A Posthumous Romance of White Male Reunion

Historians rightly offer some resistance when asked whether Abraham Lincoln was gay. The idea of a from-birth sexual orientation originates several decades after Lincoln’s lifetime. To name Lincoln’s sexuality is to make a few intellectual leaps, not only inferring Lincoln’s interiority from the necessarily limited records of his life but also conceptualizing that interiority with terms and categories foreign to Lincoln’s self-conception. Indeed, at least one historian makes Lincoln’s sexuality a graduate-seminar lesson on faulty historical questions. 

That doesn’t mean that there are no good historical questions about Lincoln and sexuality. The world prior to the emergence of homosexual identity was still a world with same-sex sex and eroticism, both of which had political meaning. That political meaning, though certainly differing as much as people differ, was not the domain of a distinct minority but, as it is today, part of a culture broadly shared by same-sex sexuality’s participants and abstainers alike. One question that I try to answer in my forthcoming book, Confederate Sympathies: Same-Sex Romance, Disunion, and Reunion in the Civil War Era, is about the political meaning derived from same-sex eroticism in cultural narratives, including those of prominent figures like Lincoln. 

Very little was said about Lincoln’s male intimacies during his lifetime. Through his 1860 presidential campaign, his public image was not associated with friendship. Instead, that campaign, the first presidential victory of the nascent Republican party, celebrated Lincoln’s self-made individualism: that he alone had laid the tracks for his own advancement. The historian David Herbert Donald, who in addition to biographies of Lincoln and Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon wrote a study of Lincoln’s friendships, noted the campaign’s conspicuous absence of friends. Herndon, who would have been Lincoln’s closest friend at the time, was kept hidden, lest his abolitionist views associate Lincoln with radicalism. David Davis, who led the campaign for Lincoln’s nomination, was no friend, claiming that his candidate had “no Strong Emotional feelings for any person—mankind or thing.” 

As for Joshua Speed, with whom Lincoln had shared a room and a bed from 1837 to 1841: he and Lincoln remained in private correspondence, but Speed would, in writing to Lincoln during the campaign, call himself “a warm personal friend, though as you are perhaps aware a political opponent.” In 1860 campaign literature, one can find many endorsers of Lincoln, and several skeptics turned supporters, but few friends and no close friends. What the campaign wanted voters to know about Lincoln was that he had risen on his own merit, not from the handouts of friends or associates. 

Friendship’s absence in that campaign rhetoric was not, however, an attempt to hide Lincoln’s intimacies from a public that would view them suspiciously. It represented a departure from antebellum political norms. For the previous two decades, national male friendship had been a crucial component of the Democratic Party’s messaging. In the three consecutive presidential elections prior to Lincoln’s, Democrats ran at the top of their ticket a Northern man known especially for his friendliness to the South and his friendships with specific Southern men. The most notable and politically consequential of these intimate friendships was between the 1852 Alabamian vice-presidential candidate Rufus King and the 1856 Pennsylvanian presidential candidate James Buchanan. In 1852, Northern Democrats were convinced they could trust King because he was intimate with Buchanan; in 1856, Southern Democrats could feel warmly toward Buchanan because he had been friends with the then-deceased King. Theirs was “a symbolically powerful partnership between North and South,” Thomas Balcerski wrote in his recent dual biography. They were a model for cross-sectional collaboration. 

Today, Buchanan and King’s relationship has generated some speculation alongside Lincoln’s sexuality. Their intimate friendship was no secret. Much the opposite, readers of campaign biographies and, more importantly, the voters hearing from electioneers drawing stump material from campaign biographies, were supposed to know of Buchanan and King’s intimacy. To voters desiring slavery’s continuation or wary of slavery’s national divisiveness, the Buchanan-King friendship was a model for national compromise over slavery. The masculinity of each was at times derided, but hardly more so than that of other politicians in the era. Their bachelor status was also a source of some ridicule, but their respective political success to the highest U.S. offices rebuts the idea that bachelorhood was a dooming political liability. The relationship between the two was, far from an electoral weakness, decidedly a point of strength for their national candidacies. 

In light of the Democratic Party’s culture of friendliness between white men of the North and South, the Republican Party’s friendless campaign offered a strong contrast. By 1860, the two parties differed starkly on the culture of male intimacy. Party politics had, in the previous three decades, cultivated divergent forms of masculinity: in historian Amy Greenberg’s terms, the Jacksonian Democratic Party’s “martial manhood” and the emerging Republican Party’s “restrained manhood.” The meaning of male intimacy also sorted by party identity. Democrats’ celebration of public, unrestrained homosociality was one worldview; the Republican synthesis of public scrutiny of masculine sexual behavior and private intimacies between men affiliated by class or college was another. These differences paralleled those of the parties over slavery: Democrats for the spirit of friendly compromise that sustained slavery’s expansion, and Republicans for containing the Slave Power that had enabled a rival South to dominate a would-be friend.

The public nature of Buchanan’s male friendships and the private nature of Lincoln’s obviously tells us nothing about the presence or absence of sexual activity within those intimacies. Distinctions between public and private in the realm of sexuality mattered enormously to people of Lincoln’s era, but the binary of heterosexual/homosexual identity had not yet emerged to refract meaning through such distinctions. As historians of male romantic friendship have demonstrated, public affections between men were a feature of early 19th-century social life; some included private sexual activity, some didn’t, though a great many likely included actions not easily classifiable by us or by participants as sexual or not. What sexual activity there was for Lincoln, and what that might have meant for him, may well have determined aspects of his personality or actions. Unlike gay politicians today, his sense of self would not have involved narrativizing the relationship between desire and identity. But, like gay politicians today, whose homosexuality is not a description of private sexual behavior but a meaningful public identity, the historical importance of Lincoln’s sexuality lies more in its public meaning than in his private acts. 

Part of Lincoln’s political savvy was to co-opt elements of his opponent’s rhetoric as his own. After he won the 1860 election with less than 40% of the national vote, Lincoln responded to secession with the language of national friendship. In doing so, he drew on both the language of 1850s Democrats and a longer tradition in U.S. politics of treating the national compact as the product of friendly intimacies — itself a product of an electoral franchise premised on gender exclusion. In his 1796 Farewell Address, George Washington, warning of the divisions of sectionalism and partisanship, had encouraged the nation’s male citizens “to be bound together by fraternal affection.” Lincoln, in his first inaugural 64 years later, declared the nation’s citizens to be “friends” who must not “break our bonds of affection.” 

That Lincolnian message has far out-shadowed his previous avoidance of the politics of fraternal affection. In the decades after his death, Lincoln himself became a symbol of that affection. Only in the late 1880s did his relationship with Joshua Speed begin to form a central part of Lincoln’s biography. By that time, a culture of reconciliation had become a dominant mode of Civil War memory, excluding, with disastrous consequences, the contributions of Black Americans to the war effort as well as the war’s emancipatory aims to transform a republic of slavery into a racially egalitarian democracy. One prominent vehicle for that reconciliationist message was The Century magazine, whose 1880s series, “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War” put heroic Confederate generals on equal footing with those of the Union. It was in that magazine that Lincoln’s former secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay, published a biography of Lincoln that, employing allusions to Ancient Greek male intimates, called Speed the “Pythias” to Lincoln’s Damon, the “Pylades” to Lincoln’s Orestes, possibly the only “intimate friend that Lincoln ever had.”

That friendship served a distinct purpose within reconciliationist culture. Speed, a Kentuckian, held enslaved people until the end of the Civil War; the antislavery politician’s friendship was thus a symbol of cross-sectional affection, not disrupted by differences over slavery even for the Emancipation Proclamation’s signer. The fact that Lincoln’s most forceful early denunciations of slavery appear in letters to Speed allowed early biographers to contextualize Lincoln’s opposition to slavery within that cross-sectional friendship and portray Lincoln as more concerned with slavery’s divisiveness than its violence. By 1926, Carl Sandburg would layer these themes with the suggestive emotional valences that Lincoln and “his Kentucky chum” had “a streak of lavender and spots soft as May violets.” The hints of homoeroticism made Lincoln and Speed a symbol of cross-sectional national unity, in concert with the Lincoln of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) who comforted the mothers of wounded Confederate soldiers. 

Lincoln and Speed’s relationship, in its public celebration after their deaths, represents a posthumous romance of white male reunion for the post-Civil War nation. It is one of many such male-male romances I explore in postbellum literature and culture in Confederate Sympathies. Many of these, from young male intimates in postbellum novels who break up to fight against each other in the Civil War to the younger brother chums of Birth of a Nation, advance a similar political message as that of Lincoln and Speed: a longing for the affections between white men of the North and South to be undisturbed by the divisiveness of slavery. The homoeroticism in each of these cases runs not against but distinctly with nostalgic desire for the pre-emancipation past. One lesson for historians of sexuality as well as historians of the Civil War era is how well-integrated homoerotic narratives could be within the reconciliationist culture that fostered white reunion and Black exclusion. 

Equally important is the lesson that evidence of historical figures’ intimacies do not come to us as unmediated historical facts but are instead mediated through layers of political narrative. Buchanan’s intimacy with Southern men was part of the Democratic Party’s messaging to win over voters favorable to national compromise on slavery. Lincoln’s intimacy with Speed, however privately meaningful within the pair’s lifetimes, became part of the posthumous symbolism of Lincoln’s purported reconciliationist orientation to Southern slaveholders. The sexuality of historical figures is, indeed, quite meaningful insofar as perceptions of it shape political understanding and historical interpretation. 

We might return to the historian David Donald for another example of how the sexuality of historical figures shapes historical interpretation. In his 2003 study of Lincoln’s friendships, Donald forcefully denied Lincoln’s homosexuality: had his friendship with Speed “been sexual Lincoln would have become a different man.” Several decades earlier, Donald had strongly insinuated that Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner was just such a different man. While Donald worked on his two-volume Sumner biography, colleagues characterized his approach as “disclosing in [Sumner] the patent evidences of a repressed homosexuality.” In a footnote to the second volume, Donald clarified that he wasn’t saying that Sumner experienced “an overt homosexual relationship,” but proceeded with insinuation that Sumner was “by choice and temperament a bachelor” with “a passive, essentially feminine element.” 

What was the difference, for Donald, between Lincoln and Sumner? Their politics. Sumner was, to Donald, one of those abolitionists who resented the moderate Lincoln as “the killer of the dream” because his Emancipation Proclamation “ended the great crusade that had brought purpose and joy.” Despite the fact that there is far less circumstantial evidence putting Sumner in bed with another man, Donald deployed a latently homosexual Sumner and an assuredly heterosexual Lincoln to valorize Lincoln’s normal, moderate politics over Sumner’s abnormal, radical politics. Such an interpretation is, of course, far less about these figures’ sexual orientation than about the historian’s ideological orientation.