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.
Read more about this topic: Sexuality Of Abraham Lincoln
Famous quotes containing the words relationship with, relationship and/or david:
“Henry David Thoreau, who never earned much of a living or sustained a relationship with any woman that wasn’t brotherly—who lived mostly under his parents’ roof ... who advocated one day’s work and six days “off” as the weekly round and was considered a bit of a fool in his hometown ... is probably the American writer who tells us best how to live comfortably with our most constant companion, ourselves.”
—Edward Hoagland (b. 1932)
“It was a real treat when he’d read me Daisy Miller out loud. But we’d reached the point in our relationship when, in a straight choice between him and Henry James, I’d have taken Henry James any day even if Henry James were dead and not much of a one for the girls when living, either.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“A temple, you know, was anciently “an open place without a roof,” whose walls served merely to shut out the world and direct the mind toward heaven; but a modern meeting-house shuts out the heavens, while it crowds the world into still closer quarters.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)