It would be difficult to describe all the factual
errors and failures in historical judgment in C.A. Tripp’s The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln in a short review. But I will try.
I did not know Tripp, though I had heard about his
work over the years. From all accounts, he was a generous man with a
sincere interest in Lincoln. After Tripp’s death, his literary
executor, who was preparing the manuscript for publication, asked me to
review it with an eye to writing an introduction. I was a logical choice
because my book Lincoln’s Quest for Union (1982; revised, 2001) was the first to explore seriously
the general topic of Lincoln’s intimate life. When I read
Tripp’s book, however, I was appalled and politely declined to be
associated with the project. I assumed that it would go nowhere, along with
all the other thousands of books by Lincoln buffs, and frankly forgot about
it. Then it all burst forth from a leading publisher last month, along with
a major story in the New York Times, packaged between an astonishing introduction by Jean Baker
and mostly praiseworthy afterthoughts by Michael Burlingame and Michael B.
Chesson, not to mention fawning blurbs from Gore Vidal and Thomas Schwartz,
among others. One has no choice but to comment.
Tripp argues that Lincoln was an active homosexual who
was mostly frustrated in his relationships with women. He had a
heterosexual side and, of course, fathered four children, but the core of
his world of desire was homosexual. If true, such a conclusion changes
rather remarkably one’s view of his childhood and youth, his
relationship with his wife, aspects of his personality such as his humor,
and even the meaning of his spirituality — or so Tripp argues.
Tripp leads off with a chapter about Lincoln’s
relationship with Capt. David V. Derickson. This handsome and appealing
man, born in 1818, was in Company K, which served as the President’s
Guard when he was staying at the Soldier’s Home just outside
Washington. Tripp argues that whenever Mrs. Lincoln was away, Derickson
slept in the same bed with Lincoln, who lent Derickson his own nightshirt
for these occasions.
The central source for the story is a cryptic
reference in the diary of Virginia Woodbury Fox, wife of the assistant
secretary of the Navy, dated 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
“Tish” who related the story to Fox was Letitia McKean, a
Washington socialite, who in turn heard the rumor from someone else who is
unknown. Tripp then claims an independent source for the story in a later
history of the 150th Regiment, Derickson’s own, by Lt. Col. Thomas
Chamberlin. Tripp also notes that Ida Tarbell, in her popular Lincoln
biography of 1895, describes the Derickson-Lincoln relationship. Tarbell
stresses that Lincoln’s son Tad loved the 150th regiment and they
him. Tad wore a little regimental uniform with a lieutenant’s
commission on his shoulders and often drilled with the men and rode his own
pony with them in review. Tarbell’s account, in turn, draws on
Derickson’s 1888 description of his relationship with Lincoln,
published in the Meadville, Pa., Tribune-Republican.
The heart of this evidence is the diary reference by
Virginia Woodbury Fox. Though contemporary, the source of the information
is unknown and secondhand (at least). This is the worst kind of hearsay. On
the face of it, no historian would credit such a story unless it was
corroborated by at least one other truly independent source. But Tripp also
misses an important detail in the Fox quote, namely that Fox herself
doesn’t believe the story. “What stuff,” the phrase she
concludes with and which Tripp struts out proudly as the title of his first
chapter, is half of the common 19th-century expression “stuff and
nonsense,” which draws on the colloquial meaning of
“stuff” as “humbug” (as explained in the Oxford English Dictionary).
Tripp is off to a bad start.
He then claims that the account by Chamberlin in the
regimental history is indeed the independent source he needs to validate
the Fox diary entry. In the text Tripp says that Chamberlin wrote his book
in 1895 (page 2), but his bibliography in fact has the correct date of
publication, which was 1905. The difference matters, for what was published
in 1895 was Tarbell’s biography that had described Lincoln’s
friendship with Derickson and which quoted from Derickson’s account
in 1888. Tarbell’s book obviously brought the whole matter of
Derickson’s friendship with Lincoln back to Chamberlin’s mind;
he may also have consulted Fox’s diary in the Library of Congress or
even himself remembered the rumor of the common male bedding from more than
40 years previously, or he made it all up. Chamberlin does add the
interesting detail of Lincoln’s giving Derickson his nightshirt to
wear, though I have to say that hardly strikes me as anything more than an
example of Lincoln’s wonderful informality in all matters.
It is not irrelevant that Thomas Chamberlin was
widowed, married again, and in all fathered nine children; that no one else
in Lincoln’s entourage noticed anything untoward in their
relationship; and that Derickson’s own 1888 account, which is
charming, speaks of nothing but a close friendship with his boss who
clearly liked and admired him.
The more familiar male
friendship Lincoln had, since I first described it in such detail in 1982,
was with Joshua Fry Speed. I can only refer the reader to my book for the
details, but suffice it to say there is no question that Lincoln’s
relationship with Speed was a close and intimate one that can reasonably be
called homoerotic but that there is no evidence at all that it was
homosexual. That cannot be excluded as a possibility, nor should it be, and
I have pondered all sides of this question for many years. Lincoln and
Speed did sleep in the same bed for three-and-a-half years, and I argue
that it was the separation from Speed in late December 1840 that created a
panic in Lincoln and precipitated his calling off his engagement to Mary
Todd on what he later named the “fatal first” of January 1841.
My argument convinced people such as David Donald, the late Roy Basler, and
many others but has led to impassioned disagreements between me and Douglas
Wilson and Michael Burlingame, who find the cause for Lincoln’s turn
from Mary in his fondness for another woman, and Mary’s protective
biographer, Jean Baker, who lends agency for the breakup to Mary herself.
These disagreements, however, are between serious historians with differing
interpretations of real evidence.
What is not valid is to argue that there was a
consummated sexual relationship between Lincoln and Speed. Besides the
utter lack of evidence, not even secondhand gossip dismissed by its
purveyor, as with Derickson, there is the social context to consider. Men
often slept together in Lincoln’s world and in that age. It was not
remarkable, even though I do think Speed was a special case and his
emotional importance for Lincoln was far greater than for that of the
sweaty lawyers who piled into a common bed on the circuit to fight off the
prairie cold. We also must consider the telling psychological picture we
have of Lincoln, who hardly presented as homosexual. It matters when a
friendship is sexualized, whatever the gender of the participants. The
tensions that sometimes tormented Lincoln came in part from his repressions
and in no small measure contributed to his greatness.
If Tripp’s evidence is flimsy to nonexistent,
his historical arguments are often dazzling in their vacuity. Take his
chapter about Lincoln’s childhood. Tripp quotes from one source,
David Turnham, who told Herndon in 1865 — nearly six decades after
the fact — that he remembered Lincoln at 9 as a “long, tall,
dangling, awkward, droll-looking boy.” From this Tripp, not
unreasonably but without any corroborating evidence, concludes that Lincoln
experienced puberty early, as much as four years ahead of the norm in
America at the time. That is all he knows from the historical record, and
it is a bit on the suspicious side. Tripp then builds an argument about
Lincoln’s early sexual experience based entirely on the findings of
Alfred Kinsey, who was convinced that those boys who mature early are more
likely to masturbate and find early pleasure in ejaculation. From
Kinsey’s interviews with mid–20th-century men in Indiana, which
may well in general tell us much of value about many boys but tell us
nothing for sure about Lincoln, Tripp has our hero masturbating often and
with great pleasure. And the more often he mentions it, the more Tripp
believes his own story, so that by pages 188 and 189, he writes: “But
since Lincoln had already arrived on his own at the powerful pleasure of
orgasm, loved it, and found that the sky did not fall . . .”
The point of this quote is in fact for Tripp to lead
into an argument about Lincoln’s skeptical attitude toward religion.
Tripp’s argument is that Lincoln, reveling in all his self-induced
ejaculatory pleasures and filled with homosexual desire, must have found
the Bible and its censure of masturbation and any kind of homosexuality a
horrid text. That leads Tripp into a decidedly unenlightening discussion of
the Second Inaugural Address.
It is not surprising that Tripp turns upside down the
story of the Lincoln marriage, making Mary the victim of Lincoln’s
sexual confusions and hardly the tortured soul she is normally painted; nor
that he completely debunks Lincoln’s love for Ann Rutledge that John
Y. Simon first and then Douglas Wilson have recently shown to be completely
true; nor that he finds in Lincoln’s humor telling signs of
homosexual longings. Enough!
David Donald once described the urgent need of many
Americans — including scholars — to “get right”
with Lincoln. C.A. Tripp has now gotten Lincoln dead right with the
sexologists. I am reminded of a story. In 1976 I organized a large
conference on Lincoln at Sangamon State, where I taught from 1972-1986. The
distinguished and brilliant but somewhat haughty Don Fehrenbacher spoke to
a huge crowd of nearly 1,000 people in the old cafeteria on “Lincoln
and the Constitution.” Afterward, an eager student asked:
“Professor Fehrenbacher, what would Lincoln have thought about
busing?” Fehrenbacher paused for a long while, looked down his nose
at the student with disdain, and answered: “He would have asked,
‘What’s a bus?’ ”
This article appears in Feb 10-16, 2005.
