The movie “Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln” boldly claims that Lincoln had sex with four different men. The evidence supporting that conclusion is underwhelming. It is an argument which had been made at length in Clarence A. Tripp’s 2005 book The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, which maintained that Lincoln was bisexual and “predominantly homosexual.” A close examination of the evidence cited in that book and in the new film suggests that it is possible but highly unlikely that Lincoln fits that description.
The evidence most often cited in the film is Lincoln’s close friendship with Joshua Speed, a Kentucky-born merchant who shared a large bed with Lincoln above his Springfield dry goods store for three and a half years while Lincoln was in his late 20s-early 30s (Speed was five years his junior). Because those young men bunked together for such a long period, several of the film’s interviewees argue that they must have been lovers. A biographer of Mary Todd Lincoln, Jean Baker, who appears several times in the film and believes that Lincoln was bisexual, rhetorically asked: “What evidence is there that they did not have sex?”
This is a strange question for a reputedly serious scholar to ask; the burden of proof by any reasonable standard falls on those who allege that Lincoln, who married and sired four children, was gay.
Though most of the numerous talking heads in the movie are not Lincoln authorities, one is a truly serious Lincoln scholar, Charles B. Strozier, author of Your Friend Forever, A Lincoln: The Enduring Friendship of Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed as well as Lincoln’s Quest for Union: A Psychological Portrait. Professor of History Emeritus at the City University of New York, Strozier is also a practicing psychoanalyst. In the film, he succinctly summarizes the relevant portions of Your Friend Forever with the authority of an academic historian who has conducted extensive research in original sources and has sufficient psychological training to plausibly analyze the relationship between Lincoln and Speed. In his judgment, they were not gay lovers.
To be sure, Speed and Lincoln were exceptionally close friends, as their correspondence indicates. Speed told an interviewer that between 1837 and 1840, “no men were ever more intimate.” Long after Lincoln’s death, Speed recalled their first meeting: fresh from the village of New Salem, which Lincoln left in order to practice law in the state capital, he rode into Springfield “on a borrowed horse, with no earthly goods but a pair of saddle-bags, and two or three law books.” There he “took an office, and engaged from the only cabinet-maker then in the village, a single bedstead.” When Lincoln revealed he had no money to pay for a bedstead, Speed reported that the “tone of his voice was so melancholy that I felt for him. I looked up at him, and I thought…I never saw so gloomy and melancholy a face.”
Speed proposed a cheaper solution: “I have a very large room, and a very large double-bed in it; which you are perfectly welcome to share with me if you choose.” He explained that he and James Bell (his cousin and business partner) “have been sleeping in the same bed for some time [two years]. He is gone now, and if you wish, you can take his place.” (Bell was just about to get married.) After inspecting the room above the store, Lincoln, “with a face beaming with pleasure,” said: “Well, Speed, I’m moved.”
Ladies’ Men
For half of their time together (excluding the many months each year when Lincoln practiced law on the judicial circuit, where he and fellow attorneys often shared beds), Lincoln and Speed slept in a loft with two other men (Lincoln’s eventual law partner William Herndon and Charles Hurst, both of whom worked at the store). Since there was no privacy in that loft, if Speed and Lincoln had sex, Herndon and Hurst would have known about it, but neither even hinted that Speed and Lincoln were sexual partners, though Herndon wrote extensively about his first-hand knowledge of Lincoln, including his views about sexual matters. Herndon described Speed as “a lady’s man,” and the Springfield merchant, Abner Y. Ellis, referred to Speed as “an old rat” of a womanizer.
In 1840, Speed fell in love with a beautiful young woman, Matilda Edwards, whom he described rapturously in a letter to his sister: “Two clear blue eyes, a brow as fair as Palmyra marble touched by the chisel of Praxiteles—Lips so fresh, fair, and lovely that I am jealous even of the minds that kiss them—a form as perfect as that of the Venus de Medicis—a Mind clear as a bell[,] a voice bewitchingly soft and sonorous and a smile so sweet lovely and playful and a countenance and soul shining through it.” Lincoln also fell head over heels in love with her and broke his engagement to Mary Todd as a result.
More telling still, Lincoln, without embarrassment or shame, freely acknowledged that he slept with men. In 1864, he described his newly appointed attorney general, James Speed, as “a man I know well, though not so well as I know his brother Joshua. That, however, is not strange, for I slept with Joshua for four years, and I suppose I ought to know him.” If Lincoln and Speed had in fact been gay lovers, it is unlikely that he would have revealed that they had slept together. To openly state that he had sex with men would have ruined his political career.
Lincoln also openly told journalist James Simonton that he slept in a bed with Charles Maltby, who had assisted him at a New Salem general store in 1832-33. The owner of that store also hired another young man, William G. Greene, who reported decades afterwards that “Lincoln & I clerked together…& slept on the same cott & when one turned over the other had to do likewise.” In “Lover of Men,” Greene is identified as one of the four male sexual partners of Lincoln. But if they were in fact lovers, why would Greene—a prosperous banker and businessman who wed a woman who bore him nine children—jeopardize his reputation by tacitly acknowledging that he had committed sodomy? Such joint sleeping arrangements among males were common on the Illinois frontier. During his four-plus years in the village of New Salem, Lincoln had bunked not only with Maltby and Greene but also several other men, among them Daniel Green Burner. No surviving evidence suggests that any of them were gay. As Burner recalled, his family’s cabin had two rooms, one where “the cooking was done and the women slept,” and the other “was for the men. Lincoln and I and occasionally other boarders occupied this room.”
In 1834-35, while serving in the Illinois General Assembly at Vandalia (then the state capital), Lincoln and attorney John Todd Stuart became political allies and bedmates. Jesse W. Fell, who spent that winter at the capital, called them “two congenial spirits not only boarding at the same house but rooming and sleeping together. Socially and politically they seemed inseparable.” Indeed, Fell said, they were “boon companions,” only 15 months apart in age but quite different in temperament and appearance. David Davis, who described the tall, slender Stuart as “the handsomest man in Illinois” with “the mildest and most amiable expression of countenance,” believed that Lincoln and Stuart “loved one another.” In 1837, Stuart chose Lincoln as his law partner, an arrangement that lasted four years. Nothing indicates that Stuart, who that same year married a woman who was to bear him five children, was gay.
Casting further doubt on the notion that Speed and Lincoln were homosexual lovers is Herndon’s account of an interview with Speed, who recalled that around 1839 or 1840, he “was keeping a pretty woman” in Springfield and that Lincoln, “desirous to have a little,” asked him, “Speed, do you know where I can get some?” Speed replied, “Yes I do, & if you will wait a moment or so I’ll send you to the place with a note. You can[’]t get it without a note or by my appearance.”
Lincoln went to see the girl—handed her the note after a short ‘how do you do &c.’ Lincoln told his business and the girl, after some protestations, agreed to satisfy him. Things went on right—Lincoln and the girl stript off and went to bed. Before any thing was done Lincoln said to the girl—“How much do you charge”. “Five dollars, Mr. Lincoln”. Mr. Lincoln said—“I’ve only got $3.’ Well said the girl—“I’ll trust you, Mr Lincoln, for $2.[’] Lincoln thought a moment or so and said—“I do not wish to go on credit—I’m poor & don’t know where my next dollar will come from and I cannot afford to Cheat you.” Lincoln after some words of encouragement from the girl got up out of bed, —buttoned up his pants and offered the girl the $3.00, which she would not take, saying—Mr Lincoln—“You are the most Conscientious man I ever saw.”
Some historians find the story implausible, though it is unlikely that Herndon would have made it up. He told Caroline Dall that whereas Lincoln “was a pure perfectly chaste man” before the death of his sweetheart Ann Rutledge in 1835, after that “in his misery – he fell into the habits of his neighborhood.” Herndon also recollected that Lincoln and Joshua Speed were “quite familiar – to go no further [–] with the women.”
In “Lover of Men,” it is alleged that during his years at New Salem, Lincoln avoided the company of young women. But residents described rumors not only about his purported sexual relations with Nancy Burner and Elizabeth Abell, but also the fact of his romance with Ann Rutledge, a thoroughly documented story. They loved each other and evidently were engaged to wed when she suddenly died, plunging him into a depression so profound that friends feared he would lose his mind.
Self-Serving Rumors
Another body of evidence cited by those who maintain that Lincoln was gay is his correspondence with Speed, which contains the most emotionally open writing Lincoln ever composed. The film suggests that Lincoln’s use of “Yours forever” to close his letters to Speed indicates that they were lovers. But in fact Lincoln used that same close in letters to at least four other men who were clearly not intimate friends. Moreover, Lincoln’s missives to Speed contain no erotic undercurrents or overtones. As David Herbert Donald, a prominent Lincoln biographer, put it: “unlike the letters between other enamored males that have been preserved,” Lincoln’s letters to Speed “are totally lacking in expressions of warm affection.”
Donald also plausibly challenged another piece of evidence cited by those who believe Lincoln was gay: his purportedly erotic relationship with David Derickson, captain of a military company that guarded the president during the Civil War. The film lays heavy emphasis on an 1862 diary entry by a Washington insider, Elizabeth Woodbury Fox, the wife of Lincoln’s chief navel aide: “Tish says, ‘Oh, 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!” But Donald noted that when Lincoln suffered from insomnia while staying at the summer White House (located on the campus of the Soldiers’ Home) and while his wife was away, he now and then “talked with Derickson until late into the night. I think it is hardly surprising that he may on occasion have asked the congenial captain to share his bed; in those days, it was not unusual for men to sleep together…. That their relationship was friendly, not sexual, is suggested by the ease with which their association ended when Derickson returned to Pennsylvania. They never saw each other again.”
A close student of the matter, historian Martin P. Johnson, closely analyzed the evidence and rejected the conclusion that Lincoln and Derickson had a homosexual relationship. His skepticism is widely shared by historians; as Charles Strozier observed: “There is almost no serious scholar who accepts this [Derickson] story except Jean Baker.” The most authoritative scholarly skeptic is Matthew Pinsker, author of Lincoln’s Sanctuary, a detailed monograph about Lincoln’s residence at the Soldiers’ Home in the warmer months of 1862, 1863, and 1864. Professor Pinsker notes that Lincoln and Captain Derickson were together there in the absence of Mrs. Lincoln for only a brief time in the fall of 1862 (approximately two weeks). During the rest of the captain’s tour of duty at the Soldiers’ Home in 1862-1863, either Mrs. Lincoln was there or the First Couple resided at the White House. That the president and Derickson had an intimate sexual relationship in those two weeks seems highly unlikely.
To understand why Lincoln may have turned to Captain Derickson for platonic companionship, it should be borne in mind that the president was, as he once described himself to Methodist Bishop Charles Gordon Ames, “the loneliest man in America. There is no one to whom I can go and unload my troubles, assured of sympathy and help.” Even when Mrs. Lincoln was present, she was more a source of anxiety than comfort. At the White House, he often told his old friend Illinois Senator Orville H. Browning “about his domestic troubles” and “that he was constantly under great apprehension lest his wife should do something which would bring him into disgrace.” And she did just that with her unethical, tactless, unpopular, scandalous behavior as First Lady. At the Soldiers’ Home (where he resided during the warmer months) he did not have the companionship of his two principal aides, John Hay and John G. Nicolay, young men who lived in the White House and were in effect surrogate sons of whom he was quite fond (especially Hay).
Almost all serious scholarship on this subject, as well as much more abundant evidence of Lincoln’s affection for women, of his robust sexual attraction to them, and the weakness of the evidence of any homoerotic tendencies, is ignored in “Lover of Men.” Thus it less a dispassionate historical documentary, seeking to reveal the truth, than a piece of LBGTQ+ advocacy designed to make members of that community feel better about themselves—as one talking head in the film explicitly acknowledges. The bachelor president James Buchanan was probably gay, but he is widely regarded as a failure and hardly a historical figure that any group would be proud to claim as a member. There’s a reason why Lincoln—despite recent and attempts by the racialist Left to discredit his name—was chosen for this treatment. His virtue is so indisputable that even his enemies want to claim him as one of their own.