Lincoln and Ann Rutledge

[Lewis Gannett]

(06-29-2014 05:22 PM)Eva Elisabeth Wrote:  

(06-29-2014 02:24 PM)Lewis Gannett Wrote:  ...does any of the evidence that Lincoln had sex affairs with men...

As I once said, I've never payed much attention to this topic. Just curious now - is there indeed any real evidence that Lincoln had sex affairs with men? Could you give one example? (Sorry if I overread it somewhere.)

I don't fully understand how this posting system works. Sometimes I don't see posts until a couple days after they appear. That's the case with Eva's post, above, and Toia's reply to it.

About "real evidence" that Lincoln had sex affairs with men. There's no smoking-gun evidence so far discovered, and I'd be willing to bet money that none ever turns up. Instead, there's a collection of verifiable items related to Lincoln's life that, taken together, suggest that he was sexually drawn to men. How strong is this evidence? Ah! Good question! You won't be surprised to hear that it depends on who's looking at the evidence. Some people check out the various items and very quickly see bisexuality. Others look at the same evidence and see no such thing. Does that surprise you, given what I've been going on about here for the last week or so? Honest: it's true: this is what fascinates me about the Lincoln sexuality debate. Like I've been saying about the Rutledge debate: How is it possible that even trained historians can examine precisely the same body of evidence and from it draw radically different conclusions?

I'm not going to run through the whole bisexuality case. It would take too much time, typing in these little boxes isn't fun, etc. Eva, the best way to see the evidence is to read C. A. Tripp's book, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, Free Press, 2005. It has a lot of interesting material about Lincoln's life and personality aside from sex & romance. I think it's a reasonably fun read. But then, I'm biased, given that I'm credited as "editor" on the title page. Jean Baker wrote the excellent Introduction. Michael Burlingame supplied a vigorous dissent, which appears in an Afterword. Michael Chesson, UMass/Boston history professor emeritus, provided a spirited Afterword in support of Tripp's argument. Chesson, incidentally, is rather conservative, married with kids, a church deacon, a captain in the Navy Reserve, a Pulitzer finalist I think twice, he won two prestigious prizes for books on Southern history, he's a Richmond native, blah blah blah, and he's a friend of mine. Actually he was one of my professors in grad school at UMass. So, there's my advertisement for and duly diligent full disclosure about the Tripp book. I really think that you should buy it and tell all of your friends to buy it, and maybe start a book club: ha ha. Funny!

I'll give you a quick thumbnail sketch of two items of evidence and then you're on your own.

Some people think that the most sensational item is a diary entry a D.C. socialite named Virginia Woodbury Fox made on Nov. 16, 1862: "Tish says, '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!" The soldier in question was Captain David Derickson, commander of a detachment of Pennsylvania soldiers who guarded the both White House and the presidential summer retreat at the "Soldiers' Home," an enclave of buildings located some miles outside of Washington. Derickson & Lincoln hit it off. As Virginia Fox noted, they sometimes slept together when Mary Lincoln was out of town. Well, what of it? The detail about Mary being away is interesting. The Lincolns mostly used separate bedrooms at the White House because Lincoln sometimes conferred with staff in the middle of the night, and also because Mary (some scholars think) had sustained injuries giving birth to Tad and had therefore given up conjugal relations. So: if Derickson's occasional sleepovers with Lincoln were purely chaste, as some have claimed, why make it a practice only when Mary was away?

There's more about Derickson. In 1895 his commanding officer, Lt. Col. Thomas Chamberlin, published a regimental history that included an account of Derickson's unit. Chamberlin wrote, "Captain Derickson, in particular, advanced so far in the President's confidence and esteem that in Mrs. Lincoln's absence he frequently spent the night at his [Soldiers' Home] cottage, sleeping in the same bed with him, and--it is said--making use of his Excellency's night-shirt! Thus began an intimacy which continued unbroken until the following spring, when Captain Derickson was appointed provost marshall of the Nineteenth Pennsylvania District, with head-quarters in Meadville." Note the "in Mrs. Lincoln's absence." Now, some people have argued--David Donald among them--that Chamberlin never would have gone on about Derickson sleeping with Lincoln if there had been even the slightest hint of scandal to it. Oh yeah? Hmm. That's open to question. Who knows what any of these people thought about the significance of the sleeping arrangement? In any case, we have two independent accounts of a sleeping arrangement when Mary was away. OK: So what? I'll speak for myself. I think Lincoln and Derickson probably had a sexual affair--and astonishingly enough, were fairly reckless about it. Even with the wise precaution of not sharing the bed when Mary was around.

Nobody has disputed the authenticity of these texts. Nobody has convincingly explained why two grown men chose to sleep together. It wasn't for lack of bedrooms; the White House had plenty and so did the "cottage," which was a large house. Lincoln didn't need a replacement bed warmer on cold nights when Mary was away because he mostly didn't share his bed with Mary anyway. As mentioned, this isn't a smoking gun. But it's suggestive.

Then there's a whole bunch of other, admittedly less dramatic stuff. To my mind the general relationship with Joshua Speed stands out. I think the correspondence between Lincoln & Speed is very telling; the most telling thing of all, actually. And everybody's heard about the four-year bed sharing above the Springfield store. Critics scoff that it was normal to share beds back then because mattresses were expensive. But for four years? Also, there was a second bed in that room above the store. Herndon sometimes occupied it, another store employee named Charles Hurst sometimes slept in it. But Lincoln & Speed often had the room to themselves. When they did, neither apparently made use of the second bed. Oh and by the way: you know the story about Lincoln arriving penniless in Springfield, too poor to buy his own bed. Generous Speed, a stranger, on the spot offered to share his bed with the sad-looking newcomer whose saddlebags contained all of his worldly possessions? We've all heard that story. It's not entirely a true story. Lincoln owned a real-estate lot in Springfield & sold it shortly after arrival for a tidy sum. Make of that what you will. The real-estate facts have been readily available to scholars for nearly a hundred years. So why do we constantly hear about how Lincoln couldn't afford a bed? You know, stuff like this really starts to add up after a while.

What do you think, Eva? Let me know. I'm curious.