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The Man Beneath the HatThe truth about Lincoln's sexuality.

By David GreenbergPosted Thursday, Feb. 12, 2009, at 11:11 AM ET

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Why, then, have reviewers been so excessively charitable? It's possible that they don't want to align themselves with a position that could seem naive or, worse, anti-gay. Plenty of Lincoln scholars have stuffily refused even to entertain the possibility of Lincoln's bisexuality, either out of an ingrained homophobia or a misguided reverence that borders on idolatry. Perhaps hoping to silence critics, Tripp warns that, "Patriotic motives have proved ever ready to obscure the raw parts [of Lincoln's personality], in effect threatening to turn the real Lincoln into yet another cardboard character."

It's also possible that people are hedging their bets because no one wants to be proven wrong. Again, Tripp reminds his readers that the possibility of Eleanor Roosevelt's bisexuality, which now enjoys some credibility, was once written off by scholars. Likewise, in a supportive afterword, historian Michael Chesson notes a similar change in scholarly opinion about Thomas Jefferson's affair with his slave Sally Hemings. In both cases, experts who breezily dismissed allegations of what their societies considered sexual deviance were shown to have been blinkered by cultural prejudices.

In Eleanor Roosevelt's case, her lesbian leanings were long denied. Then, several years ago, her letters to and from journalist Lenora Hickok were released. Those notes were so passionate and, at times, suggestive of physical intimacy that a sexual relationship between the women, if it couldn't be proved, also couldn't be ruled out. "I remember your eyes, with a kind of teasing smile in them and that feeling of that soft spot just north-east of your mouth against my lips. I wonder what we'll do when we meet—what we'll say," Hickok wrote to ER in 1933, concluding the note, "Good night, dear one. I want to put my arms around you and kiss you on the corner of your mouth. And in a little more than a week now—I shall!" (For all his talk of "smoking guns," Tripp produces nothing remotely like this letter.) Not every Roosevelt scholar believes this relationship was sexual, but many, including her most comprehensive biographer, Blanche Wiesen Cook, consider it likely.

Even more embarrassing to some scholars was the emergence of a consensus that Jefferson probably did father one or more children with Hemings. This claim circulated way back in Jefferson's day, and some of Hemings' descendants learned as a matter of course that Jefferson was an ancestor. But Jefferson scholarship for years was controlled largely by a Southern, white, male aristocracy—led by such men as Dumas Malone and Virginius Dabney—for whom the very thought of interracial sex was anathema. These scholars dismissed the idea, sometimes sneeringly, as slander. In 1974, however, Fawn Brodie's psychohistory Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History revived the argument, though it met with a chilly reception. Then, in 1997, Annette Gordon-Reed published Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, which demolished the arguments of the Jefferson boosters and began to shift scholarly opinion. The next year the journal Nature ran an article by scientists who had conducted DNA tests that suggested strongly that Jefferson was the father of Madison Hemings' male offspring—leading important Jefferson authorities such as Joseph Ellis to change their minds. Today, it's probably safe to say, most informed historians believe that Jefferson did father children with Hemings.

It would be a fallacy, however, to assume that Tripp has turned in a paradigm-shifting work like Gordon-Reed's. The books couldn't be more different. Gordon-Reed is careful in her methods, rigorous in her logic, and tentative in her conclusions (she never asserts that the Jefferson-Hemings affair definitely happened, just that it shouldn't be reflexively discounted). Tripp is random in his methods, sloppy in his logic, and overly certain in his inferences. It's a shame: After all, most historians today are liberal and tolerant enough to happily accept his claims of Lincoln's bisexuality—if only someone were to offer some real evidence to prove it.

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David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers and author of three books of political history, has written the "History Lesson" column since 1998.

Photograph of Abraham Lincoln on Slate's home page by Anthony Berger/Library of Congress.

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