In Tripp’s reconstruction of the intimate Lincoln, the fascinating discovery is not the many details about Lincoln’s homosexual side as the fact that he had, marriage to one side, so very little heterosexual side. Although William Herndon arouses some alarm in many scholars with his huge Ann Rutledge romantic tragedy, he does indeed have other tales to tell.

According to Herndon, “About the year 1835-36 Mr. Lincoln went to Beardstown and during a devilish passion had connection with a girl and caught the disease [syphilis]. Lincoln told me this…. About the year 1836-37 Lincoln moved to Springfield … at this time I suppose that the disease hung to him and not wishing to trust our physicians, he wrote a note to Doctor Drake … ” He was treated by him in Cincinnati: presumably with mercury. Was he cured? By 1840 he was engaged to the well-born Mary Todd. Lincoln was a rising man in the political world of Illinois and so must have a wife and a family. But suddenly he broke off the engagement. Took to his bed. Wrote a poem called “Suicide,” which was published in the Springfield newspaper, later to be secretly cut out of the file copy. Herndon’s commentary on all this is cryptic. He suggests that the early deaths of two of Lincoln’s sons and Tad’s disability in speaking, and then Mary Todd’s headaches, breakdowns, madness, details of which seem to conform to the *Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy’*s description of paresis-syphilis—although we have since learned that an autopsy was performed on her head (odd, since even in 1882 the whole body would have been examined). Anyway, there may be a record at Walter Reed Hospital or there may not be. More to the point at hand, why did Tripp not count the Beardstown girl in Lincoln’s heteroscore? And the whore in a Springfield boardinghouse whom Lincoln visited? She wanted three dollars. He had less. He asked for credit; then, according to Herndon, she simply charged him nothing.

So here we are; history, too. The magisterial Professor David Herbert Donald disagrees with Tripp’s interpretation of Lincoln’s intimate life, but he also rejects Herndon’s version on a key point. Since Professor Donald wrote a superb book called Lincoln’s Herndon, he is turning, as it were, on one of his own characters. Professor Donald is our foremost authority on Lincoln and so backed by much of the history establishment. Tripp is a maverick with new information and a different synthesis. Neither Donald nor Tripp nor, indeed, Herndon’s ghost can prove his case. Lincoln’s ghost is no doubt ready to chat—with, I suspect, a story, possibly obscene.

Some years ago at Harvard, Professor Donald and I were answering an audience’s questions apropos of the Massey lectures that I was giving. One urgent professor wanted to discuss Lincoln’s homosexuality, which I had ignored in my study of his presidency and Professor Donald tended to discredit. He and I were also in agreement that, true or false, what did sex have to do with his conduct of the Civil War, the emancipation of slaves?

I have now read Professor Donald’s We Are Lincoln Men, and though he does not agree with Tripp’s conclusions, their professional relations seem to have been amiable. Tripp is quick to acknowledge an occasional debt to Donald’s work, which might explain the absence of the Beardstown girl in Tripp’s study. Professor Donald is a pre-Kinseyan and so does not endorse the possibility of genital contact between Lincoln and Speed, and, later, between Lincoln and Bucktail Captain Derickson. Here is Professor Donald on Beardstown: “Equally controversial, and equally unprovable, is another intimate confession Lincoln allegedly made to Herndon. Late in life, Herndon told his literary collaborator, Weik, that “Lincoln had, when a mere boy, the syphilis about the year 1835-36.” (Which means that mere boy Lincoln was 26 or 27, by which time Alexander the Great had conquered most of the known world … ) “For this story, which Herndon wrote more than fifty years after Lincoln’s alleged escapade and more than twenty years after his death, there is no confirmatory evidence.” (In so delicate a matter, is there apt to be any?) “Lincoln never told it to anyone else.” (How on earth do we know?) “Not even to Joshua Speed, with whom he was sharing a bed at this time.” (I should think not particularly to Speed, whose bed might have been contaminated by Lincoln’s disease, particularly if, like so many men of his day, he suffered from syphilophobia, which, Donald suggests, might have been the origin of Lincoln’s story to Herndon about his own alleged syphilis, which, if he did tell him such a story, might have been the result of a common fear among relatively inexperienced males at a time when syphilis, like AIDS today, could be a killer.) Donald even quotes another historian, Charles B. Stozier, who thinks that Lincoln’s confession to Herndon—if true—revealed more about his sexual confusion and ignorance than about the state of his health. (About what, then, is he confused? Of what is he ignorant?) Are we then to believe that a brilliant lawyer nearing 30 knows next to nothing about heterosexuality in a town where girls are available for three dollars?