Lincoln and Ann Rutledge

[Lewis Gannett]

(06-24-2014 07:19 PM)LincolnToddFan Wrote:  Interesting. I don't know where I read this, but another author made an excellent point about the idea that AL might not have been heterosexual . He pointed out that if there had been even the slightest indication that he was somehow effeminate, his (many) political enemies would have taken the ball and run with it. They would have had a virtual field day with that sort of information.

Look at what Thomas Jefferson's political opponents did with the rumors that he had a slave mistress and children with her.. They were merciless, brutal.

With Lincoln, there was never even an idea planted in the anti-Lincoln press during his lifetime that his sexual orientation was anything other than heterodox. The fact that he was not a skirt chaser and was awkward with the ladies does not automatically mean he was gay. So instead, his enemies got mileage out of rumors that he was illegitimate or even-gasp! racially mixed.

Lincoln was in love with the world of ideas. His intellect and his imagination are what seemed to drive him. In our own time, when everything and everyone is defined by how they come across sexually, it is even more difficult than usual to understand a man like Abraham Lincoln.

None of us can know for sure, but I don't believe he was gay. The evidence simply isn't there.

LincolnToddFan,

You make a good point: why didn't Lincoln's enemies attack him for "being gay"? His predecessor, James Buchanan, got heat for his bachelorhood and his close friendship with William Rufus de Vane King. I think the word "molly" was publicly tossed around--which is interesting, because some scholars argue that homosexuality as we now know it didn't exist back then. David Herbert Donald, a terrific Lincoln scholar, claimed that homosexuality was rare in the American 19th century. I have trouble with aspects of this thinking--the West was overwhelmingly male and young, with few available females. Sure, lots of prostitutes, but that required money and going to town. Evidence is emerging that, in fact, the frontier was pretty darn gay. No surprise; think of what happens in prisons, boarding schools, and back in the day (no kidding), pirate ships. The point though is that the public seems to have had a surprisingly realistic awareness of same-sex sex. Given that, why didn't people make fun of Abe & Joshua sharing a bed for four years? It's a legitimate question. William Hanchett, one of the foremost scholars of the assassination, discusses the issue in a series of articles in the Lincoln Herald, "Abraham Lincoln and the Tripp Thesis." To my mind Hanchett doesn't fully solve it (he's extremely astute on other issues, however, very much worth reading). I have a hunch. Lincoln was so formidable a physical presence that few who knew him could have imagined him as "effeminate." But that doesn't get us very far, I concede. So it's an open question: if, as Tripp argues, Lincoln carried on sexually with other males from youth into his presidency (with Capt. David Derickson at the White House, for example), where was the scandal? One possible answer: nobody had any proof. Well, the obvious rejoinder is that there's STILL no proof! I'd dispute that claim but won't get into now. Here's a question for you. What did Lincoln do for sexual companionship until his marriage at the somewhat late age of 33? Was he celibate? (David Donald actually floated this odd possibility.) To reiterate, Lincoln was famously allergic to the company of unattached women. The two prostitute stories are unconvincing, by the way. And what of his legendarily "dirty" sense of humor? No getting around it: the man loved to tell jokes about sex. Was he a case of all talk, no action? That seems unlikely. OK, let's go to the bridge: Does any of this matter? Maybe not very much. To me, though, there's one reason the general issue has ended up mattering a lot: I got tired of hearing senior Lincoln scholars ridicule the Tripp hypothesis when most of those scholars well know that the subject has long been privately discussed by some of the biggest names in Lincoln historiography. It's an old hidden sore spot in Lincoln Studies: and all the bigwigs know it. However, there's a problem with taking it seriously. To the extent that Tripp is right is the extent to which the Lincoln establishment is not merely wrong, but hugely, spectacularly wrong. That's a major problem. I'll leave you with my own personal pet bombshell. The scholarly rehab of the Rutledge story, which kicked off in 1990 with articles by John Y. Simon and Douglas L. Wilson, wasn't checked for flaws. The Lincoln establishment gave it a free pass. After nearly half a century of academic exile, Ann Rutledge almost overnight was reinstalled as Lincoln's great love. No one said boo despite Randall's thorough 1945 demolition. This is weird, my friends. Very strange indeed. Lincoln scholars don't customarily hand out free passes to new interpretations that knock aside decades of consensus. At the least, they debate. They talk it over. Some fight; lots of scholars hate paradigm shifts. But there was no dissent. Not a peep! Why? My answer in brief: the long-repressed gay hypothesis had been bubbling up since the advent of gay scholarship in the 1970s, and many Lincolnists didn't at all mind Lincoln getting a girlfriend. How's that for provocative?