Lincoln's Melancholy Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  A Note on the Text

  Epigraph

  Prelude

  Introduction

  PART ONE

  The Community Said He Was Crazy

  A Fearful Gift

  I Am Now the Most Miserable Man Living

  PART TWO

  A Self-Made Man

  A Misfortune, Not a Fault

  The Reign of Reason

  The Vents of My Moods and Gloom

  PART THREE

  Its Precise Shape and Color

  The Fiery Trial Through Which We Pass

  Comes Wisdom to Us

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Sample Chapter from POWERS OF TWO

  Buy the Book

  About the Author

  Footnotes

  First Mariner Books edition 2006

  Copyright © 2005 by Joshua Wolf Shenk

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  Also visit: www.lincolnsmelancholy.com.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Shenk, Joshua Wolf.

  Lincoln’s melancholy : how depression challenged a president and fueled his greatness / Joshua Wolf Shenk.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-618-55116-3

  ISBN-10: 0-618-55116-6

  1. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809–1865—Psychology. 2. Presidents—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  E457.2.S47 2005

  973.7'092—dc22 2005009653

  ISBN-13: 978-0-618-77344-2 (pbk.)

  ISBN-10: 0-618-77344-4 (pbk.)

  eISBN 978-0-547-52689-8

  v3.0714

  For Joanne Wolf Cohen and Richard L. Shenk

  A Note on the Text

  This book is drawn from primary sources, many of which depart from modern standards of punctuation and spelling. Quotations from letters and other period documents are given as in the original.

  The inclination to exchange thoughts with one another is probably an original impulse of our nature. If I be in pain I wish to let you know it, and to ask your sympathy and assistance; and my pleasurable emotions also, I wish to communicate to, and share with you.

  —ABRAHAM LINCOLN, February 11, 1859

  Prelude

  A YEAR BEFORE HE DIED, Leo Tolstoy told this story to a reporter for the New York World:

  “Once while travelling in the Caucasus,” he said, “I happened to be the guest of a Caucasian chief of the Circassians, who, living far away from civilized life in the mountains, had but a fragmentary and childish comprehension of the world and its history. The fingers of civilization had never reached him nor his tribe, and all life beyond his native valleys was a dark mystery.”

  Tolstoy told them of his work and of the industries, inventions, and schools of the outside world. But only when he turned to the subject of warriors and generals and statesmen did he arouse the interest of his tall, gray-bearded host, the chief. “Wait a moment,” the chief said. “I want all my neighbors and my sons to listen to you.”

  “He soon returned,” Tolstoy continued, “with a score of wild looking riders and . . . those sons of the wilderness sat around me on the floor and gazed at me as if hungering for knowledge. I spoke at first of our Czars and of their victories; then I spoke of the greatest military leaders. My talk seemed to impress them deeply. The story of Napoleon was so interesting to them that I had to tell them every detail, as, for instance, how his hands looked, how tall he was, who made his guns and pistols and the color of his horse. It was very difficult to satisfy them and to meet their point of view, but I did my best.”

  When Tolstoy finished, the chief lifted his hand. “But you have not told us a syllable about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world,” he said gravely. “We want to know something about him. He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder; he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were as strong as the rock and as sweet as the fragrance of roses. The angels appeared to his mother and predicted that the son whom she would conceive would become the greatest the stars had ever seen. He was so great that he even forgave the crimes of his greatest enemies and shook brotherly hands with those who had plotted against his life. His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man.”

  “Tell us, please,” shouted one of the others, “and we will present you with the best horse of our stock.”

  “I looked at them,” Tolstoy said, “and saw their faces all aglow, while their eyes were burning . . . I told them of Lincoln and his wisdom, of his home life and youth. They asked me ten questions to one which I was able to answer. They wanted to know all about his habits, his influence upon the people and his physical strength. But they were astonished to hear that Lincoln made a sorry figure on a horse and that he lived such a simple life.”

  After telling them all he knew, Tolstoy said that he thought he could procure a photograph of Lincoln. He rode off to the nearest town, accompanied by one of the young riders. He found a photograph and gave it to him.

  “It was interesting,” Tolstoy said, “to witness the gravity of his face and the trembling of his hands when he received my present. He gazed for several minutes silently, like one in a reverent prayer: his eyes filled with tears. He was deeply touched and I asked him why he became so sad.”

  The young man answered with a question of his own. “Don’t you find,” he said, “judging from his picture, that his eyes are full of tears and that his lips are sad with a secret sorrow?”

  Introduction

  IN EARLY MAY 1860, a week before the Republican party held its national convention in Chicago, the delegates from Illinois met in Decatur, a small town in the center of the state. They met in what they called a “wigwam,” a kind of urban barn, built over a vacant lot with a canvas roof held up by wood beams. When the Decatur convention opened, on May 9, three thousand men packed inside. After an initial round of huzzahs, at the start of the afternoon session, a thirty-five-year-old politician named Richard Oglesby took the stage. “I am informed,” he said, “that a distinguished citizen of Illinois, and one who Illinois will ever delight to honor, is present and I wish to move that this body invite him to a seat on the stand.” The crowd waited to hear the man’s name, but Oglesby paused—as though, observed a man in the crowd, “to tease expectation to the verge of desperation.”

  At that moment, Abraham Lincoln was crouched on his heels at the back of the hall, just inside the entrance. A fifty-one-year-old lawyer and a veteran of the state legislature, Lincoln had left his last political office, as U.S. representative, eleven years before. After one middling term in Congress, he mostly stayed away from politics for five years. Then, in 1854, an old debate over slavery took a new turn with the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which, Lincoln wrote, “aroused me again.” Pressing his argument against the extension of slavery, and for its eventual extinction, he helped build the new Republican party in Illinois. In 1858, he challenged Stephen Douglas for his Senate seat, losing the race but gaining a national reputation from the campaign debates. In February 1860, he dazzled a crowd at New York City’s Cooper Union with an antisla
very speech the New York Tribune called among “the most convincing political arguments ever made in this city.”

  Lincoln came to the Decatur convention in May as a rising star. When Oglesby called his name from the stage of the wigwam, the delegates and onlookers broke into thunderous applause. A half-dozen men seized Lincoln and tried to push him to the front of the room. When that didn’t work—the room was too full—they lifted him up on their shoulders and passed him, not unlike in a mosh pit today, over the mass of people to the stage. The crowd roared its approval.

  Still, those in the wigwam knew that Lincoln stood a slim chance to take the national nomination the following week at Chicago. Most Republicans expected that the honor would fall to Senator William Seward, the party’s leading man. Lincoln, by contrast, failed to rate a mention on preconvention scorecards of seven, twelve, even twenty-one candidates. Lincoln couldn’t even count on the backing of his own state convention at Decatur, which he badly wanted. “I am not in a position where it would hurt much for me to not be nominated on the national ticket,” he wrote, “but I am where it would hurt some for me to not get the Illinois delegates.”

  Richard Oglesby, the young politician who was managing the convention, knew Lincoln’s position and wanted to improve it. An ambitious and energetic man—he would become a major general in the Union army and, soon afterward, governor of Illinois—Oglesby wanted to deliver the state’s delegates for him. Not some, but all; not in a tepid fashion, but with a rousing cheer.

  Oglesby had decided that Lincoln needed something to distinguish himself—a catch phrase like “Log Cabin and Hard Cider,” which had helped elect William Henry Harrison in 1840. So before the convention, Oglesby had gone to see a white-whiskered old farmer named John Hanks. Hanks was Lincoln’s mother’s cousin and had lived with the Lincoln family when they first came to Illinois in 1830. Oglesby asked what kind of work Lincoln had done in those days. “Not much of any kind but dreaming,” Hanks replied. Then he told the story of how he and Lincoln had once cleared fifteen or twenty acres of black walnut and honey locust trees, built a cabin, and mauled rails for fences.

  “John,” Oglesby asked, “did you split rails down there with old Abe?”

  “Yes, every day,” Hanks answered.

  “Do you suppose you could find any of them now?”

  Hanks said he had seen that old fence about ten years before, and he took Oglesby there the next day. While Oglesby waited in his buggy, Hanks chipped away at the fence with a knife. When he came up with shavings that were black walnut and honey locust, he declared, “They are the identical rails we made.”

  The rails were just what Oglesby wanted: symbols of free labor, solid character, triumph over the crude frontier, humble origins, and the strength to rise. He and Hanks took two of them, tied them to Oglesby’s buggy, and brought them to town. Then, on the first day of the state convention, Oglesby introduced Lincoln with a flourish. This was John Hanks’s cue. As Lincoln reached the stage, Hanks burst into the wigwam carrying the rails. A banner hanging from them explained that Lincoln had split them and announced, in large letters:

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  The Rail Candidate

  FOR PRESIDENT IN 1860

  The crowd went wild. Delegates and onlookers threw hats, books, and canes into the air. The wigwam shook so much that its canvas exterior became detached from the wood beams. “The roof was literally cheered off the building,” declared an early account of the maelstrom. The energy of the crowd foreshadowed Lincoln’s success. The state’s delegates soon resolved to back Lincoln unanimously. Buoyed by the “rail-splitter” image, Lincoln would vault into place as William Seward’s main rival for the Republican nomination. On that stage, then, Lincoln stood at the peak of three hard decades in politics. “Lincoln’s name was in every mouth,” recalled Joseph G. Cannon, who later became Speaker of the House of Representatives, “and in those stirring times everything was on fire.”

  Yet, to the wigwam audience in Decatur, Lincoln presented a strange figure. He didn’t seem euphoric, or triumphant, or even pleased. To the contrary, said a man named Johnson, observing from the convention floor, “I then thought him one of the most diffident and worst plagued men I ever saw.”

  The next day, the convention closed. The crowds dispersed, leaving behind cigar stubs and handbills and the smell of sweat and whiskey. After the wigwam had emptied, a Republican journalist named William J. Bross walked the floor. He noticed his state party’s choice for president sitting alone at the end of the hall. Lincoln’s head was bowed, his gangly arms bent at the elbows, his hands pressed to his face. As Bross approached, Lincoln noticed him and said, “I’m not very well.”

  Lincoln’s look at that moment—the classic image of gloom—was familiar to everyone who knew him well. These spells were common. And they were just one thread in a curious fabric of behavior and thought that Lincoln’s friends and colleagues called his “melancholy.” He often wept in public and recited maudlin poetry. He told jokes and stories at odd times—he needed the laughs, he said, for his survival. As a young man he talked of suicide, and as he grew older, he said he saw the world as hard and grim, full of misery, made that way by fates and forces of God. “No element of Mr. Lincoln’s character,” declared his colleague Henry Whitney, “was so marked, obvious and ingrained as his mysterious and profound melancholy.” His law partner William Herndon said, “His melancholy dripped from him as he walked.”

  Many people are surprised to hear that any aspect of Lincoln could remain largely unknown, let alone something as significant as a lifelong melancholy. It’s an old refrain. “There can be no new ‘Lincoln stories,’” the journalist Noah Brooks said in 1898. “The stories are all told.” In fact, we continue to learn about him, for several reasons. First, the sheer volume of “Lincoln stories”—first-person accounts by people who knew him—makes for a huge trove of basic information. Second, the distinguished scholarly work of each generation often facilitates new discoveries by generations that follow. Lincoln once noted how the printing press spread knowledge by making works widely available that had previously been the province of a privileged few. The same is true when primary sources are collected, transcribed, and published; when exhaustive reference works are produced; when scholars leave published books and carefully organized research files; and when interest in a subject grows to the point that entire institutions—libraries, journals, and museums—are devoted to assisting its students. The main problem with studying Lincoln is not finding sources, but choosing which sources to follow.

  A third reason we continue to learn about Lincoln is that, faced with a wealth of material—documents to read and parse, references to follow, contexts to study so that a mere shard can be seen as a piece of a whole—historians must choose interpretative frameworks. And in this they are inexorably subject to the fancies and suppositions of the times they live in. As times change, so do popular dogmas and curiosities. Therefore our approach to history changes as well. This is not to say that history is merely subjective, but that objective and subjective realities interact to create a foundation of accepted truth. “What happens over and over,” J. G. Randall wrote in 1945, introducing the first volume of his biography Lincoln the President, “is that a certain idea gets started in association with an event or figure. It is repeated by speakers and editors. It soon becomes a part of that superficial aggregation of concepts that goes under the heading ‘what everybody knows.’ It may take decades before a stock picture is even questioned as to its validity.”

  In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Lincoln’s melancholy was widely accepted by students of his life, and it became a mainstay of popular culture. But by the late 1940s, the subject began to disappear. The stock picture of Lincoln became one of stoicism, strength, and reserve. There were a number of reasons for this shift. Those curious about the historiography will find a fuller treatment in the Afterword. Here, a summary will suffice.

  In the decades after
Lincoln’s death, two emotional crises he had as a young man became central aspects of his popular persona. For real drama, the agreed-upon facts need no embellishing. But melodrama has its own purposes. The story of Lincoln’s love for Ann Rutledge and that of his agonizing courtship of Mary Todd became overblown. Then, in the 1920s and 1930s, they reached absurd heights.

  In a sharp response to such pulp, scholars emerging from rapidly expanding Ph.D. history programs fashioned themselves as “scientific historians,” whose authority over the evidence of history was supreme. They dismissed oral history in favor of court records and census data and other “hard” evidence. Prominent among these arbiters was J. G. Randall, the leading Lincoln scholar of his age. With his wife and partner, Ruth Painter Randall, he cut the legs out from under the evidence of Lincoln’s melancholy in the mid-1940s. The Randalls decided that firsthand reports of Lincoln’s two suicidal breakdowns as a young man were only so much “gossip” and innuendo. The effect was profound. In the 1960s and 1970s, graduate students learned that Lincoln’s first suicidal breakdown was a “myth.” His second episode, during a fascinating, crucial period of his life, was reduced to a few sentences even in full-scale biographies. Scholars of Lincoln largely abandoned the study of his inner life.

  The movement away from discussion of Lincoln’s melancholy took hold in a culture that was increasingly divided on matters of psychology and human suffering. In the mid-twentieth-century United States, the theories of Sigmund Freud and Emil Kraepelin—the founders, respectively, of psychoanalysis and biological psychiatry—flourished, creating both devoted adherents and sharp critics. History became one front in the war. Inspired by Freud himself, psychoanalysts eagerly put Lincoln on the couch, examining his life through the lens of childhood traumas and sexual conflicts. Many historians found this absurd, especially since much of the evidence in psychobiographies was exaggerated or outright invented.