The sexual life of Abraham Lincoln

As David Herbert Donald remarks, this is the only contemporary observation that attributes any sexually unorthodox behavior to Lincoln, and it's no better than a second-hand (or more likely third-hand) report. Still, his attempt to dismiss it doesn't completely work. He may be right that Fox's comment "What stuff!" means she is laughing off McKean's rumor (as in "stuff and nonsense"), but Tripp reads her remark more as "Hot stuff!" or "Wow!"

There can be no question that the "Bucktail soldier" involved is Derickson, whose close friendship with Lincoln is well documented, and it also appears that the gossip spread a lot wider than a few Washington ladies. In Tripp's one work of original research, he unearths a regimental history written in 1895 by Thomas Chamberlin, who was Derickson's commanding officer in the 150th Pennsylvania Volunteers (known as the Bucktail regiment). "Captain Derickson, in particular," Chamberlin wrote, "advanced so far in the President's confidence and esteem that, in Mrs. Lincoln's absence, he frequently spent the night at his cottage [the Soldier's Home, outside Washington], sleeping in the same bed with him, and -- it is said -- making use of his Excellency's night-shirts!"

This is a long way from being definitive, and Tripp predictably makes much more of it than he should, leaping almost instantly to the conclusion that Lincoln and Derickson clearly had "mutually and repeatedly satisfying" sex. But it does seem that more than a few people in the capital had the impression that the two were intimate beyond the bounds of propriety, and Donald's explanation -- it was a platonic, or "Aristotelian," friendship in which Derickson comforted the lonely, war-plagued president as they talked late into the night and then tumbled into bed, swapping nightclothes along the way -- is more than a little defensive.

On the other hand, these two men fathered 13 children between them (Derickson had nine from two marriages), so neither can be described as heterosexually inexperienced. After eight months of whatever degree of chaste or nasty closeness they enjoyed, Derickson asked Lincoln, in April 1863, to get him a promotion and a posting back home to Meadville, Pa. The president readily agreed, and they never saw each other again.

While I feel strongly that Lincoln's friendship with Speed looks less and less sexual the closer you look at it, the Derickson case remains more mysterious. Did the possibility that the two men were having sex even occur to people like Fox and Chamberlin? Were those rumors spread by Lincoln's political opponents? Did Lincoln just want a physical reminder of his rustic sleeping arrangements back in Springfield? Or is this the long-awaited indicator that the Great Uniter swung both ways?

It might seem like a cop-out to say that we'll never know, but, well, we won't. Tripp's various excursions into quasi-quack theorizing -- some accounts suggest that Lincoln experienced puberty as early as age 9 or 10, which, according to Kinsey lore, makes a man both hypersexual and unusually open to same-sex experiences -- don't help much. In fairness, Tripp never claims that Lincoln's sexual behavior had any effect on his prosecution of the Civil War, his attitude toward slavery or his memorable oratory. He begins to make a case that Lincoln's distrust of religion and dislike of moralizing, his capacity for original thinking, and his solitary nature are connected to unconventional sexuality, but the book peters out, in its final chapter, into an irrelevant tangent concerning Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and World War II.

Does it matter that we don't understand Lincoln's private life well, and that we have to admit to some uncertainty about the nature of his sexuality? I can't see that it does. Activists eager to claim a "first gay president" should take a long look at Lincoln's predecessor, James Buchanan, who never married and lived with William Rufus King, an Alabama senator, for many years. Of course, the fact that Buchanan was an inept, pro-slavery chief executive who blundered his way into the Civil War makes him a slightly less desirable role model than Lincoln.

Recent revelations about Thomas Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings speak directly to Jefferson's hypocrisy on the issues of slavery and the universal equality espoused in the Constitution he helped write, and provide a vivid object lesson in the brutal but nearly invisible intimacy of American race relations. Even if Lincoln was as homosexual as Tripp says he was, there was no public consciousness of sex between men as an "issue" in his time, and Lincoln himself would have had no name for his behavior, and no category to put himself in.

Perhaps, as advocates like Doug Ireland have argued, it would embarrass the anti-gay zealots of today's Republican Party to learn that their legendary founder engaged in practices they despise. But Ireland should know by now that there is no way to embarrass today's Republicans (whose connection to Lincoln is entirely mythological at this point). In any case, using history as political propaganda generally results in bad history and bad politics. Whatever Abraham Lincoln did in bed, and whomever he did it with, he stands above today's cultural and sexual wars as surely as he dwarfed the factional disputes of his own age. If no man is bigger than history, Lincoln sticks out of it awkwardly as an icon of our unrealized possibilities, the loneliest and strangest man ever to lead this troublesome country.

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