Lincoln's Melancholy Read online

  What resulted was deeply ironic, if not tragic. Serious scholars tended to dismiss both the specific evidence and the broad importance of Lincoln’s melancholy, leaving the field entirely to psychoanalysts of the Freudian school, in whose hands it would remain until the end of the twentieth century.

  Eventually, changing conditions led to a reappraisal. The buttoned-up culture of the 1940s, which had influenced the Randalls and their followers, gave way to the open, confessional culture of Donahue and Oprah. A tradition of viewing past leaders as stony heroes gave way to one that eagerly sought to see them as human beings, warts and all. And mental illness drew increasing attention.

  In the area of Lincoln studies, in the 1980s and 1990s, a group of emerging scholars began, independent of one another, to look anew at original accounts of Lincoln by the men and women who knew him. These historians—including Douglas Wilson, Rodney Davis, Michael Burlingame, and Allen Guelzo—had come of age in an era when the major oral histories were treated, as Burlingame has noted, “like nuclear waste.” But they found to their surprise that such sources were more like rich mines that had been sealed off and left unexplored. First in journals and then in books, they began to reassess some of the most important Lincoln stories. In the process, they brought a number of crucial oral histories to the attention of other scholars and raised again the topics so often discussed in those histories, including Lincoln’s melancholy.

  Describing what had led to his own work, J. G. Randall explained just what happens when the wheel of scholarship turns: “Evidence is then unearthed, some of it being first discovered, or brought to light after having been forgotten or neglected. Discoloring is corrected, partisan misrepresentation—perhaps accepted unawares by the public—is exposed, predilections and presumptions stripped away. Historical insight cuts through with a new clarity. In this process the historian does not claim to arrive at perfection, but he does hope by fresh inquiry to come nearer to past reality.”

  In 1998, I came upon a chance reference to Lincoln’s melancholy in a sociologist’s essay on suicide. I was intrigued enough to investigate the subject and discovered an exciting movement in the field of Lincoln studies. The aforementioned scholars had built a foundation on which new inquiries could rise. Within a year or so, I had begun to gather together all of the basic primary evidence on Lincoln’s inner life, intent on studying its meanings and mysteries.

  It is significant, of course, that I did this work in a time of relative openness on the subjects of depression and mental illness. When Lincoln was thirty-two, he wrote, “I am now the most miserable man living.” Ruth Painter Randall found this a “ridiculous” example of how in Lincoln’s time it was “considered quite fashionable to dwell on one’s emotions without restraint.” Today, more and more people recognize the value of such frank confessions and want to know about the experiences that lay behind them.

  But while this book springs from an interest in psychology, it is not a psychobiography. The distinction may seem abstract, but in fact it is crucial. The hallmark of psychobiographies is that they begin with a theory—usually some derivative of Freudian theory—and seek to buttress it with evidence. This book takes the opposite approach. It is the product of a long effort to establish the credible reports of how Lincoln lived, what he felt, and how he grew. This evidence suggests some clear lessons, but also raises challenging questions, for which answers have been sought in modern psychological research, the history of medicine, and the popular and intellectual culture of Lincoln’s lifetime. The goal has been to see what we can learn about Lincoln by looking at him through the lens of his melancholy, and to see what we can learn about melancholy by looking at it in light of Lincoln’s experience.

  Necessary as it is to acknowledge the plain facts and where they lead, it is also important to acknowledge the limits of what we can know. Those of us who are familiar with melancholy well know its elusive nature. It operates in deep recesses of thought and feeling, hidden not only from the view of an observer but, often, from the melancholic as well. The goal is not to know Lincoln’s melancholy perfectly, but to know it as best we can, and to see what story emerges.

  In broad terms, that story is fairly straightforward. From a young age, Lincoln experienced psychological pain and distress, to the point that he believed himself temperamentally inclined to suffer to an unusual degree. He learned how to articulate his suffering, find succor, endure, and adapt. Finally, he forged meaning from his affliction so that it became not merely an obstacle to overcome, but a factor in his good life.

  This is a story for our time. Affecting more than 100 million people a year, depression is the world’s leading cause of disability. In 2000, about a million people worldwide killed themselves—about equal to the number of deaths from war and homicide that year put together. Adjusting for population growth, unipolar depression is ten times more prevalent than it was fifty years ago. When we face this reality, the suffering of a prominent man in history takes on new poignancy, especially as it illuminates not only the nature of suffering but also the way it can become part of a productive life.

  As I worked on this book, I heard three main questions about Lincoln’s melancholy. First, was it a “clinical depression”? Part One investigates how Lincoln’s melancholy manifested itself in his early life and young manhood and how it fits—and challenges—the diagnostic categories of modern psychiatry. Second, what kind of treatment did he undergo? Part Two shows what Lincoln did in response to his melancholy, the strategies he used to heal and help himself. Third, in what way did the melancholy contribute to his work as a public figure? Part Three addresses how Lincoln’s melancholy became intertwined with his mature character, ideas, and actions.

  This is the story of a man who joined great pain and great power. From his early letters lamenting the “peculiar misfortune” of his temperament, to poetry he wrote on subjects such as suicide and madness, Lincoln’s life sprang from a search for meaning that explained, and even ennobled, his affliction. As president, Lincoln urged his countrymen to accept their blessing and their burden, to see that their suffering had meaning, and to join him on a journey toward a more perfect Union.

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  The Community Said He Was Crazy

  IN THREE KEY CRITERIA—the factors that produce depression, the symptoms of what psychiatrists call major depression, and the typical age of onset—the case of Abraham Lincoln is perfect. It could be used in a psychiatry textbook to illustrate a typical depression. Yet Lincoln’s case is perfect, too, in a very different sense: it forces us to reckon with the limits of diagnostic categories and raises fundamental questions about the nature of illness and health.

  Though great resources in research and clinical science have been devoted to depression in the past few decades, we can neither cure it nor fully explain it. What we can do is describe its general characteristics. The perverse benefit of so much suffering is that we know a great deal about what the sufferers have in common. To start, the principal factors behind depression are biological predisposition and environmental influences. Some people are more susceptible to depression simply by virtue of being born. Depression and other mood disorders run in families, not only because of what happens in those families, but because of the genetic material families share. A person who has one parent or sibling with major depression is one and a half to three times more likely than the general population to experience it.

  The standard way to investigate biological predisposition is simply to list the cases of mental illness—or mental characteristics suggestive of potential illness—in a family. With Lincoln, such a family history suggests that he came by his depression, at least in part, by old-fashioned inheritance. His parents, Thomas and Nancy Lincoln, came from Virginia families that crossed the Appalachian Mountains into Kentucky in the late eighteenth century. They married in 1806 and had three children: Sarah, born February 10, 1807; Abraham, born February 12, 1809; and Thomas, born about 1811. Tho
ugh our information is imperfect, to say the least, both parents had characteristics suggestive of melancholy. Nearly all the descriptions of Nancy Lincoln have her as sad. For example, her cousin John Hanks said her nature “was kindness, mildness, tenderness, sadness.” And Lincoln himself described his mother as “intellectual, sensitive and somewhat sad.” Tom Lincoln, a farmer and carpenter, was a social man with a talent for jokes and stories, but he, too, had a somber streak. “He seemed to me,” said his stepgrandson, “to border on the serious—reflective.” This seriousness could tip into gloom. According to a neighbor in Kentucky, he “often got the ‘blues,’ and had some strange sort of spells, and wanted to be alone all he could when he had them.” During these spells he would spend as much as half a day alone in the fields or the woods. His behavior was strange enough to make people wonder if Tom Lincoln was losing his mind.

  Perhaps the most striking evidence of mental trouble in Abraham Lincoln’s family comes from his paternal relations. His great-uncle once told a court of law that he had “a deranged mind.” His uncle Mordecai Lincoln had broad mood swings, which were probably intensified by his heavy drinking. And Mordecai’s family was thick with mental disease. All three of his sons—who bore a strong physical resemblance to their first cousin Abraham—were considered melancholy men. One settler who knew both the future president and his cousins spoke of the two “Lincoln characteristics”: “their moody spells and great sense of humor.” One of these Lincoln cousins swung wildly between melancholia and mania and at times had a tenuous grip on reality, writing letters and notes that suggest madness. Another first cousin of Lincoln’s had a daughter committed to the Illinois State Hospital for the Insane. After a trial, a jury in Hancock County committed thirty-nine-year-old Mary Jane Lincoln to the hospital, noting that “her disease is of thirteen years duration.” At the hospital, an attendant observed, “Her father was cousin to Abraham Lincoln, and she has features much like his.”

  What is striking about the case of Mary Jane Lincoln is that the jury, charged with answering the question of whether insanity ran in her family, concluded that “the disease is with her hereditary.” According to a family historian who grew up in the late nineteenth century, the descendants of Mordecai Lincoln “suffered from all the nervous disorders known. Some were on the ragged edge.” One family member who had frequent spells of intense mental trouble referred to his condition as “the Lincoln horrors.”

  Three elements of Lincoln’s history—the deep, pervasive sadness of his mother, the strange spells of his father, and the striking presence of mental illness in the family of his uncle and cousins—suggest the likelihood of a biological predisposition toward depression. “Predisposition” means an increased risk of developing an illness. As opposed to traditional Mendelian inheritance—in which one dominant gene or two recessive genes lead to an illness or trait—genetic factors in psychiatric illnesses are additive and not categorical. “The genes confer only susceptibility in many cases,” explains the psychiatrist S. Nassir Ghaemi, in The Concepts of Psychiatry, “not the illness. That is, they only increase the likelihood that fewer or less severe environmental factors are required for the illness to develop, compared with someone who has fewer diseaserelated genes.”

  What tips a person from tendency to actuality? For centuries, philosophers and physicians emphasized climate and diet. Today’s experts focus on harsh life events and conditions, especially in early childhood. Lincoln’s early life certainly had its harsh elements. His only brother died in infancy in Kentucky. In 1816, Abraham’s eighth year, the family moved to southern Indiana. Two years later, in the fall of 1818, an infectious disease swept through their small rural community. Among those affected were Lincoln’s aunt and uncle, Thomas and Elizabeth Sparrow, and his mother, Nancy Lincoln. Eventually, the disease would be traced to a poisonous root, eaten by cattle and then ingested by humans in milk or meat. But when Abraham watched his mother become ill, the disease was a grim mystery that went by various names, from “puking fever” to “river sickness” to “fall poison.” Later, it became known as the “milk sick.” “No announcement strikes the members of a western community with so much dread as the report of a case,” said a newspaper of the time. A physician described the course of the illness: “When the individual is about to be taken down, he feels weary, trembles more or less under exertion, and often experiences pain, numbness and slight cramps.” Nausea soon follows, then “a feeling of depression and burning at the pit of the stomach,” then retching, twitching, and tossing side to side. Before long, the patient becomes “deathly pale and shrunk up,” listless and indifferent, and lies, between fits of retching, in a “mild coma.” First the Sparrows—with whom the Lincolns were close—took sick and died. Then Nancy Lincoln went to bed with the illness. Ill for about a week, she died on October 5, 1818. She was about thirty-five years old. Her son was nine.

  In addition to the loss of his mother, aunt, and uncle, a year or so later Abraham faced the long absence of his father, who returned to Kentucky to court another bride. For two to six months, Tom Lincoln left his children alone with their twenty-year-old cousin, Dennis Hanks. When he returned, the children were dirty and poorly clothed. Lincoln later described himself at this time as “sad, if not pitiful.”

  The one constant in Abraham’s life was his sister, Sarah. She was a thin, strong woman who resembled her father in stature, with brown hair and dark eyes. Like her brother, Sarah Lincoln had a sharp mind. She stayed with the family until 1826, when she married, set up house, and quickly became pregnant. On January 28, 1828, she gave birth to a stillborn child and shortly afterward died herself. “We went out and told Abe,” recalled a neighbor. “I never will forget the scene. He sat down in the door of the smoke house and buried his face in his hands. The tears slowly trickled from between his bony fingers and his gaunt frame shook with sobs.”

  In the emotional development of a child, pervasive tension can be just as influential as loss. Lincoln’s relationship with his father—the only other member of his nuclear family who survived—was so cool that observers wondered whether there was any love between them. The relationship was strained by a fundamental conflict. From a young age, Abraham showed a strong interest in his own education. At first his father helped him along, paying school fees and procuring books. “Abe read all the books he could lay his hands on,” said his stepmother. “And when he came across a passage that struck him he would write it down . . . then he would re-write it—look at it—repeat it.” But at some point Tom Lincoln began to oppose the extent of his son’s studies. Abraham sometimes neglected his farm work by reading. Tom would beat him for this, and for other infractions.

  To men who had been born and expected to die on farms, book learning had limited value. A man ought to be able to read the Bible (for his moral life) and legal documents (for his work life). Writing could help, too, as could basic arithmetic. Anything more was a luxury, and for working folks seemed frivolous. For generations, Lincoln men had cleared land, raised crops, and worked a trade. So when this boy slipped away from feeding livestock and splitting logs to write poetry and read stories, people thought him lazy. “Lincoln was lazy—a very lazy man,” remembered his cousin Dennis Hanks. “He was always reading—scribbling—writing—ciphering—writing poetry &c. &c.”

  Later, Lincoln’s self-education would become the stuff of legend. Many parents have cited Lincoln’s long walks to school and ferocious self-discipline to their children. But Lincoln pursued his interests in defiance of established norms. Far from being praised, he was consistently admonished. He may well have paid an emotional toll. Many studies have linked adult mental health to parental support in childhood. Lower levels of support correlate with increased levels of depressive symptoms, among other health problems, in adulthood. After Lincoln left home in his early twenties, his contact with his father was impersonal and infrequent.

  When reviewing the facts of Lincoln’s childhood, we should keep in mind some context. F
or example, in the early nineteenth century, one out of four infants died before their first birthday. And about one fourth of all children lost a mother or father before age fifteen. Of the eighteen American presidents in the nineteenth century, nine lost their mother, father, or both while they were children. None of Lincoln’s contemporaries, nor Lincoln himself, mentioned the deaths of his siblings and mother as factors contributing to his melancholy. The melancholy was unusual, but the deaths were not. In the same vein, while we ought not to ignore Lincoln’s conflict with his father and discount its possible emotional aftereffects, we risk missing more than we gain if we look at it exclusively through the lens of modern psychology. In fact, such a conflict between ambitious young men and their fathers was not uncommon in the early nineteenth century, a time of broad cultural and economic change.

  Abraham was not evidently a wounded child, but signs point to his being sensitive. He spent a lot of time alone. He was serious about his studies and reading, and uncommonly eager to explore imaginative realms, which psychologists often observe in sensitive children. He also took up a popular cause among sensitive people, the welfare of animals. Some boys found it fun to set turtles on fire or throw them against trees. “Lincoln would Chide us—tell us it was wrong—would write against it,” remembered one of his neighbors. His stepsister remembered him once “contending that an ants life was to it, as sweet as ours to us.”

  At the same time, Lincoln was a winsome child. Others sought him out, followed him in games, and applauded him when he mounted a stump and performed for them, pretending to be a preacher or a states man. By the time he was a teenager, grown men would flock around him, eager to hear his jokes and stories. He was well liked.