Though mostly an autodidact, Lincoln read more widely and deeply than his friend. Lincoln was unchurched but had absorbed the Bible into the very fabric of his soul, especially the book of Matthew, references to which are everywhere in his writings, though he also evoked directly or indirectly any number of Old Testament stories in his writings and speeches throughout his life, including Genesis, Psalms, Isaiah, and Ecclesiastes, for example, as well as subtle references to less well-known books like Samuel and Hebrews. One of Lincoln’s uses of the Bible was to make covert allusions to it in his speeches (as opposed to his more direct quotations, as in the “Discoveries and Inventions” speech or “House Divided”). One very good example of a covert allusion occurs in the Lyceum speech in 1838. His point about mob rule is that it comes from within and is not imposed by an outside tyrant. “If destruction be our lot,” he says, “we must ourselves be its author and finisher.” The covert reference here is to Hebrews 12:2: “Looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith.” That kind of reference surely resonated with his audience without Lincoln having to play a religious card. “Lincoln got the preacher’s points,” Robert Bray astutely puts it, “without acting the preacher.”
He also knew most of the great soliloquies in Shakespeare by heart and warmed to long discussions of the plays themselves, especially the tragedies, and the intricacies of plot and character development. He came to know some contemporary poets through Speed, especially Lord Byron (Speed said later, “I don’t think he [Lincoln] had ever read much of Byron previous to my acquaintance with him”), but Lincoln never read anything as deeply as Shakespeare. He knew the law well, including what was then the fundamental legal text in the Anglo-American world, Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. And no one reveled in the daily paper more than Abraham Lincoln. He read it with the passion of a writer and politician. He was a powerful and effective speaker in that era before microphones and teleprompters. He knew how to project his high-pitched but resonant voice to an audience that might be in a church hall, a meeting room of an inn, or outside at a fairground. He was a master of mood. He often joked with folksy charm to large and small groups of mostly uneducated people, putting them at ease but also never talking down to them about the complicated and contentious political issues of the day. He honed all of these skills on a daily basis in his law practice and frequently gave political speeches and at times major speeches on topics of interest to him.
No one was more appreciative of Lincoln’s intellect than Joshua Speed. “No truth was too small to escape his observation,” Speed wrote, “and no problem too intricate to escape a solution,—if it was capable of being solved. Thought, hard, patient, laborious thought; these were the tributaries that made the bold, strong, irresistible current of his life.” Describing a speech Lincoln gave in 1840, Speed stressed his “wonderful faculty” to deliver long and complicated speeches without notes. He remembered everything. “He might be writing an important document, be interrupted in the midst of a sentence, turn his attention to other matters entirely foreign to the subject on which he was engaged, and take up his pen and begin where he left off without reading the previous part of the sentence. He could grasp, exhaust, and quit any subject with more facility than any man I have ever seen or heard of.” His mind, Speed felt, “was like polished steel.” If you made a mark on it, “it was never erased. His memory of events, of facts, dates, faces, and names, surprised everyone.”
On the face of it there was nothing unusual in Speed sharing his bed with Lincoln. The living and sleeping arrangements Lincoln and Speed worked out were quite typical of this period and place in American history. Inns at that time, with few rooms, simply separated the men from the women and were often only slightly larger than residential cabins. To make some money, an owner might even enlarge his loft, which could only be reached by a ladder. The shared room would then have a fireplace where food and liquor could be served. Everyone crowded into all available space—for warmth as much as anything else. Both before and after Lincoln met Speed it was a common experience for Lincoln to share a bed with other males. Richard Lawrence Miller has put together a list of all the males Lincoln slept with before he arrived in Springfield: a hired hand in 1830 with whom Lincoln was working; McGrady Rutledge, Stephen Perkins, Daniel Burner, Slicky Bill Greene, and Abner Lewis during his years living in New Salem; John Stuart in Vandalia during the legislative session of 1834–1835; and after Speed left Springfield, Milton Hay for a time, as well as William Herndon and Leonard Swett when they were out on the circuit together, though that could mean sleeping in more communal quarters with several men huddled under shared blankets to keep warm, waking to drink what his colleague Henry C. Whitney called “tough” coffee.
Domestic architecture at the time, as well, forced a sharing of beds for the typical family, especially as one moved west from the major coastal cities on the Eastern Seaboard. Speed, for example, was raised on a wealthy Kentucky plantation, but by today’s standards the house at Farmington is hardly imposing, and there were two adults and many children living in it. He certainly paired up with his male siblings to sleep, even though we don’t know from available evidence which ones, where, or when. Later, in boarding school, Speed undoubtedly shared a room and perhaps a bed with a schoolmate.
On the frontier as Lincoln experienced it there was never any measure of private space. As a young boy, he slept on a cot in the same room with his parents and one older sister in a tight log cabin in Kentucky. When the family first moved to southern Indiana (Lincoln was seven), joined by some of Nancy Lincoln’s relatives, the Sparrows, and an illegitimate cousin, Dennis Hanks (then eighteen), they lived for a year in the lean-to, fighting off the snow and cold, in a home not much of an improvement over camping outdoors. The next year Thomas Lincoln enclosed the cabin but never put in windows, and he had not yet finished the roof before winter. It was only after 1819, when Lincoln’s new stepmother, Sarah Bush Johnston, a widow, arrived with three children from a previous marriage, that Thomas added a loft to the log cabin; the boys slept in that common space.
So there was nothing unusual in the culture or in the historical moment in the mere fact that Lincoln and Speed slept together. Custom and individual experience, however, are not always congruent. The experience of a sensitive or talented few may depart sharply from that of the many. Social history provides necessary context for biography but cannot fully explain individual psychological experience at any given time. Just because it was common in nineteenth-century America that men slept together does not mean it was of no significance that young Lincoln, at a critical point in his development, made the most important friendship of his life with another young man with whom he was to sleep for the next three and a half years; one very tall man, the other of ordinary size, in a double bed, probably stuffed with corn husks, hair, or feathers, each perhaps loosely draped in a bolt of linen (or, as noted by Whitney, sometimes Lincoln on the circuit wore a “short home made yellow flannel undershirt & had nothing else on”), tossing and turning in their dreamscapes. The question is, what does it mean?
In recent years, a number of historians have assumed that Lincoln and Speed had sex and were homosexual lovers. Larry Kramer, the playwright and AIDS activist, even once claimed a source of his found a secret diary of Joshua Speed, along with prurient letters, hidden under the floorboards of the old building that housed Speed’s store, documents that detail his sexual relationship with Lincoln. Since Kramer has failed to produce the diary, most agree it is a hoax. Furthermore, the find would be quite remarkable since that building basically “underwent a bad fire in 1855,” as reported in the local paper, and burned to the ground.
In fact, there is no direct or indirect evidence to prove that the Lincoln-Speed relationship was sexualized, or was known as sexualized, witnessed as such, or talked about as homosexual by any contemporary friend, neighbor, or citizen in nosy Springfield, then or later in the oral history. Writers as varied as Jonathan Ned
Katz, Charles Shively, John Stauffer, and Clarence A. Tripp, among others, have fallen back on the tendentious argument that two young men sleeping together who were so closely bonded and who wrote such intimate letters to each other must have sexualized their relationship. One needs to consider such an argument rather closely. Its main flaw is that it imposes twentieth- and twenty-first-century assumptions on nineteenth-century customs and attitudes. We live in an era in which attitudes toward homosexuality have radically altered. While there is still resistance in some social sectors and in the backwaters to gay marriage, for example, and many young men who present as gay are unfortunately still bullied, for the most part Americans (especially those under forty or so) are increasingly at ease with all forms of homosexuality, feel gay marriage should be legalized everywhere (as the US Supreme Court recently held), gay adoption made legal, etc.
The social context of nineteenth-century friendship presents a picture so different from the present in so many particulars that it can be hard to fathom. It was a social reality then that homosexuality was wrong and should be condemned—though the term itself only came into use in the latter part of the nineteenth century in Germany and then gradually spread to the rest of the West. Sodomy was illegal. When it became manifest, sodomy, along with some instances of bestiality (or, as it was called, buggery), was severely punished. The condemnation of homosexuality, however, joined the culturally sanctioned belief that young men could, even should, be close and loving with each other—as long as the boundary against sexualization was rigidly maintained. Psychologically speaking, American culture at the time approved of expressive intimacy but punished homosexuality, and the boundary between sensuality and sexuality was clear. Expressions of love and affection between young men, often in florid literary terms, were encouraged, along with some restricted touching, but eroticism of any kind and especially sexuality that involved the genitals or orgasm were strictly forbidden. Very commonly, young middle-class men had intimate but not sexual male friendships in their twenties and into their thirties that bridged the world of childhood playmates with the families then created with female sexual partners. These specifically nineteenth-century male friendships served as vehicles for the uneasy transition from the comforts of childhood into a world of dreaded intimacy with idealized but remote, heavily garbed, and sexually guarded women. Loving and intimate male friendships during this specific phase of the life cycle were psychological by-products of the way nineteenth-century culture sharply divided the two worlds that men and women inhabited into gendered separateness.
In New Salem between 1832 and 1835, Lincoln respectfully courted the beautiful and remarkable Ann Rutledge. They were at first discreet because Ann had been betrothed to another man who left the village. But by about 1834 she gave up on her fiancé and began to talk about marriage with Lincoln. Ann was a woman of “Exquisite beauty,” Slicky Bill Greene later wrote to Herndon, matched by an intellect that was “quick—Sharp—deep & philosophic as well as brilliant.” She was “gentle & kind a heart as an angl [sic]—full of love—kindness—sympathy.” And so on in the words of some fifteen respondents to Herndon. But suddenly in August of 1835 typhoid swept Central Illinois and Ann died a gruesome, painful death.
Lincoln was distraught, fell into a clinical depression, and became suicidal. By all accounts, it was the first time he had fallen in love, and his extended courtship bound him to this impressive young woman. The sheer number of his friends and neighbors who recalled how extreme his reaction was to Ann’s death should be taken seriously. Lincoln told Mentor Graham he “felt like Committing Suicide often” after Ann died. A neighbor, Hardin Bale, later reported that Lincoln had to be “locked up by his friends” so that he would not commit suicide. Did they create something of a suicide watch through the first crucial few days after his betrothed’s death? That seems to be what Bale is suggesting, since none of the twenty-five or so log cabins strung out along New Salem’s single dirt path had actual locks. But the closeness of the quarters would have allowed Lincoln’s friends to stay with him in his grief, perhaps take away any razors he owned, and try to talk him back from the edge. Lincoln told another friend and neighbor that he dared not carry a pocketknife after Ann’s death. Some have disputed the suicidal meaning of this statement, but that is exactly why in psychiatric hospitals no sharp objects of any kind are allowed. You simply cut the veins in your wrist along a vertical line and you bleed to death.
Ann’s sudden death was tragic for Lincoln, and, to use a term of great importance in contemporary psychoanalysis, it was also traumatic. Two factors contributed to Lincoln’s traumatic reaction to her death. First, it came without warning and was extremely painful to witness. Typhoid is a bacterial disease that runs its course in three to four weeks and brings a rising temperature (to 104 degrees), diarrhea, intestinal hemorrhaging, encephalitis, delirium, and, if untreated, as of course it was in New Salem in the mid-1830s, often death.
But second, the extremity of Lincoln’s reaction to the death of Ann Rutledge, especially the testimony of his suicidal inclinations at her loss, suggests he had a fragile self that was extremely vulnerable to loss. In this, Lincoln seemed retraumatized by Ann’s death. His wild despair and depression, in other words, because they reached such extreme lengths, lead one to suspect that they evoked the earlier losses of his mother (when he was nine) and sister (when he was eighteen), losses that left him vulnerable to fragmentation as an adult when faced with events that directly or symbolically evoked the childhood trauma of his mother’s death and to a lesser degree that of his sister. Lincoln knew intimately of the “death scenes of those we love,” as he later wrote to Joshua Speed.
A dark despair of childhood origins lingered in young Lincoln. For the moment, his depression was relatively quiescent. He was in a state of what the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson called a moratorium, that moment in youth when a troubled, and often talented, young person holds at bay peremptory developmental demands, keeping them dormant and suppressed without being resolved, waiting for a kind of inner transformation that will permit the construction of a usable identity. Erikson stresses that someone in such a developmentally delayed state of tension slows things down, easily slips into “tortuous self-consciousness,” and most of all recoils from intimacy. The danger in closeness with another is the potential loss of self. For Lincoln, the unconsummated love for Ann Rutledge and then her sudden, tragic death brought back in full force the earlier trauma of his mother’s death. It left him feeling that those he most loved died.
Lincoln was only marginally less depressed when he arrived in Springfield on April 15, 1837. At first he and Joshua Speed were cautious with each other; Lincoln even failed to share with Speed the story of his relationship with Ann Rutledge. It took time for him to feel safe and trusting with Speed. That level of friendship seemed to develop after about two years and was clearly in place by 1839. Then nothing could break their bonds of affection. They worked during the day some two blocks apart but otherwise were seldom separated (at times Speed even went out on the circuit with Lincoln just to be by his side). They finished each other’s sentences. After they awoke, each day began with a light breakfast. They were together again for their main meal at the genial home of court clerk and entrepreneur William Butler, and had supper back in the store.
In the evenings, especially in winter, when not reading or talking, a fascinating male salon gathered in the back of Speed’s store by an expansive fireplace. The group consisted of the leading political and intellectual figures in town. Among those who came were the leading Whigs in the state (Edward D. Baker, Orville Browning, John J. Hardin, and others), Democratic figures (John Calhoun, Archer Herndon, Josiah Lamborn, and even Stephen Douglas, whom Lincoln later debated), politician-turned-judge Jesse B. Thomas, William Butler, and whoever else might fit cozily in back of the store and be able to contribute to the conversations. They came to talk about everything under the sun, share stories, but they mostly came because they knew Lincoln would
be there. His humor, wisdom, and humanity were already legendary. In advance of the gatherings, Speed must have arranged the kindling, probably with Herndon (then his clerk in the store), and lit the wood in his fireplace, prepared coffee and cider, and perhaps added something sweet or savory for his guests. Speed never expected to take full part in the discussions, competing against some very smart and assertive men. Besides, that was not Speed’s style. But he could—and did, as his list of memories reveals—enjoy watching and listening, seeing faces gleaming in the fires he made, hearing appreciative laughter in response to Lincoln’s stories. Herndon also made no claim to have spoken at these caucuses. He was in any event a college dropout who gratefully sat at the feet of educated, well-read, and high-minded men speaking on “politics, religion, and all other subjects.” Herndon felt greatly privileged to attend these sessions and spoke of being dazzled by these orators’ “brilliant thoughts and youthful enthusiasm.” There in the room, Herndon says, “public sentiment was made.” The same dry-goods store in which Speed and Herndon measured and cut ribbon in daylight was a different and magical place by night.
The rough maleness of the gatherings in Speed’s store found its counterpoint in the “Coterie” that assembled in the home of Ninian Wirt Edwards. Edwards was the son of the first governor of Illinois (and a graduate of Transylvania University in Kentucky, where he gave the graduation speech in Latin) and the husband of Elizabeth Edwards, the sister of Mary Todd. At their home on Quality Hill, sometimes dubbed Aristocracy Hill, just to the southwest of the square on Second and Jackson Streets, Elizabeth and Ninian greeted guests in French, hosted frequent parties with dancing and violins, and set a standard for social elegance unmatched in Springfield or, indeed, in any of the surrounding towns of central Illinois. The house itself was two stories and large enough to hold within it “a dozen prairie-farmer cabins,” as Carl Sandburg colorfully put it in Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years. Elegant brocade embellished the eaves, along with ornamental railings, engraved doors, and a long driveway that deposited visitors at the front veranda. At the north end was the large parlor where the Edwardses hosted their parties and soirees (and where the Lincolns were married on November 4, 1842).
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