What About Lincoln?

Harvard scholar John Stauffer describes “a major paradigm shift” on the historiography of Abraham Lincoln’s sexuality, including his relationship in Illinois with Joshua Speed.

New “paradigm” embraces scholarship on Honest Abe’s homosexuality

   While the gay media has been awash in unwarranted hosannas over the recent coming-out declaration by former Republican National Committee chair Ken Mehlman — who has not apologized for running the most homophobic presidential campaign in US history — the LGBT press has been ignoring an infinitely more significant development under way with vastly more important implications for the Republican Party: the increasing acceptance by historians that the loving heart of Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator and the first GOP president, found its natural amorous passions overwhelmingly directed toward those of his own sex.

   This shifting consensus about Lincoln’s sexual orientation is certainly the most stunning and effective rebuke to the Republican Party’s scapegoating of same-sex love for electoral purposes, which came to fever pitch during the 2004 race that Mehlman spearheaded for George W. Bush.

   “We are getting closer to the day that a majority of younger, less homophobic historians will at long last accept the evidence of Lincoln’s same-sex component,” John Stauffer, chair of Harvard University’s Department of American Civilization, told Gay City News, adding, “ We’re already seeing the beginnings of a trend that will amount to a major paradigm shift.”

   Stauffer is one of the nation’s leading experts on the Civil War era, and in his latest — and best-selling — book, “Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglas and Abraham Lincoln,” he supports the thesis that Joshua Speed was, as he put it, “Lincoln’s soulmate and the love of his life.”

   And in the latest issue of the scholarly journal Reviews of American History, Stauffer hammers home this point, writing, “In light of what we know about romantic friendship at the time, coupled with the facts surrounding Speed’s and Lincoln’s friendship, there is no reason to suppose they weren’t physically intimate at some point during their four years of sleeping together in the same small bed, long after Lincoln could afford a bed of his own. To ignore this, as most scholars do, is to pretend that same-sex carnal relationships were abnormal. It thus presumes a dislike or fear about such relationships, reflecting a presentist and homophobic perspective.”

   In his groundbreaking 2005 book “The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln,” the late C.W. Tripp meticulously assembled the considerable body of historical evidence for Lincoln’s same-sex affinities, including his love affair with Speed. Tripp, who worked closely in the 1940s and 1950s with the groundbreaking sexologist Alfred Kinsey, was a clinical psychologist, university professor, and author of the 1975 bestseller “The Homosexual Matrix,” which helped transcend outdated Freudian clichés and establish that a same-sex affectional and sexual orientation is a normal and natural occurrence.

   In his book on Lincoln, Tripp drew on his years with Kinsey, who, he wrote, “confronted the problem of classifying mixed sex patterns by devising his 0-to-6 scale, which allows the ranking of any homosexual component in a person’s life from none to entirely homosexual. By this measure Lincoln qualifies as a classical 5 — predominantly homosexual, but incidentally heterosexual.”

   A majority of Lincoln scholars dumped on Tripp’s book when it was published five years ago, but the “paradigm shift” on Lincoln of which Stauffer speaks is not only being led by younger historians like himself (Stauffer received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1999, began teaching at Harvard that year, and was tenured in 2004).

   In a lengthy article entitled “Abraham Lincoln and the Tripp Thesis” in a recent issue of one of the oldest scholarly journals devoted to the iconic president, the Lincoln Herald, a senior Lincoln historian and author of numerous Lincoln books, the octogenarian William Hanchett, professor of history emeritus at the University of California/ San Diego, “challenges historians to either refute the Tripp thesis or to rewrite Lincoln’s biography. Hanchett believes that Tripp is correct at least in the broad outline of his work and finds it frustrating that most historians, rather than confronting this pioneering study, choose to ignore it,” as the Lincoln Herald’s editors put it in introducing Hanchett’s revealing, carefully footnoted essay on Lincoln’s same-sex affinities.



   Hanchett in particular breaks new ground when he deconstructs what we know of the much-ignored secret Memo books kept by Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon as he spent a quarter century intensively researching his massive “Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life,” published in 1889. The UC/ San Diego scholar details how he believes that the otherwise thorough Tripp missed the evidence there that backs up Hanchett’s view that “Lincoln’s secret” was homosexuality.

   “A significant number of Lincoln’s contemporaries,” Hanchett writes, “must have known of or strongly suspected his secret. The existence of Herndon’s Memo books proves it. His rowdy friends in New Salem must have wondered why [Lincoln] declined to participate with them in their revels, and almost certainly some of them must have figured it out. They knew about homosexuality, only the word was unknown to them.”

   With the exception of a brief notice in the Gay and Lesbian Review by Tripp’s collaborator Lewis Gannett, the gay press has utterly ignored the validation of Tripp’s portrayal of Lincoln’s love affair with Speed by Stauffer, as it has Hanchett’s stunning article expanding on Tripp’s documentation of Lincoln’s same-sex emotional and physical life.

   Others, preceding Tripp, had proclaimed in print that Lincoln was gay. The first, some four decades ago, was the pioneer Los Angeles gay activist Jim Kepner, editor of ONE, the early gay magazine. Kepner focused on Lincoln’s long-acknowledged intimate friendship with Speed, as did later writers, like the historian of gay America Jonathan Ned Katz and University of Massachusetts professor Charles Shively. Gore Vidal has said in interviews that, in researching his 1984 historical novel on Lincoln, he began to suspect that the 16th president had same-sex romantic relationships. But all this was little noticed outside the gay community.

   One of the few traditional Lincolnists to describe — however obliquely — the lifelong Lincoln-Speed relationship as homosexual was the Illinois poet Carl Sandburg, in his masterful, six-volume Lincoln biography. In the 1926 tome titled “The Prairie Years,” Sandburg wrote that both Lincoln and Speed had “a streak of lavender, and spots soft as May violets.”

   “I do not feel my own sorrows more keenly than I do yours,” Lincoln wrote Speed in one letter. And elsewhere: “You know my desire to befriend you is everlasting.” In a detailed retelling of the Lincoln-Speed love story — including the “lust at first sight” encounter between the two young men, when Lincoln readily accepted Speed’s eager invitation to share his narrow bed — Tripp notes that Speed was the only human being to whom the president ever signed his letters with the unusually tender (for Lincoln) “yours forever” — a salutation Lincoln never even used with his wife.

   Speed himself acknowledged, “No two men were ever so intimate.” And Tripp credibly describes Lincoln’s near nervous breakdown following Speed’s decision to end their four-year affair by returning to his native Kentucky.

   In the preface to his massive biography, Sandburg wrote, “Month by month in stacks and bundles of facts and legend, I found invisible companionships that surprised me. Perhaps a few of these presences lurk and murmur in this book.”

   Tripp’s book was remarkable and precedent-shattering because, for the first time, he restores names and faces (more than just Speed’s) to a number of those previously invisible homosexual companions and love objects of the most venerated of America’s presidents, among them: Henry C. Whitney, another of Lincoln’s law colleagues; the young Billy Greene, a New Salem contemporary of Lincoln’s and another bedmate (who admired Lincoln’s thighs); Nat Grigsby; and A.Y. Ellis. Another was the handsome David Derickson, by nine years the president’s junior, captain of President Lincoln’s bodyguard. Tripp describes in great detail how Derickson was the object of “the kinds of gentle and concentrated high-focus attention from Lincoln that Henry C. Whitney, from having himself once been on the receiving end, well described: ‘[It was] as if he wooed me to close intimacy and friendship, a kind of courtship, as indeed it was.’”

   There is a great deal more to Tripp’s book, which — as Lincoln scholar Jean Baker noted in her admiring preface — “is not a work of sexual or biological reductionism, but rather a significant effort to understand a complicated man.” Among the many invaluable contributions is the chapter revealing that Lincoln’s supposed tragic “romance” with Anne Rutledge — often hyped by Hollywood retelling — was a myth invented after Lincoln’s death. This chapter is for the most part due to the research of Gannett, Tripp’s faithful collaborator on the Lincoln project, who edited the book for publication after Tripp’s death and has just published a longer version of his destruction of the Rutledge myth in the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, another scholarly review.

   Some of Tripp’s findings came from finely argued circumstantial deductions — which were seized upon to denounce the book by many of what Vidal has called the “scholar squirrels” of the considerable Lincoln industry, who have a lot of skin in the game.

   “Why [have] scholars [been] so willfully blind to the host of historical evidence that Lincoln had a strong homosexual component?,” Harvard’s Stauffer wrote to this reporter in an email, explaining, “The answer stems from the intense homophobia throughout 20th century America, which has profoundly shaped Lincoln scholarship. Every scholar needs to read previous scholarship on Lincoln; and even comparatively open-minded scholars, after reading the mass of Lincoln scholarship, can easily be persuaded into perpetuating the blindness about Lincoln’s relationship with Speed.”

   Stauffer, however, underscored in his email, “These explanations don’t account for the fact that most scholars today can agree that other well-known and beloved figures, such as Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, had strong homosexual tendencies but deny that Lincoln did, despite similar evidence. The reason for this paradox, and perhaps the central reason why scholars have been willfully blind to the evidence on Lincoln, is because most view him as the ‘redeemer president’— essentially ‘America’s Christ’ — and don’t want America’s Christ having strong homosexual tendencies.”

   However, the “paradigm shift” currently in progress in historians’ views of Lincoln’s sexuality is ultimately much more important news than Ken Mehlman’s tardy, skillfully crafted, self-serving admission about his own.

   Mehlman has now cashed in on his political past and is making a fortune as a managing director at Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, the giant private equity firm with a total committed capital of $58 billion, and he’s cushily nestled among hordes of gay gym bunnies in a Chelsea coop worth a reported $3.7 million. No doubt his skimpy coming-out declaration to the Atlantic Monthly’s Mark Ambinder will facilitate his new social life in the gay ghetto.

   Of course, Ambinder did not challenge any of Mehlman’s mendacious assertions pretending he had no responsibility for the virulent gay-bashing of the national 2004 campaign, or Mehlman’s pretense that Bush is “not a homophobe.” Bush’s political homophobia was deployed long before he smeared gays and used them as a winning wedge issue as president — witness the subliminal gay-baiting of Anne Richards in the campaign that elected him governor of Texas, after which Bush as governor tried to take adopted children away from gay couples who loved them. Armbinder let all of Mehlman’s rewriting of history pass without any question or factual corrective.

   Mehlman’s oft-repeated mantra was that he was “proud to be the chairman of the Party of Lincoln.” But the historians’ ongoing “paradigm shift” on the sexuality of our 16th president means that, when Republicans like Mehlman who claimed Lincoln as their political progenitor tried to introduce a ban on recognition of same-sex love into the Constitution that Lincoln defended so well, they wounded the martyr-president squarely in his heart of hearts.

   Doug Ireland may be reached through his blog, DIRELAND.


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