Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Abraham Lincoln's Sex Life

Episode Date: March 21, 2024

Abraham Lincoln is often thought of as the most loved president in America's history, but how much do we know about his personal life?Furthermore, how much do we know about his sexuality, and the potential he might have been gay?Joining Kate today are Callie Hawkins and Joan Cummins, who work at Lincoln Cottage, where he lived for over a quarter of his presidency.They also host their podcast, Q&Abe, which covers questions that visitors to the cottage often ask them, including whether he was gay or not.This podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code BETWIXT sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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The year is 1837, and the sun is setting on a number, of the day in Springfield, Illinois. I don't know about you, but Twixters, but I quite fancy a drink. While we sink a few jars in this tavern, down the street from us a young Abraham Lincoln is training to be a lawyer, and to save a few Bob, he's making a home for himself in a room above Joshua Speed's local store. Speed and Lincoln will strike up a close friendship, the closest in Lincoln's entire life, in fact, and they will share a bed for the next three years. Yeah. Now, men had very close friendships at this time. That was incredibly common. And men certainly did share beds from time to

time to save a few quid here and there. But sharing a bed for three years. That's a long, long time in anyone's book. The length of that and the intensity of their friendship will have people stroking their chin about the nature of their relationship for years and years afterwards. In fact, questions around Lincoln's sexuality have lingered long after his death, and that is what we're going to be talking about today. What do you look for in a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, my beautiful time. Goodness had nothing to do with it, Terry. Hello, and welcome back to Petwigs the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kail Lister. A lot of polls still list Abraham Lincoln as the best president of the United States has ever, ever had.

He led the country as it fell into civil war. He navigated it through one of its most tumultuous periods, whilst issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, which paved the way to abolish slavery. Whilst he's often thought of as a great statesman, What was Lincoln like as a friend or a husband? Who were the key male friendships in his life? And is there any truth to the suggestion that they were more than just friends?

Helping me get to the bottom of this today are Callie Hawkins and Joan Cummins, who work at the Lincoln Cottage Museum in Washington, D.C., where Lincoln lived for over a quarter of his presidency. Top hats at the ready betwixters. Let's do this. Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Callie Hawkins and Joan Cummins. How are you both doing? Great this morning. Doing great. You are calling me from the Lincoln Cottage, which I was aware of, but the fact that you are almost live streaming from a very important museum, I feel that that adds a real gravitas to this particular interview. you. What brought you to work at the Lincoln Cottage? Is this, is Lincoln someone you'd always been fascinated with? Or did you kind of end up here and go, oh, this is quite interesting. I'll stay around.

What got you interested in this history? I'll start that I sort of ended up here because I was looking for a job in the museum field. And the site at that point had just opened to the public in 2009. And, you know, I think Lincoln really is not someone, I'm from, South Carolina. So not someone that I spent a huge amount of time beyond elementary years really studying in school. But, you know, when I started working here, I just sort of fell in love with the place and the history. And Lincoln is one of those people that kind of creeps into your soul. And so, you know, I found that no pun intended with the twigs the sheets, but the more you uncover about Lincoln, the more, you know, fascinating he really is. And that's what's kind of kept me here

for the past 15 years. I also am not in the category of people who came here because of Lincoln. I am here and excited to be here because of the methods that we use here at the museum, which are really conversational and inquiry-based and focused on the ideas that Lincoln was working on and how those connect to how people's ideas work here in the present. Like what he was thinking about what the future of the country looks like. What do we think about what the future of the country should look like? And so that's very exciting to me to get to work directly with people in that way.

It's a deeply rich subject, so we never run out of things to talk about. What is the Lincoln Cottage? Just for anybody listening going, well, I know Abraham Lincoln is, but I'm not sure what the Lincoln Cottage is. So President Lincoln's Cottage is a home in Washington, D.C., where Abraham Lincoln and his family spent a quarter of Lincoln's presidency. Wow. They first moved out here during the hot season in June of 1862, and then came out every hot season living here roughly June to November of 1862, 63, and 64. And so they, you know, originally moved out here in part to grieve the death of their son,

Willie, who had just died downtown in Washington a few months earlier, but then spent portions of every warm season that he was president afterwards. I think this place became such a critical private place for a family that otherwise lived so publicly. It didn't mean that people didn't continue to come out here and bombard Lincoln. We know that strangers would show up at all hours of the day and night to get an audience with them. But it's a site where, you know, they spent considerable time as a family. And it's also where he developed his ideas around the Emancipation Proclamation. So his first hot season in residence was spent here in an upstairs bedroom crafting one of the most nation-changing documents in our country's history.

Wow. Because sometimes you get like places that are museums and that when you actually look into it, the person in question may be visited there on a Sunday afternoon once. But this is like a beloved family home for years and years where he was really drawing up these documents that completely altered American history. Wow. Yeah, that's right. We live in a country where, you know, George Washington slept here, myth, you know, sort of is pervasive. And this is not that. This was a place that was so incredibly important to the Lincoln family and to Lincoln's presidency, which is rare to find. Do you know, Abraham Lincoln is one of those American presidents. And I'm not even in America, but even I feel that kind of very hallowed, hushed, awed, awed, my God, is Abraham Lincoln. and emancipate the slaves and with the beard and the hat and he's got that very, it's Abraham Lincoln. So when it popped up in my calendar that I'm interviewing somebody

about Abraham Lincoln for a podcast on sex, my first reaction was, but he didn't have sex. He was Abraham Lincoln. That doesn't make any sense at all, but I feel that you're going to give me a much more rounded sense of who this man actually was beyond the kind of the Lincoln mythology. Yeah, he was also. human person, right, who was busy making very difficult decisions, but he was a human person the

whole time that that was true. He was married, wasn't he? He had some, like, stop and start marriages that almost happened, but then didn't quite happen? What was that story there? So there's a couple of people in Illinois before Lincoln moved to D.C. that are sort of possible courtships. It's not really clear whether there were any firm promises to get married or not get married or maybe we're thinking about getting engaged, but we haven't followed through yet. So there's a couple of people in Illinois that sit into that category. And there is a moment where he and Mary had started a relationship and then broke it off briefly before getting back together. That's really interesting, isn't it? But then, you know, I do look at like the timeline of what Lincoln was going on. I'm amazed. He

had time for any kind of relationship with anybody at all. Wars, revolutions, uprising. It's just intense, but the world that this man was born into. Can you paint me a bit of a backstory before we get, you know, to the kind of the juicier stuff? Like, where was Lincoln even born? What family did he come from? How did he even get into politics? He was born in charitably, the middle of nowhere, in Kentucky, in the U.S. Total countryside. frontier situation famously sort of gets a log cabin reputation here in the U.S. And he and his family lived there for a couple of years before moving to Kentucky and then to Illinois. And so when Lincoln moved to New Salem, Illinois, as a 22, 23-year-old, that was the

biggest town he'd ever lived in, and it was not a big town. And then he moved to Springfield, Illinois, which was a bigger town, a significant town in terms of the politics of Illinois. And that's where he really built his political career in terms of being connected to the state legislature and getting involved in what was becoming the Republican Party, which was brand new in U.S. history at that point, and directly connected to the issue of slavery. And so I think it's interesting because he was not, as an adult, very connected to his birth family. Wow. So do we have any sense of like, was it an estrangement? Was it just that he didn't have time?

Was it, what was going on there? I think he and his father had very different points of view about what was important about life. And we know for sure that he resented the fact that he owed his father, his wages, until he was in his early 20s, that until he reached the age of majority, his father was in control of his money.

Yeah, that'd do it. Yeah. And I really think Lincoln, you know, wanted to do something besides farming and had a lot of ambition and a lot of intelligence and was looking to really, engaged that and that wasn't very important to his father. And also, you know, his mother died when he was a little boy. And I think that left a real home friendly. I think they were incredibly close. He referred to her

for most of the rest of his life as his angel mother. And I think certainly she was an early advocate for the things that Lincoln saw that were special about himself, which were the things, as Joan pointed out, you know, he didn't want to be a farmer. He would, of much rather have been, you know, sitting in a field reading a book. You know, his mother encouraged that in a way that his father didn't. And I think that that her absence was very large in his life. And I think that, you know, his father then went on to search for a new wife, brought home a woman who became his stepmother, who Lincoln also became incredibly close with. Her name was Sarah Johnson. she was also an encourager of Lincoln and his love of reading and love of books.

And so those two became very close to, and she was very nurturing of these things that I think Lincoln probably recognized in himself, which have, I think, in many ways, become the things that we all sort of remember and know about having made Lincoln special as well. But Lincoln certainly did not grow up in a family of privilege. His wife, on the other hand, very much did. Marries well. But Lincoln, you know, was, yeah, he did. He married up in terms of education and wealth and privilege and opportunity and things like that. And so that was something that is unique about Lincoln's rise to the presidency and unique among other presidents who had come before him too.

Really is a self-made man. That really is the American dream, isn't it? Right there. Can you paint me a picture of what was going on in America when a very young Abraham Lincoln went to, No, I'm not being a farmer, and he wandered off and, you know, got in, lodged himself on the world of politics. What kind of world was America at that time? What was going on? So he moved to New Salem and to Springfield in the 1840s. And 1840s, US was in a really interesting place because the people who had made the revolution happen were fading out of the picture.

So still a very young country, but a generation of people for who, whom it had always been a country, which was new and different, I think. There had been a lot of conversations in the 1820s and 30s about whether people who didn't have a lot of money, specifically white men who didn't have a lot of money, should be allowed to vote. And that had really changed a couple of things in terms of what politics looked like. And then the issue was what is going to happen with slavery. And at this point, it was really whether slavery was going to spread west into the territory that the U.S. was taking over. Oh, I didn't know that that was right.

I thought it had always been the debate of like, should we have it or should we not have it, not should we expand to this particular idea? Yeah, there were, of course, people having the conversation of like, this is terrible, we should stop doing it everywhere. Yeah. But the mainstream discourse was all about, well, what about these new states and territories? Which side are they going to be on? How are we going to decide which side they're on? Are we going to use a geographic line to demarcate it? Are we going to let them vote on it? If we're letting them vote, who gets to vote? So there were a lot of conversations around that. And that's really the issue that the country was wrestling with.

So if a young Abraham, abes, if he'd grown up on a farm, had he had contact with the system of slavery and enslaved people? His father was also very anti-slavery. Part of why they moved out of Kentucky was because Kentucky was slave territory and his father did not appreciate the competition. Wow. Okay. Like economically speaking. Okay. So Lincoln did not grow up on a farm where enslaved people worked.

Again, Mrs. Lincoln did grow up in a place of privilege. There were absolutely enslaved people working in her household when she was a young person. We know that Lincoln, he hired himself out to take a boat from Illinois to New Orleans. to like work down the Mississippi on the boat. And so it's very probable that he encountered some of the worst of American slavery while he was in New Orleans. But that's kind of like one of the few times that we know about before he became a politician and a lawyer where he would have encountered the reality of that situation.

And then when he moved to Washington, D.C., there were many, many more African Americans here in D.C. than there were in Illinois. Wow. Okay. So we've got a very tall, very thin, slightly awkward, super intelligent but not really spent a long time at school, young Abraham Lincoln who's just launched himself on the world of politics. And like, although he said he was awkward, the confidence that you must have to go, yeah, I can do that. That blows my mind. Like, was he a man with enormous confidence, do you think? There must have been in there somewhere. I get the impression that he was very confident in his ideas and in his. his ability to get things done. And that it was not necessarily like, this is about how awesome I am, but like, I am the person who can do this. Like, let's get going on it.

I do think Mrs. Lincoln shared his ambition. They were both incredibly ambitious. She was interested in politics as well. And so it was like, I would describe it as a team effort. Yeah. And I would say that Lincoln was very self-assured in a way that is maybe a little different from confidence. Kind of like, you know, I think, Joan, you described it perfectly.

Like, he was confident in his ideas if he wasn't like super macho. But I do think that he was very self-possessed. I think that he was incredibly self-assured and was also really self-effacing. And I think that was part of the charm that drew people to him in a way because he was also very open and honest about his shortcoming. And he had this joke about being two-faced. He was also very funny. Somebody accused him of being two-faced and he said,

I assure you if I had two-faces, I wouldn't be wearing this one. That's funny. That's properly funny. It's funny. And it's also like I think him saying, hey, look, I realize that I don't necessarily have a face for TV. But also, I'm pretty confident and I can poke fun at myself. We should talk.

because we could talk about his campaign for emancipation and the abolition of the slave trade. And that's a very, very noble topic. But I also want to know about the nitty gritty stuff. So tell me about his relationship to his wife. Where did they meet? How did they get on? It's incredibly normal. They met each other at a party that a mutual friend was hosting.

And they started talking to each other and they hid off from there. And again, like I said, they were getting to know each other. And then there was a moment where they split up. and then they came back together after that. Mary was a catch. More people need to understand that she was a total catch. She was beautiful. She was smart.

She was well educated. She moved in all of the right circles. She had money. And she was ambitious. And I think that that might have been a lot or too much for some people. but I can just imagine, you know, Lincoln at this part, and, you know, we weren't there, so we don't know exactly how it happened. But I can imagine, you know, Lincoln towering above everybody else and seeing this petite woman just really working the room and controlling the conversation and talking about politics and talking about all of these things and sort of thinking to himself, that's it for me. And I think that as Jonas pointed out several times, I mean, they were really a pair.

They were well matched for each other. And in some ways, you know, she was the kind of partner for him, you know, that I think a lot of us look for. Like she was encouraging. She would push him. She, you know, helped him be the best version of himself. And I think it's really important to point out that a lot of the reason that we want to talk about these other relationships, is because people try to distance Mary from Abraham. A lot of the men in Lincoln's own life tried to distance her from him

to make themselves seem closer to Lincoln. But she was really it for him. And I do think that she was not only a strongest support, but, you know, one of his confidence. I'll be back with Joan, Callie, and Abe after this short break. Can I ask you to I absolutely get that she was the pride. she was smart, she was educated, she was ambitious, she was beautiful, petite, had loads of money, Bravo. What does she see in him? Because these are quite humble origins that you've described.

You know, he's from the middle of nowhere and he's a farming background and he didn't really go to school. What was it about him that made her go, yep, that's the one? I mean, I think she met him and was like, this person is incredibly intelligent. He's astute. Like, this is the person who can take us all the way. I think he must have had unbelievable charisma because that sounds like a woman who could have had her pick. Yeah, he was smart. He was funny.

He was... Tall. What draws any of us to anybody? He was tall. You know, I mean, I think that Lincoln was, I think, just different, too, from probably a lot of the people in the circles in which she ran. And I think that was probably pretty exciting to her. You know, as Joan pointed out, she was from...

a slaveholding family, but she had always been anti-slavery. And I think she recognized that in Lincoln. And maybe this was an opportunity for her to not live the life sort of laid out for her. And I think that we don't often talk about theirs as a love story because of all of the tragedy that they endured. That doesn't do their relationship. It doesn't give them enough credit because I think that there's what. was a very sustaining love to endure the things that they did.

There was something more than ambition. There was something more than attraction. It was a deep and abiding love they had for each other. One of the things people often talk about that they admire about Lincoln in terms of his approach to politics is that he spent a lot of time listening to the people around him before deciding what he wanted to do. And I can imagine that being a person who was intelligent and had a lot of ideas and was ready to talk about. them, that him being a good listener for her would be really appealing as well. And they did suffer so much tragedy, not only the war, which must have been incredibly stressful, but they had, was it four children and only one survived to adulthood? And then of course, you know, the assassination, that's

pretty stressful. They must have been bonded together very strongly these two. Yeah, I think so, you know, as you pointed out, they had four children, only the oldest survived. and lived into adulthood. Three of their four children died of specific illnesses. And so when you think about Mary especially was a mother who endured the deaths of three of her four children, her only surviving son had her committed to a mental institution. Oh, there's gratitude. Bloody out.

Yeah. Her husband was murdered right beside her. I think that we have tended to remember her for these few moments of, behavior that we sort of deem extraordinary. And, you know, in reality, she was a woman who lost the five most important men to her and five most important people in her life. And I think that it's just incredible how she was able to survive all of that. Absolutely. All right. So let's talk about it. Let's talk about the great big elephant in the room. And one that I, I'd heard rumors around Abraham Lincoln's sexuality, but I'd always kind of

thought, that's just internet gossip and potentially the efforts of historians attempting to make up for the fact that for hundreds of years we refused to believe that anybody was gay. We're now deciding that, well, everybody's gay. But there does seem to be some evidence that you can debate with this about what was Abraham Lincoln's sexuality. A difficult question because modern concept of sexuality didn't exist. You can't project them back in time. But this is significant enough for you to have dedicated an episode of your podcast to this. So let's talk about Mr. Lincoln's sexuality. Yeah, I would say that we know about as much about Lincoln's sex life as we do about anybody from the Victorian period, which is almost nothing. That nobody like writes down,

I don't want to say nobody. Very few people write down, I had a great time last night with so-and-so. Here's exactly what happened. We are pretty confident that he had a sexual relationship with Mary because they had four children. And for other people in his life, there's the same lack of evidence. But what we do know is that he had a deep and abiding, loving relationship with Joshua Speed, who was one of his best friends and most important companions when he lived in Illinois. And that is one of the people for whom a lot of folks are like, well, maybe they very clearly care deeply for each other. They shared a bed for three years, which could have been sexual or could not have been sexual. We have no idea. But it's definitely possible that they were in what we would consider a gay relationship with each other, queer relationship. That's interesting, is it?

The sharing the bed thing, because that opens up a whole heap of historical debates. They often get a little bit taken away from the issue of sexuality, but the issue of space and of bed sharing, it was incredibly common in the past because beds were expensive. You would have grown up if you were looking enough to have a bed sharing it with your family. If you were very poor and stay in a Doss house, you could pay a penny and you'd be in bed with loads of other people. So bed sharing is very common.

Would the president have been sharing a bed? That's really the niche issue because he could afford another one, I'm sure of that. What do you make of that, the bed sharing bit? Well, when Lincoln and Speed were sharing a bed, he was not yet the president. He was this totally ordinary person who had just moved to town. And he walked into Speed's store and was like, hey, do you know anywhere I could rent a room? And Speed was like, yeah, actually upstairs. So the roommate?

Yeah. Lincoln lived above Speed's store for several years. And they shared the bed that was up there. I don't think that's enough to swing it for me. me. It's interesting. They must have had a very close relationship. Yeah. To have slept to each other's bed. But I don't, given the context of the time and where he was, the fact, so what else is there that's made people go, well, it might have been something more than just flatmates. We have some of the letters that Lincoln wrote to speed. And they say things like, you know, my desire to befriend you is everlasting, that I will never cease while I know how to do anything. Oh, that's quite intense. It seems pretty

intense and it seems meaningful to both of them. And if the question is, were they dating, they loved each other. We know about that. They seem to be very intensely attached. I'm going to base that on the evidence that if I sent that message to my best friends, they'd text back within a few minutes and go, fuck off. I think that's probably what they would say. So they were clearly very connected. There's a lot of love there. What do you guys think? I know. that this is all speculation, we'll never ever know the answer now, but what, for your money, was this a romantic relationship? For me, the uncertainty is okay that we don't know whether it was a romantic relationship or not. The things that we do know are that they care deeply for each other.

They wrote these letters. They were really important in each other's life. The major reason you would want to say yes or no was if it was really important to you whether or not Lincoln had a same-sex relationship. And the reasons that I can think of for that to be important are that you are looking for someone like yourself in history or that for some reason, it's really important to you that Lincoln was not in a same-sex relationship. Yeah, that's a good point. And that there would be something about that that would be a problem damaging to his legacy, change the way that you thought about him. And so if it's okay with you, that people are in same-sex relationships, the answer that is, maybe is a good one.

Can I ask you, what happened to Joshua Speed? I mean, if he was, if they were flatmates before he was the president, what happened when he became the president? I was going to say, Speed is the one who does the leaving, but that makes it sound way more dramatic than I think it was. But Speed left Illinois and moved back to Kentucky to get married to a woman named Fannie Henning. Awesome name. Yeah, he and Lincoln were riding each other back and forth because they were very nervous about it.

They were like, what if I'm not good? at being married, especially to a girl kind of conversation. Oh, nasty thoughts interesting. And so we have letters where Lincoln's like, hey, it's going to be fine. And then we don't have Joshua's letters, but only have Abraham's letters. But we have a letter from Abe that's like, oh, my God, I got your letter, which, as far as we can tell, Speed sent the morning after he had gotten married. And Abe is like, I got your letter that you're okay and I'm so happy. And he says, I have barely at the distance of 10 hours become calm. So it's like really important to him that his friend was okay and thriving in this new situation that neither of them were familiar with.

There's a lot in that, isn't there? There's a lot that many, many ways that you can read that. But that to me does sound like somebody who is very interested in the fact that their friend may have just had sex and got. married and that there's been that anxiety. Wow. Yeah. I don't want to say yes or no, but that's fascinating. That really is. Right. And, you know, there is a way to read that story that's like, oh my God, my boyfriend is with somebody else and I want to make sure he's okay. And I like, maybe I have a lot of complicated feelings about that. And there's a way to read the story that's like, we are two bachelors and have been our whole lives. And now you're going to go live with a girl? Like, what is that even going to be like? And so I think there's plenty of space in there to think about different versions of how that shook out.

And it wasn't just Joshua, was it? There was another great love of Lincoln's captain David Derrickson. Yeah. Can you tell me a bit about him and what their relationship was? David Derrickson was the captain of the unit of soldiers that was assigned to guard Lincoln and his family while they were living here at the cottage. So the cottage was and is about three miles from the White House and it was considered. the countryside at the time. Now it's fully an integrated part of Washington, D.C. there's houses across the street.

It's a crowded neighborhood. So there was a unit of soldiers that was sent out to guard the campus, essentially. And Derrickson was their captain. And again, we have letters from Lincoln and from Derrickson, where they talk about how they feel about each other. So Derrickson says about Lincoln that he is one of the most kind-hearted and pleasant gentleman I have ever met. And Lincoln said about Derrickson, the captain and I are getting quite thick.

So, did they talk to each other? Did they enjoy each other's company? Yes, absolutely. Everything we have that might be like a little bit related to sexuality comes from other people who are spreading a rumor that Derrickson spent the night in Lincoln's bed and used the president's night shirt while he was doing that. Shocking. And specifically pointed it out that he did this. while Mrs. Lincoln was away.

Right. Okay. Unlike at the White House, we know that at the cottage, the two shared a chamber here, shared a room and shared a bed here at the cottage. And so I think that that's in part Mrs. Lincoln was away, and that was in part what sort of created the questions or the chatter about all of this. That could also just be rumors trying to attack Lincoln's credibility, and that's interesting. Yeah.

So maybe people. we're trying to attack his credibility and maybe he had like a cute fling with this guy he met while he was out here at the cottage like we don't it's hard to tell we don't know do we don't know doing now one of the things that i have read about lincoln that i didn't quite realize when before before i came to talk to you is that he had really bad periods of depression which i hadn't i hadn't realized that he really struggled with this what did that look like it's hard to know and a lot of how we might talk about it today is sort of imposing 21st century understandings of mental health and that kind of stuff onto 19th century issues. But it was described as his melancholy. And I think that Lincoln would

probably, you know, go quiet or go dark for periods of time and when he was really struggling. And, you know, I think that one of the things that we think a lot about here at the cottage is how people tend to remember Lincoln and his own struggles with his mental health as one of the things that propelled him to greatness and look at what he was able to accomplish in spite of all of his struggles with his mental health. And by the same token, history and society has tended to sort of use the same argument for Mary and her struggles with mental health as one of the things that made her crazy and I'll say crazy in air quotes and so I think that that is really interesting but they both struggled quite a bit I think with their mental health and you know any imaginings about what may

have caused that would be just that you know just imaginings it would be could it have been a lifetime of loss and struggle and you know who really knows but it is something that he it struggled as you said for for quite a long time and there's one episode but in particular that occurred in Illinois, where it seems like speed is the person who took care of him while that was happening. Wow. Oh, that's interesting. Again, before he was in a relationship with Mary. I know that, like you said, that why is it important if you know somebody's sexuality? But I would love to know because I'd want to know, how does someone understand their sexuality at this particular time period?

How did Lincoln and other people talk about it to themselves? How did they conceive of it? That is so fascinating. Like, did they think that they had singed and done something awful? All of those questions, I would love to know the answer to him. We just never ever will. It's so frustrating. You could get, like, so close and you're just never going to get it.

You are right where a lot of historians end up, where we're like, what if Lincoln had a diary? And we could answer all of these questions about what he really thought about Joshua speed and what he really thought about slavery when and how specifically he fell in love with Mary. Like there's just so much that we love to know. Yeah. That's inaccessible to us.

But isn't it fascinating to just even raise the possibility and to just discuss it and just offer a different space for these things? I think that that's amazing. And for me, it's a very happy idea. What if there were more than one person in his life who loved him? That would be great. Yeah. That would be fantastic.

how and why they loved him, like sort of doesn't really matter. Guys, you have been amazing to talk to today, and that seems like a very good place to leave our conversation. He was a man who was very loved, and anything more than that, we can't really say. But you have been so wonderful to talk to about this, and if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? We are at lincolncottage.org is our website and the best place to find us, and there is a tab there for our podcast, Q&Aid.

That's such a good name. It's just the best name for a podcast, Q&Aid. Who came up with that? That is all Joan. Amazing, Joan. She came up with the name. I was going to say, it was me. The podcast is called Q&Abe,

and we answer real questions that we've gotten on tours from visitors. Obviously, if folks are interested in this episode, they'd be interested in our episode about whether Lincoln was gay or not, where you could hear directly from some of the experts we've talked about. But we also have episodes about Mrs. Lincoln's mental health.

Some of my favorite questions are the questions little kids have asked me. Like, how could Lincoln sleep if slavery was happening? It's fair. That's a good question. It's a great question. And we talk to a sleep doctor about it. So, like, come find out with us. Thank you so much for talking to me today, guys. You have been wonderful.

Thank you, Kate. I've enjoyed myself very much. Thank you. Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Joan and Callie for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like reviews. and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject

or if you just fancy saying hello, you can email us at betwixt at historyhit.com. We've got episodes on everything from the history of drag to sexuality in the Aztec Empire, all marching your way. This podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith, the senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets,

The History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound. Thank you.