The "Homosexual" Lincolln

That other prominent modern-day Lincoln tear-down tactic--racist being the other--that smacks strongly of looking at the past through the wrong-ended lens of the present is the theory that he was also a closet homosexual.

This theory gets all mixed up with the shortage of beds in Lincoln's time. In our time if a man sleeps with a man he must therefore be a homosexual. If a woman sleeps with a woman she must be a lesbian. And that is the main buttress of this argument that Lincoln was a homosesexual. He spent endless nights, particularly in his earlier years, sleeping in the same bed with another man--or men. But in Lincoln's time it was a question of a shortage of beds. There was not an overabundance of racks in his day, particularly on the frontier. This was before he married Mary Todd, then he started sleeping with her instead, and they produced four children.

It was not unheard of for two opposing candidates running for Congress in Illinois in Lincoln's time to travel together, hammer and defame one another on the stump all day, and then sleep congenially in the same bed at night. When Lincoln first came to Springfield in 1837 Joshua Speed offered to share his bed and Lincoln dumped his saddlebags in the upstairs room and accepted. It beat going in debt or sleeping out in the village square.

This shortage of beds permeated society right up into Lincoln's presidential years. Gettysburg was so crowded with bodies when Lincoln went there to deliver his immortal Gettyburg Address in November 1863 that the main speaker of the day, Edward Everett, spent a restless night worrying tht he was going to have to share his bed with the governor of Pennsylvania, who was arriving late. Everett's daughter, Charlotte, come with her father to this great event, was forced to sleep with two other women in the same bed. (Five in a bed was not said to be uncommon that night in Gettysburg, which was mobbed.) The three-in-one weight worked out to be too heavy for Charlotte's bed. It collapsed in the night, pitching Charlotte and her two sleeping comanions out on the floor.

Ånother "evidence" trotted out that Lincon must have been a homosexual was his preference for the company of men throughout his lifetime. But looked at not through the lens of the present, but of the past in which he lived, and for the kind of man he was--from which such matters should be viewed--Lincoln just wasn't all that handy with the ladies. Besides he loved telling stories and most of his stories were not fit for mixed company. Cover your ears, ladies.