The Black Republican

I need to state right now how much I dislike Google News. Aside from the fact that half the time you get bizarre American murder stories reported on from the likes of China Daily, you also end up wasting inordinate amounts of time reading really interesting news that you probably didn't need to read (and probably would have never seen elsewhere) and that not-so-coincidentally reduces your dwindling supply of duct tape.*

Today's case in point comes from the pages of the The Australian which reports on a a new book that makes the outrageous claim that yet another Great Person of History was homosexual.

(Clarence) Tripp, an influential gay writer who died two weeks after completing his manuscript [Ed: How convenient! He'll never be questioned on Hannity & Colmes....], claims Lincoln reached puberty at nine and became a sexual "outsider", which supposedly influenced his decision to fight for the emancipation of slaves....

By his late teens, according to Tripp, Lincoln was having a passionate affair with Joshua Speed, a neighbour with whom he shared a bed for four years. His warm letters to Speed were signed "yours forever", an endearment he did not use with his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, who bore him four children.

As anyone who's ever read a biography of Lincoln knows, this is patently absurd. First off, as Tripp critic and Harvard professor David Herbert Donald notes later in the article, "Victorian men often shared beds and used flowery language in an asexual fashion." But we don't have to defend all of the Victorian Age for this one.

Lincoln was a lawyer in an age when lawyering meant being part travelling salesman, taking long trips by horse and buggy from county to county to appear at the bar in different jurisdictions. And did these lawyers stay at Motel 6 when they got to the next town? As Carl Sandburg put it, "Some taverns had big rooms where a dozen or more lawyers slept of a night." You can imagine that occasionally there might have been more lawyers than beds - as would happen when the state legislature would meet. (Don't you suppose that's the origin of the expression "Politics makes strange bedfellows"?) As for Lincoln and Speed, Sandburg records their first meeting, that pretty much says it all:

Lincoln pulled in his horse at the general store of Joshua Speed. He asked the price of bedclothes for a single bedstead, which Speed figured at $17. "Cheap as it is, I have not the money to pay," he told Speed. "But if you will credit me until Christmas, and my experiment here as a lawyer is a success, I will pay you then. If I fail at that I will probably never pay you at all." Speed said afterward, "The tone of his voice was so melancholy that I felt for him.... I thought I never saw so gloomy and melancholy a face in my life." Speed offered to share his own big double bed upstairs over the store. Lincoln took his saddlebags upstairs, came down with his face lit up and said, "Well, Speed, I'm moved." A friendship, to last long, began, as with William Butler, clerk of the Sangamon Circuit Court, who told Lincoln he could take his meals at the Butler home and there would be no mention of board bills.

In today's age, the likelihood that two men sharing the same bed aren't homosexual is about as probable as a shopkeeper giving out merchandise on the strength of a man's word, or a business aquaintance offering free meals at his wife's table every night indefinately. Hard as it is to believe, the world used to be different in each respect.