The sexual life of Abraham Lincoln

Donald's account of the story in "'We Are Lincoln Men'" adds some vital context. Although the two had never met, Lincoln was well known to Speed. The newly minted lawyer may have been penniless, but he had already served two terms in the Illinois Legislature and was a rising star in the state's Whig Party (which Speed supported). Indeed, a year earlier, Speed had heard Lincoln debate a prominent Whig turned Democrat named George Forquer, an occasion that saw one of Lincoln's earliest rhetorical flourishes. Noting that Forquer had just erected a lightning rod over his fancy Springfield house, Lincoln declared: "I would rather die now than, like the gentleman change my politics ... and then have to erect a lightning-rod over my house, to protect a guilty conscience from an offended God."

One can't rule out Tripp's hypothesis, and some observers were suspicious of the Lincoln-Speed friendship decades ago. In his 1926 biography of Lincoln, Carl Sandburg famously wrote that the two men had "streaks of lavender, spots soft as May violets," which many have read as a homosexual reference. But it seems at least as likely that Speed wanted to befriend and aid a young politician whom he admired and supported, and who was clearly going places. Herndon, who clerked in Speed's store at the time, slept in the same room with Lincoln and Speed on many nights during the ensuing four-year period and never commented on any observed physical intimacy.

Lincoln himself joked about the matter in later years. He appointed James Speed, Joshua's brother, as U.S. attorney general in 1864, and told a friend that James "was a man I know well, though not so well as I know his brother Joshua. That, however, is not strange, for I slept with Joshua for four years, and I suppose I ought to know him." Donald wonders whether the president of the United States would have spoken so freely of a friendship if it had had any clandestine or forbidden elements.

Tripp moves on rapidly to Lincoln's letters to Speed, written after the latter left Springfield and returned to Kentucky in 1841. There can be no question that the loss of Speed was quite a blow for Lincoln; their friendship was closer than any other he ever enjoyed. (Many of Lincoln's colleagues and associates remembered him as generally cold and distant. David Davis, the Illinois political boss who got him the Republican presidential nomination in 1860, described him as having "no Strong Emotional feelings for any person -- Mankind or thing.")

In Lincoln's letters, Tripp finds an entire world of sublimated erotic expression, which is quite a stretch when you consider that the most personal of these missives concern Speed's impending marriage, which Lincoln consistently urges him to go through with. Tripp has an explanation, of course: Bisexual men "support each other's heterosexual efforts in a spirit of being helpful, yet also as a way to stay close by and fully informed of every move." (He has already stipulated that Lincoln was not bisexual but predominantly homosexual, but never mind -- cataloging all the contradictions in this book would require more space than I have.)

Tripp seizes upon every expression of affection in the letters ("You well know that I do not feel my own sorrows much more keenly than I do yours," Lincoln writes), but skips over the passages in which Lincoln praises "the heavenly black eyes" of Speed's fiancée, and writes, "I am now fully convinced that you love her as ardently as you are capable of loving." When Lincoln's letters to Speed are entirely concerned with the business dealings and legal affairs of Springfield, Tripp detects an erotic tension beneath the mundane details, arguing that "it is precisely this kind of impersonal recounting of some irrelevant bit of news that is often resorted to by distraught lovers who are contending with some strain."

Um, no. It is precisely this kind of ex post facto amateur psychoanalysis that gives sexologists like Tripp such a bad name when they exhume the dead to hunt for hidden signals of gayness. I'm prepared to believe in Lincoln's possible bisexuality, but Tripp can feel the Speed case slipping through his fingers, and his claims become increasingly desperate. This would be a more honest book, and perhaps a more convincing one, if he had simply written: "Listen, I'm a gay man and a sex researcher, and I'm here to tell you that Abe Lincoln looks, sounds and smells like a homo. I can't prove it, but I know it's true."

When it comes to David Derickson, who spent about eight months as Lincoln's bodyguard in 1862 and '63, there is much less evidence, but what there is, is considerably more suggestive. On Nov. 16, 1862, Virginia Woodbury Fox, a Washington socialite and the wife of assistant Navy secretary Gustavus Fox, recorded a bit of especially juicy gossip in her diary. A friend, Leticia McKean, had informed her that "'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!"

Next Page: The Derickson case remains the more mysterious

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