The True Lincoln

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But as the civil rights movement shone a spotlight on inequality and discrimination, Lincoln's image came in for a beating. The myth of Lincoln as the black man's best friend was hard to square with his own words, from the Lincoln-Douglas debates, that he had "no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races" and that "there is a physical difference between the two, which in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living upon the footing of perfect equality." In a 1968 piece for Ebony, "Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist?", Lerone Bennett Jr. presented a Lincoln who often told racist jokes and who, well into his presidency, urged that freed blacks should leave the U.S. for another continent. Three decades later, Bennett returned to the theme in his book Forced into Glory, which became a best seller in black-interest bookstores.

Bennett's book is only one side of a sharp argument over Lincoln and race, but its success served as a sharp reminder that--just as in all previous times--modern America will insist on seeing Lincoln on its own terms. Consider C.A. Tripp and his argument that Lincoln was gay. His book The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln begins with the fact that Lincoln during his late 20s and early 30s shared a bed with a young man named Joshua Speed. As President, Lincoln may also have shared his bed with a captain of his guard unit in Washington.

But for men to share beds in the mid-19th century was as common and as mundane as men sharing houses or apartments in the early 21st. Tripp's claim proceeds from what Jonathan Ned Katz calls "epistemological hubris and ontological chutzpah." A scholar of 19th century sexuality, Katz explains that the terms homosexual and heterosexual did not exist in Lincoln's time, and that fact is just one piece of evidence that the concepts of gender, sexuality and same-sex relationships were radically different in Lincoln's world. In those days, men could be openly affectionate with one another, physically and verbally, without having to stake their identity on it.

So what do we, today, make of a world that operated according to such fundamentally different rules? And what do we make of the personal life of a leader so long encrusted in mythology? Fortunately, we've never been in a better position to see him. Along with new interest in the private lives of public figures, new trends in scholarship allow us a fresh chance to see Lincoln as he lived, thought and acted. Following the boom in oral history in the 1960s, today's Lincoln scholars are closely studying the massive body of recollections from people who knew him well, including intimate portraits that had long been neglected or obscured. In the past decade, more than a dozen volumes of essential primary evidence on Lincoln have been published, including original writings and research by his White House secretaries, John Hay and John Nicolay, and the Civil War dispatches of Lincoln intimate Noah Brooks. The granddaddy of all oral histories, the interviews and statements collected by Lincoln's law partner Herndon, are now easily available for the first time.