Lincoln's Melancholy Page 4

  For now, it suffices to say that the breakdown was a second episode of major depression. According to the criteria in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, this qualifies Lincoln for the diagnosis of “major depressive disorder, recurrent.” Strictly speaking, the illness is characterized by two or more major depressive episodes, separated by at least a month. More broadly, it suggests an underlying problem that can be expected to surface in various ways throughout a person’s life. Consider: Someone with two episodes of major depression has a seventy percent chance of experiencing a third. And someone with three episodes has a ninety percent chance of having a fourth. (The phrase “clinical depression” can be applied to any incident of major depression or to people who experience major depressive disorder.)

  What the statistics suggest, the course of Lincoln’s life confirms: by the time he was in his early thirties, he faced a lifetime of depression. Still, the quality and character of his illness would change through the years. The acute fits of his young manhood gave way to less histrionic, but more pervasive, spells of deep gloom. Dramatic public avowals of his misery gave way to a private but persistent effort to endure and transcend his suffering. Yet the suffering did not go away. As we will see, in his middle years Lincoln demonstrated signs of chronic depression. And even when he began to do the work for which he is remembered—and took evident satisfaction in finding a great cause to which to apply his considerable talent—he continued to suffer.

  Modern diagnoses can help initiate a discussion of Lincoln’s troubles. With many physiological conditions, disease names are merely pointers. They stand in for the “real thing,” which can be directly observed. But with psychological phenomena, language doesn’t just name a reality; it creates a reality. This is crucial, given that the pain of depression is compounded, for sufferers, by the fact that it is hidden and often suspected of not being genuine. “In virtually any other serious sickness,” writes William Styron in his memoir of depression, Darkness Visible, “a patient who felt similar devastation would be lying flat in bed, possibly sedated and hooked up to the tubes and wires of life support systems . . . His invalidism would be necessary, unquestioned, and honorably attained. However, the sufferer of depression has no such option.” By identifying Lincoln’s trouble directly and clearly, we acknowledge it as a basic fact, just as he did.

  Yet all too often medical diagnosis is used to end, rather than begin, a conversation. To say, as recent scholars have, that Florence Nightingale suffered from bipolar disorder or that the Salem witch trials were driven by “epidemic hysteria, with conversion symptoms” is no substitute for knowing how the individual figures, and the communities they lived in, understood themselves. Such retrospective diagnoses often leave the impression that modern psychiatric categories are infallible, when in fact they are only one way to account for the complex reality of human trouble.

  In their book The Perspectives of Psychiatry, Paul R. McHugh and Phillip R. Slavney identify four approaches to a suffering person. The first approach seeks to identify disease, or what the person has. The second seeks to identify a person’s dimension, or who he or she is. The third focuses on behavior, or what the patient does. Each of these approaches has some value for a study of Lincoln’s life, but none so much as the “life story” perspective, which seeks a holistic understanding of what patients want and what they can become.

  Diagnosis, we must remember, exists primarily to facilitate treatment in a clinical setting. It is a snapshot at a moment in time. But here we want to make sense of a whole life. As the writer and physician Oliver Sacks has noted, “To restore the human subject at the centre—the suffering, afflicted, fighting, human subject—we must deepen a case history to a narrative or tale; only then do we have a ‘who’ as well as a ‘what,’ a real person, a patient, in relation to disease.” This distinction between case history and narrative is right on point. The former tries to eliminate questions with facts, whereas the latter draws on facts to articulate the essential questions of a person’s life.

  Can we say that Lincoln was “mentally ill”? Without question, he meets the U.S. surgeon general’s definition of mental illness, since he experienced “alterations in thinking, mood, or behavior” that were associated with “distress and/or impaired functioning.” Yet Lincoln also meets the surgeon general’s criteria for mental health: “the successful performance of mental function, resulting in productive activities, fulfilling relationships with other people, and the ability to adapt to change and to cope with adversity.” By this standard, few historical figures led such a healthy life.

  Chapter 2

  A Fearful Gift

  IN LINCOLN’S LATE TWENTIES, his friends and colleagues came to regard him as “melancholy.” The word would be used to describe him for the rest of his life. What did it mean?

  In a modern dictionary, the noun “melancholy” has two definitions. First, it means “thoughtful or gentle sadness.” This comes through when, for example, Stanley Crouch writes of his “melancholy resentment” about the neglected history of African Americans or when Andrew Delbanco alludes to the “melancholy suspicion that we live in a world without meaning.” Melancholy often qualifies ideas or feelings that are anguishing but familiar, and somehow connected to what William Faulkner called “the agony and sweat of the human spirit.” Thus is melancholy the province of lovers, poets, philosophers—anyone who reflects on the true experience of sentient beings.

  The second definition of melancholy is “the gloomy character of somebody said to have an excess of black bile (archaic).” This refers to an ancient theory of biology called humoral theory, which originated 2,500 years ago and hung on, in some form, until well after Lincoln’s death. Humoral theory held that one’s temperament, or bodily and psychological makeup, gave rise to one’s character—that is, distinctive qualities, especially of mind and feeling. A person with a preponderance of black bile would have a melancholy temperament, and probably a melancholy character as well. The melancholy character fascinated Aristotle, who asked, in a famous passage, “Why is it that all men who have become outstanding in philosophy, statesmanship, poetry or the arts are melancholic, and some to such an extent that they are infected by the diseases arising from black bile?” Citing Plato and Socrates and “many other heroes” as examples, he continued, “Many such men have suffered from diseases which arise from this mixture in the body . . . In any case, they are all, as has been said, naturally of this character.”

  That passage is often cited for its reflections on the relationship between melancholy and creative achievement, a topic for Chapter 9. The point here is that Aristotle assumed that people of a certain character were also vulnerable to a certain disease. The sorrowful, existentially anxious, querulous, and insightful experience of melancholy was strongly tied to the raging, disabling illness of melancholia. (The suffix “ia” signifies disease.) In the early twentieth century, “depression” replaced melancholia as the preferred medical term for the serious disease. Modern descriptions of major depression have enough in common with age-old accounts of melancholia that, for the sake of this discussion, we can say that they are essentially the same thing.

  The big difference is that today we often hear that the disease of depression is entirely distinct from the ordinary experience of being sad or in the dumps. But in the nineteenth-century conception of melancholy, these were part of the same overall picture. A person with a melancholy temperament had been fated with both an awful burden and what Byron called “a fearful gift.” The burden was a sadness and despair that could tip into a state of disease. But the gift was a capacity for depth, wisdom—even genius.

  In the spring of 1837, Lincoln left New Salem for Springfield, Illinois. He was twenty-eight years old. He had a law license and an invitation to join the practice of John Todd Stuart, one of the state’s eminent attorneys. Lincoln’s reputation preceded him; in the previous session of the legislature, he had emerged as a wunderkind leader of both the Whig party and Sangamon
County.

  Compared to New Salem, a one-road village cut from the forest, Springfield might have seemed like a teeming metropolis. It had broad streets laid out in a grid and sturdy brick buildings. There were taverns, hotels, and two newspapers, one run by the Democrats, the other (the Sangamo Journal) by Lincoln’s Whigs. Shops sold all kinds of goods, from luxurious imports like Cuban cigars to staples like hardtack and sperm oil. On the west side of the town square, near the corner of Fifth and Washington streets, stood a general store co-owned by Joshua Fry Speed. A half block from Lincoln’s law office, the store sold dry goods, groceries, hardware, books, medicines, bedclothes, and mattresses— “every thing,” Speed noted, “that the country needed.” When Lincoln came into the store, he held the saddlebags that had been carried by his horse on the ride from New Salem. The bags contained all he owned. He set them down as he approached the counter. He told Speed that he needed to know the price of the “furniture” for a single bed—that is, a mattress, blankets, sheets, and a pillow.

  Lincoln stood nearly six feet four inches tall, though his height was less commanding than awkward, as his shoulders stooped and his arms and legs were drastically long. His hands were large and bony. He had green eyes so light they looked almost gray. Speed was twenty-two years old, a handsome man with deep brown eyes and straight brown hair that curled slightly over his ears. He made the calculations with chalk on a piece of slate and told Lincoln the items would cost seventeen dollars. Lincoln answered that it seemed like a good price, but that he couldn’t afford it. He said that he could go on credit, but even then he’d be able to pay only “if my experiment here as a lawyer is a success.” But Lincoln added, “If I fail in this, I do not know that I can ever pay you.” Speed listened to Lincoln with his eyes still on the slate, and noticed a sad tone in his voice. Then he looked up at his customer. “I thought then,” he wrote years later, “as I think now, that I never saw so gloomy, and melancholy a face.”

  The appearance of melancholy on Lincoln’s countenance was remarked upon by many people who met him around this time. “He was a sad looking man—gloomy—and melancholic,” said William Herndon, who was a clerk in Speed’s store in the late 1830s and later became Lincoln’s law partner and biographer. O. H. Browning, another politician and lawyer, observed that Lincoln had a “constitutional melancholy” and was subject to “fits of despondency.” James Lemen, Jr., still another member of the Illinois bar, said that Lincoln had “a settled form of melancholy, sometimes very marked, and sometimes very mild, but always sufficient to tinge his countenance with a shade of sadness, unless a smile should dispel it, which frequently happened.” Like Browning, Lemen thought the melancholy a “constitutional trait, or characteristic.”

  These men did not consider Lincoln’s melancholy a mere liability, nor did they distance themselves from Lincoln because of it. To the contrary, consider the reaction of Joshua Speed to the customer who came into his store and gloomily said he couldn’t afford the cost of bedding. “The contraction of such a small debt, seems to affect you so deeply,” Speed said. “I think I can suggest a plan by which you can attain your end, without incurring any debt. I have a very large room, and a very large double-bed in it; which you are perfectly welcome to share with me if you choose.”

  “Where is your room?” Lincoln asked.

  “Upstairs,” Speed said, pointing to the winding stairs at the back of the store.

  Lincoln took his two bags, went up the stairs, and set them on the floor. When he came down again, he was beaming. “Well Speed,” he said, “I’m moved.” The two men lived together for the next four years.

  This oft-told story captures several essential points about Lincoln’s melancholy after he arrived in Springfield. First, he seemed to give wide rein to sadness, tenderness, and worry. One time, in 1839, he was riding from Christianburg, Illinois, to Springfield with a large group. They were riding two by two, with Lincoln alongside John J. Hardin. The group paused in a thicket of plum and crabapple trees to water their horses. After a while, Hardin came up. The others asked him where Lincoln was. “Oh,” Hardin said, “when I saw him last, he had caught two little birds in his hand, which the wind had blown from their nest, and he was hunting for the nest.” When Lincoln finally joined the group, some of the men laughed at him. “I could not have slept tonight,” he told them earnestly, “if I had not given those two little birds to their mother.” There were other stories like this and, as the laughing men showed, not everyone thought they reflected well on Lincoln. “In many things,” remembered Mary Owens, a woman Lincoln courted, “he was sensitive almost to a fault.”

  Still, Lincoln’s sensitivity worked for him. Speed’s gesture of assistance in the face of his melancholy was not uncommon. “Men at once, at first blush, everywhere saw that Lincoln was a sad, gloomy man, a man of sorrow,” recalled Herndon. “I have often and often heard men say: ‘That man is a man of sorrow, and I really feel for him, I sympathize with him.’ This sadness on the part of Mr. Lincoln and sympathy on the part of the observer were a heart’s magnetic tie between the two.”

  Indeed, when Lincoln was in distress, he could count on receiving aid as surely as he gave it to stray animals. A few months before the encounter in Speed’s store, for example, Lincoln was in session at the Illinois General Assembly, working to pass a bill that would make Springfield the state capital, replacing Vandalia. For a young politician seeking to bring the pork home to his constituents, it was a big opportunity. But four other cities were vying to be the capital. Vandalia wanted to keep its status. And one powerful cabal sought to build a new capital (“Illiopolis”) on land its members owned. “The contest on this Bill was long and severe,” recalled Robert Wilson, one of Lincoln’s colleagues. After Springfield’s opponents tabled the bill until the next session—a blow that was almost impossible to recover from—Lincoln went to the tavern room of his colleague Jesse K. Dubois. “He told me that he was whipped,” Dubois recalled, “that his career was ended.” “I can’t go home without passing that bill,” Lincoln said. “My folks expect that of me, and that I can’t do and I am finished forever.” Dubois suggested a parliamentary maneuver to resuscitate the bill. More important, he pledged his support—giving Lincoln a crucial vote that he hadn’t been able to count on before. “We gave the vote to Lincoln because we liked him,” Dubois explained, “and because we wanted to oblige our friend, and because we recognized his authority as our leader.”

  Lincoln’s friends didn’t merely help him. According to Herndon, they “vied with each other for the pleasure or the honor of assisting him.” Such enthusiasm can be seen in an exchange that took place after the Assembly adjourned. Stopped for the night on the way home, Lincoln tossed and turned so much that he woke one of his traveling companions, William Butler. Butler asked what was the matter. “Well, I will tell you,” Lincoln answered. “All the rest of you have something to look forward to, and all are glad to get home, and will have something to do when you get there. But it isn’t so with me.” Lincoln complained that he was poor and in debt, with no way to get out. “I am going home, Butler, without a thing in the world.” Butler said that he first tried to cheer Lincoln up. Finding that he couldn’t, he went and paid some of Lincoln’s debts, took the young man’s clothes home so his wife could wash them, and insisted that Lincoln come live with him.

  To some extent these men acted out of sympathy. But they also apparently found Lincoln’s melancholy character alluring. Gloom, in the early nineteenth century, was not seen as an absence of cheer. It was, for better and for worse, a unique experience with its own correlates. According to the Encyclopaedia Americana—which Lincoln owned and used—the “melancholic temperament” was characterized by not only gloominess, asceticism, and misanthropy, but also deep reflection, perseverance, and great energy of action. The encyclopedia noted, of all the temperaments, “Each has its advantages and pleasures, with some corresponding drawback.” Aware of the drawbacks, people around Lincoln were also well at
tuned to melancholy’s advantages. To be grave and sensitive—to feel acutely the agony and sweat of the human spirit—was admired, even glorified. “A fitful stain of melancholy,” wrote Edgar Allan Poe, himself no stranger to the experience, “will ever be found inseparable from the perfection of the beautiful.” In the same way that young men today tone their pectoral muscles to better resemble professional athletes, many young men of Lincoln’s day thrust out their emotions so as to resemble the heroes of romantic poetry. Lord Byron was all the rage, not just in London and New York but also on the American frontier. His verse play Manfred began with a soliloquy that instructed:

  Sorrow is Knowledge: they who know the most

  Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth.

  In Byron’s poem “The Dream,” a favorite of Lincoln’s, melancholy is described as “a fearful gift”:

  What is it but the telescope of truth?

  Which strips the distance of its fantasies,

  And brings life near in utter nakedness,

  Making cold reality too real!

  Speaking of what he called the “age of Introversion,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1837, “We are embarrassed with second thoughts; we cannot enjoy any thing for hankering to know whereof the pleasure consists . . . The time is infected with Hamlet’s unhappiness,—‘Sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.’” But Emerson urged that this was only a symptom of a profound opportunity. “I look upon the discontent of the literary class, as a mere announcement of the fact, that they find themselves not in the state of mind of their fathers, and regret the coming state as untried; as a boy dreads the water before he has learned that he can swim.”