For years, tongues have wagged about whether America’s 16th president, Abraham Lincoln, practiced what in his day was called “the love that dare not speak its name.” Speculation about the Great Emancipator’s sexuality was largely stoked after the 1926 publication of Carl Sandburg’s biography of Lincoln, in which he described the latter’s relationship with his friend Joshua Speed as having “streaks of lavender — spots soft as May violets.”
The phrase — which was removed from subsequent editions of Sandburg’s biography — has been interpreted by some as a veiled reference to a homosexual relationship between Lincoln and Speed, since the phrase "streak of lavender" was period slang for an effeminate man, and later connoted homosexuality.
Was Lincoln gay? I honestly don’t know. But if there’s a genetic component to human sexuality, it may have also been present in one of Lincoln’s descendants—his great-granddaughter, Mary Lincoln "Peggy" Beckwith, one of his last two confirmed descendants, along with her younger brother, Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith (1904-1985).
"Peggy" Beckwith (1898–1975) was the daughter Jessie Harlan Lincoln (the daughter of Abraham Lincoln's eldest son, Robert Todd Lincoln) and Warren Wallace Beckwith. Born in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, was raised with her brother in Manchester, Vermont at the family estate of her grandfather, Robert, a farm known as Hildene. Peggy Beckwith attended the Madeira School, then called Miss Madeira's School, a private prep school, but she did not attend college.
Before the outset of the First World War, Beckwith engaged in professional pursuits in Cuba. In 1918, she returned to the family farm at Hildene to occupy positions left vacant by men who were serving in the war. Beckwith took an agricultural course at Cornell University and organized young women to work the farm.
Beckwith earned her private pilot's license sometime around 1931. In the 1930s, she built a private landing strip in Manchester, Vermont, and purchased several airplanes, including a three-seat sports plane. Among the planes she owned were a Cutliss Gypsy Moth and a Traveler.
She also ran the farm at Hildene and was later described as "a squat, fair-haired, blue-eyed, chain smoker who golfed and dabbled in oil painting and sculpture." Beckwith never married or had children, and it was rumored she was a lesbian.
Despite her desire to eschew publicity, she was well known by the local farming community. Beckwith was said to run errands around Hildene "dressed in blue jeans, overalls, with a shirt and a man's cap."
Beckwith christened the submarine Abraham Lincoln on May 14, 1960. She died July 10, 1975, a month before her 77th birthday. Upon her death, her brother, Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith, who died in 1985, became Abraham Lincoln’s last living descendant.
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