Where did Lincoln encounter this culture? The better question would be: Where did he not encounter it? He needn’t have done more than read the Whig newspaper in Springfield, the Sangamo Journal, later renamed the Illinois State Journal. One piece on “how to succeed” is worth quoting at length.
Push along. Push hard. Push earnestly . . . You can’t do without it. The world is so made—society is so constructed that it’s a law of necessity that you must push. That is if you would be something and somebody.
Who succeeds? Who makes money, honor, and reputation? He who heartily, sincerely, manfully pushed and he only. Be what you may at the top or bottom of the scale, you have got to push in it to command success. It’s so with every man. Do you point to what is called the man of genius? And you think he doesn’t push? Why, he’s your companion pusher—he pushes all the time. It’s the very philosophy of his height and power . . .
If things look dark, push harder.—Sunshine and blue sky are just beyond. If you are entangled, push—if your heart grows feeble, push, push. You’ll come out glorious, never fear. You are on the right track, and working with the right materials. So push along, keep pushing.
Such motivational squibs were addressed to a generation of young men whose fathers had been farmers or tradesmen and who had seemed plenty content if the day had work enough, the night had food enough, and no dread sickness besieged family or livestock. Tom Lincoln, later portrayed as a shiftless ne’er-do-well, was in fact a perfectly respectable man at a time when it was perfectly respectable to have modest aims. He was said to have been satisfied with his life. In his son’s world, this kind of satisfaction was somehow suspect, if it kept you from pushing.
In many respects, Lincoln embraced this new culture wholeheartedly. As a boy, he had disliked physical work, the mainstay of a subsistence economy, preferring the mental labor that the market economy would make abundant. He also saw wages as a kind of liberation. When he was a teenager, Lincoln kept a skiff on the Ohio River, a thoroughfare of the American market. One day two men hired him to row them out to a larger boat. Lincoln expected “a few bits” in payment, but as the men climbed out, they threw back two silver half-dollars. “I could scarcely believe my eyes,” Lincoln recalled when he was president. “Gentlemen, you may think it was a very little thing . . . but it was a most important incident in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, a poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day . . . The world seemed wider and fairer before me.” The world was wider because he could find his fortune outside the rural areas in which he had grown up. He could visit New Orleans (which he did twice as a young man) and settle in a village or town. It was fairer because he could pursue his own interests rather than do manual labor without individual reward.
Lincoln’s choice of both political party and profession signaled his interests. His kin had been Democrats, the party of cheap land and western expansion. Under Andrew Jackson, president from 1829 to 1837, the Democrats fought to keep government small and the economy decentralized, opposing the burgeoning system of banks, paper currency, and public spending on roads and canals. The Whigs—named, during Jackson’s rule, after the antimonarchist party in Britain—were the party of upward mobility, of merchants and urban elites. They favored an aggressive government plan to build a national economy with internal improvements, central banks, and a tariff to protect domestic manufacturers. Meanwhile, both politics and the law played key roles in the development of the market economy. Legislators wrote laws to govern economic exchange. Lawyers made it so the laws would be enforced.
Lincoln cut the strings of tradition. He clambered into the ranks of educated, upwardly mobile Whiggery. He did his best to make himself the model lawyer-citizen, nurturing the qualities that would be essential for this new world, with an intense devotion to matters of honor, insisting, “I want in all cases to do right.” “Honest Abe” was an early nickname. Lincoln had many assets in this new world—“physical assets and strength of character that permitted him to tell things as he saw them,” Douglas Wilson has observed, “and not as he was expected or pressured to by his peers.” He was unusually bright and hardworking. He built a network of allies who cared for him like family.
Yet Lincoln encountered trouble along with the opportunity. He was not even five years out of his father’s house when he had his first breakdown. He began to wonder aloud whether he could do anything with his life, or whether he ought to “let the whole thing go by the board.” He saw plainly that with the chance of rising high came the risk of falling fast and hard.
At the same time that “self-made” entered the nation’s lexicon, so did the notion of abject failure. Once reserved to describe a discrete financial episode—“I made a failure,” a merchant would say after losing his shop—“failure” in antebellum America became a matter of identity, describing not an event but a person. As the historian Scott Sandage explains in Born Losers: A History of Failure in America, the phrase “I feel like a failure” comes to us so naturally today “that we forget it is a figure of speech: the language of business applied to the soul.” It became conventional wisdom in the early nineteenth century, Sandage explains, that people who failed had a problem native to their constitution. They weren’t just losers; they were “born losers.”
The failure identity was a stopgap for the shortcomings of a new system, a way of blaming its inevitable dark side on the very people who were bearing the brunt of it anyway. “We never knew a man in the world, who was a light smart pusher, who finally did not become rich, respectable, wise, and useful,” instructed Lincoln’s newspaper, the Journal. If this was true, as so many new experts on the human condition professed, how to account for those who were pushing in a field of mud and sinking? And what was such a sinking man to think about himself? Had the middle ground between triumph and failure disappeared? When Henry David Thoreau wrote, in 1854, that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” he was quarreling with an emerging culture that scorned a man who did odd jobs, lived on a pond, and wrote poetry for no money. At Thoreau’s funeral, his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson conceded, “I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition.”
The painful irony of Lincoln’s situation in his late twenties and early thirties is that the very successes that could prop him up also exerted an equally powerful force that could tear him down. Failure—which he stared in the face as he went deep into debt at New Salem—was hardly the worst of it. As we have seen, when Lincoln was having his dark episodes, first in 1835 and again in the winter of 1840–1841, people didn’t just call him “depressed” or “melancholy”; they worried that he was going, or had already gone, insane. “Many of his friends feared that reason would desert her throne,” remembered Robert Rutledge, of Lincoln’s turmoil after his sister’s death. Six years later, Lincoln was diagnosed with hypochondriasis, a form of partial insanity that doctors said often led to the full-blown condition. According to Jane Bell, a Springfield woman who described Lincoln’s case in a January 1841 letter, “The Doctors say he came within an inch of being a perfect lunatic for life.” One 1841 textbook on insanity explained that “more persons are attacked between the ages of 30 and 40 years, than during any other interval of ten years in life.” As Lincoln reeled in the aftermath of his second breakdown, he was thirty-two.
It was more than age and temperament that made Lincoln seem in danger. For it was an article of faith that the newly mobile culture made people vulnerable to insanity, and that “self-made” men like Lincoln were prime candidates for such a miserable fate. This outrageous claim had a strong basis in contemporary biological thought. Mendelian genetic theory, that parents pass on to their children the raw material of life, became well known long after Lincoln’s death. The dominant thinking on inheritance in his time, following Jean Baptiste Lamarck’s influential theory of evolution, was that parents transmitted the sum of what they had learned, experienced, and suffered. According to this theory, at the moment of conception, writes th
e medical historian Charles Rosenberg, “the particular biological identities of both parents”—that is, the cumulative interaction of all their habits, debilities, and knowledge, plus their original constitutional endowments—were passed on to the child. The theory held that emotion and temperament flowed from the mother, intellect from the father. So a man who spent most of his life drawing a plow across a field and calculating lengths of wood for a proper cabinet (Tom Lincoln) would produce a child well equipped for farm work and carpentry, but rather poorly equipped for, say, jurisprudence or political philosophy.
Medical authorities asserted that this biological reality caused no difficulty as long as people gauged their expectations to their capacities. Isaac Ray, from 1845 to 1866 the superintendent of the Maine State Hospital for the Insane, wrote that in the “old world” it was “agreeable enough to people . . . to follow on the same path their father trod before them, turning neither to the right hand, nor to the left, and perfectly content with a steady and sure, though it may be slow progress.” The United States, physicians warned, may have gone too far in casting off rigid tradition. Now the sons of poor, uneducated men sought wealth and education, participated in elections, and even found places in government. The new culture, noted the physician William Sweetser in a layman’s guide to mental hygiene, beckoned “each citizen, however subordinate may be his station, to join in the pursuit of whatever distinctions our forms of society can bestow.” “Every one sees bright visions in the future,” Sweetser wrote. But the reality, he cautioned, was not nearly so luminous. People expected too much, pushed themselves too hard, and therefore brought strains upon their minds that they were constitutionally incapable of withstanding. “Mental powers,” explained the popular medical writer Edward Jarvis, “are strained to their utmost tension . . . Minds stagger under the disproportionate burden.” The result was an insanity that did not creep up slowly but struck frightfully and suddenly. Any person, at any time, could go mad and commit horrific violence or sink into permanent idiocy.
For proof, the doctors turned to the favorite plaything of the early-nineteenth-century intellectual classes, statistics. They published charts that showed the United States near or at the top of international rankings of insanity per capita. In March 1844, for example, the Southern Literary Messenger published a short article, “On the Distribution of Insanity in the United States” by C. B. Hayden. On the whole, the article observed, rates of insanity were higher in the new republic than in the nations of Europe. “We might at first refuse to admit the existence in our country of any peculiar causes, calculated to produce insanity,” wrote Hayden, “accustomed, as we are, to congratulate ourselves upon the very diffusion among all classes of those blessings of existence, which contribute to mental and physical health and happiness.” But it turned out, Hayden argued, that the very conditions that so pleased Americans—religious freedom, economic opportunity, political equality—promoted mental imbalance. “Life in our republic,” Hayden explained, “has all the excitement of an olympic contest. A wide arena is thrown open, and all fearlessly join in the maddening rush for the laurel wreath, or golden chaplet.” The resulting rancor, excitement, and anxiety produced “sickness of hope deferred, ambition maddened by defeat, avarice rendered desperate by failure.”
Whether or not Lincoln read this article (he subscribed to the Southern Literary Messenger), he couldn’t have avoided such a widespread and commonly accepted argument. Fears of insanity were incessant, creating what the historian David J. Rothman calls “a heightened, almost hysterical sense of peril.” Before 1810, the United States had only a few asylums for the insane, and only one received public funding. By 1860, twenty-eight of thirty-three states had a public institution for the insane, and many had several. At a time when government provided neither education for children nor pensions for the aged, legislators across the country—responding to horror stories of sudden, violent insanity—voted to levy special taxes to build these institutions. Lincoln’s Illinois was among them. After an 1846 visit from Dorothea Dix, the leading advocate of asylums, the Illinois General Assembly voted to fund, with new taxes, a State Hospital for the Insane at Jacksonville, not far from Lincoln’s home at Springfield. This is the hospital where his cousin’s daughter, Mary Jane Lincoln, was later committed.
The existence of an ostensible cure for insanity may have led to greater alarm. Seeking to extend and strengthen their field, asylum superintendents lectured widely on the dangers of insanity. The superintendents virtually created modern psychiatry. (The Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane later became the American Psychiatric Association.) The big leather-bound books they used to classify the patients entering their institutions would lead to systematic diagnoses seen in the modern Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Yet for many people, to be entered into one of those books was not the beginning of treatment but the end of an independent life: many who went to the asylum never came home. Mary Jane Lincoln died at Jacksonville after twenty-one years there.
A creeping fear of madness often accompanies depression. Sufferers wonder if their black moods will ever lift, or if their feelings of alienation from the healthy world will deepen and widen. “These fears are at least fifty percent of what it is to be melancholy,” says Lauren Slater, a clinical psychologist who has written about her struggles with mental illness. “If you were to be really, really depressed but know that it was going to end in five days, it wouldn’t be depression. The terror is in what the future holds.” The psychologist William James famously wrote about this “panic fear . . . the worst form of melancholy” in The Varieties of Religious Experience. He told of being in a state of “philosophic pessimism and general depression of spirits about my prospects” one night, when suddenly an image descended on him of a madman he’d seen in an asylum. “This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other,” James wrote. “THAT SHAPE AM I, I felt, potentially.”
Did such fears occupy Abraham Lincoln? He was doubtless well acquainted with the way a person could become, as he put it, “locked . . . in a mental night.” In the mid-1840s, Lincoln wrote a poem about a madman whom he had known intimately in Indiana. Matthew Gentry was one of Lincoln’s peers, “rather a bright lad,” he recalled, and the scion of the wealthiest family in the Little Pigeon Creek area. When Lincoln was sixteen and Gentry nineteen, “he unaccountably became furiously mad,” Lincoln said, and Gentry never recovered, only settling gradually into a “harmless insanity.” On a return trip to the area, Lincoln had seen him “lingering in this wretched condition.” He said later, “I could not forget the impression his case made upon me.”
The poem Lincoln wrote, published as “The Maniac,” gives three perspectives of madness. It describes a violent breakdown, with Gentry maiming himself, fighting with his father, and trying to kill his mother before he was physically restrained, howling and shrieking. This sensational picture is followed by a more subtle and compassionate view, describing Gentry’s “mournful song” rising on a still night, to which the narrator “stole away” before dawn to listen.
Air held his breath; trees, with the spell,
Seemed sorrowing angels round,
Whose swelling tears in dew-drops fell
Upon the listening ground.
The poem concludes with a kind of clinical view of madness, as a state in which the higher soul of humanity has left the body, leaving nothing more than a “brute,” in a condition worse than death.
The crucial mental health question in Lincoln’s time was whether a person was sane or not. On the right side of that line, one had considerable latitude for expressions of distress. On the wrong side, one could be cast off from civilized society.
It bears mentioning, in this context, that madness struck Lincoln’s family. His first cousin Mordecai Lincoln, who lived in Hancock County, Illinois, was a bright and energetic man, a cobbler, carpenter, and violinist. A florid man, he was prone to dramat
ic gestures, like appearing in the door of the schoolhouse and rolling apples to the children and the teacher. But something went awry with Mordecai Lincoln as he grew older. Raised a Catholic, he grew embittered toward the church and especially Jesuit priests. His eccentricities, once charming, gave way to something darker. Eventually he became paranoid, observing plots to ruin him and writing detailed accounts of these conspiracies. He stopped working for pay and lived like a hermit with hundreds of pigeons—he built elaborate houses for them—and a dog named Grampus. He sometimes visited his kin and, without saying a word, would pick up a violin and walk the floor weeping while he played. In the 1850s, Abraham Lincoln visited his cousin Mordecai and inquired about him, giving one man in Hancock County the impression that he was “quite attached.” This doesn’t mean that Lincoln identified with his cousin’s mental difficulties. But it would not be surprising if he did, or if he ruminated on the family history that led a jury in the county to decide, when committing Mary Jane Lincoln to the asylum, “The disease is with her hereditary.”
The irony is that by seeking what he wanted in life, Lincoln put himself in a position where he might lose everything. He might be consigned to misery, failure, perhaps madness. But what matters here is not just that prospect but Lincoln’s response to it. Despite the fears, or perhaps in part because of them, he worked all the harder in his thirties and forties to “make himself,” emotionally as well as materially, and go on to do the special work he longed for. Perseverance and forbearance became core aspects of Lincoln’s character, and he would one day give the same advice his law partner Stephen Logan gave him, that what matters is whether a person “keeps up his labors and efforts until middle life.”
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