The Real Lincoln
Who was the man behind the myth? New research delves into Abe's early years
Most scholars attribute Lincoln's depression in large part to guilt. He couldn't recover, he wrote over a year later to Speed--when he and Mary were still not married--with the "never-absent idea that there is one still unhappy whom I have contributed to make so. That still kills my soul." Later he added: "Before I resolve to do one thing or the other, I must regain my confidence in my own ability to keep my resolves when they are made."
Resolution. Why does it matter how much Lincoln agonized over marriage? Quite frankly, scholars say, because this was one of the few times in his life that a man who would become known for his single-minded determination actually wavered. He didn't snap out of his gloom for over a year, when he finally returned to Mary, asked her forgiveness, and then married her in a hastily arranged ceremony. After that, "the debilitating episodes of the 'hypo' " --as Lincoln called his depressions--"did not recur," writes Wilson, and instead of struggling with self-doubt, Lincoln "became known for his resolution." From then on, James McPherson wrote in the New York Review of Books , "once he made a decision, he stuck with it--a matter of no small importance when the issues became Union or Disunion. Victory or Defeat. Slavery or Freedom." As Lincoln would famously tell those who opposed his Emancipation Proclamation, "The promise, being made, must be kept."
Still, it was not a happy match. Herndon was far from the only friend of Lincoln's who came to despise his wife. (He called Mary "the hell-cat of the age.") Nevertheless, the couple made their marriage last through the turbulent years ahead, including the deaths, in childhood, of two of their four sons. (A third would die six years after the assassination.) Lincoln would always be a melancholy man, but the debilitating, suicidal depressions that plagued him in his youth would never return.
In a book published last month, another scholar, C. A. Tripp, came to a radically different conclusion about Lincoln's depression and personal problems--attributing them to the fact that he was "predominantly homosexual." For evidence, Tripp, who died before his book was published, points out that Lincoln, while they were rooming together, slept in the same bed with his friend Joshua Speed for four years, that he used the salutation "Yours forever" only in letters to Speed, and that his despair in 1841 was the result of Speed's own imminent marriage. Tripp is not the first Lincoln scholar to make this claim. Carl Sandburg, in his 1924 biography, wrote enigmatically that Lincoln and Speed's relationship had "a streak of lavender and spots soft as May violets."
Controversy. Most historians, however, don't see much of a case for a gay Lincoln. Many men slept in beds together in the 19th century, they point out. Tripp is flatly wrong when he claims Speed is the only one to whom Lincoln signed his letters "Yours forever" --he addressed notes to at least half a dozen other people that way. His book has been called "a hoax and a fraud" by his former coauthor, who walked off the project. And for many scholars, the very fact that Lincoln made no attempt to hide his relationship--and even spoke about it as president--confirms their suspicions of Tripp's thesis. "I simply cannot believe that, if the early relationship between Joshua Speed and Lincoln had been sexual, the president of the United States would so freely and publicly speak of it," writes historian Donald.
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