Lincoln's Melancholy

by Joshua Wolf Shenk

  Mary Todd was an ambitious woman at a time when courtship was one of the few outlets where women could exercise power. The power was not of the vote, but of the veto. What made Mary Todd ambitious—a dubious compliment for a Victorian female—was how hard she worked to solicit proposals that she could then accept or reject. At some point, she lit on Lincoln, and he on her. Precious little detail exists of their early contact, but they probably met soon after she arrived in town. According to Mrs. Edwards, Lincoln found her sister beguiling and sat silently while Mary led the conversation. She would have had much to talk about that interested him—stories of Henry Clay, for instance, a friend of the Todd family and Lincoln’s political hero. Ninian and Elizabeth Edwards at first favored the match. After all, Lincoln and Todd shared political interests and literary tastes. Abe Lincoln wanted to achieve high political office. Mary Todd often said she was destined to marry a president.

  Often awkward, courtship in the early nineteenth century was awkward in its own special way. For Lincoln’s parents’ generation, families were understood to serve a largely practical purpose. If men and women loved each other, it was an outgrowth of shared responsibility and familiarity—and a matter of luck. With limited choices and no chance of divorce, people had to take a stab at a good match and live with it. But as Lincoln came of age, marriage increasingly became seen as an emotional and spiritual union. Young men and women were being instructed that they should find “true love.” Yet if anyone knew what that meant, there were few good ways to find it. Courtship was fraught with tension, for the moment a man began to “come see” a woman, the prospect of marriage sat in the room with them like an elephant. And there were few opportunities for young couples—at least those who followed the rules—to spend time together alone.

  Meanwhile, declaring an interest in marriage could trigger a massive responsibility. “In nineteenth-century America,” writes Jean Baker, in Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography, “a matrimonial pledge was as legally binding a contract as any commercial agreement, and the right of the rejected to seek damages was a familiar litigation.” Lincoln himself had successfully represented a plaintiff in a “breach of promise” suit. And, of course, once married, there was no turning back. “Love might not be eternal,” Baker writes, “but marriage, with divorce not yet an established civil procedure, was . . . The choice of a bad mate was an irrevocable error.”

  In this environment, letters were one good way for couples to get to know each other. According to Joshua Speed, that’s how Todd and Lincoln began their tortured affair, exchanging notes in the late summer and early fall of 1840. In September and October, when Lincoln was down in “Egypt,” the southern part of Illinois, campaigning for William Henry Harrison, he sent letters back to Springfield. “She darted after him—wrote him,” Speed recalled. “She had taken a fancy to Mr. Lincoln,” said his friend O. H. Browning, “and I always thought she did most of the courting until they became engaged.” Apparently Lincoln expressed enough interest that, by the time he returned to Springfield in November, they were considered an item.

  But he quickly decided he had made a mistake. According to a variety of observers, the proximate cause of Lincoln’s change of heart was a new arrival in town. In the middle of November, Matilda Edwards, a wry, self-assured, pretty eighteen-year-old, came to Springfield for the winter, accompanying her father, a member of the General Assembly. She turned heads with her willowy figure and her blond hair that hung in curls, “like the wind at play with sunbeams,” said one admirer. Like Mary Todd, Matilda Edwards stayed in the Edwards home on the hill—in fact, the two young women probably shared a bed. Mary took note of the new arrival: “a most interesting young lady,” she wrote, “her fascinations, have drawn a concourse of beaux & company round us.”

  Lincoln was among the “concourse of beaux.” “Mr. Lincoln,” said Browning, “became very much attached to her, (Miss Matilda Edwards) and finally fell desperately in love with her.” Yet he judged that, as a matter of honor, he couldn’t approach Edwards—or any other girl—until he secured a “release” from Todd. He may have thought that she, too, desired a release from their engagement. For Mary Todd was still encouraging a number of men in their affections—not just Lincoln, but the Democratic buck Stephen Douglas, a Whig widower named Edwin Webb, and Lincoln’s good friend Joseph Gillespie. “Miss Todd is flourishing largely,” one socialite reported in January. “She has a great many Beaus.”

  Maybe Mary Todd had decided she wanted Lincoln and used the other men to tease out his interest. Maybe she hadn’t yet decided and wanted to keep an open field. Maybe she had committed to Lincoln but strayed herself. “Lincoln’s & Mary’s engagement &c were broken off by her flirtations with [Stephen] Douglas,” offered her sister and brother-in-law in a joint interview. An intriguing remark by Mary herself—and one of very few she made about the troubled courtship—suggested a sense of wrongdoing. “My beloved husband,” she wrote in 1865, “had so entirely devoted himself to me, for two years before my marriage, that I doubtless trespassed, many times & oft, upon his great tenderness & amiability of character.”

  According to Speed, what pained the tender Lincoln was that he wanted out of the relationship, but he didn’t know how to get out. He had a strict sense of rectitude—“especially when it comes to women,” he wrote—and knew that his reputation would suffer if he behaved dishonorably. Mary Todd’s relations, prominent and wealthy Whigs in Kentucky and Illinois, were not people to cross. Finally deciding he had to act, Lincoln wrote her a letter, took it to Speed, and asked him to deliver it to her. When he said no, Lincoln rejoined, “Speed, I always knew you were an obstinate man. If you won’t deliver it I will get someone else to do it.” But Speed wouldn’t give the letter back. “Words are forgotten,” he said, “misunderstood—passed by—not noticed in a private conversation—but once put your words in writing and they stand as a living and eternal monument against you. If you think you have will and manhood enough to go and see her and speak to her what you say in that letter, you may do that.”

  Lincoln did as his friend suggested, but—maybe this is why he wanted to write—he bungled the job. Here is how Speed (the only good source for this exchange) told the story, in an interview, as recorded by Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon: “Went to see ‘Mary’—told her that he did not love her—She rose—and Said ‘The deciever shall be decieved wo is me.’; alluding to a young man She fooled—Lincoln drew her down on his Knee—Kissed her & parted—He going one way & She an other.”

  Some of the details here are unclear: Which young man did she “fool”? Who told Speed about it, Lincoln or Todd? Regardless, the gist of the exchange was plain enough. Intending to break things off, Lincoln had told Todd that he didn’t love her. But when she got upset, he drew her to him and kissed her. When Lincoln reported the exchange to Speed, he said, “The last thing is a bad lick but it cannot now be helped.” In other words, with his gesture of affection, Lincoln made matters more ambiguous than before.

  Here is how Speed reported the next step of this affair, as recorded by Herndon: “Lincoln did Love Miss Edwards—‘Mary’ Saw it—told Lincoln the reason of his Change of mind—heart & soul—released him.” In other words, though Lincoln didn’t have the nerve to say it, Todd saw that he fancied Matilda Edwards. She came to him and told him that she knew what was going on and that he could consider himself freed from any obligations to her. Then, according to both her sister and brother-in-law, she made another point, which proved to be the kicker. “Miss Todd released Lincoln from his Contract,” Ninian Edwards told Herndon, “leaving Lincoln the privilege of renewing it if he wished.” Elizabeth Todd Edwards described the same exchange and added flavor to her sister’s motivation. “The world had it that Mr L backed out. And this placed Mary in a peculiar Situation & to set herself right and to free Mr Lincoln’s mind She wrote a letter to Mr L Stating that She would release him from his Engagements . . . yet She Said that She would hold the question an open one—tha
t is that She had not Changed her mind, but felt as always.”

  The message may sound innocuous, or even kindly. But for Lincoln there was a scolding subtext. He had extended himself to a woman, who still loved him, yet he was dallying with others. “His conscience troubled him dreadfully,” said Browning, “for the supposed injustice he had done, and the supposed violation of his word which he had committed.” Desiring a woman he was not free to approach, bound to a woman he had decided he didn’t love—facing all the while the crack-up of his political career—Lincoln now faced a direct challenge to the one asset that mattered to him above all others, his reputation. He fell apart. “Lincoln went Crazy,” Speed said,”—had to remove razors from his room—take away all Knives and other such dangerous things—&c—it was terrible— was during the Special session of the Ills legislature in 1840.” “Lincoln,” said Ninian Edwards, “went Crazy as a Loon.”

  From here, we need to leap ahead fifteen months. In the interim, Lincoln had helped Joshua Speed through his own emotionally tumultuous engagement. Finally Speed had married, and he wrote to Lincoln that he was “far happier” than he ever expected to be. Lincoln replied, in a letter of March 27, 1842, “I am not going beyond the truth, when I tell you, that the short space it took me to read your last letter, gave me more pleasure, than the total sum of all I have enjoyed since that fatal first of Jany. ‘41. Since then, it seems to me, I should have been entirely happy, but for the never-absent idea that there is one still unhappy whom I have contributed to make so. That still kills my soul. I can not but reproach myself, for even wishing to be happy while she is otherwise.”

  There is no question that Mary Todd was the “one still unhappy,” nor that Lincoln associated her, somehow, with the events surrounding “that fatal first.” An early biographer seized on this connection and assumed that the breakup between Abraham and Mary had taken place on January 1, 1841, sending him into a depression. From the publication of that book, in the early 1870s, until very recently, scholars have made the same assumption.

  When we look at the actual letter, however, questions arise. Lincoln said that the news of Speed’s happiness brought him more pleasure than anything since “that fatal first.” In a long exchange that preceded that remark, Lincoln had been deeply occupied with Speed’s trouble, and he’d repeatedly professed his own sympathetic misery. It bears asking: Might “that fatal first” have referred to something in Speed’s life? Might it allude to something that affected both friends? Might Lincoln’s breakup with Mary Todd have been part of a much larger story?

  With these questions in mind, we return to the available evidence about the winter of 1840–1841 in Springfield. Nothing else suggests that Lincoln and Mary Todd split on January 1, and three pieces of evidence suggest that, at the very least, we should consider the case unsettled.

  First, we have Joshua Speed’s testimony. Speed told Herndon that Lincoln got his fraught release from Mary, then went crazy during the special session of the legislature in 1840. It may be that Speed meant to refer to the whole session, which ran from late November 1840 to early March 1841. More precisely, though, the special session was over on December 5. The fact that Democrats used the session’s endpoint as a pretext to try to kill the state bank—which led to Lincoln’s inglorious window jump—would have made this date memorable.

  Second, we have a letter from Mary Todd, written in December 1840, and its cryptic mention of Lincoln. Referring to changes that had taken place in her world, Todd wrote, “Lincoln’s, lincoln green, have gone to dust.” What on earth did she mean by this? It helps to know that Lincoln green was a style of dyed wool—famously worn by Robin Hood—that originated in Lincoln, England. The phrase “Lincoln green” appears in a passage of Sir Walter Scott’s epic poem Rokeby. It is intriguing to consider that Todd, who loved Scott’s work, was alluding in her letter to this poem, which is the story of a maiden named Matilda, who married a commoner rather than the nobleman to whom she had been promised. In Springfield, Lincoln’s status as the son of a poor farmer—as opposed to the many young burghers about town—was often remarked upon. Using clever shorthand, Todd may have been saying that a connection between her and Lincoln had dissolved and that the commoner was now tied to Matilda Edwards. Or perhaps “gone to dust” signified a mental breakdown, in which a person’s outward character (metaphorically his suit of clothes) vanishes, showing something naked and shocking underneath.

  Third, a recently discovered letter indicates that Lincoln and Todd may have been sixty miles from each other on January 1, 1841. On Christmas Eve day, a party that included Todd and Matilda Edwards traveled from Springfield to Jacksonville, Illinois. A few days later, Matilda’s father, Cyrus Edwards, wrote a letter from Springfield in which he said that the young women “will return on Monday.” This letter was postmarked Tuesday, December 29, 1840. If we assume he didn’t mean Monday, December 28 (which had already passed when the letter was mailed), this puts Mary Todd in Jacksonville until January 4.

  For well over a century, students of Lincoln’s life have accepted the pat story of a breakup on the fatal first and called it the cause of the depression that followed. But in acknowledging that we don’t know when this breakup happened, we soon see that we don’t know why, either. Lincoln’s exchange with Mary Todd, far from being the single precipitant of his trouble, was just one factor among others in the emotional and existential equivalent of a perfect storm.

  This, it bears mentioning, is characteristic of nervous breakdowns generally, including those that end in suicide. However urgently we try to find clear narrative lines—x stress led to y reaction—the picture is never that clear. In the midst of a depressive crisis, the question “What’s wrong?” can be infuriating, because the answer, in the depressive’s mind, is “Everything!” Even the assumption that stresses lead to reactions is problematic, because very often the case is reversed: We might feel bad because something has gotten screwed up. We might screw things up because we feel so bad. Or both.

  When we consider the winter of 1840–1841 with fresh eyes, and mindful of the realities of depression, it is astonishing how much has been left out of traditional accounts. For example, the terrific stress in Lincoln’s political life has, until recently, been considered separately from his emotional turmoil, when it has been considered at all. But the legislative session of 1840–1841 represented an amazing and, we can imagine, devastating turn of events in Lincoln’s career. In the mid-1830s, he had been a rising star, making deals, passing big bills, and coming to lead his party. However, he had gone far out on a limb to advocate and defend the internal improvements scheme, which had manifestly destroyed the state economy. Even a sanguine man in Lincoln’s situation could easily have feared that his career would be over. But as Lincoln wrote in 1840, “You know I am never sanguine.”

  The courtship, too, was more than a minor matter of individual relationships. Any serious romance, even a pleasant one, would have produced great stress. Marriage today is a serious matter for many people, but it’s nothing compared with the early nineteenth century. The fact that it was a lifetime, irreversible commitment was just the start. When a man placed a ring on a woman’s finger, he accepted the burden of supporting a family, both financially and emotionally. This decision brought many young men to question who they were, what they were capable of, and what kinds of lives they were going to lead. Sensitive as he was, Lincoln felt the full weight of these questions.

  Lincoln had a companion on this journey. His intimacy with Joshua Speed was fueled by the momentous questions both faced as they moved toward marriage. This raises yet another issue that made the winter of 1840–1841 such hell, and of all the long-overlooked aspects of this period, it may be the most vital. Even in the best circumstances, there would have been tension between Lincoln and Speed. A friendship like theirs thrived on a transition from boyhood to manhood, and as Anthony Rotundo has shown, the pattern is that once the first of the two friends got married, the friendship fell apart.
It’s as if a ship designed to carry two people over rough waters had to be destroyed at the end of the voyage. That’s fine if you care only about reaching the destination, but it’s awfully hard if you’ve grown attached to the vessel.

  Speed had his own drama. His father had died in March 1840. Around that time, Farmington, his family’s plantation outside Louisville, was hurt badly in the financial downturn. With the price of hemp, its core crop, cut by more than half, Farmington was a “tottering concern,” Speed wrote. His family urged him to come home and help prop it up. But he wasn’t sure what to do. He had lived in Springfield for five years. “I have many friends here,” he wrote to his sister at Farmington, “and while I have not done anything to rank me among the first men here, either for mind or money—I feel confident that I have credit for as much talent as I deserve and I think have made as much money as I could have expected for one with as little age, experience, credit, or capital as I had to start upon.” How much money he’d made wasn’t just an index of his overall success, but a factor to consider as he weighed his future. Part of the job of managing the plantation, as Speed put it, would be “to govern the negroes”—fifty-plus slaves. In Springfield, Speed had a very different life, working as a merchant in a free state. His family’s pressure notwithstanding, he didn’t relish “the life of a farmer,” which, he said, “has always seemed tasteless to me.” Though still undecided, Speed sold his stock in the store and would soon choose “to go or stay, as I think best.”

  Here’s where it gets interesting. In the middle of the letter, beginning a new paragraph, Speed wrote, “Two clear blue eyes, a brow as fair as Palmyra marble touched by the chisel of Praxalites—Lips so fresh, fair, and lovely that I am jealous even of the minds that kiss them—a form as perfect as that of the Venus de Medicis—a Mind clear as a bell a voice bewitchingly soft and sonorous and a smile so sweet lovely and playful and countenance and soul shining through it . . . All these charms combined in one young lady if nothing else interposed would be enough to keep me here—Would they not!”