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Not that there's Anything Wrong with that
Instapundit linked up this "preview" of a book that makes a rather startling claim about our 16th president, Abraham Lincoln:
A forthcoming book by the late Dr. C.A. Tripp — The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, to be published in the new year by Free Press — makes a powerful case that Lincoln was a lover of men.
The politics of the article's author badly colors their critique, but it's definitely an intriguing idea. However, like Cornwell's book on Jack the Ripper, it sounds very much as if Dr. Tripp does not have a "smoking gun" (as it were), but instead has assembled a whole lot of circumstantial evidence. Of course, the problem with circumstantial evidence is that it is open to different interpretations. The morality, customs, and mores of mid 19th century America are strikingly different from early 21st century America, and it is in my opinion rather tricky to pull the two apart.
Still, I'll be quite interested to read what other, less political, critics make of the thing.
I have a classmate that is a Lincoln historian. I wonder what he would say about all this. I agree with you that we cannot project our social and sexual mores back onto other times but at the same time same-sex relationships did happen. It sounds as if the work is grounded in scholarly research. I may have to read this myself just to see what it says. But I am finding that the emphasis on "bed sharing" stated in the article to be dubious circumstantial evidence. It is only recent that people stopped sharing beds. It was common for complete strangers to share beds at inns, so why not friends?
Posted by: carrie on October 28, 2004 11:08 AM