Today the sexuality of each one is not news, or should not be, but in the 19th century the sexuality of Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth President of the United States and the first for the Republican Party, it would have been a major scandal. This post is not intended to judge the US President, only to tell certain curiosities and then let each one draw their own conclusions.
According to the official biography of Abraham Lincoln, he married Mary Todd on November 4, 1842 and they had 4 children (Robert, Edward, William and Thomas), plus…
At the age of 28, young Abraham Lincoln arrived in Springfield (Illinois) to establish himself as a lawyer. He soon struck up a friendship with a handsome young man and store owner named Joshua Fry Speed. six years younger than him. As the economy of Lincoln was not very buoyant, Speed offered to share his house, located above the store, and his only bed. The fact of sharing a bed with another man does not imply, and much less at that time, being homosexual. Another thing is to share a bed… for four years . On January 1, 1841, Lincoln learned that Speed was leaving him and returning to Kentucky. Lincoln was dejected and fell into a depression:
Now I am the unhappiest man in the world.
When he was named President another man appeared in his life, the commander of his personal guard David V. Derickson . From dispatching on some occasion with Lincoln, due to his occupation, he became a fixture in the president's daily routine, even sharing a bed. Thirty years later, Thomas Chamberlain , a young member of the personal guard, remembered these facts:
Captain Derickson won the President's trust and in the absence of Mrs. Lincoln, who often spent the night away, they slept in the same bed and even wore his Excellency's nightgown.
This is also reflected in the newspaper of Virginia Woodbury Fox , the wife of the assistant secretary of the navy:
A soldier from the President's personal guard accompanies him at all times and when Mrs. Lincoln is not at home, he sleeps with him. What things?
And to top it off, Lincoln's stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln , after her death he said:
He wasn't very fond of girls.
We will never know for sure if he was bisexual, but what we can say is that he had a real passion for sharing a bed with men.
Sources:Vanity Fair, Queers in History, Abraham Lincoln Association