Pamindurham has already posted an excellent diary
New book: Abe Lincoln was gay; Freepers erupt on the NYT story about C. A. Tripp's forthcoming book,
The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, and the eruption of outrage on the right.
The NYT story (requires subscription) is here: Finding Homosexual Threads in Lincoln's Legend
I'm withholding final judgment as to whether Tripp is correct, since I haven't read the book. From the reviews, the evidence seems intriguing, but hardly conclusive.
But I do want to reflect on the controversy it’s sure to stir up, and to do so by looking to a similar controversy a few years back, about whether Thomas Jefferson had a sexual relationship with, and children by, his slave Sally Hemings.
That controversy was also sparked by the work of a non-professional historian: in this case, Annette Gordon-Reed, a law professor who wrote
Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, and by DNA testing of some of Jefferson's supposed white and black descendants. White Jefferson descendants and many right-wingers erupted in indignation, seeing this as an attempt to slander a Founding Father and the author of the Declaration of Independence. The furor seems to have died down, and the consensus among historians now seems to be that there was such a relationship.
The Tom and Sally scandal shed light on two things:
- the phenomenon of master-slave sexual relations. Historians already had plenty of evidence that white slaveholders had sexual relations with slave women; the relationship between Jefferson and Hemings would be a high profile example, but hardly exceptional. Even if it didn't add much to historians' understanding of the phenomenon, the Tom and Sally affair did bring those kinds of relations to the consciousness of the white public in a dramatic and high-profile way.
- Jefferson himself, and especially his thinking about slavery and race. How could a white man who complained of black people's body odor, and compared them to orangutans, have a sexual and affectionate relationship with Hemings? (Part of the answer possibly lay in the fact that Hemings herself had more than half white ancestry.) Does this make TJ more hypocritical? More human?
So what does this earlier controversy tell us about the current one?
- We can expect the same sort of politicization of the findings--that is, for this to be cast as a partisan attack on a president whose stature is second only to the Founding Fathers. (Pamindurham's diary covers the freepers' reaction on that score.)
- The fact that the author, Tripp, was not a professional historian is also likely to come into play, as at least some professional historians will dismiss his research and findings as the work of an amateur. The implication here—and it’s likely to be directly stated about Tripp, given his work as a psychologist on homosexuality, and his status as a gay man—is that the author is a dabbler and an activist, driven less by the historical scholarship than by a contemporary political agenda.
As to the wider historical lessons we can draw:
- same-sex relations in 19th century America: We may never know for sure whether Lincoln had sex with other men, and in any event, he surely wasn’t “gay,” since homosexuality—as an identity distinct from heterosexuality—hadn’t yet been recognized as such. The evidence seems clear, however, that Lincoln had the kind of strong, affectionate same-sex friendships that historians have seen as common in the 19th century. To that extent, as with Jefferson, this is a high-profile but not unique example. But its very profile may help bring historical discussions about the social construction of sexual identity, and about same-sex relations (sexual or otherwise) to the consciousness of the straight public—and I say “straight” because this is not news to most gay Americans (just as the history of sexual relations between masters and slaves wasn’t news to black Americans).
- what does it tell us about Lincoln? Here I'm less certain of the significance. I should say at the outset that I'm not particularly a fan of biography as a mode of history, and especially of popular biographies that seek to know and understand the character of an individual, and his/her personal life. And it doesn't seem to me that these "revelations" about Lincoln connect with his public life--as antislavery politician and wartime president--in the same way that the revelations about Tom and Sally did with Jefferson's public life. But I would like to hear what others think.