Book Looks to Lincoln’s Friends

Professor of American History and American Civilization Emeritus David H. Donald is a Lincoln man through and through. He takes his place among the ranks of thousands of Lincoln admirers ranging from his historical contemporaries to temporally distant scholars and aficionados.

As a writer who has devoted much of his work to Lincoln, it should come as no surprise that Donald’s latest book covers him as well. However, Donald makes a daring move in historical biography by profiling the men behind the man. We Are Lincoln Men: Abraham Lincoln and his Friends, recently released in paperback, analyzes six key friendships in Lincoln’s life by blending psychoanalytic theory with historical fact.

Inspired by his late friend Eudora Welty’s anthology The Norton Book of Friendship, Donald brings psychological and philosophical literature on friendship together with primary sources culled over his prolific career as a Lincoln scholar.

The result is a kind of retrospective psychoanalytic profile of the 16th president. One can almost imagine a somber, supine Lincoln stretched out on a velvety couch, spewing his recollections and desires to Professor Donald, the self-effacing therapist who probes the depths of his patient’s psyche.

Donald believes he is successful in executing such an intimate portrait. “Distinguish between what we know based on facts, what we think we know based on reports, and what we infer from our general knowledge of a man’s character,” he says. “Support your arguments [and] label speculative what is speculative.”

Donald himself admits that this approach to historical biography is necessarily speculative at times. But it is clear that it would be difficult to answer the kinds of questions he asks without focusing on Lincoln’s own psychology and the psychology of interpersonal relationships.

Donald, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lincoln, describes Lincoln as a solitary figure, “a very lonesome man who had only one very close friend in his lifetime.” But with We Are Lincoln Men Donald thought anew about a controversial set of questions of personal character, romance, and political maneuvering.

Questions the book explores include why didn’t Lincoln have any close childhood friends? Was he engaged in a homoerotic relationship with confidante Joshua Fry Speed? Did Lincoln take advantage of his friendship with Secretary of State William H. Seward to control foreign policy himself?

Donald preemptively defended his discussion of hot-button issues against critics who may accuse him of gratuitously sensationalizing his book. He says that no dialogue about Lincoln’s friendships is complete without Joshua Speed, whom Lincoln met in 1837 and with whom he shared everything from burlesque anecdotes to marriage ambitions to the burden of the seceding South.

After consulting with psychologists, scrutinizing the language of correspondence between the co-confidantes, and considering popular attitudes toward homoeroticism in Lincoln’s time and place, Donald concludes that Lincoln and Fry were close friends—and not lovers.

Having written several books on Lincoln alone, Donald says he decided to undertake yet another project on the figure because he wanted a chance to explore Lincoln’s personal side from a personal perspective. “I felt sort of entitled to tell you how I feel about some of this material,” he says.

With the exception of the literature on friendship, Donald relied exclusively on primary source material, much of which he drew from his extensive personal files. He therefore chose to profile only those of Lincoln’s friends who kept some kind of written record of their interactions with Lincoln. Ulysses S. Grant apparently considered himself a Lincoln man, but no record of his correspondence with Lincoln exists.

The stress of the presidency can be a heavy burden for one man to bear alone. Like Sen. John Kerry, Lincoln was accused of vacillation because he seemed to frequently contradict himself. Donald claims Lincoln created confusion because he would actually test different arguments on different audiences, which could possibly have been curtailed had he had a trusted adviser.

Donald has warm sentiments to his readers. He responds to a dozen or so letters from readers each year, most of whom are average people with a keen interest in Lincoln. Similarly, while at Harvard Donald advised about 65 doctoral students. He says he thinks of them as his children and of their children as his grandchildren.

Donald says he hopes We Are Lincoln Men will prompt his readers to be more self-reflective. “We can better define ourselves in learning what other people do or don’t do,” he says. “Friendship was a problem for Lincoln; maybe it’s a problem in my own life.” In fact, Donald says that he identifies with Lincoln because, like Lincoln, he lacked close childhood friendships.

Donald is currently editing a biography of John Wilkes Booth by William Kaufmann and soon plans to begin his own family history. This marks a departure from most of his previous work because he will have to work from legal documents rather than letters and diaries.

Donald’s interest in Lincoln dates back to his graduate studies at the University of Illinois, Lincoln’s home from 1830-1861, where Donald reportedly became “ensnared” in Lincoln studies. Through a lifetime’s worth of scholarship, Donald has come to know Abraham Lincoln intimately. Would Donald and Lincoln have been friends if their lives had coincided?

“If you’d asked me that when I was much younger, I would have said, ‘Oh, no! That man who goes around laughing at his own stories and hee-hawing over them?’ I wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with him,” Donald said. “But young people are often intolerant, and I was too. His sense of humor, which I found objectionable as a youth, is actually very funny indeed…. So yes, I think I would have become a Lincoln man in my maturity.”