The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln [Hardcover]

C.A. Tripp (Author), Jean Baker (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 4, 2005

The late C. A. Tripp, a highly regarded sex researcher and colleague of Alfred Kinsey, and author of the runaway bestseller The Homosexual Matrix, devoted the last ten years of his life to an exhaustive study of Abraham Lincoln's writings and of scholarship about Lincoln, in search of hidden keys to his character. In The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, completed just weeks before he died, Tripp offers a full examination of Lincoln's inner life and relationships that, as Dr. Jean Baker argues in the Introduction, "will define the issue for years to come." Throughout this riveting work, new details are revealed about Lincoln's relations with a number of men. Long-standing myths are debunked convincingly -- in particular, the myth that Lincoln's one true love was Ann Rutledge, who died tragically young. Ultimately, Tripp argues that Lincoln's unorthodox loves and friendships were tied to his maverick beliefs about religion, slavery, and even ethics and morals. As Tripp argues, Lincoln was an "invert": a man who consistently turned convention on its head, who drew his values not from the dominant conventions of society, but from within.

For years, a whisper campaign has mounted about Abraham Lincoln, focusing on his intimate relationships. He was famously awkward around single women. He was engaged once before Mary Todd, but his fiancée called off the marriage on the grounds that he was "lacking in smaller attentions." His marriage to Mary was troubled. Meanwhile, throughout his adult life, he enjoyed close relationships with a number of men. He shared a bed with oshua Speed for four years as a young man, and -- as Tripp details here -- he shared a bed with an army captain while serving in the White House, when Mrs. Lincoln was away. As one Washington socialite commented in her diary, "What stuff!"

This study reaches far beyond a brief about Lincoln's sexuality: it is an attempt to make sense of the whole man, as never before. It includes an Introduction by Jean Baker, biographer of Mary Todd Lincoln, and an Afterword containing reactions by two Lincoln scholars and one clinical psychologist and longtime acquaintance of C.A. Tripp. As Michael Chesson explains in one of the Afterword essays, "Lincoln was different from other men, and he knew it. More telling, virtually every man who knew him at all well, long before he rose to prominence, recognized it. In fact, the men who claimed to know him best, if honest, usually admitted that they did not understand him." Perhaps only now, when conventions of intimacy are so different, so open, and so much less rigid than in Lincoln's day, can Lincoln be fully understood.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Psychologist, therapist and former Kinsey sex researcher Tripp—author of the 1975 classic The Homosexual Matrix—died in May 2003 at the age of 83, just after completing this riveting new study that makes a surprisingly compelling case for Lincoln's bisexuality. Tripp merges a sexual psychologist's knowledge with a prosecutor's eye for evidence as he scrutinizes letters, diaries and oral histories gathered by early Lincoln researchers. Seeing what others either could not or would not, Tripp itemizes in telling detail three homosexual liaisons from different stages of Lincoln's life. The first involved young Billy Green, a frequent bunk mate in New Salem during the 1830s. The second was a passionate union with the aristocratic Kentuckian, and Lincoln's lifelong friend, Joshua Speed in Springfield, Ill., during the 1840s (Tripp notes, refuting others' arguments, that poverty did not necessitate their long-term sharing of a bed). The last involved Capt. David V. Derickson, President Lincoln's bodyguard and intimate companion between September 1862 and April 1863; it is documented that the president shared his bed with him on numerous occasions during Mary Lincoln's frequent absences. Throughout the book, the most important factor is Tripp's knowledgeable sex therapist's eye running over key sources to detect telltale markers missed by previous writers who lacked Tripp's training. An Introduction by Jean Baker (biographer of Mary Todd Lincoln) and concluding comments from Lincoln scholar Michael Chesson help put Tripp's groundbreaking—and sure to be controversial—study into historical context. BOMC, InsightOut Book Club alternates. (Jan. 11)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Here’s a book that provokes more rebuttals than reviews. Every critic breaks out the textbooks to dispute, distort, and dismiss the evidence. Only The Advocate comes out with unabashed praise. Otherwise, the critical consensus is that the late Tripp, a former therapist, psychologist, Kinsey associate, and author of The Homosexual Matrix (1975), twists well-known evidence with an eye on an agenda rather than historical accuracy. More importantly, he doesn’t attempt to answer the trickier question of how Lincoln’s sexual predilections affected his role in American history. Reviewers also mourn Tripp, who passed away in 2003, with wishes that he’d been around to edit the manuscript’s jumpy, uneven prose.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (January 4, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743266390
• ISBN-13: 978-0743266390
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (50 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,105,574 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 33 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Not Proven April 14, 2005

By James Rawson

Format:Hardcover

Tripp offers an intriguing thesis -- Lincoln's fundamental
homosexuality -- that can be useful in understanding and
explaining many of the most difficult aspects of his character.
Lincoln's famed melancholy, his evident sorrows, and his stormy
marriage and difficult family life can be readily explained and
perhaps rightly understood in the light of this premise.

Nevertheless, though Tripp's conclusions make a great deal of
sense from a psychological perspective, I do not find them
wholly convincing. This is possibly an inherent scepticism I
have with pyshological explanations of historical figures: I
am unsure and unconvinced that what we know now about
pyschology must always hold true for the past (it was a
different context, and thus quite similar manifestations may
have quite dissimilar causes while similar causes may have very
dissimilar manifestations.)

My scepticism is also due to my training as a historian. While
a pyschologist may well be allowed (perhaps MUST be allowed) to
make great conclusions from scant evidence, a historian
generally should not be. Tripp offers a goodly body of
evidence about the relationship between Lincoln and Speed (one
that I find persuasive, even.) But he draws a great deal of
inference from a small body of evidence for other examples.
And Tripp relys upon a style of argumentation which I cannot
abide: "Since we know my premise to be true, all this that
follows must be true." This is a common tact in psychological
writing starting with Freud, at least, but it fails to convince
me.

Were Tripp to have offered the text as a history paper in a
class of mine, I'd've told him to get more data or moderate his
conclusions. My feeling is that Tripp's case deserves Scotland's
so-called "(...) verdict:" neither "guilty" nor "not guilty,"
Tripp's case remains "not proven."

Still, this work adds a useful dimension to Lincoln scholarship
and provides a worthwhile starting point for future exploration.

I much appreciate the book's presentation with its introduction
by Mary Todd Lincoln's biographer Jean Baker and its two
afterwards, both pro and con. These enhance the book's value to
both the scholar and the casual reader.

23 of 28 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Not a compelling argument but interesting March 5, 2005

By Eclectic listerner

Format:Hardcover

While this book was interesting and I actually read the whole thing, even as a gay person, I found the "evidence" to not be compelling. Gay people (as well as some heterosexuals) do this all the time ....try to judge someone else's outside (actions, mannerisms, etc) in relation to their insides (feelings, experiences, etc.) For me, it mostly shows that you can find or interpret "evidence" to support anything you want to believe. An argument could just as easily be made that Mary Lincoln was a dominatrix and that Lincoln loved being dominated. Sorry, but if it takes 200+ pages to try and convince us, it ain't that convincing. In that no one is going to believe this except those already inclined to do so, what is the point?

At any rate, Lincoln was an extremely interesting man on many levels, and I enjoyed reading about him.

67 of 87 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Lincoln = Gay? February 19, 2005

By S. M Marson

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

When I carry THE INTIMATE WORLD OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN with me, people comment on the book's content and express their opinion. However, I discover that few of these people have actually read the book! Clearly, this is a controversial book that generated a great deal of TV talk, but the talk lacks substance. Mostly frustratingly, people will draw conclusion regarding the validity of Tripp's position without reading the book. Thus, my first recommendation is to read the book and assess Tripp's methodology. Don't buy the TV talk.

Tripp (deceased just prior to publication), a well known clinical psychologist, has hypothesized that Lincoln was not a heterosexual. This is considerably different from stating that Lincoln was a homosexual - which is how people who haven't read the book (i.e., Bill O'Reilly) interpret Tripp's findings. Besides failing to read the book, many people lack the biological, historical and sociological background to understand Tripp's findings. Here is where a solid liberal arts education pays off and perhaps herein lays the major criticism of Tripp's work. Tripp fails to build the biological, historical and sociological foundation that provides the legitimacy for Tripp's conclusions.

I can give examples of critical foundation issues that Tripp failed to address. First, he needed to review the function of genes in human biology. Many people with limited knowledge believe that genes provide discrete and clear cut outcomes - male/female; blue eyes/brown eyes. Many genes don't function in this manner. This biological tidbit has profound implications for sexual orientation.

Second, Tripp needed to address the fundamentals of linguistic and sociological theory regarding the consequences for NOT having the term "homosexual" during Lincoln's life span. "Homosexuality" as a social science concept didn't exist until after Lincoln's assassination. The sociological and linguistic implications are profound and would have an impact on Lincoln's sexual activities.

Third, he failed to address statistical theory. Forty-two (42) men were presidents. According to the current state of the art for estimating homosexuality among men, every 10th man is homosexual. Thus, employing the central limit theorem, our best estimate includes the notion that less than 4.2 of our Presidents have homosexuality tendencies. So, who are the gay presidents?

The major contribution of Tripp's work is that he forces us to realize "so what!" If Lincoln was gay, it doesn't change anything. Nevertheless, Tripp's work is an excellent exercise of one' critical thinking skills.