THE POLITICS OF ILLINOIS from the 1830’s to 1850’s can provide a good case study of attitudes toward gays—partly because the region was then a part of the American West, where political discussion was almost unrestrained, and partly because participants included some of the most famous characters in American history.
Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln’s famous political adversary and debating opponent, could be quite uninhibited in public in his physical contact with men. A friend noted that soon after Douglas won election to the Illinois state legislature, he “in so short a time made himself acquainted and familiar with the members of the legislature, and had become quite a pet with them, sitting on their knees even.” Another politician later observed that after Douglas became a judge, “It was not unusual for him to come down from the bench, or leave his chair at the bar, and take his seat on the knee of a friend, and, with an arm thrown familiarly around the neck of his companion, have a social chat, or a legal or political consultation.” An eyewitness watched Judge Douglas routinely descend from the bench while a case was underway and go over to lawyers, “often sitting in their laps.” Someone who casually knew Douglas recalled, “He has been seen at Knoxville, when the court room was crowded, to seat himself upon the knee of old Governor McMurtry and, with his arm upon his shoulder, talk with him for a considerable time.”
Social customs change, and such lap-sitting per se isn’t necessarily evidence of erotic or tactile pleasure, but in this case we have the recollections of Douglas’ contemporaries—their startled confusion—to justify our own hunch. Referring to Douglas, an Illinois politician declared, “Such familiarities were not general at the West.” For example, when a member of Congress genially slapped the shoulder of Senator Thomas Hart Benton (D–MO), “The senator haughtily drew himself up and said: ‘That, sir, is a familiarity I never permit my friends. … Sir, it must not be repeated.’” From the U.S. Senate gallery an astonished visiting politician watched Douglas “after a boisterous speech, throw himself upon the lap of a brother senator and loll there, talking and laughing, for ten or fifteen minutes, with his arm around the neck of his friend, who seemed to be painfully embarrassed.”
It is quite possible that in some cases Douglas used such conduct as a form of aggression, putting the recipient in an awkward spot, having to rebuff Douglas’ ostensible friendliness or else accept some humiliation. Such a scenario would be further evidence that Douglas chose conduct having homosexual overtones in his own time. Politician Carl Schurz, who saw and disapproved of Senator Douglas’ lap-sitting, is an important witness because Schurz mentioned matter-of-factly that he shared a bed with a man who was stumping in Wisconsin with him and also with Galusha Grow (shortly to be Speaker of the U.S. House) for an oratorical engagement in a frontier town. Schurz seemed to regard sharing a bed with another man as a routine element of Western travel, but was offended upon seeing one man sitting on another man’s lap.
Although some male viewers of Douglas’ conduct indicated their distaste, his behavior never became a public issue. Even men who didn’t welcome his attentions avoided making any open dispute. If, in contrast, Douglas had publicly kissed and fondled a woman, they would certainly have issued a protest, verbal or otherwise. At a time when few holds were barred in political competition, boorish conduct by Douglas would have been widely reported in Illinois newspapers. Indeed, he received criticism for spitting tobacco juice where ladies’ dresses would track through it, and he was ridiculed for grandstanding to women in the Senate gallery. Illinois journalists’ silence about his public attentions to men suggests a degree of tolerance toward homosexual behavior, or at least a willingness to disregard it.
Then, as now, politicians’ sexual conduct was fair game in election campaigns. In an 1834 Illinois congressional race, William L. May (subsequently a law partner of Stephen Logan, who eventually became Lincoln’s law partner) responded to charges that he had once been indicted for burglary. He explained that he was in the house simply to have consensual sex with the woman resident, whose husband objected and brought the indictment. That explanation elicited accounts of May’s involvements with other women. A handbill declared,
To the fires of the monkey you have superadded, the vigor of the horse. Sir, such boasts might have done for the brothel; for the grog shop they were too low; but in a public print, over your own signature and you a candidate for a seat in Congress, what term in language is sufficiently strong to express our deep and abiding abhorrence of such a self-glorious Priapus. Would you vie with the god Hercules in his thirteenth labor?—what, fifty daughters of King Thespeus in a single night?
Such frank disapproval of an Illinois politician’s heterosexual conduct indicates that the silence about Douglas was not because public discussion of sex was taboo, but because attentions between men were acceptable and not newsworthy. At the very least, Illinois social conventions related to gay conduct were nebulous enough that practitioners could expect less criticism than if they were straights who violated the community’s sexual norms.
Additional evidence about attitudes toward homosexuality can be found in the experience of the Mormons in Illinois. The Mormon city of Nauvoo was the state’s most populous metropolis (bigger than Chicago), and Mormon leaders were able to offer votes in a solid bloc that could determine the outcome of statewide elections. In 1842, those votes were going to be cast for Democrats, and the opposing Whig Party needed a huge get-out-the-vote campaign to overcome the Mormon bloc.
John Cook Bennett, a deputy to Mormon leader Joseph Smith, was employed as a senior lobbyist promoting Illinois legislation that Smith wanted. In 1842, the two men had a falling out, and Bennett began to reveal details of the leadership’s sexual proclivities, information that was widely distributed in the Illinois Whig press. The state’s foremost Whig newspaper declared: “Rulers of this Mormon confederacy are steeped in pollutions of the blackest dye—pollutions and crimes violatory of all laws, human and divine—and for which we can hardly find a parallel without going back to the engulfed ‘cities of the plain.’” Later the paper referred to “modern Sodomites of Nauvoo.” The pro-Smith Nauvoo Wasp replied in kind, saying that Bennett himself was notorious for “adultery, fornication, and—we were going to say, (buggery).” How did the public react to such reports? Springfield’s Whig newspaper assured readers around the state that “Our city and county have been in a state of much excitement for a week past, growing out of the disclosures made by General Bennett. … All his statements, given of his own knowledge, are undeniable facts. People at a distance, therefore, may judge of the degree of excitement which the exposures of the pollutions and corruptions and enormities of Joe Smith have caused in our community.”
Newspaper readers “at a distance” may have imagined general indignation sweeping through Springfield (the state capital) and the surrounding region. But Whig politician Abraham Lincoln privately informed a fellow politician, “Bennett’s Mormon disclosures are making some little stir here, but not very great.” Democratic candidates for governor and lieutenant governor soared to victory with aid from the Mormon voting bloc. The Illinois Whig publicity machine, run by experts at arousing the public, was unable to nurture and exploit homophobia—which indicates that it mattered little, if at all.
A study of reaction to publicity about sexual behavior among Illinois politicians of this era cannot ignore Lincoln himself. After Lincoln became an Illinois lawyer, his far-ranging legal practice included numerous lawsuits for plaintiffs or defendants in slander and libel cases. These included accusations of just about any illegitimate sexual practice that could be named, ranging from adultery to acts with barnyard animals. Absent from these cases handled by Lincoln was any allegation that one of the parties was engaged in homosexual conduct. Even if such a court case turns up some day, that would not affect the rarity of anyone reporting homosexuality in order to defame an enemy. As we have already seen, Westerners were largely indifferent about homosexuality.
Admittedly, the Illinois criminal code of the 1830’s referred to sodomy, much as a later era criminalized marijuana use. In both instances, however, practitioners were normally ignored even if their habits were widely known. For instance, Stephen Douglas raised eyebrows among observers of his conduct but was left alone by prosecutors. Nonetheless, penalties could be severe if law enforcers chose to press matters. In the 1830’s, section 164 of the Illinois criminal code said that anyone convicted of sodomy would be ineligible to hold public office. Such prohibitions were generally regarded seriously. Thus, for example, dueling was another act that disqualified a participant from public office, and any past involvement in dueling generated vigorous debate at election time, and sometimes resulted in litigation to determine a winning candidate’s eligibility to serve. That Lincoln shared a bed with another man (Joshua Speed), a matter that fueled a recent debate about his sexual orientation, was public knowledge at a time when it could have disqualified him from holding office. Apparently it wasn’t a matter that anyone considered important enough to mention.
Illinois newspapers were willing to discuss such things, however infrequently. The St. Clair Banner declared that two editor–politicians “were at the Memphis convention, and pigged together in the same bed.” One of the attacked editors angrily responded: “What the Banner means by our having ‘pigged together in the same bed’ is beyond our comprehension.” Some of the state’s most active attorneys and politicians shared a bed with Lincoln, and were quite open about it. One reason such arrangements received no comment was because Lincoln’s premarital bed was typically part of a barracks arrangement, and not in a private bedroom. Even his much advertised sleeping arrangement with Joshua Speed was in the presence of other men who slumbered in the same room. Lincoln made no effort to hide it; as president he said, “I slept with Joshua for four years, and I suppose I ought to know him well.” Lincoln and his Illinois opponents engaged in hard-hitting political campaigns, and his antagonists would not have missed a chance to end his political career. From their silence about homosexuality we can reasonably infer that insufficient evidence existed to prosecute Lincoln for sodomy. Moreover, although enough information existed to generate gossip that he was gay if anyone wanted to start a rumor, the absence of such a whispering campaign suggests that the public didn’t care about reports of homosexuality.
In the Illinois of Lincoln’s era, male homosexuality was regarded as simply a vice, along the line of tobacco smoking. Men who were either bisexual or homosexual were not labeled as such, any more than they were pigeonholed as bald or thin. Sexual orientation was merely one of many personal characteristics. What destroyed that tolerant attitude is a topic for another day, but clearly a key factor was the emergence of a system for classifying people based on sexual orientation that emerged in the late 19th century, a system complete with pejorative labels and stereotypical behavior patterns (such as men sleeping together or sitting on each others’ laps) that society deemed improper or immoral.
In the Illinois of Lincoln’s time, the status of male homosexuals was scarcely distinguishable from that of other citizens integrated into society. Lincoln ultimately liberated the slaves, but he did not have to liberate gay people, who had yet to be singled out as a pariah group or any kind of group at all. This tolerance was based on democratic values that still exist and that can be nurtured to blossom again. The past shows that American society in the future need not be permeated with homophobia. In this, the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, let us have renewed dedication to the ideals of that conflict’s victors, and seek to guarantee that all persons can live, work, and love without fear.
Richard Lawrence Miller is the author of Lincoln and His World: Volume 3, The Rise to National Prominence, 1843-1853
