Chronicles of Reuben”? More on this in a moment. Here it is appropriate to point out that this unsigned item of erotica was so wildly original that its first readers immediately identified the author: “No one else could have written it.”
It certainly is true that Lincoln was a formidable raconteur. As Booraem correctly points out, he was also prone to telling amazingly dirty jokes and stories. But Booraem completely misses the point of why this is significant. He comments that Lincoln didn’t tell dirty stories “to arouse his listeners but to get a laugh.” A few sentences later he concludes, “Telling stories other men enjoy hearing isn’t presumptive evidence of being homosexual.” Of course not. Who ever said that it was?
The key thing about Lincoln telling dirty stories to male friends is not the effect it had on the friends, but what it tells us about Lincoln. From Tripp’s sex-research perspective, Lincoln’s bawdy sense of humor reflected a preoccupation with sexual matters. The term for this is “sex-mindedness.” The trait correlates with early puberty, which in turn correlates with a high lifelong sex drive (see Alfred Kinsey’s Male volume, page 325, for an excellent summary). There is persuasive evidence that Lincoln hit puberty quite early. From William Herndon to Carl Sandburg we have vivid accounts of him “shooting up,” or entering his post-pubertal growth spurt, at age ten or eleven. This and his off-color sense of humor strongly suggest that Lincoln was highly sex-minded and that he had a strong sex drive. And so the question: with whom did he do it?
As Booraem perhaps would concede, the record does not indicate that Lincoln found an outlet with females. We have no reliable evidence that he had any sex at all with women until he married at the somewhat late age of thirty-three. Does this prove that Lincoln had sex with men? No. But it lends plausibility to the case that he did. Otherwise, Lincoln would seem to have led a completely chaste life until early middle age. Such a sex history is very unlikely for a highly sex-minded individual.
In “The Chronicles of Reuben,” the phrase “low crotch” means a big penis, not a hernia. It’s hard to know what point Booraem is making here. This is a poem about two young men having anal intercourse and failing to produce a baby. It delighted the tiny Indiana community for which Lincoln wrote it at age nineteen. Booraem’s objections to our characterization of the poem as “sophisticated” and “precocious” are inapt. The locals found it memorable, so much so that an elderly ex-resident woman could quote the poem verbatim in 1866, decades after Lincoln wrote it, as Booraem himself notes. How many teenagers in the 19th century wrote poems on a taboo topic that made such a lasting impression? Well, there was Arthur Rimbaud—and he personified precocity!
On to the “centerpiece,” the question of sharing beds. About this Booraem writes, “The short answer is that Lincoln was a 19th-century man with business interests. For men to share beds in an impersonal, business context was so routine that it raised no eyebrows.” This exactly describes Lincoln’s bed-sharing with men while “riding the circuit,” making rounds from one country courthouse to another in the company of other lawyers and judges, staying at crowded inns, sharing beds. It does not, however, describe Lincoln’s four-year bedding arrangement with Joshua Speed, or the bed sharing that occurred with Captain David Derickson, a presidential guard, at the White House and the Soldiers’ Home. Oddly, Booraem doesn’t even mention Derickson.
Lincoln’s relationships with both men were highly personal. His correspondence with Speed makes this clear. Each had an obsessive interest in the other’s sex life. Lincoln said of Derickson, according to a contemporary: “The Captain and I are getting quite thick.” David Donald has suggested that Lincoln and Derickson slept together because they liked each other and enjoyed talking. But Donald does not explain a key aspect of the arrangement: Lincoln slept with Derickson when Mary Lincoln was out of town. A contemporary source wrote in her diary, “Tish says, ‘there is a Bucktail soldier [Derickson] here devoted to the President, drives with him, and when Mrs. L. is not home, sleeps with him.’ What stuff!” Did Lincoln not want Mary to find him in bed with Derickson? If they were merely chatting, why not? Did the two men sleep together when Mary was away because Mary understandably vetoed sharing her bed with a soldier? No, at this time the Lincolns maintained separate bedrooms.
To be sure, same-sex bed sharing was very common in the 19th century. The reason is simple: a scarcity of mattresses. This did not, however, apply to the White House. Nor did it apply to the room in which Lincoln and Speed shared a bed for four years: that room had a second bed. Yet Abe and Josh chose to sleep together. Moreover, during this period Lincoln began to make money from his legal career. He could easily have afforded his own room and his own bed. As Jean Baker, the distinguished biographer of Mary Lincoln and the author of the introduction to Tripp’s Intimate World, has noted, sharing the same bed for a stretch of years with other options available was unusual; it wasn’t done. But Lincoln and Speed did it anyway.
Booraem dismisses the Lincoln homosexuality argument with a certitude that undermines his reputation as a historian. Yes, one can disagree with the Tripp thesis. But it is frankly embarrassing that Booraem should do so on such flimsy grounds.
Lewis Gannett
Dear Hendrik, …
THANKS for the minutiae in your quibble with our outing of the sixteenth president. In my opinion, you (and other Americanists) could have spent your time more productively. Yes, to be sure, there may be fissures in our case for Lincoln’s homosexuality. However, as someone who has claimed that three of our past presidents—James Garfield, James Buchanan, and Grover Cleveland—were not exclusively heterosexual, it seems strange for you to be drawing the line at Lincoln, where the evidence appears to be quite good. And yet you stand by silently when your mentor, the homophobic Lincoln historian David Herbert Donald, endorses the opinion of Charles Strozier when he argues with Lombrosian logic that Lincoln could not have been bisexual because then he would have been “torn between worlds, full of shame, confused, and hardly likely to end up in politics.”
If someone had said such a thing as that about an African-American, a Jew, or a woman, he would have undoubtedly been called upon to resign his professorship. Donald is one of the co-authors (with Bernard Bailyn, Robert Dalleck, David Brion Davis, John L. Thomas, and Gordon S. Wood) of The Great Republic: A History of the American People, Volume Two, a major, very lengthy American history textbook. Its fourth and final edition came out in 1992. Nowhere in this “authoritative” tome is even one president, vice president, cabinet member, senator, U.S. representative, Supreme Court justice, state governor, head of a major government agency, or senior military officer identified as anything other than a Kinsey “zero,” i.e., exclusively heterosexual. By 1992 Congressmen Robert Bauman, Fred Richmond, Jon Hinson, Gerry Studds, and Barney Frank had been publicly identified as gay. For the authors of The Great Republic to ignore this fact, to imply that homosexuals or bisexuals never did anything of importance in U.S. history, and for Donald to declare as late as 2003 that homosexuals are “hardly likely to go into politics,” brands them all as a bunch of bigots.
And then there’s the case of Walt Whitman. While most American history textbooks exalt the poet, almost none mentions the fact that he was a Kinsey “six,” exclusively homosexual, preferring sex with males aged twelve to 22. Or what about the case of one of the Great Emancipator’s contemporaries, Benjamin Disraeli, who so ably led the greatest empire of the age? In his recent biography, William Kuhn persuasively argues that he was gay, contradicting Donald’s solemn incantation—a desperate “say it ain’t so”—that politics and homosexuality could not coexist in the 19th century.
Whether Lincoln and Disraeli and a horde of other historical figures were homosexual is an important question, a crucial question for GLBT scholars, worthy of more than the squirrelly quibbling that you provide. Surely you don’t take up with that second rank of naysayers who argue that, even if a major figure in history were incontrovertibly outed, it wouldn’t matter anyway. This is not a time for desperately patching the walls of Lincoln’s threatened closet, but instead for smashing the conspiracy of silence and invalidating the insults of the bigots.
William A. Percy
