Sexuality of Abraham Lincoln
Encyclopedia
The sexual orientation of Abraham Lincoln
is a topic of debate based on speculation of circumstantial events, a poem open to interpretation, common figures of speech used by Lincoln, his courting of several women, his marriage and children, and other information, with nothing conclusive to confirm his 'sexuality'. Lincoln was married to Mary Todd
from November 4, 1842, until his death on April 15, 1865. They had four children. Gay activist C. A. Tripp has commented that Lincoln's problematic and distant relationship with women stood in contrast to his more warm relations with a number of men in his life and that two of those relationships arguably had homosexual overtones. Lincoln biographers, including David Herbert Donald
, have strongly contested these claims and believe that there is no evidence of homosexuality in Lincoln's life. As an astute politician, Lincoln was a man with many "friends", Donald says. In his letters, for example, Lincoln refers frequently to acquaintances, even political enemies, as "my personal friend".
In his 1926 biography of Lincoln, Carl Sandburg
made an allusion to the early relationship of Lincoln and his friend Joshua Fry Speed
as having "a streak of lavender, and spots soft as May violets". "Streak of lavender" was slang in the 1930s for an effeminate man, and later connoted homosexuality. Sandburg did not elaborate on this comment.
Lincoln wrote a poem that described a marriage-like relation between two men. It is an open question whether the poem is a sign of his sex life or whether it was intended to taunt. It included the lines:
This poem was included in the first edition of Herndon's Life of Lincoln, but was expurgated from subsequent editions until 1942, when the editor Paul Angle reinserted it. This is an example of what Mark Blechner calls "the closeting of history" in which evidence that suggests a degree of homosexuality or bisexuality in a major historical figure is suppressed or hidden.
C. A. Tripp, who died in 2003, was a sex researcher and protégé of Alfred Kinsey
. He began writing The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln with Philip Nobile until a falling out between them. The New York Times
quoted Nobile saying "Tripp's book is a fraud", noting that Nobile "declined to say what was fraudulent, however, because he said he was writing his own article about it". Nobile wrote a critical review of Tripp's book in the Weekly Standard, in which he accused the Tripp book of plagiarizing his own work, of relying heavily on Charles Shiveley without proper attribution and of distortion. Tripp's book includes an afterword by historian and Lincoln biographer Michael Burlingame titled "A Respectful Dissent", in which he states:
In a second afterword to the book titled “An Enthusiastic Endorsement”, historian Michael B. Chesson makes the argument for the historical significance of the work:
Time
magazine also addressed the book as part of a cover article by Joshua Wolf Shenk, author of Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness. Shenk dismissed Tripp's conclusions, stating that arguments on Lincoln's homosexuality were "based on a tortured misreading of conventional 19th century sleeping arrangements". Charles Morris has critically analyzed the academic and popular responses to Tripp's book, arguing that much of the negative response by the Lincoln Establishment reveals itself to be equally guilty of rhetorical and political partisanship as that of Tripp's defenders. In an earlier essay, Morris argues that in the wake of Larry Kramer's "outing" of Lincoln, the Lincoln Establishment engaged in "mnemonicide", or the assassination of a threatening counter memory, including the methodologically flawed but widely appropriated case against the "gay Lincoln thesis" by David Herbert Donald in his book "We Are Lincoln Men".
Since about 1981,
Author and gay activist Larry Kramer
has been researching and writing a manuscript called The American People: A History, an ambitious historical work that begins in the Stone Age
and continues into the present. In 1999 Kramer claimed that he had uncovered new primary sources which shed fresh light on Lincoln's sexuality. The sources included 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 said to reside in a private collection in Davenport, Iowa. Historian Gabor Boritt, referring to Kramer's documents, wrote, "Almost certainly this is a hoax ...". Tripp also expressed skepticism over Kramer’s discovery, writing, “Seeing is believing, should that diary ever show up; the passages claimed for it have not the slightest Lincolnian ring.” Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux
announced in September 2010 that it had acquired worldwide rights to the book and plans to publish it in two volumes beginning in 2012.
Critics of the hypothesis that Lincoln was homosexually inclined note that Lincoln married and had four children. Scholar Douglas Wilson claims that Lincoln as a young man displayed heterosexual behavior, including telling stories to his friends of his interactions with women.
Tripp notes that Lincoln's awareness of homosexuality and openness in penning this "bawdy poem" was unique for the time period. Donald, however, notes that Lincoln would have needed to look no further than the Bible to realize "that men did sometimes have sex with each other", and historian William Lee Miller, among others, has acknowledged that Lincoln was reading the Bible well before his twentieth birthday.
Lincoln's stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln
, commented that he "never took much interest in the girls". However some accounts of Lincoln's contemporaries suggest a strong but controlled passion for women. Lincoln was devastated over the 1835 death of Ann Rutledge
. While some historians have questioned whether there was in fact a romantic relationship between her and Lincoln, historian John Y. Simon reviewed the historiography of the subject and concluded, "Available evidence overwhelmingly indicates that Lincoln so loved Ann that her death plunged him into severe depression. More than a century and a half after her death, when significant new evidence cannot be expected, she should take her proper place in Lincoln biography." Herndon, Lincoln's law partner, in his biography of Lincoln, attests to the depth of Lincoln's love for Miss Rutledge. An anonymous poem about suicide published locally exactly three years after her death is widely attributed to Lincoln. His courting of Mary Owens was diffident. In 1837, he wrote to her from Springfield to give her an opportunity to break off their relationship. Lincoln wrote to a friend in 1838: "I knew she was oversize, but now she appeared a fair match for Falstaff
".
recalled, "I have slept with 20 men in the same room".
A tabulation of historical sources shows that Lincoln slept with at least 11 boys and men during his youth and adulthood. There are no known instances in which Lincoln tried to suppress knowledge or discussion of such arrangements, and in some conversations, raised the subject himself. Tripp discusses three of them at length: Joshua Speed, William Greene, and Charles Derickson.
in Springfield, Illinois
, in 1837. They lived together for four years, during which time they occupied the same bed during the night (some sources specify a large double bed) and developed a friendship that would last until their deaths. According to some sources, William Herndon and a fourth man also slept in the same room. Historians such as Donald point out it was not unusual at that time for two men to share even a small bed due to financial or other circumstances, without anything sexual being implied. Putting the issue in historical perspective, Jonathan Ned Katz
wrote of the bed sharing:
Katz does indicate that such sleeping arrangements "did provide an important site (probably the major site) of erotic opportunity". Katz notes that referring to present day concepts of "homo, hetero, and bi distort our present understanding of Lincoln and Speed's experiences" and that rather than there being "an unchanging essence of homosexuality and heterosexuality" people throughout history "continually reconfigure their affectionate and erotic feelings and acts". He suggests that the Lincoln-Speed relationship fell within the 19th century category of "intense, even romantic man to man friendships" with erotic overtones that may have been "a world apart in that era's consciousness from the sensual universe of mutual masturbation and the legal universe of 'sodomy,' 'buggery,' and 'the crime against nature'".
Possibly, correspondence of the period, such as that between Thomas Jefferson Withers
and James Henry Hammond
, provides clear evidence of a sexual dimension to some same-sex bed sharing. 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. None of Lincoln's enemies hinted at any homosexual implication.
Joshua Speed married Fanny Hennings on 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
.
met in Springfield in 1839 and became engaged in 1840. In what historian Allen Guelzo calls "one of the murkiest episodes in Lincoln’s life", Lincoln called off his engagement to Mary Todd at the same time that the legislative program he had supported for years collapsed, his best friend Joshua Speed left Springfield, and John Stuart, Lincoln’s law partner, proposed ending their law practice. 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". During this time, he avoided seeing Mary, causing her to comment that he "deems me unworthy of notice".
Jean H. Baker, historian and biographer of Mary Todd Lincoln, describes the relationship between Lincoln and his wife as “bound together by three strong bonds – sex, parenting and politics”. In addition to the anti-Mary Todd bias of many historians engendered by William Herndon’s (Lincoln's law partner and early biographer) personal hatred of Mrs. Lincoln, Baker discounts the criticism of the marriage as both a basic misunderstanding of the changing nature of marriage and courtship in the mid-19th Century and attempts to judge the Lincoln marriage by modern standards.
Baker notes that “most observers of the Lincoln marriage have been impressed with their sexuality”. Some “male historians” claim that the Lincolns’ sex life ended either in 1853 after their son Tad’s difficult birth or in 1856 when they moved into a bigger house, but have no actual evidence for their speculations. In fact, there are “almost no gynecological conditions resulting from childbirth” other than a prolapsed uterus (which would have produced other noticeable effects on Mrs. Lincoln) that would have prevented intercourse, and in the 1850s “many middle-class couples slept in separate bedrooms”.
Far from abstaining from sex, Baker suggests that in fact the Lincolns were part of a new development in America that saw the birth rate declining from seven births to a family in 1800 to around 4 per family by 1850. As Americans separated sexuality from child bearing, forms of birth control such as coitus interruptus, long-term breast feeding, and crude forms of condoms and womb veil
s, available through mail order, were available and used. The spacing of the Lincoln children (Robert in 1843, Eddie in 1846, Willie in 1850, and Tad in 1853) is consistent with some type of planning and would have required “an intimacy about sexual relations that for aspiring couples meant shared companionate power over reproduction”.
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led his country through a great constitutional, military and moral crisis – the American Civil War – preserving the Union, while ending slavery, and...
is a topic of debate based on speculation of circumstantial events, a poem open to interpretation, common figures of speech used by Lincoln, his courting of several women, his marriage and children, and other information, with nothing conclusive to confirm his 'sexuality'. Lincoln was married to Mary Todd
Mary Todd Lincoln
Mary Ann Lincoln was the wife of the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, and was First Lady of the United States from 1861 to 1865.-Life before the White House:...
from November 4, 1842, until his death on April 15, 1865. They had four children. Gay activist C. A. Tripp has commented that Lincoln's problematic and distant relationship with women stood in contrast to his more warm relations with a number of men in his life and that two of those relationships arguably had homosexual overtones. Lincoln biographers, including David Herbert Donald
David Herbert Donald
- Career :Majoring in history and sociology, Donald earned his bachelor degree from Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. He earned his PhD in 1946 under the eminent, leading Lincoln scholar, James G. Randall at the University of Illinois...
, have strongly contested these claims and believe that there is no evidence of homosexuality in Lincoln's life. As an astute politician, Lincoln was a man with many "friends", Donald says. In his letters, for example, Lincoln refers frequently to acquaintances, even political enemies, as "my personal friend".
Historical scholarship and accusation of fraud
Commentary on Abraham Lincoln's sexuality has existed for some time but re-entered the public light in 2005 with the posthumous publication of gay activist C.A. Tripp's book The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln.In his 1926 biography of Lincoln, Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg was an American writer and editor, best known for his poetry. He won three Pulitzer Prizes, two for his poetry and another for a biography of Abraham Lincoln. H. L. Mencken called Carl Sandburg "indubitably an American in every pulse-beat."-Biography:Sandburg was born in Galesburg,...
made an allusion to the early relationship of Lincoln and his friend Joshua Fry Speed
Joshua Fry Speed
Joshua Fry Speed was a close friend of Abraham Lincoln from his days in Springfield, Illinois, where Speed was a partner in a general store...
as having "a streak of lavender, and spots soft as May violets". "Streak of lavender" was slang in the 1930s for an effeminate man, and later connoted homosexuality. Sandburg did not elaborate on this comment.
Lincoln wrote a poem that described a marriage-like relation between two men. It is an open question whether the poem is a sign of his sex life or whether it was intended to taunt. It included the lines:
This poem was included in the first edition of Herndon's Life of Lincoln, but was expurgated from subsequent editions until 1942, when the editor Paul Angle reinserted it. This is an example of what Mark Blechner calls "the closeting of history" in which evidence that suggests a degree of homosexuality or bisexuality in a major historical figure is suppressed or hidden.
C. A. Tripp, who died in 2003, was a sex researcher and protégé of Alfred Kinsey
Alfred Kinsey
Alfred Charles Kinsey was an American biologist and professor of entomology and zoology, who in 1947 founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, now known as the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, as well as producing the Kinsey Reports and the Kinsey...
. He began writing The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln with Philip Nobile until a falling out between them. The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
quoted Nobile saying "Tripp's book is a fraud", noting that Nobile "declined to say what was fraudulent, however, because he said he was writing his own article about it". Nobile wrote a critical review of Tripp's book in the Weekly Standard, in which he accused the Tripp book of plagiarizing his own work, of relying heavily on Charles Shiveley without proper attribution and of distortion. Tripp's book includes an afterword by historian and Lincoln biographer Michael Burlingame titled "A Respectful Dissent", in which he states:
In a second afterword to the book titled “An Enthusiastic Endorsement”, historian Michael B. Chesson makes the argument for the historical significance of the work:
Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
magazine also addressed the book as part of a cover article by Joshua Wolf Shenk, author of Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness. Shenk dismissed Tripp's conclusions, stating that arguments on Lincoln's homosexuality were "based on a tortured misreading of conventional 19th century sleeping arrangements". Charles Morris has critically analyzed the academic and popular responses to Tripp's book, arguing that much of the negative response by the Lincoln Establishment reveals itself to be equally guilty of rhetorical and political partisanship as that of Tripp's defenders. In an earlier essay, Morris argues that in the wake of Larry Kramer's "outing" of Lincoln, the Lincoln Establishment engaged in "mnemonicide", or the assassination of a threatening counter memory, including the methodologically flawed but widely appropriated case against the "gay Lincoln thesis" by David Herbert Donald in his book "We Are Lincoln Men".
Since about 1981,
Author and gay activist Larry Kramer
Larry Kramer
Larry Kramer is an American playwright, author, public health advocate, and LGBT rights activist. He began his career rewriting scripts while working for Columbia Pictures, which led him to London where he worked with United Artists. There he wrote the screenplay for Women in Love in 1969, earning...
has been researching and writing a manuscript called The American People: A History, an ambitious historical work that begins in the Stone Age
Stone Age
The Stone Age is a broad prehistoric period, lasting about 2.5 million years , during which humans and their predecessor species in the genus Homo, as well as the earlier partly contemporary genera Australopithecus and Paranthropus, widely used exclusively stone as their hard material in the...
and continues into the present. In 1999 Kramer claimed that he had uncovered new primary sources which shed fresh light on Lincoln's sexuality. The sources included 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 said to reside in a private collection in Davenport, Iowa. Historian Gabor Boritt, referring to Kramer's documents, wrote, "Almost certainly this is a hoax ...". Tripp also expressed skepticism over Kramer’s discovery, writing, “Seeing is believing, should that diary ever show up; the passages claimed for it have not the slightest Lincolnian ring.” Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Farrar, Straus and Giroux is an American book publishing company, founded in 1946 by Roger W. Straus, Jr. and John C. Farrar. Known primarily as Farrar, Straus in its first decade of existence, the company was renamed several times, including Farrar, Straus and Young and Farrar, Straus and Cudahy...
announced in September 2010 that it had acquired worldwide rights to the book and plans to publish it in two volumes beginning in 2012.
Critics of the hypothesis that Lincoln was homosexually inclined note that Lincoln married and had four children. Scholar Douglas Wilson claims that Lincoln as a young man displayed heterosexual behavior, including telling stories to his friends of his interactions with women.
Tripp notes that Lincoln's awareness of homosexuality and openness in penning this "bawdy poem" was unique for the time period. Donald, however, notes that Lincoln would have needed to look no further than the Bible to realize "that men did sometimes have sex with each other", and historian William Lee Miller, among others, has acknowledged that Lincoln was reading the Bible well before his twentieth birthday.
Lincoln's stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln
Sarah Bush Lincoln
Sarah Bush Lincoln was the second wife of Thomas Lincoln and stepmother of President of the United States Abraham Lincoln. She was born in Elizabethtown, Kentucky to Christopher and Hannah Bush. She married her first husband, Daniel Johnston, in 1806, and they had three children. When Daniel...
, commented that he "never took much interest in the girls". However some accounts of Lincoln's contemporaries suggest a strong but controlled passion for women. Lincoln was devastated over the 1835 death of Ann Rutledge
Ann Rutledge
Ann Rutledge was allegedly Abraham Lincoln's first love.-Relationship:Born near Henderson, Kentucky Ann Mayes Rutledge was the third of ten children born to Mary and James Rutledge. In 1829, her father, along with John M. Cameron, founded New Salem, Illinois...
. While some historians have questioned whether there was in fact a romantic relationship between her and Lincoln, historian John Y. Simon reviewed the historiography of the subject and concluded, "Available evidence overwhelmingly indicates that Lincoln so loved Ann that her death plunged him into severe depression. More than a century and a half after her death, when significant new evidence cannot be expected, she should take her proper place in Lincoln biography." Herndon, Lincoln's law partner, in his biography of Lincoln, attests to the depth of Lincoln's love for Miss Rutledge. An anonymous poem about suicide published locally exactly three years after her death is widely attributed to Lincoln. His courting of Mary Owens was diffident. In 1837, he wrote to her from Springfield to give her an opportunity to break off their relationship. Lincoln wrote to a friend in 1838: "I knew she was oversize, but now she appeared a fair match for Falstaff
Falstaff
Sir John Falstaff is a fictional character who appears in three plays by William Shakespeare. In the two Henry IV plays, he is a companion to Prince Hal, the future King Henry V. A fat, vain, boastful, and cowardly knight, Falstaff leads the apparently wayward Prince Hal into trouble, and is...
".
Co-sleeping
As noted above, in 19th century America men commonly bunked with other men. For example, when lawyers and judges traveled "the circuit" with Lincoln, the lawyers often slept "two in a bed and eight in a room". William H. HerndonWilliam Herndon (lawyer)
William Henry Herndon was the law partner and biographer of Abraham Lincoln.-Biography:Born in Greensburg, Kentucky, Herndon and his family moved to Illinois in 1820, and they settled in Springfield when he was five. Herndon attended Illinois College from 1836-1837. In 1840 he married Mary J....
recalled, "I have slept with 20 men in the same room".
A tabulation of historical sources shows that Lincoln slept with at least 11 boys and men during his youth and adulthood. There are no known instances in which Lincoln tried to suppress knowledge or discussion of such arrangements, and in some conversations, raised the subject himself. Tripp discusses three of them at length: Joshua Speed, William Greene, and Charles Derickson.
Relationship with Joshua Speed
Lincoln met Joshua Fry SpeedJoshua Fry Speed
Joshua Fry Speed was a close friend of Abraham Lincoln from his days in Springfield, Illinois, where Speed was a partner in a general store...
in Springfield, Illinois
Springfield, Illinois
Springfield is the third and current capital of the US state of Illinois and the county seat of Sangamon County with a population of 117,400 , making it the sixth most populated city in the state and the second most populated Illinois city outside of the Chicago Metropolitan Area...
, in 1837. They lived together for four years, during which time they occupied the same bed during the night (some sources specify a large double bed) and developed a friendship that would last until their deaths. According to some sources, William Herndon and a fourth man also slept in the same room. Historians such as Donald point out it was not unusual at that time for two men to share even a small bed due to financial or other circumstances, without anything sexual being implied. Putting the issue in historical perspective, Jonathan Ned Katz
Jonathan Ned Katz
Jonathan Ned Katz is an American historian of human sexuality who has focused on same-sex attraction and changes in the social organization of sexuality over time...
wrote of the bed sharing:
Katz does indicate that such sleeping arrangements "did provide an important site (probably the major site) of erotic opportunity". Katz notes that referring to present day concepts of "homo, hetero, and bi distort our present understanding of Lincoln and Speed's experiences" and that rather than there being "an unchanging essence of homosexuality and heterosexuality" people throughout history "continually reconfigure their affectionate and erotic feelings and acts". He suggests that the Lincoln-Speed relationship fell within the 19th century category of "intense, even romantic man to man friendships" with erotic overtones that may have been "a world apart in that era's consciousness from the sensual universe of mutual masturbation and the legal universe of 'sodomy,' 'buggery,' and 'the crime against nature'".
Possibly, correspondence of the period, such as that between Thomas Jefferson Withers
Thomas Jefferson Withers
Thomas Jefferson Withers was a Confederate politician from South Carolina who served in the Confederate States Congress during the American Civil War....
and James Henry Hammond
James Henry Hammond
James Henry Hammond was a politician from South Carolina. He served as a United States Representative from 1835 to 1836, the 60th Governor of South Carolina from 1842 to 1844, and United States Senator from 1857 to 1860...
, provides clear evidence of a sexual dimension to some same-sex bed sharing. 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. None of Lincoln's enemies hinted at any homosexual implication.
Joshua Speed married Fanny Hennings on February 15, 1842, and the two men seem to have consulted each other about married life. Despite having some political differences over slavery
Slavery
Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation...
, they corresponded for the rest of their lives and Lincoln appointed Joshua's brother, James Speed
James Speed
James Speed was an American lawyer, politician and professor. In 1864, he was appointed by Abraham Lincoln to be the United States' Attorney General. He previously served in the Kentucky Legislature, and in local political office.Speed was born in Jefferson County, Kentucky, to Judge John Speed...
, to his cabinet as Attorney General
Attorney General
In most common law jurisdictions, the attorney general, or attorney-general, is the main legal advisor to the government, and in some jurisdictions he or she may also have executive responsibility for law enforcement or responsibility for public prosecutions.The term is used to refer to any person...
.
Mary Todd Lincoln
Lincoln and Mary ToddMary Todd Lincoln
Mary Ann Lincoln was the wife of the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, and was First Lady of the United States from 1861 to 1865.-Life before the White House:...
met in Springfield in 1839 and became engaged in 1840. In what historian Allen Guelzo calls "one of the murkiest episodes in Lincoln’s life", Lincoln called off his engagement to Mary Todd at the same time that the legislative program he had supported for years collapsed, his best friend Joshua Speed left Springfield, and John Stuart, Lincoln’s law partner, proposed ending their law practice. Lincoln is believed to have suffered something approaching clinical depression
Clinical depression
Major depressive disorder is a mental disorder characterized by an all-encompassing low mood accompanied by low self-esteem, and by loss of interest or pleasure in normally enjoyable activities...
. Lincoln's Preparation for Greatness: The Illinois Legislative Years by Paul Simon
Paul Simon (politician)
Paul Martin Simon was an American politician from Illinois. He served in the United States House of Representatives from 1975 to 1985 and United States Senate from 1985 to 1997. He was a member of the Democratic Party...
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". During this time, he avoided seeing Mary, causing her to comment that he "deems me unworthy of notice".
Jean H. Baker, historian and biographer of Mary Todd Lincoln, describes the relationship between Lincoln and his wife as “bound together by three strong bonds – sex, parenting and politics”. In addition to the anti-Mary Todd bias of many historians engendered by William Herndon’s (Lincoln's law partner and early biographer) personal hatred of Mrs. Lincoln, Baker discounts the criticism of the marriage as both a basic misunderstanding of the changing nature of marriage and courtship in the mid-19th Century and attempts to judge the Lincoln marriage by modern standards.
Far from abstaining from sex, Baker suggests that in fact the Lincolns were part of a new development in America that saw the birth rate declining from seven births to a family in 1800 to around 4 per family by 1850. As Americans separated sexuality from child bearing, forms of birth control such as coitus interruptus, long-term breast feeding, and crude forms of condoms and womb veil
Womb veil
The womb veil was a 19th-century American form of barrier contraception consisting of an occlusive pessary made of rubber. It was a forerunner to the modern diaphragm and cervical cap. The name was first used by Edward Bliss Foote in 1863 for the device he designed and marketed...
s, available through mail order, were available and used. The spacing of the Lincoln children (Robert in 1843, Eddie in 1846, Willie in 1850, and Tad in 1853) is consistent with some type of planning and would have required “an intimacy about sexual relations that for aspiring couples meant shared companionate power over reproduction”.
Relationship with David Derickson
Captain David Derickson was Lincoln's bodyguard and companion between September 1862 and April 1863. They shared a bed during the absences of Lincoln's wife, until Derickson was promoted in 1863. Derickson was twice married and fathered ten children, but whatever the exact level of intimacy of the relationship, it was the subject of gossip. Elizabeth Woodbury Fox, the wife of Lincoln's naval aide, 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!'" This sleeping arrangement was also recorded by a fellow officer in Derickson's regiment, Thomas Chamberlin, in the book History of the One Hundred and Fiftieth Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteers, Second Regiment, Bucktail Brigade. Historian Martin P. Johnson notes that the strong similarity in style and content of the Fox and Chamberlin accounts suggests that rather than being two independent accounts of the same events as Tripp claims, both were in fact based on the same report from a single source. David Donald and Johnson both dispute Tripp's interpretation of Fox's comment, saying instead that the exclamation of "What stuff!" was, in that day, an exclamation over the absurdity of the suggestion rather than the gossip value of it.External links
-
- to 1856; strong coverage of national politics
-
- (1832 to 1901) ; covers 1856 to early 1861; very detailed coverage of national politics; part of 10 volume "life and times" written by Lincoln's top aides
- Michael F. Bishop, "All the President's Men", Washington Post February 13, 2005; Page BW03 online
- Book Questions Abraham Lincoln's Sexuality - Discovery Channel
- "The sexual life of Abraham Lincoln" by Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.comSalon.comSalon.com, part of Salon Media Group , often just called Salon, is an online liberal magazine, with content updated each weekday. Salon was founded by David Talbot and launched on November 20, 1995. It was the internet's first online-only commercial publication. The magazine focuses on U.S...
, Jan. 12, 2005 (requires subscription or viewing an ad before reading) - The Lincoln Bedroom: A Critical Symposium Claremont Review of BooksClaremont Review of BooksThe Claremont Review of Books is a quarterly review of politics and statesmanship published by the Claremont Institute. Many consider it a conservative intellectual answer to the liberal New York Review of Books...
, Summer 2005 - Exploring Lincoln's Loves Scott Simon in conversation with Lincoln scholars Michael Chesson and Michael Burlingame. National Public Radio, February 12, 2005
- We Are Lincoln Men Margaret Warner speaks with Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Herbert Donald about his book, We Are Lincoln Men: Abraham Lincoln and His Friends. Public Broadcasting ServicePublic Broadcasting ServiceThe Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....
, November 26, 2003 - Jay Hatheway. American Historical Review 111#2 (April 2006) - An Edgewood CollegeEdgewood CollegeEdgewood College is a Dominican Catholic liberal arts college in Madison, Wisconsin, in the Diocese of Madison. Overlooking the shores of Lake Wingra, it occupies on Madison's near west side....
history professor's book review of C.A. Tripp's The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln online - Mr. Lincoln and Friends: Joshua F. Speed
- (1832 to 1901) ; covers 1856 to early 1861; very detailed coverage of national politics; part of 10 volume "life and times" written by Lincoln's top aides
-
- to 1856; strong coverage of national politics