Lincoln's Melancholy

by Joshua Wolf Shenk

  In Lincoln’s time, the word “melancholy” was used far more often to describe men than women—unlike today, when nearly twice as many women as men are diagnosed with major depression. In both cases, melancholy highlights distinctive aspects of a culture’s prevailing view of masculinity. This point is worth some attention, because our conception of masculinity today is so problematic. Men often resist articulating their problems directly, weighed down by a vision of maleness that precludes such confession. “Men are not supposed to be vulnerable,” writes the psychologist Terrence Real, an authority on depression in men. “Pain is something we are to rise above. He who has been brought down by it will most likely see himself as shameful.” Yet, far from eliminating trouble, such reticence seems to contribute to it. While only half as many men as women are diagnosed with depression, men kill themselves at four times the rate of women. Psychologists connect the often muted depression of men with all manner of destructive behavior. Women, meanwhile, hardly benefit from having exclusive domain over sensitive feelings. Both sexes, as Real says, must “halve themselves.” Both are kept from being whole.

  The modern understanding of depression, which segregates its manifestation as a disease and its manifestation as a thoughtful, reflective sadness, is certainly connected to these overly narrow gender roles. In the late nineteenth century, Jennifer Radden explains, the “human, redeeming, ambiguous (and masculine)” aspects of melancholy became separated from “aberrant, barren, mute (and feminine) depression.” But through Lincoln, we can glimpse a time in which these two aspects of melancholy could be integrated in a man’s life. Along with his overt feeling, Lincoln impressed people with his physical strength and athletic prowess. Nor did he shy from getting aggressive. One time, Lincoln told an irascible crowd at a political rally to let his colleague speak, and vowed to whip anyone who tried to take him down. No one doubted that Lincoln meant it.

  In Lincoln’s day, melancholy could be a valuable aspect of a man’s life. In a letter in the spring of 1837, Lincoln referred to the prospect of some old friends leaving the area. “That gives me the hypo,” he wrote, “whenever I think of it.” The word he used was an abbreviation of hypochondriasis, a disease akin to melancholia. But “the hypo”—also “the hyp” or simply “hypos”—used as Lincoln did in this letter, had its own flavor. It signified an existential unrest, a gloomy or morbid state that lurked in the background of one’s life, but also a connection to insight and a drive for heroic action. The opening passage of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick contains a famous use of “hypos” that helps us understand not only a forgotten phrase but a forgotten character type. “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth,” Ishmael declares, “whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to the sea as soon as I can.” Ishmael’s dour moods led to adventure. And when he found the Pequod, he reflected explicitly on the relationship between sadness and grandeur. “Take my word for it,” Ishmael said upon seeing Ahab’s ship, “you never saw such a rare old craft as this same rare old Pequod . . . A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.”

  The modern idea that depression is unmanly also had some resonance in Lincoln’s age. In the midst of a hard time, Joshua Speed once wrote, “I have suffered so much of late from sick head ache and hypo that I am almost un-manned.” Lincoln later used the same phrase in the same way. The verb “un-man” is defined in a nineteenth-century dictionary as “to break or subdue the manly spirit in; to cause to despond; to dishearten; to make womanish.” In other words, there was a sense that truly going off the deep end—being unable to work or function, as happens in the disease of depression—ran contrary to true masculinity. The important point is that, then as now, moods were often tied to gender roles.

  Lincoln’s melancholy emerged at a time when both his feelings and his identity as a man were in flux. Young men like him and Speed were expected to undertake a journey from boyhood to manhood, which also involved a journey from the feminine realm of passion and emotion (extolled by romanticism) to the masculine realm of judgment and reason (the ideals of the Enlightenment). In other words, it maybe that Lincoln began to express his melancholy at a time when he had especially wide cultural latitude to do so.

  In order to understand Lincoln’s melancholy, we need to understand the common features of such a transition. In a society where contact with women was limited, it was common for young men, after leaving home but before marriage, to pair off and form a special bond. As Anthony Rotundo explains in American Manhood, these friends helped each other weather the storms of their age. They gossiped, philosophized, and fretted to one another. One such pair of special male friends, Daniel Webster and James Harvey Bingham, addressed each other as “Lovely Boy” and “Dearly Beloved.” “My heart is now so full of matters and things impatient to be whispered into the ear of a trusty friend,” Webster wrote to Bingham, “that I think I could pour them into yours till it ran over.” Compare this with Lincoln’s message to Joshua Speed: “You know my desire to befriend you is everlasting—that I will never cease, while I know how to do any thing.” The two were bedmates, allies, and confidants. Many people who knew Lincoln said it was a relationship that had no par in his life. Speed himself said, “No two men were ever more intimate.”

  Temperamental similarities probably deepened their tie. Both young men were melancholy, and drawn to the reflections of poetry and philosophy. Both were ambitious and had what Lincoln pronounced “the peculiar misfortune . . . to dream dreams of Elysium far exceeding all that any thing earthly can realize.” An expansive Speed once described himself “like the rich fruit of the tropicks that bursts its vine because of its richness and luxurance—or like a tea kettle that is lifting its top and losing its contents by the constant boiling and evaporation within.—or like a china pitcher filled with ice water and oozing through the glass.” Lincoln noted how, in his friend, “excessive pleasure” was sometimes accompanied “with a painful counterpart at times.” They took turns consoling each other when the bottom fell out.

  Because Lincoln and Speed were so intimate, and shared a bed, people sometimes assume they were homosexual. The conversation has been amplified in recent years. In 1999, the playwright Larry Kramer declared that Lincoln and Speed were lovers, quoting newly found Speed documents to prove it. News spread around the world of what the Independent of London called Lincoln’s “outing.” But Kramer has since quietly gone on record admitting that he invented the documents for a work of fiction. More recently, the late sex researcher C. A. Tripp concluded, in The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, that Lincoln measured a “5” on the Kinsey scale, where “1” is entirely heterosexual and “6” is entirely homosexual. That assertion, too, has more bluster than substance. Tripp’s evidence adds up to the fact that Lincoln spent a good deal of time with men, sometimes sharing beds with them and often expressing fondness for them. On this basis, precious few men in the early nineteenth century would not be called gay.

  The question, as it has recently been framed, of whether Lincoln was homosexual would make a good topic for a high school debating competition, because it will admit of no proof in either direction. We might as well undertake to answer definitively whether Macbeth was gay. The text of the play does not negate the possibility—and indeed, once considered, it has a certain salacious appeal. Sure he was married, but so are many gay men. And didn’t he say to a male player in act 3, “I to your assistance do make love”? Clearly the man had a deep conflict. Perhaps he had a deep secret, too. But with characters in plays, as with people in history, our understanding is limited by available texts. Intuition and common sense can help, but only
if they’re leavened by an awareness that the world we see “onstage” is different from the world we live in.

  This, of course, applies to Lincoln’s melancholy as much as to his sex life. For instance, Lincoln often referred, in various letters, to being “anxious.” And he frequently began letters by deprecating what would follow. But neither of these points illustrates his melancholy, for the simple reason that they were both so ordinary. The same is true with men sharing beds. In tight living quarters—Lincoln grew up in a one-room cabin, and even a wealthy family like the Speeds had only two bedrooms for nine children—many bodies shared the same covers. And before the invention of the coil spring mattress in 1865, a decent mattress was a real luxury. (A nice one had straw, horsehair, and feather stuffing, with cotton or linen ticking, carefully stitched and buttoned.) Not only families but strangers at inns and soldiers in the field often slept snugly against each other. Bed-sharing, in other words, was about as common as, and indeed was very similar to, the way that people today share apartments. Do some flatmates have sex with each other? Of course. Does the fact that two people share an apartment tell us anything about whether they are having a sexual relationship? Of course not.

  Given how many homosexuals remain in the closet, it might sound like homophobia, or a refusal to deal with plain realities, to insist that it’s not possible to know whether Lincoln and Speed were lovers. On the contrary, a frank avowal of our ignorance is the first step in honestly dealing with Lincoln’s sexuality. Jonathan Ned Katz has studied male eroticism as it existed before “homosexuality”—a word coined in 1892 which, Katz argues, became associated with a discrete identity only in the early twentieth century. As Katz makes clear, the subject forces us to strip away modern assumptions. “I do start with a present interest in men’s erotic and affectional relationships with men,” Katz writes. “I also assume that such relationships existed in some form in this past era”—that is, 1820 to 1892. “But I assume, as well, that I do not know the particular historical character of these relationships as they existed and functioned within the sexual and gender systems of the nineteenth-century United States. Back then, they may have been socially organized, named, and perceived in ways quite foreign to us.”

  Lincoln’s society had different baselines about how to name, and how to conceive of, same-sex relationships. We don’t know what Lincoln and Speed did in their bed together. But if, say, they snuggled or held hands, they wouldn’t have had to decide on this basis about being different from other men. “In the early nineteenth century,” explains Anthony Rotundo, “there wasn’t a line in the sand between those who were affectionate with other men and those who weren’t.” While sharing a bed, Speed and Lincoln were occupied with finding wives. Speed also slept with prostitutes and at one point “kept” a pretty girl as an employee, from whom he received sexual favors. Indeed, Lincoln’s good friend was known as an “old rat” in his predilection for professional women. Lincoln may well have slept with prostitutes, too.

  Lincoln and Speed had an intimate friendship, buoyed by an emotional and intellectual connection. When we look at the friendship from their point of view, we see that the labels “homosexual” and “heterosexual” obscure more than they reveal. “The twentieth-century tendency,” writes Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, is “to view human love and sexuality within a dichotomized universe of deviance and normality, genital and platonic love.” But this, she argues, “is alien to the emotions and attitudes of the nineteenth century.” In her study of female relationships of the period, she found women who clearly loved each other whose “eminently respectable and socially conservative families” acknowledged the love and found it compatible with heterosexual marriage. “Emotionally and cognitively,” Smith-Rosenberg writes, “their heterosocial and homosocial worlds were complementary.”

  While the tensions of his sexual interests remain largely hidden from us, the tensions of Lincoln’s emotional life are in plain view. He embodied all the potential and all the danger of a melancholy man. Speed, who introduced Lincoln to the poetry of Byron, said his friend seemed “artless,” like the title character of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron’s famous epic poem. “If I was asked what it was that threw such a charm around him,” Speed wrote, “I would say that it was his perfect naturalness. He could act no part but his own.” Speed noted how Lincoln’s sadness coexisted with tremendous talent. “I was fresh from Kentucky then and I had heard most of the great orators,” he later recalled. But after seeing Lincoln speak, “it struck me then, as it seems to me now, that I never heard a more effective speaker . . . The large crowd, seemed to be swayed by him, as he pleased.”

  In his late twenties, Lincoln was an up-and-comer, giving form to his own heroic ideal. He became a lawyer and developed his practice. He rose in the legislature to the point of leading his party. And he thundered on the vital causes that stirred him. “If ever I feel the soul within me elevate and expand to those dimensions not wholly unworthy of its Almighty Architect,” he said in a speech on the national bank, “it is when I contemplate the cause of my country, deserted by all the world beside, and I standing up boldly and alone and hurling defiance at her victorious oppressors.”

  A palpable sensitivity underlay such bravado. At a debate in 1840, Lincoln faced Stephen Douglass, a young star for the Democrats. (He later dropped the second s from his last name.) Both sides thought that Lincoln did poorly. The Democratic newspaper said he “left the stump literally whipped off of it.” One of Lincoln’s allies, Joseph Gillespie, said, “Lincoln did not come up to the requirements of the occasion.” Gillespie knew Lincoln to be “very sensitive” on these matters, and in this instance found him “conscious of his failure.” “I never saw any man so much distressed,” Gillespie said. Lincoln begged for another chance to speak, and his allies gave it to him. Surveying the thin crowd—it was the day after Christmas—Lincoln said that he found the low turnout “peculiarly embarassing,” and he wondered aloud if people had come merely to “spare me of mortification.” “This circumstance,” he said, “casts a damp upon my spirits, which I am sure I shall be unable to overcome during the evening.” Yet his speech, Gillespie said, “transcended our highest expectations.” Afterward, Lincoln wrote to his law partner in Washington, “Well, I made a big speech, which is in progress of printing in pamphlet form. To enlighten you and the rest of the world, I shall send you a copy when it is finished.”

  It is striking how quickly Lincoln’s dim pessimism could give way to supreme confidence. This, too, was consistent with the melancholy character, which gave a person access to the deep channels of the soul—the waters of sadness, the bedrock of constancy, the gold of mirth. Because he felt deeper and thought harder than others, Lincoln could be expected to alternate among states more quickly, returning, more often than not, to sadness, disquiet, perturbation, and gloom. After his first few years in Springfield, Lincoln told Herndon that he felt destined to be a great man. At the same time, he said that he feared he would come to ruin.

  A hot topic in the literature on depression is whether—quite aside from what happens to people after they recover—the incidents of disease themselves have any use. One theory of evolutionary psychology holds that depression may serve as a response to need. Its premise is that while we use our brains and bodies to think and behave in the modern world, they developed in what’s known as the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness. This “environment” wasn’t a particular place or time, but the thousands of years during which the human species evolved. According to the theory of natural selection, qualities that help people survive and reproduce tend to spread in the species. Qualities that get in the way of survival and reproduction tend to die out. In the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, depression might have helped people get things they wanted or needed when other strategies, such as aggression and persuasion, were less effective. It might also have quashed ineffective behaviors and forced useful change.

  This isn’t to suggest that our ancestors �
�faked” depression. To the contrary, the painful, debilitating—and real—nature of the condition is precisely what would have spurred others to help or the depressed person to change. Evolutionary psychologists suggest that the adaptive aspect of depression can still be seen in the modern world. Lincoln’s case could be considered an illustration. His melancholy emerged at a time of profound need, and it seems to have helped him thrive. Feeling bad was part of what helped him do well, as his moods consistently provoked empathy, assistance, and admiration.

  Many dispute this evolutionary perspective, claiming that for every conceivable advantage depression might convey, there are countless undeniable drawbacks. And for whatever reason it arises, depression can quickly take on a life of its own. Whether we look for an explanation to neuroplasticity (the ability of neurons to “reorganize” themselves) or the psychology of habit, it is plain that thoughts, feelings, and behavior beget like thoughts, feelings, and behavior. And unlike, say, the pain of a broken leg—which is linked to a specific stimulus and recedes in proportion to the recession of that stimulus—melancholy, by its nature, is free-floating, vague, and uncertain. Part of the appeal of melancholy in the early nineteenth century is that it was associated with a kind of reserved power that could take spectacular outward expression. Yet there was also ample awareness of the damage that could come from that power when, rather than moving outward to help a person meet some need, it ricocheted around inside—to use an anachronistic metaphor—like a mortar shell in a tank.