Lincoln's Melancholy

by Joshua Wolf Shenk

  In 1860, when Lincoln was the Republican nominee for president, a schoolmate of his son Bob’s was denied admission by Harvard College. Lincoln wrote the boy that “I have scarcely felt greater pain in my life” than on learning the news. “And yet,” he added, “there is very little in it, if you will allow no feeling of discouragement to seize, and prey upon you.” He told him to go see Harvard’s president and learn what obstacles he had to overcome, and how to overcome them. “In your temporary failure,” he wrote, “there is no evidence that you may not yet be a better scholar, and a more successful man in the great struggle of life, than many others, who have entered college more easily.” Lincoln said he knew this was true from his own “severe experience.” Indeed, many people of this era sought success in the “great struggle of life,” but there were few who felt the struggle more acutely.

  Chapter 5

  A Misfortune, Not a Fault

  ONE OF THE REASONS that depression is so problematic—and deadly, leading to many of the forty thousand suicides in the United States each year—is that people are often loath to admit they are suffering, let alone explore it in detail. Given the dangers Lincoln faced, it is exceptional that he energetically investigated his own condition, and the experience of other suffering people, both in practical and existential terms. It is all the more unusual when we see the tradition that Lincoln came from, which viewed the more pronounced forms of melancholy as aberrant, even sinful—a kind of infestation of the body or soul by external, malevolent forces that needed to be cast out or violently suppressed. Rejecting this tradition, Lincoln struck out into his own intellectual territory, slashing through thickets of medical theory, philosophy, and theology. He arrived tentatively at his own idea, that melancholy arose from natural, sometimes beneficent forces. Talking about it in plain human terms was his first step toward claiming his own ground as a person who, through no fault of his own, needed help.

  Lincoln was raised in the thick of Old School Calvinism. In Kentucky and Indiana, his parents belonged to a fire-breathing sect called Separate Baptism, in which congregants heard—in the tradition of Jonathan Edward’s famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”—that they were bound for eternal hellfire, and nothing they could do or say or think would change their fate. Preachers did allow that a chosen few were ordained for grace and would be saved, but these fortunate ones had been selected by God before time began. As one Baptist preacher in Lincoln’s Kentucky explained it, “Long before the morning stars sang together . . . the Almighty looked down upon the ages yet unborn, as it were, in review before him, and selected one here and another there to enjoy eternal life and left the rest to the blackness of darkness forever.” Such Baptist ministers were so intense that it has been said that they “out-Calvined Calvin.”

  Doctrine affected conceptions of health and psychology. Inspired by Jesus himself, Christian ministers from the earliest days cast themselves as healers, especially of ailments that sprang from unseen causes. In the fourth century, John Cassian described a condition among his fellow monks that he called “acedia”: a “weariness or distress of heart . . . akin to dejection” that took “possession” of unhappy souls and left them lazy, sluggish, restless, and solitary. Later, acedia became widely translated as sloth, one of the seven deadly sins, and blended with melancholy in the popular mind. Both required, at the very least, confession and penitence. More stubborn cases called for exorcism to cast out evil spirits.

  This view of melancholy as aberrant strongly influenced both the clergy and the physicians of North America. The English Calvinists, or Puritans, who colonized Massachusetts in the early seventeenth century, believed that melancholy, in many forms, came from demonic possession. “Some Devil is often very Busy with the poor Melancholicks,” wrote Cotton Mather. “Yea, there is often a Degree of Diabolical Possession in the Melancholy.” Though it may be hard to take such talk seriously as psychology, the historian David Harley observes that the Calvinist system had hierarchies of disorders, consistent diagnostic criteria, and wide popular acceptance. The system’s message boiled down to this: “For the godly,” Harley writes, “the correct response to any affliction was to search for God’s purpose and to repent, before seeking removal of the affliction through the use of the appropriate means.”

  As decisively as Lincoln left the rural life, he left the Baptist church as well. In New Salem he became widely known as an infidel. He rejected eternal damnation, innate sin, the divinity of Jesus, and the infallibility of the Bible. For a time it seemed that there was nothing sacred that Lincoln didn’t reject. He recited the poetry of Robert Burns, the notorious Scottish freethinker. He carried around a Bible, reading passages and arguing against them. It reached a point where it hurt Lincoln politically, with people loudly refusing to vote for a man with such “shocking” views. When Lincoln put his ideas about the Bible and Christ on paper, even one of his fellow skeptics thought he’d gone too far, and threw the manuscript into the fire.

  Lincoln never joined a church, but this didn’t mean he was indifferent to moral and existential matters. To the contrary, his mind was on fire with ideas and beliefs and concerns. And as energetically as he flung aside some influences, he eagerly cultivated others. Indeed, in the early days of the nation, having a roving, doubting mind was itself a kind of august tradition. A number of the Founders—including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson—were freethinkers. “Often defined as a total absence of faith in God,” writes Susan Jacoby, in Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, “freethought can better be understood as a phenomenon running the gamut from the truly antireligious—those who regarded all religion as a form of superstition and wished to reduce its influence in every aspect of society—to those who adhered to a private, unconventional faith.” Turning away from orthodox religion, many freethinkers constructed a faith in their own minds, working with evidence from the natural world.

  The American tradition of separation of church and state grew directly from the freethinking of the Founders. After political independence, they considered independence of thought and belief a logical next step. In 1779, Jefferson proposed, for his state of Virginia, a guarantee of equality for citizens of all beliefs, and nonbeliefs—“meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection,” Jefferson wrote, “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.” This act inspired the secular spirit of the U.S. Constitution. Legal barriers to equality still remained—Connecticut, for example, withheld equal rights from Jews until 1843—but guided by Thomas Paine’s plea for freedom of conscience, The Age of Reason, Americans moved in the direction of religious liberty.

  As the nineteenth century dawned, a strong reaction set in against this secular heritage. A series of religious revivals, the Second Great Awakening, swept the country. Dozens of new Christian sects sprang up, including the Methodists and the Mormons. Between 1776 and 1845, the number of preachers in the United States, per capita, tripled. Many of these new Christians saw the liberty of the Revolution as the liberty to decide which kind of Christianity to practice. Paine became castigated as a Judas, a reptile, and a louse, and the attacks only intensified after he died, in 1809. In the 1820s and 1830s, “Paine’s memory,” Jacoby writes, “was kept alive only by small, marginalized groups of freethinkers”—among them a young Illinoisan named Abraham Lincoln.

  The swirl of ideas in the first half of the nineteenth century can make it hard to find Lincoln’s place, but the challenge is proportionate to the reward. The multiplicity of traditions he drew from—and the original way he synthesized them, and also held on to contrasting ideas—is what makes Lincoln so fascinating. In some ways, he was rejecting an old tradition, the religious dogma of his youth, for the new faith of the nation, individualism and liberty. But given that Paine’s deism had become hotly controversial, in another sense Lincoln was defending an American tradition against the onslaught of the new.

  The
se intellectual currents connected to a vital struggle going on in Lincoln’s mind. Figuring out what he thought about the big questions of existence was not an abstract or academic matter. The rumblings of his mind and the ocean of ideas he swam in can be seen in a series of letters he wrote to his friend Joshua Speed in early 1842.

  Speed, remember, had left Springfield in the spring of 1841, disconsolate, in part owing to romantic disappointment. Over the summer, he met and courted Fanny Henning, a religious young woman with what Lincoln called “heavenly black eyes.” When he finally proposed marriage, and she said yes, he began to have a nervous breakdown. On hand at Farmington when the young couple courted, and with Speed at Springfield in the fall of 1841, Lincoln watched his friend slide into misery. Speed noted the parallels: “In the winter of 40 & 41, he was very unhappy about his engagement . . . How much he suffered then on that account none Know so well as myself—He disclosed his whole heart to me—In the summer of 1841. I became engaged . . . and strange to say something of the same feeling which I regarded as so foolish in him—took possession of me.”

  Around the first of the year, 1842, Speed set out from Springfield to Louisville, where he intended to make Miss Henning his bride. Lincoln gave his friend a letter before his departure, full of counsel and succor. “Feeling, as you know I do, the deepest solicitude for the success of the enterprize you are engaged in,” he began, “I adopt this as the last method I can invent to aid you, in case (which God forbid) you shall need any aid. I do not place what I am going to say on paper, because I can say it any better in that way than I could by word of mouth; but because, were I to say it orrally, before we part, most likely you would forget it at the verry time when it might do you some good.”

  It is a signal feature of depression that, in times of trouble, sensible ideas, memories of good times, and optimism for the future all recede into blackness. Lincoln had good reason to expect that Speed would “forget” his words just when they were most important. And he intended his letters to be of practical use. “As I think it reasonable that you will feel verry badly some time between this and the final consummation of your purpose,” he wrote, “it is intended that you shall read this just at such a time.” He continued: “Why I say it is reasonable that you will feel verry badly yet, is because of three special causes, added to the general one which I shall mention. The general cause is, that you are naturally of nervous temperament; and this I say from what I have seen of you personally, and what you have told me concerning your mother at various times and concerning your brother William at the time his wife died.” Speed’s mother had a tendency to melancholy, and his older brother William, when his wife died in the spring of 1841, was thought by relatives “almost crazy.” There was plenty more emotional difficulty in the Speed family, but it is telling that Lincoln cited only two family members. If he considered this sufficient evidence, Lincoln—the son of a mother whom he described as sensitive and sad, and a father who sometimes had spells of the blues—probably judged that melancholy ran in his family, too.

  But this was just a step on the way to Lincoln’s main idea: however Speed’s trouble came down to him, it was inherent in his makeup, or temperament, and thus a basis of his character. There was no more use protesting this fact than protesting one’s height. In Lincoln’s thinking, this “nervous temperament,” the “general cause” of trouble, had been exacerbated by three “special causes”:

  The first special cause is your exposure to bad weather on your journey, which my experience clearly proves to be verry severe on defective nerves.

  The second is, the absence of all business and conversation of friends, which might divert your mind, and give it occasional rest from that intensity of thought, which will some times wear the sweetest idea thread-bare and turn it to the bitterness of death.

  The third is, the rapid and near approach of that crisis on which all your thoughts and feelings concentrate.

  Lincoln made it clear that he spoke about Speed’s case from experience. Bad weather, he said, had been hard on his own “defective nerves.” He knew both the intense, grinding thought cycles of melancholy and how, with the approach of a crisis, vague fears could concentrate into sharp, crippling pains. Though these letters are addressed to Speed and are written mainly in the second person, Lincoln refers explicitly to himself several times: “my experience clearly proves . . .”and” let me, who have some reason to speak with judgement on such a subject, beseech you . . .” In substance, the voice is first-person plural. As Lincoln saw it, most people could handle the stress of courtship and marriage, endure poor weather, and separate from their friends without collapsing. But for others—like himself and Speed—these “special causes” of woe were like a shove off a cliff. “The particular causes,” he wrote, “to a greater or lesser extent, perhaps do apply in all cases; but the general one, nervous debility, which is the key and conductor of all the particular ones, and without which they would be utterly harmless, though it does pertain to you, does not pertain to one in a thousand. It is out of this, that the painful difference between you and the mass of the world springs.”

  Many people, faced with a suffering friend, would just tell him to go see a doctor. Perhaps because Lincoln had experienced medical treatment himself, and come out the worse for it, he put no stock in conventional therapy. He took Speed’s condition as an opportunity to tear the problem of suffering down to its foundations: What was its origin? What caused it to manifest itself? What could be done about it?

  It’s apparent that he’d given the matter some thought and that he was influenced by contemporary science. Notice that he called “nervous debility” the “key and conductor” of the exacerbating causes. A key, of course, is a device that opens, closes, or switches circuits, and a conductor is a medium through which current passes. Notice, too, how he used the word “nervous” rather than “melancholy.” These terms suggest Lincoln’s awareness of the scientific evidence for the existence in the human body of discrete systems, including a nervous system responsible for bodily and mental sensations. With this innovation, which became widely accepted in the early nineteenth century, diseases that had been attributed to black bile or the influence of demons now were believed to arise from an injury or “debility” of the nervous system. The idea was that, for some, the body’s circuits and wires improperly processed sensations of the outside world. Thus, people with nervous illnesses could feel worse than they really were. In other contexts, Lincoln had used “melancholy” and “hypochondriasis,” but he avoided them here, probably because they had different connotations. “Melancholic” suggested an ancient malady, the affliction of Aristotle, Martin Luther, Saint Augustine, and Robert Burton. “Nervous” was a modern term, and Lincoln used it in the modern sense.

  This is not to say that Lincoln was poring over books on medicine or science, only that he was alive and curious about his world. It’s like a person in the early 1990s using the word “neurotransmitter.” It would signal familiarity with a concept that was seeping into popular thinking but not yet universally held.

  The substance of Lincoln’s message to Speed also reflected new influences. One of the basic ideas of the evangelical movement in the early nineteenth century was that people could help themselves. Rather than wonder and fear the fate God decreed for them, they could actively change their lives by renouncing sin and accepting Christ. From this same pool of thought rose a wave of healers who claimed that disease wasn’t a product of inscrutable humors that needed to be poisoned or purged from the body, but natural phenomena that could be studied and understood. This idea blended Enlightenment rationalism with evangelical optimism.

  H. L. Mencken joked that Puritanism was “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, maybe happy.” There was something in this of the old doctors, too, forever torturing their already suffering patients. But the new healers said that happiness was intended by divine and natural law. In the early nineteenth century, new healing systems sprouted like weeds, for
erunners of today’s natural or “alternative” medicine. Grahamism—the child of preacher-turned-hygienist Sylvester Graham—proposed that good health came from a natural diet, including bread from unbolted wheat flour (hence the “graham cracker”). Hydropaths proposed to cure all disorders by internal and external application of water. And homeopaths offered the startling idea that the best medicine was administered in infinitesimal doses, as little as a millionth of a gram.

  Lincoln had some contact with and some interest in the progressive and fundamentally optimistic approaches to health and healing. In late-eighteenth-century Vienna, a physician named Franz Anton Mesmer proposed that, just as Newton had shown an invisible physical force called gravity, he could demonstrate the existence of a potent invisible force called “animal magnetism.” Illness, Mesmer argued, was caused by a disconnection from this great force, and talented healers could bring people back into salutary contact with it. In 1836, a Frenchman named Charles Poyen came to the United States and began lecturing on mesmerism. Packed halls greeted him, and by the early 1840s, Boston alone had several hundred practitioners of mesmerism, claiming to cure everything from heart disease to melancholia.

  As in the rest of the country, Springfield, Illinois, saw “a profound stir . . . on the subject of mesmerism, animal magnetism, and so forth,” remembered Sophie Bledsoe Herrick. “My father was found to have uncommon power in this line.” Herrick’s father, Albert Taylor Bledsoe, a former Episcopalian minister, practiced law alongside Lincoln and, for a time, lived in the same boarding house. Lincoln watched with interest as Bledsoe performed his experiments. For example, there was a “Mrs. B,” who suffered from a painful nervous tic. Bledsoe moved his hands over her body—using the “classic passes” of mesmerism, his daughter said—to great success. Once when Lincoln and Bledsoe were discussing mesmerism in the Globe Tavern, they could hear the sounds of Mrs. B’s piano playing from a room in an adjoining building. Bledsoe said he believed he could make her stop playing without going near her. Try it, Lincoln said. As Bledsoe’s daughter told the story, the next moment, the playing ceased. Bledsoe and Lincoln went to the other building and knocked on Mrs. B’s door. When she answered, Lincoln exhorted her to continue playing. She said that she didn’t know what was the matter. She had never felt this way before, but however hard she tried, she just couldn’t go on playing.