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She had long-term relationships with FDR, JFK and LBJ.
She still nurses a crush on Abraham Lincoln.
She’s currently involved with Teddy Roosevelt.
OK, it’s not as salacious as it sounds, but historian Doris Kearns Goodwin does compare the act of researching and writing her award-winning presidential biographies to a swoonfest of sorts.
“I feel like I’ve had a series of affairs with these various people over the years,” she said in a phone interview to promote her upcoming appearances at the annual Festival of the Arts Boca tonight and Saturday.
A regular political analyst on NBC, MSNBC and Meet the Press, the 67-year-old Goodwin — who lives outside Boston but enjoys a few weeks each winter in Palm Beach County — seems to have a clear favorite among her subjects: the central figure of 2005′s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.
“Living with (Lincoln) is such a great joy because of the person he is,” she says. “There are human qualities that he has, and you feel when you’re in his presence that, somehow, some of it might just rub off — his ability to admit errors, his great sense of humor, the way he would bring in people who could argue with him, his ability to be kind …
“All of us wish we could have more of those qualities that are truly there with him.
“And when you write about him, you realize he’s even greater than you thought he was when you started.”
Although there was a surge of Lincoln books published in 2009 — the bicentennial of the 16th president’s birth — still, they come.
Even oddities such as Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, by Seth Grahame-Smith, best-selling author of last year’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
And next year, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Lincoln.
“There’s an enormous appeal of Lincoln to all perspectives,” says Goodwin, noting that President Obama and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin have both claimed Team of Rivals as one of the their favorite books.
“These very different people are so attracted to Lincoln. If only we could have that kind of person to bring together the partisanship in Washington right now.”
But how might Lincoln, who often joked about his own homeliness, fare in a 21st century campaign, particularly against telegenic candidates who use personal stylists, schedule $400 haircuts and often land on People magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful list?
If he lost the stovepipe hat and shaved off the beard, he’d look like a different Lincoln, Goodwin says: A rugged, even sexy, rail splitter.
“If he were able to look like that today, I think he’d do just fine,” she says. “In a debating situation, he’d blow them all away.
“He could use humor — he was so quick — and he knew how to speak in a natural language.
“If he had to make long speeches, he’d obviously be terrific.
“And he was great with people. He loved being around people and he could remember them later and ask questions about how they were doing.”
(Hunky Irishman Liam Neeson, by the way, is slated to play Lincoln in the long-awaited Steven Spielberg adaptation of Team of Rivals. “These movies take longer to make than it takes me to write a book,” Goodwin says.)
Tonight, Goodwin will talk about her approach to biography — “how you go about it, what you learn doing it, and really the fun of living with these people” — but on Saturday at the festival, she’ll interview the most important man in her life: her husband, Richard Goodwin.
The writer, presidential adviser, speech writer and playwright worked in the White House under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and served as the lead investigator who uncovered the quiz-show scandals of the 1950s.
He’s currently penning his memoirs, while Doris Goodwin is working on a book about Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and the muckrakers.
And who will Goodwin fall for next?
“I don’t know anymore. That’s the problem,” she says. “You want to have the next subject be as interesting and dramatic as the one you just wrote about.
“After Lincoln, I thought, ‘What am I going to do? I can’t go back to Millard Fillmore.’ “
DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN
When: Tonight, 7 p.m.
Where: Festival of the Arts Boca, Mizner Park Cultural Arts Center. Goodwin will interview her husband, author Richard Goodwin, at Mizner Park at 4 p.m. March 13.
Information: FestivalOfTheArtsBoca.org or (866) 571-ARTS.
RÉSUMÉ: Doris Kearns Goodwin
Childhood: Born in Brooklyn and grew up in Rockville Center on New York’s Long Island.
Education: B.A. Colby College, Ph.D. in government at Harvard University.
Experience: Taught at Harvard University and worked as an assistant to President Lyndon Johnson during his final year in the White House.
Books: Lyndon Johnson and The American Dream (1976), The Fitzgeralds and The Kennedys (1987), No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (1995, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in history), Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir (1997), Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005, winner of the Lincoln Prize and the inaugural Book Prize for American History).
Current writing project: A book about the broken friendship between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Due in 2011.
Random fact: A lifelong baseball fan, Goodwin was the first female journalist to enter the locker room of the Boston Red Sox.
It will be interesting to see what she writes about T. Roosevelt and Taft. I recently finished reading a book that was very unflattering toward both of them.
Goodwin is one of the most interesting historians of our day. I so wish I could have been a student of hers. When I hear she’s going to be on the TV all else stops. Very interesting and personable woman. She goes deep with her subjects and never disappoints by sharing a tidbit or two we’ve not known or heard before. I also admire her ability to shut up the stupid with facts. Doris Kearns Goodwin is a treasure..
He was also a racist. He smoked hemp and was a confessed athiest. He had no respect for the constitution.
She is a Kennedy suck up.
PBC resident, to which “He” are you referring?
I just finished an article on Abraham Lincoln’s very personal and intimate bisexual sex life and relationships with his father and mother and stepmother, and numerous others based on a number of extremely prominent authors including Doris Kearns. Most prominent in the research, was Harvard Prof. John Stauffer’s work in “Giants.” The Article is hereby set forth.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN:
More Than A Penny, Up Close and Intimate
By Elliot S. Shaw, Esq. Copyright Elliot S. Shaw, Esq. 2010
BURLEY Thomas Lincoln charged toward the young teen Abraham sitting on the split rail fence reading a soiled, weathered copy of the Bible. He was in a foul mood, screaming at Abraham, “I’m ginna beat ya te a stump thinkern ya be’s smarta and betta thin folk; foolin yisself with eddication.” Thomas then swung a vicious, wild fist at his son Abraham’s head and knocked him off the fence onto the muddy ground, his Bible falling into a brown, rain puddle. Abraham’s head reverberated with pain, but it was his book being “mussed” up that caused his biggest heartache. The gangling, awkward Abraham didn’t fight back, although already six feet tall as a teenager, soon to be six-four and over 200 pounds.
Thomas Lincoln had been a Kentucky legend around Hardin County as a cussin’, no holds barred, rough and tumble fighter biting off noses, ears and lips, poking and pulling out eyeballs from their sockets and keeping them as souvenirs. There were gruesome rumors that Thomas had been castrated by an opponent’s ripping bites although no actual recordings of this event were ever discovered. Such violent activities, however, were the way of establishing rank, status and self esteem in the then backwoods West of the United States in the early 1800s, in states like Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois. Instead of dueling like rich men, if someone wanted to save face, they had to be willing to lose part of it.
These grizzly fights were fueled in a world of constant violence by men guzzling down eight to twelve shots of rot-gut whiskey or rye from a jug in just a few hours to suppress their gnawing fears. The foreboding backdrop of life for these ragged frontiersmen, and their families, was the constant danger of being struck down or maimed by countless numbers of large bears, huge racked deer, and all variants of wild animals. Indian attacks would spring up out of dense, green, forests, and all manner of illness, disease; and accidents were always happening with few, if any, skilled doctors who were usually miles away. In the “alcoholic republic of America,” more citizens were wasted, or died of alcoholism by 35, than any other cause, many with faces scarred and disfigured from terrible fights.
Although he was too respectful to fight back, Abraham Lincoln despised his carpenter-trained, mostly farmer, father, Thomas, so much that he didn’t even attend his funeral when he died although he did help pay for Thomas’ care in his later years. Abraham thought his father, who could hardly read or write, ignorant and impoverished, and he hated Thomas’ oft-stated contempt and put-downs of Abraham’s reading and learning. He was also frustrated by Thomas’ always moving to places where there was absolutely nothing to excite education. Thomas was considered, by numerous neighbors, an excellent specimen of poor white trash–lazy and worthless. Other kinder neighbors said Thomas was a hardworking, church-going Baptist, but a bad businessman.
However, there was something even more offensive that made Abraham hate the boorish, Thomas “Linkern,” which would affect Abraham Lincoln for the rest of his life. He considered his father nothing less than a slave master, no different for poor whites in the backwoods than Southern slaves. The young giant was used by his father to clear acres of land, split rails, plant and harvest corn and build log cabins; not only for himself but as a rental to others for $8 to $10 dollars a month. This left Abraham with little time to attend school or read. Thomas took Abraham’s earnings and left Abraham without a dime.
From all this strenuous labor and his genetics, Abraham’s shoulders and forearms became so strong that he could hold a heavy axe out horizontally without a quiver. He could also perform amazing feats such as lifting a thousand-pound box of rocks, and out leap, out run, and out throw, all challengers. Today, such talent might have captured him a lucrative contract with the NBA, a stint on a reality show, or perhaps become a superstar in the NFL. In the 1800’s, though, of course this was not the case. A man’s average height was 5’7” and usually weighed in at 145, which was only fair to middlin’ for hard labor. Abe was great material for this lifestyle, but he hated farming, carpentry and physical labor. He was far more an intellect, many say even a genius, starving for more knowledge. Emotionally, his chief dread and gnawing fear was that he would wind up being like his father, a nobody and a bully.
Born February 12, 1809, Abraham’s first seven years of life were spent in the boon-docks of Kentucky. Thomas then hauled the family across the Ohio River to Pigeon Creek in Southern Indiana in 1816, another rough country site with only 40 families within five miles–and not a touch of polite civilization. Misery engulfed Abraham from the very beginning of the fourteen years he spent there, until he reached 21 years of age. His birth mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, as tall as her husband Thomas at 5”10”, was also a fighter who could throw most of those men who dared to put her powers to the test. Ironically, although Lincoln was born into a family of fighters and hunters, he himself was not violent, nor did he spend much time hunting.
After arriving in Pigeon Creek, Abe’s mother gave birth to Abraham’s only sibling, a sister, who died in childbirth. Shortly thereafter when Abraham was only eight, his mother contracted milk sickness (brucellosis) and died. She was also an unspoken source of embarrassment to him. He later admitted to a friend, “my mother was a bastard–she was the daughter of ‘a nobleman’ from Virginia.” Even amongst poor white trash, the son of a bastard was a sign of shame, and if the rumors were true that his father Thomas had been castrated in a fight, he would have been the bastard son of a bastard. But there was some poignant solace in his mother’s unfortunate background. Abraham considered his Mother much smarter than his Father, and he was convinced that she inherited the nobleman’s qualities, and he the qualities of his Mother. This gave Abraham some belief that he could possibly escape his backwoods poverty and ignorance with less than one year of formal schooling. For, in addition to his great strength and fighting abilities, he was gaining fame and popularity in the community as a jokester and storyteller, even though he was fixated on dirty, juvenile jokes such as the following story about a couple who believed that Judgment Day was upon them and decided to reveal their sins to each other:
“Well dear,” said she, “our little Sammy is not your child.” “Whose is he?” said the husband. “The one-eyed shoemaker. He came to see me once when you were away and in a vile hour I gave way.” “Well,” said the husband, “is the rest mine?” “No,” said she, “they belong to the neighborhood.”
About the only good thing that happened to Abraham at Pigeon Creek was Thomas’ remarriage shortly after Nancy Hank’s death, to Sarah Bush Johnston, a widow with children from a previous marriage. Abraham at that time was wild, ragged and dirty, but Sarah started changing things at once. She brought a featherbed, walnut bureau, tables and chairs, silverware, and a spinning wheel (all luxury items to Abraham), and ordered the lazy Thomas to finally build a wall to close off the three sided, crude cabin.
Most importantly, Sarah cleaned Abraham up and treated him with as much love as her own children. According to one relative, Sarah was Abraham’s best friend in the world. No man could love a mother more than he loved her. Abraham now had time to read more and more with her protection. Later on, when he was contemplating his greatest political ambition of running for President, he took a dusty and dirty train and horse coach ride to visit her and discuss the possibility. She fortuitously warned him that she was afraid that if he was elected, something terrible could happen to him.
Moving On
While Abraham rarely went to church and was not religious, he started to believe in an over-ruling Providence that insisted on sobriety and peace. He devoured the Bible, not for its religious content, but to learn and educate himself in history, moral allegories, and cultural development. In addition, he delved into the Farmer’s Almanac, a spelling book, Shakespeare, and the Columbian Orator, a popular book of the day which went through 23 editions from 1797 to 1860, and was considered essential reading for a proper education. Its subject matter was considered radical because the poems, stories and speeches included between its covers were intended to teach boys that all men are created equal and entitled to the inalienable rights of life, liberty and happiness. It was determined to be so radical in the South, that during the height of the slave crisis in the 1840s and ‘50s, the most prominent Southern newspaper included it on a blacklist of abolitionist books–in effect banning it from Southern schools and homes.
Reading the “Columbian Orator” was also Lincoln’s first step toward changing his backwoods slang into educated English. He learned that his name wasn’t pronounced “Linkern” or “Linkhorn,” that fruit didn’t become “spiled” but “spoiled,” people didn’t “brung things back” from the woods where “skeeters” were as thick as trees at the “crick,” and young Lincoln “weel be good, but God knows whin.”
Abraham grew into a towering figure through his teens at Pigeon Creek. Although facially unattractive, lanky, and awkward, he too passed the whisky jug around and had his share of brawls, even to the point of dislocating one man’s shoulder. As peaceful as Abraham was, the great contradiction of his life was that he was an unusually accomplished fighter. He had little choice in the backwoods. By the time his family’s life of drifting westward ended in 1830, in New Salem in Southern Illinois, west of Springfield, Abraham had reached the age of twenty-one. He further had given in to that overruling Providence and refused to participate in no-holds-barred, rough and tumble fighting, and gave up drinking for the rest of his life. He considered these activities not to be symbols of freedom and democracy reflecting equal opportunity, but a destruction of those very qualities and thought them to be the tools of tyranny. This wise man also used persuasion to force smaller men to think twice about their desire to fight him.
Before the family moved to New Salem, Abraham took his first trip down the Mississippi River to New Orleans because his father had rented him out for $8 a month to work on a flatboat. Since Abraham was then only nineteen years old, his father still legally had him enslaved and took his earnings. One peaceful evening, while anchored on the sugar cane coast near Baton Rouge, Abraham heard some quiet splashes in the water. All at once, several slaves, most likely working as a front for Southern planters, climbed aboard the flatboat to kill the crew and hijack the cargo. The huge Lincoln quickly picked up a club and started swinging back ferociously at the pirates driving them away. He immediately cut the cable and weighed anchor. In the fierce scuffle, Lincoln sustained a deep gash from a club leaving a scar over his right eye.
To Lincoln, the river was just fine; it meant freedom. He had time to read, tell stories, and just gaze out at the stars while a gator occasionally swam by and the bullfrogs croaked in symphony all night. He even tried to get a job on a steamboat, but he was still only nineteen. It was not until his second trip down the Mississippi to New Orleans in the winter of 1830-1831, after Abraham had reached adulthood and had moved to New Salem with about 100 families, that his dream was unleashed. At that time, New Salem was the largest pocket of civilization in which he had ever lived, as big as Chicago in 1830. There were actually even some books floating around.
The second steamboat trip opportunity began when a, slick, fast-talking, hard-drinking businessman, Denton Offutt, took one look at the blue-jeaned, hickory-stripe-shirted Abraham Lincoln, and hired him at once for about $10 per month. Lincoln thought it was decent pay and accepted the offer to build a flat boat to run farm produce down to New Orleans and come back on the steamboat. To get to the Mississippi River from New Salem in Southern Illinois, you first had to travel down the narrow Sangamon River.
Unfortunately, the flatboat got caught on a snag with its bow sticking out over a mill damn. If the flatboat couldn’t get off the edge of the damn, then the corn and wheat produce would become water logged and ruined in no time. The now-adult Lincoln shocked a group of disbelieving New Salem citizens that day who had come over to watch the predicament of the hanging protrusion of the flatboat. He had lust arrived and had no money and no connections in New Salem. But Abraham had a piercing ambition for fame and approval of his peers. He knew this opportunity would go far to further introduce himself to the New Salem community.
Lincoln’s fertile mind engendered an idea, and he convinced Offutt to transfer the slowly sinking cargo sitting in the rear of the flatboat to another nearby boat. Lincoln then drilled a hole in the stuck bow as a water drain and as the flatboat tipped forward as the water drained out, he pushed the boat until it stabilized in the river past the mill damn. With his enormous strength, Lincoln moved the nearby boat alongside the now freed flatboat and reloaded all the barrels onto the flatboat. It worked like a charm as almost everyone in town watched with wonderment.
The Mississippi River in the then West of the United States was the superhighway of commerce with flatboats, keelboats, barges and steamboats carrying everything from Bibles to bullets, whiskey to women. It was heavily populated with tall-talkers and braggarts like Mike Fink, for one famous example. New Orleans was to the United States, most particularly the South in the first half of the 19th century, like today’s “open” sin city, Las Vegas. It is not surprising that floating into New Orleans was like entering a foreign country to Abraham. He loved the hustle and bustle of a city of 50,000 people. Thirty thousand of them were black, some free, most not.
However, Abraham’s heart bled from the sounds of the cracking whip and screams of pain and the clanking of chains dragging over the cobblestone streets pulling blacks in sinister parade. The white men leered at black slave women being auctioned away to augment the harem’s of the southern planters. New Orleans was perhaps the largest and most important slave depot and auction marketplace, save for Washington D.C. Based on these sights and sounds of slavery, Lincoln would admit 20 years later that the horrid pictures “were still in his mind.” In Indiana and Illinois, there were virtually no free blacks because of high surety bonds imposed on freed slaves upon entry to assure their good behavior. But by the ‘40s and ‘50s, many slaveholders from Kentucky entered the supposedly free northern state of Illinois with their slaves. Abraham was particularly empathetic because he had just achieved his own freedom from his owner, Thomas.
Denton Offutt was entirely impressed by his newly discovered giant Abraham, and immediately offered Lincoln a job as a store clerk in his General Store in New Salem. Offutt also wanted to make money on Abraham by setting up fights and betting on him. In New Salem, Abraham would only fight in regulated bouts where each man had to hold one hand on the other fighter. Of course Abraham was a consistent winner. Not only did Abraham gain community rank and status by his fighting success, he made fast friends with even his losing opponents who were often unsavory characters. Lincoln now had a platform at the General Store from which to tell dirty jokes and tall tales. He was always the center of attention when he was present not only because of his enormous size and strength, but because he was the best entertainment in town, his deep set eyes sparkling and dancing as he captivated his male listeners and set the stage for politicking.
One particular fight, in front of Offutt’s General Store to promote business, was against Jack Armstrong and his Clary’s Grove gang. Armstrong, during Lincoln’s pounding of him, admittedly lost hold of Lincoln thus violating one of the few rules. But Lincoln let the fight be called a draw–a generous trait that defined him and showed his contradictory nature of fighting and peace. Later, a Lincoln campaign advisor called the fight with Jack Armstrong one of the most significant incidents of Lincoln’s early life. The defeated Armstrong, a fearsome powerhouse in the community, was befriended by Lincoln, and they became fast friends. With Abraham’s now established celebrity, and Jack Armstrong’s support, Lincoln was elected Captain of the local Black Hawk Volunteers Company in 1832. The war was specifically against the Sac and Fox Indians.
Captain Lincoln and his volunteer unit saw no fighting against the Indians which deep down pleased Lincoln, who instinctively shied away from bloodshed if he could. Notwithstanding this lack of bloody violence, Abe was constantly fighting the best men of the other militia units. He won all of those fights except one. Being elected as Captain of the Company was one of Lincoln’s greatest thrills. Lincoln, from his youngest years, had a burning ambition and deep-seated need for fame and the approval of his peers. While wealth was attractive, it was never what he really sought. At heart, he was the purest of politicians and was a genius at politics. This surging need for fame and popularity was almost certainly generated by his deep sense of personal loneliness and feelings of social inadequacy in Pigeon Creek. These feelings of sadness scarred Lincoln emotionally for the rest of his life, although mostly hidden behind his well-developed façade of great confidence and inner strength.
Underlying this deep sense of sadness and inner, personal foreboding, was the fact, rarely historically discussed, that Lincoln was a man, a very big man with a big libido to match. It was well known amongst his neighbors in New Salem and the Illinois Capitol of Springfield, that Lincoln had a powerful, and at times, uncontrollable libido. This fact was first evidenced by a neighbor, who stated that, with some of Lincoln’s buddies from his Black Hawk War Volunteer Company, Lincoln patronized a whorehouse. William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner in Springfield, and ultimately his biographer, said Lincoln could hardly keep his hands off prostitutes. In 1835, Herndon also wrote that Lincoln would succumb to his devilish passion for hiring prostitutes and would then nervously worry that he had contracted syphilis. But he treated prostitutes differently then eligible women.
When Abraham had settled down in New Salem, he had still sounded like an ignorant hick. He worked feverishly to improve his English, ran for the Illinois State legislature and lost, although he did win big in his home County of Sangamon. On his second run, he was victorious and served four terms in the Springfield Capital. During this time, he got hold of a copy of Blackstone’s law treatise that was the backbone of English and American law. He also became a superb orator and debater. In the first half of the 1800s, political debates were the most exciting form of entertainment particularly in the then American West; thousands attended. Lincoln was fast on his way to Illinois celebrity status.
In 1832, upon Lincoln’s return from the Black Hawk War, Offutt’s General Store was failing, so Abraham bought his way back into the General Store business with a partner. It was a dry goods and grocery store, but in fact, “groceries” meant jugs of alcohol from which Lincoln no longer drank. Later on, in political campaigning, “Honest Abe” lied and said he had never sold groceries. This store failed as well because New Salem could not support three General Stores. Actually, the town couldn’t support two stores either; Jack Armstrong had smashed up one competitor to force him out of business.
Lincoln was eventually elected to the Illinois State Legislature as a member of the Whig party run by his political idol, Kentuckian, Henry Clay. The Democrats consisted of the slave owners in the South, Irish labor in the North, and northern sympathizers of which there were many because they did business with the South in conjunction with its huge slave wealth. The Democratic Party was very supportive of Andrew Jackson’s destruction of the Second US National Bank and insisted on enforcement of all contracts, most especially as to slave property. In fact, they cited the US Constitution’s slave provisions as mandating such a legal position. They wanted total freedom from the Federal Government unless it served their interests.
The Whigs wanted the second National Bank to be reestablished. This National Bank served as a currency regulator over the banks– as does the US Federal Reserve today. The Whigs wanted to slowly move toward abolition eventually. The result of the US Bank’s termination set off one of the worst depressions in American history from 1837 to 1844, with Banks collapsing right and left. The North was clobbered economically, while the values of slaves continued to rise–in today’s currency to about $75,000 per slave. Literally, the largest portion of the asset value of the United States was invested in slavery. The Whigs also wanted the Federal Government and the states to build a vast infrastructure of roads, damns and canals. Eventually, the Whig party, along with short-lived abolition parties, became the Republican Party.
In the State legislature, Lincoln did cast a vote against suppressing Abolition societies, which of course failed by a huge majority, but helped to show Lincoln’s admirable leadership skills. He emphasized building the infrastructure for the State, a very smart move for a politician on the make. And lest one think for a second that Abraham Lincoln put humanitarian concerns ahead of pure politics, that was not the case. This point-of-view was clearly revealed in the first years of his Presidency. His antipathy to slavery was far behind his sense of political survival and need for approval of his peers. Both in the North and South, certainly in Illinois, northerners were as entirely racist as the South, even if they didn’t like slavery. One great example of Lincoln’s purely political behavior was his political protection of Whigs. Irish laborers who voted Democratic were entering the state in substantial numbers. Lincoln didn’t want them voting as a block of Democrats against the Whigs, so he supported legislation that would restrict their ability to register to vote.
In history books, we are taught that the reason for the Civil War was because the North was moving closer and closer to wanting abolition of slavery in the South. This is only partially correct. Many northerners felt that the depression of 1837 was caused by the economically and politically dominant South. The 1830s through the 1850s were full of “compromises” on slavery with Fugitive Slave Acts being reinforced. Territories north of the extended Mason-Dixon Line, and in violation of the Northwest Territories Act, were being turned into slave jurisdictions. There were also court decisions that allowed Southerners to transfer and hold slaves in the northeast so that slaves would not be deemed free. It was this aggression of the South in trying to force the entire United States to become safe for slavery that truly upset the North.
It was not until one of Lincoln’s sons, Willie, died in the summer of 1863, rekindling Lincoln’s humanity, and with a titular Union victory at Antietam, Maryland, that Lincoln decided to make effective the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Lincoln had previously always supported enforcement of Fugitive Slave Acts, but, even again, the main purpose of the Proclamation was to rob the South of free labor used to support the Confederacy’s war effort and to pick up black soldiers to fight for the Union at half the pay of white soldiers. Lincoln refused to change this pay scale because it would go against the gross racism of even the Union by forcing pay equality for blacks. Lincoln well knew that horrible racism against blacks would last at least another 100 years. Even after the Emancipation, because of this inherent racism, Lincoln championed resettlement of all blacks to foreign soil.
Lincoln’s study of Blackstone’s law treatises taught him that there were three levels of hierarchal law: natural or God’s law, positive, or man-made constitutions, statutes and enactments, and the common law based on court rulings, decisions and precedents. Abraham Lincoln, through his self-taught legal education, without the benefit of clerking and tutoring from a lawyer as most attorneys did at the time to pass the Bar, accepted this natural law of all men being created equal. Nonetheless, until the Emancipation, he refused to act in accordance with the tenants of Blackstone and the tenants of the Declaration of Independence.
Speed
New Salem was dying and would soon become a ghost town. But Springfield, Illinois, was a growing capital. Lincoln decided to remove himself from New Salem and relocate to Springfield on April 15, 1837, to finish studying and practice law. Before he left New Salem, he had been engaged to a short, plump, eligible woman named Ann Rutledge, the daughter of a tavern owner where Lincoln had been boarding. She was said to be the prettiest girl in New Salem. Absolutely terrified of marriage, Lincoln dragged his feet on the engagement even though he deeply loved her. Tragically, during the protracted engagement, Ann became sick with what was believed to have been typhoid, and died in the hot, rainy summer of 1835. Lincoln went into one of his first major and suicidal, severe depressions emanating from his childhood loneliness and melancholy; his ongoing emotional sense of not fitting in.
About a year after the death of Ann Rutledge, Abraham became engaged a second time in New Salem to a moderately wealthy, educated and polished woman who was attractive, in society, and at times eloquent. Mary Owens was a little taller than his normal female interests, with deep blue eyes and blond hair from a slave-owning Kentucky family. Lincoln was initially smitten but again dragged his feet. Mary considered Abraham a man of fine intellect, energetic and aspiring, although crude and ungainly. She predicted that Abraham would one day rise above his humble and modest position in society.
As if to prove Lincoln’s intrinsic insensitivity, however, one time, while horseback riding with Abraham and friends, Mary fell off her horse. As the very dispassionate and uncaring man he sometimes was, Lincoln just kept on riding–never stopping to give her a hand and telling her later that she was plenty smart and could take care of herself. However, she found him very sensitive in many other areas, and at that time it was difficult to find a literate and sober man. Despite love letters to the contrary, after Abraham moved to Springfield, he did everything he could to cause a break up of the engagement.
Lincoln did not feel comfortable with marriage-eligible women. He was tall and awkward, ugly many said, and these women at get togethers often would laugh at him right before his face. Lincoln was the hero of men and loved to be with them, but entirely uncomfortable with eligible women never knowing what to say to them even though a powerful and great speaker.
A hidden truth about Lincoln began to unfold upon his relocation to Springfield. His first stop in Springfield was at the Bell and Company’s General Store on the West Side of town, where he met the co-owner, Joshua Speed standing behind the counter. Speed had a comely, long tender face with high cheekbones, hair neatly combed, full lips and eyes that seemed both wise and playful. He was genteel, educated and cultured. This man would become the love of Lincoln’s life. After some negotiations with Speed, Lincoln told Speed, with great pathos, that his saddle and some law books which he had placed on the counter were all he owned, and that he couldn’t afford a mattress, sheets, and a pillow–regardless of the fair offer made by Speed.
Speed actually knew of Lincoln because he had heard him debate a Democratic opponent in 1836 and was impressed. Speed also shared Lincoln’s Whig politics and was the son of a wealthy Kentucky planter who owned sixty slaves valued in today’s currency around $4,500,000. Lincoln looked forlorn and sad to Speed, thus arousing Speed’s sympathy. Speed said he had a very large room and a very large double-bed in it which Lincoln was perfectly welcome to share with Speed–if he chose. Speed gestured toward the stairs leading upwards, and Lincoln ascended. He came back down with a beaming smile and said, “Well Speed, I’m moved in.” For the next four years, even after Lincoln could afford his own room, Speed and Lincoln were bedmates above the General Store sharing their most intimate secrets. Speed’s clerks, including William Herndon, once in a while slept in the room as well.
Abraham and Speed often discussed the leading poets of the day such as Speed’s favorite, Lord Byron, and Lincoln’s love of Robert Burns. Lincoln’s speech and thought also showed greater depth as a result of his relationship with Speed. Speed later declared about himself and Lincoln, “No two men were ever more intimate,” and a mutual friend stated that, “Lincoln loved this man more than anyone dead or living.”
No one knows for certain whether or not there was carnal activity in that bed, and there has been discussion as to whether or not Lincoln was gay or bisexual. Considerable evidence exists, however, that Lincoln’s uncontrollable libido went both ways in an era well before the Victorian siege of American sexuality ever made a distinction between “homo” or “hetero” sexual love. Moralists of the day decried out-of-marriage love on any front. Pornography was freely available, and even in the South adultery, sodomy and prostitution laws were very infrequently, if ever, enforced or enacted. Slaveholders’ slave harems were also an important part of wanting to retain slavery. Homosexuality was quite openly common amongst the political, economic, and literary elite.
Speed was also a lady’s man who told Herndon at the end of his life that he had a courtesan in Springfield for a while. Lincoln had told him that he was “desirous to have a little” and asked “Speed, do you know where I can get some?” Speed responded, “Yes I do. I’ll send you with a note. You can’t get it without a note or by my appearance.” Everything on the record strongly suggests that both Lincoln and Speed were actively bisexual in accord with the cultural temper of the time.
Then came the “fatal first of Jany, ’41.” Lincoln had an extremely embarrassing political faux pas. In a political fight between Whigs and Democrats over a quorum, Lincoln jumped out a window of the State House, thus generating a lot of negative political press. But this was not the worse event at that time. Speed’s father had died, and he told Lincoln he would be returning back to Kentucky.
Lincoln went into his most severe recorded depression, so serious that Speed removed knives and other such sharp objects from being around Abraham because it became very clear that he was seriously contemplating suicide. Lincoln said “I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth.” Speed didn’t return to Kentucky till May 1841, and shortly thereafter, married. Lincoln visited him later in Farmington and considered this visit, with slaves caring for his every need, to have been one of the happiest times in his life.
Slaveholding became so common in Illinois, a supposedly free state, that anyone coming from wealth usually achieved it from slavery. Lincoln was no revolutionary and absolved Speed, Kentuckian Henry Clay, and many others, of promoting slavery, although Lincoln would talk and befriend blacks as well. Lincoln would converse for hours with one of the few freed blacks in Illinois, Billy the Barber, in Springfield, in Billy’s shop. Billy would also refer numerous law clients to Lincoln.
It was at this point that Lincoln met his future wife, Mary Todd, while working on the successful Whig Presidential candidacy of William Henry Harrison in 1840. Mary Todd was a well-educated, almost man-like, violent little Whig and the intelligent daughter of a slave-owning family from Kentucky. She was short and plump and witty enough to match Lincoln and a lover of poetry like Lincoln and Speed. In 1839, when she first moved to Springfield, Mary told people that her intention was to marry a future President of the United States.
After Lincoln consulted his former love, Speed, on whether or not Speed was happy being a married man and he received an affirmative answer, he overcame cold feet and married Mary Todd on November 4, 1842, reportedly looking and acting like he was being led to the slaughter and, yet by another woman’s account, cheerful as he had ever been. In context, Lincoln was most likely drawn to Mary’s intellectual and political skills as well as her family’s wealth, a marriage of convenience; love and romance being secondary. In any event, his life in politics and legal practice accelerated after his marriage to Mary Todd. He resigned after four terms as a State Legislator and was elected to one undistinguished term in Congress–voting against slave abolition in Washington D.C. Eventually Mary evolved into a wifely nag from Abraham’s perspective constantly criticizing Lincoln’s male foibles at home.
Against all odds
Lincon’s eventual assent to the White House is, of course, very well documented in history. But up until the very day of the Emancipation Proclamation, which was originally drafted as another last ditch effort to preserve the Union in exchange for delaying abolition and paying slaveholders to free slaves, Abraham Lincoln was protective of slavery. This political position was constantly criticized and berated by the escaped slave and great, baritone orator, and abolitionist editor, Frederick Douglass. After a meeting in 1862 at the White House with Lincoln in which Douglass felt more comfortable with him then any white abolitionist and after the Emancipation Proclamation, Frederick Douglass became one of the loudest trumpets praising Lincoln as a great, great man for the rest of his life. In today’s terms, Lincoln was absolutely not a white supremacist but politically and personally a mandated racist of his time and culture.
Suspiciously enough, Lincoln’s most constant defensive refrain for not freeing the slaves during the first two years of the Civil War was that the border-states would secede to the Confederacy and surround Washington and weaken the Union even further. He also knew that the racist North was reticent toward black soldiers with guns and a mass migration of freedmen to the North–even if it would clearly help defeat the South. The paradox was that slaveholding Kentucky, considered by Lincoln to be a border state he could not lose, was the home of his great slaveholding love, Joshua Speed, his slaveholding wife Mary Todd Lincoln, and the home of his slaveholding Whig idol, Henry Clay. Kentucky never seceded from the Union although many Kentuckians re-tinted their Union soldiers’ pictures with gray after the Emancipation.
Tennessee had already seceded from the Union and when slaveholding Maryland tried to secede with Delaware not far behind, Lincoln immediately declared Martial Law in Maryland, preventing the Maryland legislature from meeting and arresting most of the secessionists in Maryland, along with suspending habeas corpus rights.
The United States Supreme Court Justice, southerner Roger Taney, an entirely Southern sympathizer along with six other southern Justices, had decided in 1858, in the famous Dred Scott decision, that Blackstone’s concept of natural law was to be considered above manmade law was wrong, and that the entire United States was subject to slave laws. He and the other six Justices also later ruled that the southern states had the Constitutional right to secede from the Union. Then, the Supreme Court ruled that the imposition of Martial Law on Maryland was unconstitutional. Lincoln, the ultimate man of respect for the law, would have none of Taney’s decisions, whether right or wrong. In 1861, the South had completely misunderstood Lincoln’s fierceness and persistence as a fighter, and after victory, his willingness to call it a draw. They hadn’t talked to Jack Armstrong.
Lincoln was a political genius who had forsaken his dislike of slavery for political purposes. At all times, however, the admiration of his peers was essential to his being. His greatness stemmed from his own humanity as an everyman and personal story of suffering, sadness and loneliness. It was Abraham Lincoln’s ability to resolve his desire for inner peace and gentility with his willingness to fight that was paramount to his success. It took a horrid fight, the Civil War, to force this emotionally tortured man into being the great giant he really was. Lincoln must surely rest with a smile of happiness now. His suffering indeed saved the United States and changed it from a constitutional, racist slave haven into a land of an attitude of equality as the Declaration of Independence intended; and for it, he has the eternal approval of his peers.
PS. While the article only touches upon Lincoln’s comtempt for religion–he was not an atheist believing in an “overruling providence” but a “deist” like George Washington, Jefferson, et. al.–it ignores his almost certain hemp (marijuana) use because Kentucky’s main crop in the early 1800′s was hemp for rope and it would be an insult to Kentuckians to believe that they didn’t figure out the potency of the buds. Illinois was settled in the beginning by migration from Kentucky and Indiana.
To PBC Resident; If you belive Lincoln had no respect for the Constitution, then you have no understanding of the Constitution whatsoever. Uninformed can be cured. Stupid is forever. You seem to be the latter.
I always love reading about articles on Abe.
Wondering if Kearns has swung “that way” in the past year and a half
Dear Mr. Shaw, Undoubtedly the best article I have read in the Palm Beach Post. Thank you and Ms. Kearns. and to “just wondering”….you are obviously an idiot…..
She is a noted and serial plagiarist.