On January 22, Lincoln went to a political meeting and heard some news that concerned Stuart’s prospects for reelection. He wrote him again on January 23, but he began with an apology: “From the deplorable state of my mind at this time, I fear I shall give you but little satisfaction.” Lincoln delivered the political news. Then he stopped writing for a time. When he started again, his handwriting was smaller and he pressed harder on the page. “For not giving you a general summary of news,” he wrote, “you must pardon me, it is not in my power to do so. I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I can not tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me.”
Assigning undue credit to Lincoln’s medical treatment imposes an unjustified endpoint on his crisis of the winter of 1840–1841. It is true that, at the end of January 1841, as the worst of the cold weather lifted, he got hold of himself enough to get back to work. He made a morbid joke of it. “Dear Stuart,” he wrote to his law partner on February 3. “You see by this, that I am neither dead nor quite crazy yet.” The stress on Lincoln had not abated, however. He still had to resolve what a friend called his “embrigglement” with Mary Todd. In March 1841, a friend remembered seeing Lincoln “hanging about—moody—silent & &c. The question in his mind was Have ‘I incurred any obligation to marry that woman.’” Speed, too, was depressed, complaining of his “sick head ache and hypo” and pining away for Matilda Edwards, who rebuffed him. In early March, he acknowledged the game was up. “All feeling is dead and dust,” he wrote. In a deep funk, he wrote home about the “treachery of false friends,” which he connected to his rejection. In April, Speed left for Kentucky and had another attack of the hypo aboard the boat.
Politically, Lincoln may have been relieved when the legislative session drew to an end in early March. But he could not have been encouraged by his prospects in the wake of a ruined economy and a Democratic stranglehold on state offices. In fact, it would be another six years before Lincoln again took public office. In Washington, John Stuart set about trying to get him a posting overseas, as chargé d’affaires in New Granada (now Colombia). Lincoln told him to go ahead, “as I fear I shall be unable to attend to any bussiness here, and a change of scene might help me.”
Though Lincoln’s public histrionics did not last, his melancholy did. In June 1841, Mary Todd wrote that Lincoln had been avoiding “the gay world” for months. She wished that he would “once more resume his Station in Society,” and, in a reference to the brooding king-poet of Shakespeare’s Richard II, “that ‘Richard’ should be himself again.” In July, Speed wrote to his friend William Butler in Springfield, “Say to Mrs. Butler I’m glad to hear Lincoln is on the mend”—indicating that, last he heard, his friend still had some serious mending to do. In a move that observers described as a kind of convalescence, Lincoln traveled to Louisville in July and August, to spend five weeks on the Speed estate outside town. Throughout Lincoln’s visit, he was “moody & hypochondriac . . . at times very melancholy,” Speed said. Speed’s mother, no stranger to melancholy, noticed it and tried to comfort Lincoln. Indeed, the empathy Lincoln received from the Speed family was probably unlike anything he had experienced before. He knew the kindness of friends and strangers, but never from quite such a warm, bright, well-read, and close-knit group.
Farmington was less like a farm than a private village. Approaching it from Bardstown Road, one traveled down a long drive lined with locust and walnut trees. On the grounds, slaves planted and picked hemp, made rope and bags, and cooked meals for the family in a kitchen house next to Mrs. Speed’s formal garden. At the center of the property was a redbrick home built in the Federal style; its rooms had fourteen-foot ceilings and smooth poplar floors. Lincoln had seen such luxury before, but always from the outside. Here he was made to feel one of the family. The Speeds provided him with a horse and assigned a slave to be his valet. At their mahogany dining table, they served him saddle of mutton and peaches and cream.
When he left Farmington, Lincoln saw something dramatically at odds with the luxury he had just known. He and Speed took the steamboat Lebanon down the Ohio River to St. Louis. They shared passage with a slave trader, who had a dozen “negroes,” as Lincoln called them, in chains. After Lincoln got home, he wrote a letter to Mary Speed, Joshua’s sister, and discussed these slaves. This letter is the earliest extended statement by Lincoln on enslaved African Americans, thirteen years before he made the future of slavery a major part of his public life, and twenty years before he became president.
While this letter is often quoted, it has rarely been placed in the context of Lincoln’s philosophical journey in the midst of his melancholy. Indeed, Lincoln brings up the slaves to illustrate an idea. “By the way,” he began, “a fine example was presented on board the boat for contemplating the effect of condition upon human happiness.” The condition of these slaves could hardly have been worse. Chained together “like so many fish upon a trot-line,” they had been torn away from their homes and families, to be taken to “where the lash of the master is proverbially more ruthless and unrelenting than any other where.” Yet despite this, Lincoln wrote, “They were the most cheerful and apparently happy creatures on board. One, whose offence for which he had been sold was an over-fondness for his wife, played the fiddle almost continually; and the others danced, sung, cracked jokes, and played various games with cards from day to day. How true it is that ‘God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,’ or in other words, that He renders the worst of human conditions tolerable, while He permits the best, to be nothing better than tolerable.”
Lincoln’s description did not go deeper than what was apparent to him, not presuming to account for the inner state of the slaves. And he was moved by the contrast with his own condition. A free man, relatively prosperous, just ending five weeks in luxury’s lap, and he was quite unhappy. The slaves, treated abominably, at least showed cheer—the appearance of happiness. Later, he would refer again to the slaves he encountered on the boat, profess that the sight was a “torment” to him, and justify his political position in part on that emotional connection. But at the time, Lincoln articulated no political point of view. His mind was elsewhere, trying to construct, from the throes of difficulty and uncertainty, a way of understanding the world and his place in it. In these early musings, Lincoln was still searching to understand who he was, where he was going in the world, and, indeed, whether he could survive. Yet this self-centered concern with his own suffering led him, slowly, to see and grapple with the suffering around him.
Previously, Lincoln had responded to his troubles by seeking help from others, either explicitly or implicitly. Now he spent an increasing amount of time alone. “Today, the fact that isolation can be therapeutic is seldom mentioned in textbooks of psychiatry,” writes Anthony Storr, in Solitude: A Return to the Self. Yet, Storr points out, the capacity to be alone, sometimes for long periods, can be profoundly important, as people come to terms with loss, sort out their ideas, or go through serious change. “That solitude promotes insight as well as change,” Storr continues, “has been recognized by the great religious leaders”—including the Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed—“who have usually retreated from the world before returning to it to share what has been revealed to them.”
Lincoln, in his early thirties, was decades away from attaining the sort of wisdom that would justify comparison with such figures. But like them, he turned from his suffering to the great questions of existence. In his seminal book, Man’s Search for Meaning, the psychiatrist Victor Frankl described the essence of what has come to be known as an existential approach to the human condition with this metaphor: “If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch,” he wrote, “they increase the load which is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together.” It is similarly true, he said, that therapy a
imed at fostering mental health often should lay increased weight on a patient, creating what he described as “a sound amount of tension through a reorientation toward the meaning of one’s own life.”
Lincoln certainly followed the spirit of this advice—looking, in his time of hurt, not to lighten his load so much as to increase it. Having flirted with a desire to die, he asked himself what he needed to live for, and he found an answer that would stay with him throughout his adult life. In the nadir of his friend’s depression, Speed told Lincoln that he would die unless he rallied. Lincoln said that he could kill himself, that he was not afraid to die. Yet, he said, he had an “irrepressible desire” to accomplish something while he lived. He wanted to connect his name with the great events of his generation, and “so impress himself upon them as to link his name with something that would redound to the interest of his fellow man.” This was no mere wish, Lincoln said, but what he “desired to live for.”
More than two decades later, the two men would meet again, this time in the midst of a civil war, and Lincoln would remind Speed of the conversation.
PART TWO
Chapter 4
A Self-Made Man
FOR SOME PEOPLE, psychological health is a birthright. For many others, like Abraham Lincoln, it is the realization of great labor. In the early 1840s—his early thirties—Lincoln began that labor in earnest. An exchange with his law partner in those years, Stephen T. Logan, is perhaps illustrative. Lincoln told Logan one day that he despaired of ever competing effectively against a certain lawyer who had great advantages in education. “It does not depend on the start a man gets,” Logan answered him. “It depends on how he keeps up his labors and efforts until middle life.”
Lincoln liked that advice, and he came to fulfill it, not only in his intellectual and material labors, but in his philosophical and emotional ones as well. But before we can see the work he did to attain psychological health, we have to understand what tools he had to draw on and what, truly, he was up against. While his breakdowns dramatically illustrated his emotional trouble, Lincoln faced a more fundamental challenge, one rooted in the culture he lived in. The same ideas that governed his life—giving him structure and guidance—also spelled out what could easily have been a path of doom.
It was an ironic coincidence that, on January 1, 1841—a day at the center of Lincoln’s second breakdown—the Quincy (Illinois) Whig described him as a “self-made man.” But the irony is worth seizing on. No label better spoke to the complex psychological culture through which Lincoln would have to find his way, so it is fitting that it attached to him at the symbolic nadir of his emotional life. Today, “self-made” has rather narrow, even cartoonish connotations, applying mainly to people who make fabulous amounts of money in some idiosyncratic enterprise. In Lincoln’s time, the word had just been coined (its first use is credited to Henry Clay in 1832), and it had a much stronger charge. The change in its meaning can be compared with the way that “hippie” went from an explosive term to a tired relic in a few short decades. Like those shaggy-haired creatures of the sixties, self-made men in the early nineteenth century were widely understood to be a wedge undercutting tradition.
For most of history, people had been “made,” primarily, by the circumstances of their birth. Children of farmers had grown up to work the land. Children of the elite had assumed their parents’ mantle. But in the early-nineteenth-century United States, the political and religious freedoms of the new republic, combined with a new economic reality, allowed young people to construct lives of their own. What had been a dream just a generation before—democracy in government, liberty in speech and religion—became a matter of daily life. The dream still eluded women, Native Americans, and African Americans; many minority ethnic groups had to struggle for their own. Such shortcomings, though, must not obscure the boldness of the country’s basic proposition. To say that “all men are created equal”—even when the phrase, in practice, applied only to white men—and that they could do what they wished, unfettered by church or crown, was to go further than any nation had gone before.
Over this landscape blew the winds of economic change. In the late eighteenth century, Thomas Jefferson had imagined a nation of independent farms. But by the 1820s, various forces were combining to create what historians call the market revolution, driven by the exchange of cash for goods and services. Like the industrial revolution, to which it was intricately connected, the market revolution was not any one event but many broad changes over time in the way people worked and what they worked for. Today we take for granted that most people earn a wage or salary, which they use to buy what they need, and that the basic economic unit is the mobile working person, subject to individual opportunities and risks. In the early nineteenth century, such a system was in its infancy. The word “market” still referred not to a whole area of economic activity, with buyers and sellers subject to supply and demand, but to a place where people gathered, often at great effort, to sell or trade things. As late as 1820, families made three quarters of all goods—food, clothing, tools—for their own use.
With the advent of the market revolution, more workers earned wages and more farmers sold crops for cash. Shops and factories multiplied. Villages grew into towns. Towns grew into cities. Advances in transportation made new kinds of markets possible. Before the early 1800s, human beings had never traveled faster than an animal or the wind could carry them. A trip from Louisville to New Orleans and back took about a month—floating downstream and trudging back by horse or foot. Then came steam travel for both sea and land. Robert Fulton launched the first commercially viable steamship on the Hudson River in 1807. And the railroad, the “iron horse,” began puffing in the United States in the 1820s. By the 1840s, that same trip between Louisville and New Orleans could be done in a few days.
Technology not only spurred the new economy but also raised basic questions about what was physically possible. Electricity could travel like lightning over long distances. This promised to make a great practical difference in people’s lives, but had just as much power as a symbol. In 1844, Samuel Morse inaugurated the first major U.S. telegraph line, using his newly devised code to translate words into electric blips. Morse’s first message was “What hath God wrought.”
Indeed, nothing less than the understanding of God’s earth was in flux. For centuries, the church had censored scientific ideas that were contrary to Christian doctrine. When censorship ended, new questions flourished. For example, biblical scholars had long said with confidence that the world was about six thousand years old—that it had been created in six days, beginning at 9 A.M. on October 23, 4004 B.C. Then geologists showed that the world had been created over the course of eons. This in turn led to theories of evolution, to which Charles Darwin, in 1859, would add his theory of natural selection. Imagine living at a time of such discovery. Lincoln became a proponent of evolution.
The pragmatic innovations that swept through the first half of the nineteenth century were accompanied by a series of religious revivals known as the Second Great Awakening. The historian William G. McLoughlin explains that the word “awakening” broadly applies to the period around the 1830s—just as it does, for instance, to the 1960s. Both are examples of times, writes Robert C. Fuller, “in which a people reshapes its identity, transforms its patterns of thought and action, and redefines the means for sustaining a healthy relationship with the wider powers upon which its well-being is dependent.” Naturally, the Awakening of the 1830s spread to new ideas about mental health and healing.
The fact that we still find Lincoln relevant shows how much of human life remains constant through history. Yet a period’s character does affect individual character. Psychology, the study of what happens in our minds, is tightly interwoven with culture, the name we give to our beliefs, practices, and social behaviors. The scholar Andrew Delbanco goes so far as to define culture as a collective psychological notion. “Human beings need to organize the inchoate sensations amid which
we pass our days—pain, desire, pleasure, fear—into a story,” Delbanco writes. “When that story leads somewhere and thereby helps us navigate through life to its inevitable terminus in death, it gives us hope. And if such a sustaining narrative establishes itself over time in the minds of a substantial number of people, we call it culture.”
In the early nineteenth century, a new culture—a new idea about what to hope for—emerged for many Americans, centered around the independent self, under nation and God. It had long been the case—in the receding world of subsistence agriculture, with a settled state and an established, unyielding church—that the person mattered much less than the family or tribe, its land, and its consuming, collective mission to advance and survive. Individuals mattered little compared to rulers or priests. Slowly but powerfully, the new culture tugged at the threads of this tapestry. It gave rise to something new, which even needed a new word. “Individualism” first appeared in the United States in 1835, in the translation of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Tocqueville, a Frenchman, had traveled around the country in 1831—the same year Lincoln settled at New Salem—and found himself intrigued by its distinctive qualities. “Individualism” he wrote, “is a novel expression, to which a novel idea has given birth.” The novel idea was that every person can “sever himself from the mass of his fellows” and draw apart into his own circle. This was a strange frontier, where “inner” values could take the place of those rooted in land, kin, and tradition.
Today, many people not only take the self for granted but struggle mightily to connect it to anything larger. In Lincoln’s time, the idea of the self had the power—tinged with uncertainty, even with danger—of something emerging and ascending. A barrage of literature instructed people about the possibility of an inner life and a personal ambition. What’s more, this literature insisted on the necessity, the moral value, of such a life. “A new culture of achievement demanded a regimen of self-culture or ‘self-help,’” writes the historian Kenneth Winkle. “A veritable cult of self-improvement emerged to encourage young men to nurture a host of inner qualities that readily became the values of the new society.”
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