C.A. Tripp - The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln

The Intimate World of Abraham LINCOLN

ALSO BY C . A . T RIPP

The Homosexual Matrix

C . A . TRIPP
E DITED BY L EWIS G ANNETT

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tripp, C. A.

The intimate world of Abraham Lincoln / C. A. Tripp; edited by Lewis Gannett.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865Psychology.

2. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865Friends and associates.

3. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865Relations with women.

4. PresidentsUnited StatesBiography.

5. Intimacy (Psychology)Case studies.

6. CharacterCase studies.

I. Gannett, Lewis.

II. Title.

E457.2 .T75 2005

973.7092dc22 2004057605

ISBN 0-7432-6639-0
eISBN: 978-1-439-10404-0
ISBN-13: 978-0-743-26639-0

To Future Lincoln Scholars
With hopes that Planck was incorrect:

A New Scientific truth does not triumph
By convincing its opponents,
But rather because its opponents die,
And a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

MAX PLANCK

By Jean Baker, Goucher College

The debate over Abraham Lincolns sexuality has become an insistent inquiry. During the 1990s the issue has been considered on call-in shows, in magazines, on websites, and in the private conversations among scholars who have devoted their lives and reputations to understanding the sixteenth president. Whisper campaigns have even included talk of a newly discovered diary written by Lincolns lover, which turned out to be fictitious. Clearly the matter has seized the publics attention, and it needs to be addressed. But no one has seriously researched the question until C. A. Tripps The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln. Fortunately Tripps book is much more than an effort to answer the limited question, by applying todays categories to past sexual behavior, of whether Lincoln was a homosexual. What follows is neither polemic nor expos, but a full-fledged character study that places Lincolns sexuality into a larger, more significant framework of trying to understand this elusive man.

Of course Lincoln, labeled by his law partner William Herndon the most shut-mouthed man I knew, has offered little assistance in answering questions about his love life. In fact the president left few clues about any aspect of his personal affairs, much less his sexual preferences. Such reticence extends into his relationships with his parents (scholars still argue about his feelings toward his father); his marriage (about which there seems to be unending debate); and even his paternal views of his four sons (although he did once describe his eldest son Robert as a rare ripe sort smarter at about five than ever after). In the autobiography encouraged by his Republican supporters in the fall of 1859 when he was emerging as a candidate for that partys nomination, Lincoln, already among the best-known men of his generation, produced a spare, less than six-hundred-word description of his first fifty years. His autobiography was short, he averred, because there is not much of me.

Historians have taken Lincolns comment as an example of his humility. Yet such brevity and evasiveness also demonstrate his lifelong public silence about personal matters, a conventional response among men during the nineteenth century, though less so, then as now, among aspiring politicians. In any case discussions about sex, even between long-married heterosexual couples, were rare in the nineteenth century. Physical intimacy remained a private matter about which nineteenth-century Americans, little given to the confessional outpourings of their twenty-first-century descendants, left few hints. We would not expect Abraham Lincoln to tell us that he favored sex with men, although he may have left some clues. And because scholars have only recently begun investigating sex as a time- and place-bound experience, we have little context for assessing sexual practices in Lincolns time.

Todays focus on sexsome call it an American obsessionis radically different. Retrospective considerations of the sexuality of nineteenth-century historical figuresincluding Lincolns presidential predecessor James Buchanan, whom some proclaim our first gay presidentabound. Gay activism has helped stir historians to investigate what had been an invisible, unfathomable subject, unimaginable to some, improper and meaningless for others.

Homosexualsmale and femalenow seek civil rights, and grudgingly some courts and legislatures have moved to protect these rights. A similar, but much slower transformation in private attitudes supporting homosexuality, has accompanied such changes, but heterosexual acceptance of the other is still limited and tenuous. As late as the mid-1980s over 60 percent of all Americans found homosexuality an unacceptable lifestyle. Evidence outing the iconic Lincoln, among many historians and much of the general public, will come as bad news dishonoring a revered figure. Some will protest that the case C. A. Tripp makes in The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln has not been proven and is largely circumstantial; others will turn away in disgust, for homosexuality is a subject that stirs deep emotions. But many will applaud efforts to answer questions that threaten to obscure all others, on the eve of the bicentennial celebration in 2009 of Lincolns birth. In the end Lincoln is too important a figure in our national past to censor, especially since in the argument presented here, Lincolns sexuality is integral to understanding his presidential leadership. Whatever the response, Tripps The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln deserves a fair reading.

No one asks if Andrew Jackson, Franklin Pierce, Ulysses S. Grant, or Andrew Johnson were homosexuals. They seemed too robustly sexual, meaning, of course, that they responded to women. On the other hand, even if Lincoln himself has left few obvious indications of his possible homosexuality, there were always hints observed and commented upon by historians. Some, like Ida Tarbell writing her two-volume The Life of Abraham Lincoln in 1900 and Margaret Leech in her 1941 Reveille in Washington 1860-1865, discovered evidence of Lincoln in bed with another man in 1862, but for reasons of prudery, implausibility or ignorance about homosexuality, they declined to develop this material into any argument about Lincolns homosexuality. (In terms of Lincoln scholarship it is not surprising that two women, among the disproportionate host of male historians, found these clues.)

In 1924, Carl Sandburg, in the first volume of The Prairie Years, poetically described Lincolns streak of lavender and spots soft as May violets, but Sandburg pursued the issue no farther. There is also fragmentary evidence about Lincolns homosexuality in the comments of Lincolns contemporaries made to that oral historian par excellence, William Herndon, when the latter was gathering material about the president after his assassination. To some, Lincoln was not a garden-variety heterosexual.