“THE POLITICAL GENIUS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN”
DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN
DECEMBER 18, 2005

I've edited this very slightly for readability. The whole speech is online.

The interviewer asks whether Ms Goodwin would like to talk about Abraham Lincoln’s sexual orientation.

MS. GOODWIN: Well, the argument has been made. This is where it’s so great to have this comparative perspective. Some of you may know, there's been a book recently that argued that Lincoln was gay.

INTERVIEWER: C. A. Tripp, who was a researcher at Kinsey Institute for years.

MS. GOODWIN: Exactly. And he put Lincoln on a scale from heterosexual to homosexual and had him way down on the homosexual line because Tripp argued two things: firstly, that he slept in the same bed with his friend Joshua Speed for three years, and secondly, that he wrote affectionate letters to Speed. Well, you have to understand what the context of the time is.

First of all, none of us fully know what's going on in anybody’s bed nowadays, much less 200 years ago.

Also, there was not the same sense of privacy then that we have now. Sleeping in the same bed with same sexes was quite common. In fact, when Lincoln was on the circuit in Illinois, when the lawyers and the judges and the bailiffs and the sheriffs and the prisoners would all travel from one county courthouse to the other, staying in the same tavern or boarding house, they would often sleep three lawyers to a bed, not even just two. The only
one who got his own bed was the judge, David Davis, because he weighed over 300 pounds so no one else could fit in the bed. [laughter]


So I don't think that alone tells us... (inaudible). Salmon P. Chase [Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury] had lost three wives. Edwin Stanton [Lincoln’s Secretary of War] had lost his first wife whom he loved passionately. And Stanton writes to Chase in much more affectionate language than anything Lincoln wrote to Speed. He writes to him, “Ever since our pleasant intercourse last summer, no one is in my mind more waking or sleeping. I dream of being with you at night, I want to hold you by the hand and tell you I love you.” No one even began to suggest that either of them were gay, but that is the way they wrote to one another.

When William Seward [Lincoln’s Secretary of State]was in the state senate in New York, an older state senator writes to him and says, “I feel positively womanish about you. Ever since I’ve been away, I miss you so much.” And Seward writes back saying, “I feel a rapturous joy that you feel like I do.” But then the next year their friendship breaks up because this older state senator tries to seduce Seward’s wife, who almost falls in love with
him. [laughter] And nobody ever suggested Seward was gay.

So I think unless we assume that all of the guys in the cabinet are gay, it’s more likely that men had really close friendships then, and I think it's wonderful that they could talk to each other in that open, romantic, even loving way.

Men and women couldn’t be friendly then in the same way. why not? Because there was so much chaperoning for women. So you find that women write to each other this way in the same time period. We have to put our own sexual understandings back to a time when there was romance, there was love, but I don’t necessarily think there was sex.