The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln (Hardcover)

by C.A. Tripp (Author), Jean Baker (Introduction) "Virginia Woodbury Fox, the wife of Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus V. Fox, traveled in high sociopolitical circles and kept a detailed diary noted..." (more)
Key Phrases: recollected words, homosexual side, homosexual response, White House, New Salem, Mary Todd (more...)

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)
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From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
For years, there have been rumblings about the sexuality of our greatest president. Almost 80 years ago, the biographer Carl Sandburg saw in Lincoln "a streak of lavender and spots soft as May violets." Now, in The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, the late sex researcher C.A. Tripp presents the most sustained argument yet that the Great Emancipator was a lover of men. In the end, however, the book reveals more about modern obsessions than it does about Lincoln. We live in a highly sexualized culture, but Lincoln did not. The modern concept of homosexuality did not exist in Lincoln's day, as Tripp concedes, but he rapidly abandons such restraint in his search for that streak of lavender.

Lincoln's ineffectual predecessor, James Buchanan, is considered by some historians to have been homosexual. But Lincoln is far more useful to those who seek validation through history.

Tripp, a psychologist and gay-rights activist, died soon after completing his manuscript. In prose that is by turns bantering and strident, he insists that Lincoln's homosexuality is clear to all those with open eyes. But the evidence he presents is not new, and there is no "smoking gun." Still, this strange, disjointed book may succeed in planting a seed of doubt in the minds of many about Lincoln's sex life.

The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln is laced with references to the work of Alfred Kinsey, Tripp's colleague in the 1940s and '50s. As Tripp relates, Kinsey discovered a correlation between the early onset of puberty in boys and a greater incidence of homosexual activity. Seizing upon a vague description of the young Lincoln as tall and gangly, Tripp concludes that Lincoln entered puberty at age nine -- four years earlier than average -- and that his sexual precocity must have taken homosexual form. Such dizzying leaps of logic are characteristic of Tripp's work.

To take another example, Tripp is struck by the fact that Lincoln, as a young state legislator, shared a bed for four years with his best friend, Joshua Speed. When Speed moved home to Kentucky in 1841 and Lincoln's engagement to Mary Todd came temporarily to an end, Lincoln suffered an emotional crisis. The two men subsequently exchanged a series of letters, some of which Lincoln ended with "Yours forever." All of this leads Tripp to conclude that Lincoln and Speed conducted a passionate homosexual affair. But 19th-century notions of privacy were vastly different from our own, and mattresses were in short supply. During two of their four years as bedmates, Lincoln and Speed shared the room with two other young men, both of them decidedly heterosexual.

As for the affectionate letter-ending flourish that Tripp trumpets as proof of his case, the historian Michael Burlingame points out in a dissenting afterword that Lincoln closed many a letter with the same tribute. The letters themselves are not exactly spicy; one of Lincoln's missives to Speed contains an impersonal account of a murder trial, hardly the stuff of romance. Tripp, however, is not deterred, 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, and who thus choose to recount details from a neutral territory as they wait out a storm that swirls about them." This makes a mockery of the historical method. Tripp could make a grocery list sound suspicious.

Tripp also suggests that Lincoln had a male lover during his presidency: Capt. David V. Derickson, the commanding officer of the Army company assigned to protect the Lincoln family while they resided at a summer retreat outside Washington. A few months after the two men met and became friends, Virginia Woodbury Fox, the wife of the assistant secretary of the Navy, wrote to a friend: "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!" A regimental history written three decades later echoed these observations, adding also that Derickson made "use of his Excellency's night-shirt!" The morning they met, Derickson accompanied Lincoln back to the White House, and they shared pleasantries along the way. Tripp depicts this initial conversation as "an almost classical seduction scene" that left Lincoln "wound up if not revved up." Such overheated speculation succeeds only in damaging Tripp's case.

Nor is this part of that case new; the Derickson story has been known for decades, though many may encounter it in Tripp's book for the first time. Tripp's insinuations are contradicted by much of the other evidence: Lincoln was the father of four and Derickson the father of nine, attesting to thei