Upper-class male cohabitation in mid-19th century USA

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My own reading has left me at believing that this (Buchanan's special longing apart) was fairly common in North America in the 19th century. E.g. Joshua Wolf Shenk's biography Lincoln's Melancholy contains this passage:

Not only families but strangers at inns and soldiers in the filed often slept snugly against each other. Bed-sharing, in other words, was about a common as, and indeed was very similar to, the way that people today share apartments.

It appears in the context of narrating that Abraham Lincoln and his intimate friend Joshua Fry Speed for some time even shared a bed, and whether this may indicate that Lincoln may have had a h*m*sexual relationship. (The author thinks that the question admits no definite proof in either direction.)

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