Sexuality of Abraham Lincoln - Historical Scholarship and Debate

Historical Scholarship and Debate

Commentary on Abraham Lincoln's sexuality has existed for some time but re-entered the public light in 2005 with the posthumous publication of C. A. Tripp's book The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln.

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 period 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, which 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 restored 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 was gay and 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 went on to write 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. Nobile's book on Lincoln has never appeared, but he did go on to meet further controversy of his own, involving allegedly wrongful accusations by Nobile of his superiors' involvement in a cheating scheme.

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 planned 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".

In 2012, Sylvia Rhue, a filmmaker and activist, interviewed Reverend Cindi Love about her family history and research. Love, a descendant of William Herndon, noted that family history held that Herndon was gay and the lover of Lincoln.

In her book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Doris Kearns Goodwin points out the flaw of asserting Lincoln's sexuality as homosexual simply on the basis for his attachment to the young Speed:

"Their intimacy is more an index to an era when close male friendships, accompanied by open expressions of affection and passion, were familiar and socially acceptable. Nor can sharing a bed be considered evidence for an erotic involvement. It was a common practice in an era when private quarters were a rare luxury...The attorneys of the Eighth circuit in Illinois where Lincoln would travel regularly shared beds" (58).

Furthermore, Goodwin reiterates what historian Donald Yacovone has stated in the past: "the preoccupation with elemental sex" reveals more about the later centuries "than about the nineteenth"(58).