Lincoln's Melancholy Read online

  Suicide was on Lincoln’s mind in his late twenties. He spoke of it frequently during his first breakdown, and the “suicide watch” shows that his friends took him seriously. As we have seen, he confessed to his friend and colleague Robert Wilson that he thought so often of suicide—and so seriously—that he didn’t carry a knife in his pocket for fear of what he might do with it. In a famous passage of a speech in January 1838, Lincoln addressed the possibility of self-destruction on a national scale. Arguing that the United States could never be vanquished by foes from abroad, he urged, “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

  According to Joshua Speed, Lincoln addressed the subject of suicide in another literary work, a piece not on national destruction but on self-destruction. Speaking to a biographer after Lincoln’s death, Speed said he was certain that Lincoln had written a poem on suicide and published it in the Sangamo Journal. But Speed said that he wasn’t sure about the date. It might have been 1840 or 1841 or, Speed said finally, 1838.

  For 139 years the poem remained undiscovered. One reason is that an influential early biography assigned it an incorrect date. Another reason is that for many decades Lincoln scholars were busy throwing out evidence relating to his melancholy, rather than seeking new material. But recently an independent scholar in Missouri named Richard Lawrence Miller noticed the poem and brought it to light.

  On August 25, 1838, the Sangamo Journal carried its usual mix of ads, news, and editorials. Wallace and Diller’s Drug and Chemical Store, at 4 Hoffman’s Row, had just received a fresh supply of sperm oil, fishing rods, and French cologne. L. Higby, the town collector, gave notice that all must pay their street tax or face “trouble.” And atop the news page, in the sixth column, between a report from the Schuyler County Presbytery and the Sangamon County Agricultural Society, the paper carried an unsigned poem titled “The Suicide’s Soliloquy.”

  The lines are preceded by a note that explains that they were found “near the bones” of an apparent suicide in a deep forest by the Sangamon River. The conceit, in other words, is that this is a recovered suicide note. We learn from the poem that the woebegone narrator came to the riverbank to leap from the metaphorical brink between anguished thought and oblivion. As the poem begins, he announces his intention:

  Here, where the lonely hooting owl

  Sends forth his midnight moans,

  Fierce wolves shall o’er my carcase growl,

  Or buzzards pick my bones.

  No fellow-man shall learn my fate,

  Or where my ashes lie;

  Unless by beasts drawn round their bait,

  Or by the ravens’ cry.

  Yes! I’ve resolved the deed to do,

  And this the place to do it:

  This heart I’ll rush a dagger through

  Though I in hell should rue it!

  Often understood as an emotional condition, depression is, to those who experience it, largely characterized by its thoughts. William Styron says his depression was like a storm in his brain, punctuated by a thunder of self-critical, fearful, despairing thoughts—one clap following another in an endless night. Oppressed by these thoughts, people often become hopeless. Hopelessness, in an extreme form, leads people to think that only one thing can break the cycle, and that is suicide. In what psychologists call “cognitive restriction,” all the world’s possibilities become narrowed to just two: whether to live or to die. “The single most dangerous word in all of suicidology,” writes Edwin Shneidman, who founded the field of suicide studies, “is the four-letter word only” as in “only one thing to do . . . only way to get away from it . . . jump off something good and high.”

  Lincoln clearly knew the peculiar thought habits that are characteristic of depression. In 1842, called upon to comfort a friend in the midst of a severe depression, Lincoln wrote of “that intensity of thought, which will some times wear the sweetest idea thread-bare and turn it to the bitterness of death.” “The Suicide’s Soliloquy” is an eloquent illustration of such a torturous cycle of thoughts.

  To ease me of this power to think,

  That through my bosom raves,

  I’ll headlong leap from hell’s high brink

  And wallow in its waves.

  The narrator of the poem makes a formal argument. He’s willing to trade life on earth for life in hell. Many authors today would use “hell” as a metaphor for a hard place. In Lincoln’s world, most people considered hell an actual place where one’s soul would be subject to unending anguish and torture—conditions worse than a human being could conceive. Knowing how he strays from the path to heaven, the narrator fully expects an “endless night” of “frightful screams, and piercing pains,” with devils burning and whipping him. But he cannot be dissuaded. “Think not with tales of hell to fright / Me, who am damn’d on earth!” the poem insists, before resolving in orgiastic imagery of the self-murder:

  Sweet steel! Come forth from out of your sheath,

  And glist’ning, speak your powers;

  Rip up the organs of my breath,

  And draw my blood in showers!

  I strike! It quivers in that heart

  Which drives me to this end;

  I draw and kiss the bloody dart,

  My last—my only friend!

  Without an original manuscript or a letter in which ownership is claimed, no unsigned piece can be attributed definitively to an author. But the context points strongly to Lincoln. The reasons are, first, that it fits Joshua Speed’s date; second, that its syntax, tone, reasoning, and references are characteristic of Lincoln; and third, that the poem has the same meter as Lincoln’s other published verse. A number of scholars who have closely studied Lincoln in this period say that the poem rings true.

  What strengthens the case is that the poem is illustrative of several paradoxical features of Lincoln’s melancholy in his late twenties, which in turn illustrate the paradox of melancholy more generally. He often evinced both the pain of a sufferer from depression and the curiosity of an observer. He articulated a sense of himself as degraded and humiliated, but also, somehow, special and grand. And though the character of this poem chooses death by the dagger, the author of the poem—using his tool, the pen—gave voice to the impulse toward life. While the poem authentically portrays the suicidal mind in many respects, in one respect it falls short. Most suicidal people don’t have a sense of what will come next. In particular, writes Edwin Shneidman, “The idea of Hell does not ordinarily enter into suicide . . . The destination (or concern) is not to go anywhere, except away. The goal is to stop the flow of intolerable consciousness; not to continue in an afterlife or an eternity. ‘Escape’ does not mean to escape from one torture chamber to enter another. In suicide the goal is to achieve a peace of mindlessness.”

  It might seem that writing a poem on suicide would be a sign of danger. In fact, Lincoln’s poem both expressed his connection with such a morbid state of mind and, to some extent, announced a mastery over it. This is consistent with a pattern often observed by clinicians after a first severe episode of depression: people who struggle to recover take some pride in their ability to have overcome such a dismal time. If a second severe episode hits, it can be much worse. “Depression is the most difficult when people get better and then get sick again,” says the psychiatrist Nassir Ghaemi. “They experience getting well. They hope that they’ll stay well. And the next depression is all the harder. They just can’t bear it.”

  Chapter 3

  I Am Now the Most Miserable Man Living

  THE EVENTS SURROUNDING January 1, 1841, are among the most often mentioned, and the most frequently misunderstood, episodes in Lincoln’s life. Countless works aver that, on that day, he split up with his fiancée, Mary Todd, then fell into an intense but shortlived depression, during which he missed work, made a spectacle of himself around town, and wrote a letter declaring, “I am now the most miserable ma
n living.”

  In fact, it’s unclear what happened on the day that Lincoln later referred to as “that fatal first of Jany. ‘41.” Rather than a clear reference to a known event, Lincoln’s phrase is better understood as the suggestive headline over a tumultuous, transformative period in his life—a time when a series of interwoven personal and professional crises stripped from him nearly every layer of his fragile identity and threw him into a profound, long-lasting depression. At a time when he had drawn closer than ever to suicide, Lincoln submitted himself to the care of a medical doctor, only to emerge from the “treatment” worse than when he went in.

  It is essential to get to the truth of this story—and to acknowledge where the truth is elusive—because the episode is so essential to Lincoln’s life. The crisis, or series of crises, proved to be a turning point. It marked the end of Lincoln’s youth, with its dramatic fits of public melancholy, and the beginning of his manhood, with a quiet, weary suffering that many witnessed but few could understand. It marked the end of his startling rise as a provincial politician and the beginning of a long, slow trudge to find a voice in the affairs of the nation. Far from a simple period of sickness and recovery, it was a profound testing for Lincoln. In this period, he asked in stark terms whether he must die. And he arrived at a hard-fought clarity about the reason he would live.

  During Lincoln’s rise as a state politician in the late 1830s, the country’s economy was booming, and nowhere more than in Illinois. In just ten years the state’s population tripled, as immigrants from the eastern states and Europe spilled into the prairies. Stoking the fires of optimism, the Illinois General Assembly passed, and the governor signed, a bill to create an extensive system of rails, roads, and canals. The law authorized $11 million in bonds (more than $200 million in modern dollars) to finance it all. The fever for such projects—known as “internal improvements”—had spread from the East, where the Erie Canal, which opened in 1825, put New York City on the path to become the world’s great commercial center. The canal’s champion, DeWitt Clinton, a ten-time mayor of the city and three-time governor of the state, became a national hero. Lincoln showed his ambition, and his bravado, when he told a colleague that he wanted to be the DeWitt Clinton of Illinois.

  While many politicians backed internal improvements for political or pecuniary gain, Lincoln was a true believer. At first, this redounded to his advantage. But in 1837, the United States fell into one of the worst financial depressions of its young history. Across the country, scores of banks failed. Unemployment and ruined fortunes led to food riots. In Illinois, which had been propped up by land speculation and massive state spending, the debt exploded from $400,000 in 1836 to $6.5 million in 1838—compared with a puny $150,000 in annual revenue.

  Early in the crisis, erstwhile backers abandoned the internal improvements program. But Lincoln fought to expand it. When the canals and roads were finished, he argued, the state would reap the rewards, so it ought to endure the short-term pain. Thus Lincoln tied his reputation even more closely to a disastrous policy. By the fall of 1839, with the debt continuing to rise and with mounting evidence of corruption among private builders, the projects were shut down—“without benefit of clergy,” Lincoln noted sardonically. By the end of 1840, the state was a wreck. Bank-issued currency was worthless. The state debt now exceeded $13.6 million. The mere interest on those loans exceeded the state’s annual revenue.

  Lincoln’s career suffered with the program he had strongly advocated. In August 1840, he was reelected to the legislature—but narrowly, with the fewest votes of any successful candidate. His colleagues frankly acknowledged that he, with the other partisans for internal improvements, would not be a viable candidate for higher office. That same season, Lincoln lost the biggest political fight of his young career when William Henry Harrison, the Whig candidate for president, lost Illinois, despite Lincoln’s ferocious politicking. (Harrison did win the White House.) Before Lincoln returned to Springfield, he spent most of the year traveling, going over hard roads, eating lousy food, giving political speeches to mostly hostile crowds, and scrounging up legal work to pay his bills. “In short,” writes Douglas Wilson, “arriving in Springfield in November 1840, Abraham Lincoln must have been physically and emotionally exhausted.”

  But he got no relief. Along with a stiff workload in the courts—in December, he had nine cases before the state supreme court alone—Lincoln had to serve as Whig floor leader for a special session of the legislature, which convened on November 23 to address the debt crisis. Lincoln put forth a bill—“with great diffidence,” he said—to borrow more money and raise new taxes in order to deal with the stupefying state debt. While he worked to put out one political fire, a new one erupted. During the economic boom, the state bank had issued paper currency that, in theory, could be exchanged at any time for “specie”—actual silver or gold. With the economic collapse, however, the bank had put out far more paper money than it could support. The Assembly had granted a reprieve—a suspension of specie payments—that kept the bank alive. By law, specie payments would resume when the legislature adjourned. Everyone assumed that would be the following year, when the regular session ended. But in a maneuver to crush the bank—a pillar of the Whig program—the Democrats moved to formally adjourn the special session, forcing the bank to come to account months earlier than previously expected.

  With the vote set for Saturday, December 5, the final day of the special session, the Whigs knew they would lose. In a gambit to prevent a quorum, they left the building, with Lincoln and Joseph Gillespie remaining inside to manage things. According to the Democratic newspaper, the Illinois State Register, Lincoln “appeared to enjoy the embarrassment of the House” when it seemed that the vote would be hijacked. Then the sergeant at arms, who had police powers, went out and rounded up the absent members. A new count, including Lincoln and Gillespie, showed exactly sixty-one people in the room—just the number to achieve a quorum. Lincoln, said the Register, “suddenly looked very grave . . . The conspiracy having failed, Mr. Lincoln came under great excitement, and having attempted and failed to get out at the door, very unceremoniously raised the window and jumped out.” Mocking him, the Register joked that Lincoln was probably not hurt, “as it was noticed that his legs reached nearly from the window to the ground!”

  Lincoln not only lost a key fight but made a fool of himself in the process. And the political pressure did not let up. During the regular session, which convened on December 7, the Democrats put forth a plan to pack the state courts and won. Lincoln tried to unseat the Democratic public printer and lost. In the latter campaign, Lincoln learned that one of his Whig colleagues, Andrew McCormack, planned to go against him. Departing sharply from his usual cool, determined tone, Lincoln declared his “utter astonishment” at McCormack’s plans. “It can not be, that one so true, firm, and unwavering as you have ever been, can for a moment think of such a thing . . . All our friends are ready to cut our throats about it.” Lincoln’s composure had begun to unwind—no surprise, given that this career crisis coincided with an equally grave, confusing, and stressful period in his personal life.

  After Ann Rutledge’s death, Lincoln had drawn close to marriage once, with disastrous results. He courted a bright, witty, wealthy young woman named Mary Owens, but quickly lost interest and found himself in a painful dilemma. On the one hand, he thought he’d committed to the marriage and, he wrote, “I made a point of honor and conscience in all things, to stick to my word.” On the other hand, he didn’t want to marry the girl. “Through life I have been in no bondage, either real or imaginary from the thraldom of which I so much desired to be free,” he wrote. Finally, he proposed, and Mary Owens refused him. This made him think that maybe he loved her after all.

  Lincoln said at the end of the affair that he’d never marry, because “I can never be satisfied with any one who would be block-head enough to have me.” Practical complications compounded these psychological ones. Compared with a rural ou
tpost like New Salem, Springfield was a hive of social activity, but the cast of characters in a town of only a few thousand was still sharply limited. It was not unlike scenes in many Victorian novels in which the entrance of an eligible figure puts everyone in a dither.

  Though awkward with women, Lincoln gamely continued to try to find a mate. Joshua Speed, the scion of a wealthy Kentucky family, helped usher Lincoln into one locus of courtship in Springfield: the hilltop home of Ninian Edwards, the son of Illinois’s former territorial governor, and his wife, Elizabeth Edwards, the daughter of the prominent Kentucky banker Robert Todd. “Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Speed were frequently at our house,” Mrs. Edwards recalled, and they “seemed to enjoy themselves in their conversation beneath the dense shade of our forest trees.” Late in 1839, Elizabeth Edwards’s younger sister, Mary Todd, came from Lexington to stay on indefinitely. Twenty years old, with light brown hair, blue eyes, and long lashes, she immediately made her presence known. She was witty, daring, politically astute—and a terrific flirt. Her younger cousin, Presley Judson Edwards, remembered that “if there were several gentlemen in the room with her, each one seemed to think he had received a special notice from Miss Todd.” Her brother-in-law Ninian Edwards said bluntly, “She could make a bishop forget his prayers.”