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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Shoddy scholarship, wishful thinking and bad writing are not the same thing as fraud or dishonesty, however, and that's where the rub lies with "The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln." Poorly as it makes its case, Tripp's book reminds us how little we know about the private life and personality of the president who freed the slaves and saved the Union, the man who challenged America to live up to the high-flown rhetoric about freedom and equality in its founding documents. Much of this has to do with Lincoln's nature; as his longtime law partner and early biographer William Herndon wrote, Lincoln was seen even in his time as "a profound mystery -- an enigma -- a sphinx -- a riddle ... incommunicative -- silent -- reticent -- secretive -- having profound policies -- and well laid -- deeply studied plans."
More than that, though, the difficulty with assessing Lincoln's private life (or that of anyone else who lived before the 20th century) is that the nature of private life has changed dramatically from his time to ours, and the distance between us distorts the view. Neither Tripp nor his critics, to my mind, fully reckon with the fact that when we look at Abe Lincoln and Joshua Speed together in that double bed above Speed's general store, we literally don't know what we're seeing.
Whether their relationship had a sexual component or not, it belongs to a vanished world of intimate male friendships of a kind almost unrecognizable to us, and to an age in which social intercourse between men and women was ritualized and tightly controlled. Homosexuality did not exist as a word or as an identity. Sodomy was illegal, but so was every other kind of nonmarital sex, and in practice private homosexual acts were generally ignored. (Preachers and moralists of the day were more concerned with masturbation, which was seen as responsible for poor public health and numerous moral ills.)
About the best we can do, when looking at passionate male friendships of the 19th century, is guess: Some were undoubtedly sexual, most were presumably platonic, and many fell somewhere in between, meaning that they were homoerotic in nature but not necessarily genital. In "'We Are Lincoln Men,'" Donald cites the case of Daniel Webster, whose mash notes to a Dartmouth classmate were addressed "Dearly Beloved" and signed "Accept all the tenderness I have," although there's no evidence they ever had sex. (For a literary example, one might consider the relationship between Frodo and Sam in J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings," which is tender, loving and even sensual, without being sexual.)
I'm not confident that Tripp or Donald or anyone else can reliably read the signals in a 19th century same-sex friendship, at least not when the evidence is as ambiguous as it is in the Lincoln-Speed case. Tripp essentially begins by assuming that the only way to explain their four years of bed-sharing is that they were lovers. Then he cherry-picks the friendliest details and psychologizes, rationalizes and generally massages away any contradictions. Arguably, of course, Donald or any other heterosexual (myself included) is likely to begin with the opposite assumption, and then look for evidence that the sleeping arrangement was an innocent matter of economics, space and the chilly nights of frontier Illinois.
"'We Are Lincoln Men': Abraham Lincoln and His Friends"
By David Herbert Donald
Simon & Schuster
288 pages
Nonfiction
If you're looking for anything new on the Speed case, you won't find it here. The facts, such as they are, are well-rehearsed to the level of mythology: At age 28, newly admitted to the bar, Lincoln moved from the dying hamlet of New Salem, Ill., to Springfield, then a metropolis of some 1,500 residents. Arriving there in the spring of 1837, he went to Speed's general store and discovered, to his chagrin, that the cost of a mattress, pillow and linens came to $17.
"He said that was perhaps cheap enough," as Speed put it years later, "but, small as the sum was, he was unable to pay it. But if I would credit him till Christmas, and his experiment as a lawyer was a success, he would pay then, saying, in the saddest tone, 'If I fail in this, I do not know that I can ever pay you.'" Speed had another idea, telling the newcomer, "I think I can suggest a plan by which you can avoid the debt and at the same time attain your end. I have a large room with a double bed up-stairs, which you are very welcome to share with me."
Tripp pounces on this like a cat on a crippled mouse, declaring that earlier scholars have missed the true implications of this story. "In hindsight it is clear that their very first meeting began what was to become the major event in Lincoln's private life, an intense and ongoing homosexual relationship with Speed." Later, he adds: "To anyone alert to homosexual propositions it is perhaps obvious from the outset that this is very much what was involved here, as Speed quickly moved the situation from a sale on credit to a generous invitation to Lincoln to move right into his room and bed."
Perhaps I'm insufficiently schooled in homosexual propositions, but it doesn't seem obvious at all. Lincoln grew up in that legendary log cabin (actually several different ones), sleeping rough with his siblings and step-siblings on such cots and mattresses as were available. Men on the frontier bunked together routinely, and privacy was a commodity available only to the rich. In William Herndon's account of riding the rural Illinois legal circuit with Lincoln, he remembers dormitories with up to 20 men crammed into a room, sleeping on the furniture, the floor, or piles of rope and straw.
