I just heard on Biography.com, that Lincoln often spoke of his great love for Anne Rutledge, while he lived in the White House. Is this true? I thought that there wasn’t good proof of their relationship, but, I would think that his carping about it while in the WH would be a pretty good indication. So, is there new evidence? Who was the source for this?
Thanks,
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Affection does not equal intercourse.
That’s why.
Likewise, Lincoln openly admitted to sharing a bed with Joshua Speed for four years. As this was not uncommon among young, financially constrained bachelors at the time, it doesn’t mean either man was gay.
It equals a blowjob
Here’s a quote from Dale Carnegie’s biography, Lincoln the Unknown.
Unabashed sentimentality and dubious scholarship. But the book was written in 1932, so the story of Ann Rutledge has been around for a long time.
But Lincoln was not financially constrained, he was a practicing lawyer. Find any other example of two adult, non-related men who shared a bed for that long.
Most of the information on the Anne Rutledge relationship was gathered by (Lincoln’s law partner) William Herndon in interviews with Salem residents after Lincoln’s death. Herndon wasn’t prone to romanticism, though his collaborator in compiling the info was a bit more inclined.
IMO, the Rutledge relationship grew into a great romance over the years largely because biographers decided there needed to be a great romance there. She was probably more of a crush as Lincoln had rarely encountered young ladies before (his mother died when he was a child, his sister when he was a few years older, his stepmother and stepsisters were basically hillbillies) and she was probably cute and flirtatious and the fact she was engaged to another man made her safe as well.
Herndon related Lincoln’s experience with a couple of prostitutes over the years also (this was NOT warmly received and did not appear in the first edition of Herndon’s LINCOLN), and said that Lincoln was terrified he’d received a STD from one. (Remember that in the 19th century syphilis was often fatal.) Some biographers have posited this as a reason for Lincoln ending his engagement to Mary Todd shortly before their first scheduled wedding and of course his depressive collapse following.
He seems to have actually proposed to Mary Owens, a woman he began courting soon after Rutledge’s death. In his early days in Springfield he became very angsty and wrote her letters basically telling her if she married him she’d be miserable and he would have no problem with her not doing so but if she absolutely insisted he would marry her- all implying there had been some sort of proposal and acceptance, at least privately. Obviously she declined which seemed to relieve him. He and Joshua Speed both paid court to Springfield’s most eligible bachelorette Matilda Edwards (sister of Ninian, who was married to Mary Todd’s sister and with whom Mary Todd lived), but Lincoln must have immediately realized that she was wayyyy above his station (attractive, cultured, an heiress, and much sought after).
All of the women Lincoln courted were above his station socioeconomically. Admittedly that’s not saying a lot since he was penniless, but being penniless on the frontier wasn’t remotely uncommon. Anne Rutledge’s father owned a farm and tavern and was one of the more affluent settlers in New Salem (not rich by city standards but compared to his New Salem neighbors he was doing well- well enough he didn’t want his daughter to settle for Lincoln- she was engaged to a man with more promise who was likely a con man). Mary Owens had inherited rental properties from her family enough to be self supporting. Matilda Edwards was from a very wealthy family and as mentioned Lincoln was really shooting too high (Speed was from a very wealthy family himself so he could aim higher).
Finally he married Mary Todd of course, and this was very much a mixed marriage socioeconomically (or to use Gore Vidal’s employment of a term that doesn’t quite mean that, hypergamy). Mary was from a rich family but had no great inheritance coming her way- her father had many children and was still having kids with his second wife when she met Lincoln. (Mary and her stepmother detested each other and in fact it’s why she was in Springfield with her sister instead of in Kentucky with her father.) Her greatest inheritance was actually from her maternal grandmother. However, though she was relatively penniless at the time he married her any inheritance was worth far more than Lincoln stood heir to, plus she was one of the most educated women in Illinois and passionate about politics and had an intellect that would have repelled some men but surely attracted Lincoln.
Of course the penalty for marrying into a much higher caste was that Mary also had a deserved reputation for being impossible to live with: a psychotic temper, continual neediness, irrational jealousy, and prone to excessive spending. Still, she gave up a LOT when she married Lincoln: he had nothing (was in fact still deep in debt when she married him), he was generally considered ugly and was 16 inches taller than she was, nobody knew he was going to be president at the time, and he had his own personality quirks: if she was needy he was prone to self absorption and often absent when he was present, he suffered from recurrent bouts of melancholy.
He also had no understanding of female personality or of the comfort level his wife was used to as his own mother and sister were long dead by this time and both were rugged pioneer women. To the women he grew up with a day’s work began before sun-up when you hauled yourself off a corn shuck mattress, went outside and drew water from a well (picking up and dropping a heavy rock to break the ice first if it was frozen), collecting eggs, milking a cow and then fixing breakfast over an open fire all as the sun is getting up, and then you have a day of backbreaking labor that often involves malnutrition and never involves new clothing. When he took Mary to live in a boardinghouse it was a place that he probably thought “Ma or sister would have thought they were in heaven here” while to Mary it was going from a mansion filled with servants and finery to a small dark room in a house full of strangers, most of them a step up from hillbillies, and the nocturnal noises of newlyweds probably being overheard and laughed at by these people you’re seeing at breakfast each morning- she gave up a LOT to be with him, and this after the humiliation of their first aborted union.
Sorry, off topic, but the point being that while Mary’s sinning gets plenty of coverage I think the degree to which she was sinned against is often overlooked. And that Lincoln’s romantic life was complicated and ultimately unknowable.
I have no idea if there was a romantic relationship with Speed. I’ve little doubt that they had sex of some sort at some point (two horny guys in a bed for four years, things are gonna come up) and that this along with genuinely loving him and confiding in him (Lincoln was a very lonely man who had no family he could relate to- he hated his father, loved his stepmother but she was toothless illiterate hillbilly with all superstitions that implied, and his brother and sister died when he was young, so Speed was like a brother and a friend and the first intellectual he’d really spent time around) and probably some awareness of Greek ideals of man:man love probably all combined to make Speed the love of his life whether he was gay or whether he wasn’t. Mary Todd was always a space alien to him: tiny, pampered, the same body parts as his sister and mother had but completely different arrangements and nothing in common with them, and then crazy- it would have made him miss Speed all the more.
Sorry, but trying to call Lincoln and Creed gay is just plain presentism: projecting present-day attitudes onto historical figure. Neither man lived in the 21st century, so their feelings and thoughts would not be like ours. The fact that they shared a bed means nothing sexual in the context of their time.
Two horny 19th century guys sharing a bed were not going to do anything sexual with each other: first of all due to the taboo against homosexuality and second because of the often forgotten taboo against masturbation. If Lincoln or Creed got horny, there were plenty of prostitutes available, and the taboo against that came from the pulpit but not from the congregation.
Yeah, you’re right… that would never happen. Never in a million years. :rolleyes:
Which is why there was no homosexuality or masturbation until 1938 when it was invented in a laboratory in Cleveland.
Paying money you can’t afford for what is at best loveless and meaningless experiences is fun after all, and other than risking being robbed, beaten or killed by her pimp (or her husband) and or contracting an incurable disease that leads to agonizing death and malformed children what’s the worst that could happen?
Speed and Lincoln lived in Springfield when it was the wild west. This wasn’t the upscale bawdy houses of New Orleans or D.C.- prostitutes usually plied their wares in tents by the river and were notorious for being unattractive, dishonest, and carriers of disease. Every time you went to one was another shot of Russian roulette. Their customers were usually the dregs of humanity; “the quality” ventured to the cities for it; one experience probably scared the hell out of Lincoln. Whatever their orientation I can see two men sharing a bed turning to each other for stimulation (which is free monetarily and free of disease) than going to prostitutes on a regular basis.
I think I’m no more or less horny than the average fellow.
And admittedly, I speak from speculation, not experience, since I have not in fact spent four years sharing a bed with a man.
BUT.
No, I don’t believe that simple horniness and the proximity of a man would cause sexual contact to occur if it were me.
I have no idea if it did with Lincooln, but I absolutely reject the premise that it would have been almost inevitable for any two guys of ordinary hormonal composition.
My understanding is that gays are of ordinary hormonal composition. However, allow for the fact it was a very different time- one in which there was not readily available pornography and when prostitution was as mentioned playing Russian roulette, syphilis was not only often fatal but everybody would have likely seen a syphilitic, and most people who grew up in Lincoln’s caste would have been exposed to sex at a very early age (one room, several kids around- privacy is purchased with a sheet). Add to this that Lincoln had issues where women were concerned, perhaps not the least reason why the terrible reputations of the women of his mother’s family (more of his mother’s immediate family had illegitimate children than didn’t and his grandmother had done jail time for fornication), and that you’re dealing with two men who, whatever their orientation, had heavier than average baggage. Their letters absolutely indicate a higher than average intimacy than most men expressed even allowing for the grandiloquent language of the time- they definitely loved each other, each wrote that they were not like other men, and when Lincoln had his complete collapse (at the time that he and Speed were both engaged to be married) Speed convinced his family to take him in and nurse him back to mental health or something like it.
I reject the labels homosexual or bisexual or heterosexual also as relatively meaningless at the time. Certainly said orientations existed then, but it was very uncommon for men not to marry and among the same-sex inclined Oscar Wilde or Ralph Waldo Emerson (men whose same sex attractions were recorded but who married and had children) seems to have been more the norm than Walt Whitman (who didn’t marry though he did claim to have children) or “Aunt Nancy” and “Mrs. King” (the nicknames given James Buchanan and his longtime roommate William Rufus King respectively). I don’t find it unreasonable to theorize that two men who had a strong attachment to each other and who had limited to no success with women and who were not far removed from the sexual prime of their lives may have experimented. It still happens in boy’s schools, prisons of course (where not all sexual contact is rape or by same-sex oriented inmates), the military to some extent (Sebastian Junger’s The War discusses the phenomena in modern day Afghanistan) and elsewhere.
My personal belief is that Lincoln was probably celibate after his son Tad was born (when he and Mary had to either largely or totally cease sexual relations as she could not risk another pregnancy). As to his orientation, there’s not conclusive evidence to identify him as homosexual or bisexual, but I think there’s more evidence than for most of his contemporaries to hypothesize that he may have been.
Concur. The idea of sex with a man holds zero interest to me. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) Like Bricker, I don’t buy the idea that two straight guys in bed together, even for a number of years, will inevitably have sex.
ETA: And that’s even if the guys involved are BFF.