Lincoln and Ann Rutledge

[LincolnToddFan]

Just chiming in...the idea that the Lincolns did not share a bed during their WH years has been disproven by two separate eyewitnesses on two separate occasions:

July 12 1861 "....it was 4am on July12, the sixth time that night that Lincoln was awoken by a knock on the door from Colonel Daniel Butterfield, his military secretary. Wearing nothing but a red flannel shirt, which he struggled to hold down in front him, Lincoln answered the door "Colonel, do you ever sleep"?..........the colonel apologized for yet another disturbance, but he was there under orders from General Scott. Lincoln explained that his dressing gown was twisted around his wife's feet and not wanting to wake her, he came out in his shirt instead. "Either I have grown too long or the shirt has grown too short, I know not which," he said, still struggling to hold the shirt down in front of him. (The President's War/Chris DeRose/ pg#91)

So, he was not only sharing a bed with MTL, he was apparently doing so in the nude on this particular occasion. If his dressing gown was tangled around the feet of his sleeping wife, where was his nightshirt? Why did he have to throw on a shirt(that he struggled to cover his modesty with?)

The other occasion is mentioned in Matthew Pinsker's "Lincoln's Sanctuary" when Captain Charles Derickson came to the Soldier's Home in the middle of the night in July 1863 with a message for the president which he delivered directly to Lincoln's bedroom and spoke to him with Mary lying beside him. Charles Derickson was ironically the son of David Derickson, who is alleged by some to have been AL's lover.

In separate letters to Mary Jane Welles and Elizabeth Dixon in the summer of 1865, several weeks after AL's murder, Mary lamented the loss of the man she said had been everything to her..." he was always my all...LOVER(emphasis mine) husband, father...truly, truly my ALL"(emphasis MTL) Leavitt and Turner/ Letters of Mary Todd Lincoln

If the sexual side of her marriage had been over for years, why did Mary make a point to refer to Lincoln as her lover(to two intimate friends) instead of simply calling him husband and father?

They slept in separate bedrooms in the WH and for the last few years of their time in Springfield, but their rooms were always conjoined. According to the memoirs of Emilie Todd Helm (Mary's sister) and Elizabeth Keckly, Lincoln could and did frequent his wife's bedroom and sitting rooms...and he never knocked before entering.

There is no real reason to believe that Lincoln and Mary did not enjoy regular conjugal relations.

In fact perhaps Mary shared his bed more than is believed, and Lincoln simply did not enjoy sleeping alone, which is why when Mary was not at the Summer Home with him Captain Derickson was invited to the place of honor, so to speak? In the White House he did not avail himself of cavalry during MTL's absences. Tad shared his father's bed.

Maybe he was lonely and preferred not to sleep alone.

And yes, Mary was insanely jealous. Everyone knows what happened at City Point when she saw a woman riding beside the president. If any unseemly gossip had reached her ears about AL's peculiar attention to David Derickson, she would have "reacted" to put it mildly.