At bottom, mesmerism was an accessible scheme for self-improvement. It proposed a semi-scientific language with which to discuss fundamentally spiritual, moral, and psychological concerns. And it offered to meet people just where they were and help them get to a better place. It probably owed its effectiveness to the placebo effect. But the idea that the plain acts of one person could beneficially affect the mind of another person was a breath of fresh air after centuries of scolding, punishing treatments. Hypnotism came out of mesmerists’ practice, and it led, eventually, to Freudian psychoanalysis.
Another innovation with great appeal came in the field of temperance. In 1830, per capita consumption of distilled spirits—whiskey, gin, rum, and the like—had reached four gallons, the highest in U.S. history. In reaction, a massive temperance movement emerged, centering on religious and moral denunciations of drink. In 1840, a group of reformed drunkards in Baltimore began to meet and offer each other support and fellowship. They decided to take their message to other drunkards, and chapters sprang up around the country. They called themselves the Washington Temperance Union. Soon a chapter formed in Springfield. On the occasion of George Washington’s birthday in 1842, the members invited Lincoln to speak to them.
He took the opportunity to explain why “old-school” temperance efforts had failed and why the Washingtonians had so much success. To denounce drinkers “in the thundering tones of anathema and denunciation,” Lincoln argued, was not only unjust but impolitic. It simply worked better to reason with, coax, and convince people, he said. Quitting drink was a good thing, he continued, because people could work and support their families better sober than drunk. The Washingtonians got reformed drunkards to speak about these advantages and to encourage others by the force of their example. In contrast, Lincoln said, harsh condemnation could no more pierce a man’s heart than a rye straw could penetrate the hard shell of a tortoise.
His references to “Old School” Calvinism and “Hard Shell” Baptism were subtle, but Lincoln was not subtle about his critique of the old theology. Calvinism saw human beings subjected to a harsh and wrathful God; Lincoln proposed that people could shape their own lives by the exercise of will. Of the Washingtonians, he said admiringly, “They teach hope to all—despair to none. Denying the doctrine of unpardonable sin, they teach, ‘While the lamp holds out to burn / The vilest sinner may return.’” Drunkards, Lincoln said, should be “pitied and compassionated, just as are the heirs of consumption and other hereditary diseases.” Their failings ought to be treated as a “misfortune, and not as a crime, or even as a disgrace?
He made the same point about melancholy. After he spent time with Joshua Speed’s fiancée, Fanny Henning, Lincoln wrote, “There is but one thing about her, so far as I could perceive that I would have otherwise than as it is. That is something of a tendency to melancholly. This, let it be observed, is a misfortune not a fault.” The distinction is essential. Fault implies a failure or weakness for which a person should be held to account, if not outright blamed. Misfortune is an unhappy circumstance, something bad that has happened to a blameless good person.
In his letters to Speed, Lincoln showed that he had a keen eye for the misfortune that he and his friend shared—a nervous temperament. This led him to think pragmatically about how to live with such a condition. In particular, he named three kinds of troubles that could beset a person with a nervous temperament: poor weather, isolation or idleness, and stressful events. In the winter of 1841–1842, Speed faced all three. That is why Lincoln predicted a rough season. “If from all these causes,” he wrote, “you shall escape and go through triumphantly, without another ‘twinge of the soul,’ I shall be most happily, but most egregiously deceived.” Lincoln advised his friend to adjust his expectations to the unavoidable reality. Don’t expect to marry with feelings of delight, he said. Rather, aim to get “through the ceremony calmly, or even with sufficient composure not to excite alarm in any present.” In that case, Lincoln said, “you are safe, beyond question, and in two or three months, will be the happiest of men.” For the future, Lincoln predicted, “I incline to think it probable, that your nerves will fail you occasionally for a while; but once you get them fairly graded now, that trouble is over forever.” In other words, just as it would take a good amount of work to level a tall hill in order to build a road there, Speed could, with effort, “grade” his nerves and achieve happiness. If, however, he did feel agonized or distressed in the future, Lincoln begged his friend to ascribe it to natural causes and “not to some false and ruinous suggestion of the Devil.” Suffering was not a punishment from beyond or a malevolent infestation of the soul. Like the earth turning on its axis or energy passing through a conductor, it was a part of the natural world, to be studied, understood, and, when possible, managed.
Yet even as Lincoln argued for science, reason, and progress, he brought forward a quite different but equally vital point of view. Determined in his belief in the power of human beings to improve their lives, Lincoln was also determined to accept things the way they were. He subscribed to a school of thought known as fatalism, which said that events on earth were preordained and humans powerless to change them. For example, when Speed expressed worries about his fiancée’s health—she had taken ill with consumption and traveled to New Orleans on the advice of doctors—Lincoln sympathized with him, but urged that he see the big picture. “The death scenes of those we love,” he wrote, “are surely painful enough; but these we are prepared to, and expect to see. They happen to all, and all know they must happen.” Lincoln knew that Speed, like himself, was a skeptic, an infidel. And he knew that his fiancée was a devout Methodist. In this instance, he said, it was her faith, and not his disbelief, that would bring the truest comfort. “Should she, as you fear, be destined to an early grave, it is indeed, a great consolation to know that she is so well prepared to meet it.”
“Destined,” in that sentence, was no metaphor. Lincoln believed that individuals had destinies that had been laid out for them in advance, and which they had little, if any, power to affect. Indeed, in this same passage Lincoln went on to suggest that Fanny Henning’s illness itself might be part of a divine plan, to assuage Speed’s doubts about his love for her. Lincoln thought that Speed’s “present anxiety and distress about her health and her life, must and will forever banish those horid doubts, which I know you sometimes felt, as to the truth of your affection for her.” He continued, “If they can be once and forever removed, (and I almost feel a presentiment that the Almighty has sent your present affliction expressly for that object) surely, nothing can come in their stead, to fill their immeasurable measure of misery.”
Far from a passing fancy, Lincoln’s fatalism was one of his bedrock beliefs. He would quote Shakespeare: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends / Rough-hew them how we will.” Brutus, he argued, by way of example, had been drawn inexorably by laws and conditions to kill Caesar. Neither could have escaped that fate. Though it may seem that we choose a particular action, he suggested, we are in fact like billiard balls: struck from behind, we move according to fixed laws and strike what is in our path. “His idea,” recalled his law partner William Herndon, “was that all human actions were caused by motives”—motive, in this sense, being the power or energy behind something. In discussions with Lincoln, Herndon took the opposite view, arguing for something akin to free will. “I once contended,” Herndon recalled, “that man was free and could act without a motive.” Lincoln smiled at him and replied that it was impossible, “because the motive was born before the man.” Far from being free, Lincoln argued, man was a mere tool, a cog in the wheel of a great machine that, in Herndon’s words, “strikes and cuts, grinds and mashes, all things, including man, that resist it.”
As the scholar Allen Guelzo has shown, Lincoln was a serious philosophical thinker who kept abreast of the leading ideas of his time. He said, in 1846, that he followed “what I understand is called the ‘Doctrine of Necessity’—that is, that the hu
man mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which the mind itself has no control.” John Stuart Mill, who used the phrase “philosophical necessity,” said that it boiled down to the proposition that people’s actions and thoughts are subject to laws, as clearly as are physical events. In one sense, this brand of determinism was anticlerical, substituting a kind of scientific or philosophical perspective for a spiritual one. “Virtually all of the major deistic or ‘infidel’ literature published in America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century,” Guelzo explains, “incorporated some form of determinism, largely as a way of accounting for order in the universe without invoking a personal God to create and provide for it.” The classic image was of a “watchmaker God,” who set the universe in motion as though winding a clock, then took no active role in human affairs. Yet when people began to describe how such a clock worked, they quickly moved to a cosmology that transcended empirical method. Lincoln, in particular, occupied an ambiguous middle ground. In some conversations he spoke of “motives” and “laws.” In others he spoke about “God” and “destiny.” It seems he was talking about the same thing.
Religious language helped Lincoln cover over the liability of being associated with unorthodox thought. It was one thing for a cloistered intellectual like John Stuart Mill to argue for “necessity,” and quite another for a politician to do so. For Lincoln to say that “laws” governed the mind flew in the face of one of the basic assumptions of evangelical Christianity, that a living God (or “Providence”) governed the world, watching out for his flock, guiding and correcting them, rewarding them for correct behavior. Lincoln in the early 1840s was not ready to acknowledge the existence of Providence. In his temperance speech he seemed to compare such a belief to one of the weird quirks of humankind, like a thirst for alcohol, that needed to be respected only because it was so common. “The universal sense of mankind on any subject is an argument, or at least an influence, not easily overcome,” he said. “The success of the argument in favor of the existence of an overruling Providence mainly depends upon that sense.”
Yet, whether he identified laws or Providence as the guiding force of the world, Lincoln’s philosophy led him to an idea of self akin to the Calvinist one—as a speck of dust in an infinite scheme, a humble witness to the grand mystery of life. When Speed thanked him for his help, Lincoln answered, “The truth is, I am not sure there was any merit, with me, in the part I took in your difficulty; I was drawn to it as by fate; if I would, I could not have done less than I did. I always was superstitious; and as part of my superstition, I believe God made me one of the instruments of bringing your Fanny and you together, which union, I have no doubt He had fore-ordained. Whatever he designs, he will do for me yet. Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord’ is my text just now.” This didn’t mean that Lincoln thought God would take care of him. It meant that whatever God had planned, good or bad, he would find out soon enough.
“Superstition” perfectly describes Lincoln’s self-consciousness about his spirituality. He believed in something he knew to be irrational, yet he did not push away the superstition. He seemed to draw closer to it. It was around 1841, Lincoln later said, that he left off making public arguments in favor of the “Doctrine of Necessity,” which public shift seems to have coincided with a private one. When he was at Farmington with the Speed family that summer, the family matriarch, Lucy Gilmer Speed, noticed and felt pained for Lincoln’s suffering. One morning when they were alone, Mrs. Speed approached him and pressed into his hand an Oxford edition of the Bible. She told him to read it, adopt its precepts, and pray for its promises. If he wanted help, she said, he would find it there. “It made a deep impression on him,” Joshua Speed said of the exchange. “I often heard him allude to it—even after he was President.”
Why would this moment make such an impression? For one thing, Mrs. Speed was not the Bible-thumping sort who provoked Lincoln to refer to the Illinois countryside as “priest ridden.” Her family was theologically liberal, attending the church of a famous Unitarian minister named James Freeman Clarke, who was based in Louisville in the 1830s. Such an affinity with Lincoln, on top of her own experience with melancholy, may have made her an effective messenger. “If you would win a man to your cause,” Lincoln advised in his temperance address, “first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart, which, say what he will, is the great highroad to his reason.”
If the encounter with Mrs. Speed marked a turning point, it wasn’t because it ended a struggle for Lincoln but commenced a new phase, one in which he brought his search for his own beliefs to the fore. “Tell your mother,” he wrote to Mary Speed, “I have not got her ‘present’ with me; but that I intend to read it regularly when I return home. I doubt not that it is really, as she says, the best cure for the ‘Blues’ could one but take it according to the truth.” That phrase—“could one but take it according to the truth”—speaks directly to Lincoln’s predicament. Human beings can exercise their will over the conditions for faith, but faith itself, by definition, is a matter beyond the self. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James notes how diverse traditions—from Christian monks to Christian Scientists—all describe profound spiritual experiences as a lapse of will, where one is decisively overtaken by a powerful, unknowable force. James professed himself unable, despite great interest, to be so taken. In the early 1840s, Lincoln was apparently in a similar predicament. “He always seemed to deplore his want of faith as a very great infelicity,” said Albert Taylor Bledsoe, “from which he would be glad to be delivered.” Yet deliverance eluded him. Belief coexisted with doubt. He would have to find his way through this muddled terrain.
Joshua Speed and Fanny Henning were wed on February 15, 1842. Lincoln eagerly waited for news of the ceremony. When Speed’s letter arrived, Lincoln opened it with what he called “intense anxiety and trepidation.” He was so worked up, he said, that ten hours later “I have hardly yet . . . become calm.” He felt chastened since, true to his character, he had given way to fear rather than resting in hope: “I tell you, Speed,” he wrote, “our forebodings, for which you and I are rather peculiar, are all the worst sort of nonsense . . . You had so obviously improved, at the verry time I so much feared, you would have grown worse.”
Once Speed got married, and reported to Lincoln that he was indeed feeling better, the tone of Lincoln’s letters changed dramatically. For months he had countered his friend’s gloom, assuring him that he would be all right and that the future would treat him kindly. Now, though, the vigilant, relentlessly consoling persona washed away. Hearing that Speed had decided to take up the plantation life on land that he had inherited outside Louisville, Lincoln bemoaned, “How miserably things seem to be arranged in this world. If we have no friends, we have no pleasure; and if we have them, we are sure to lose them, and be doubly pained by the loss . . . I feel somwhat jealous of both of you now; you will be so exclusively concerned for one another, that I shall be forgotten entirely.” Having gamely stepped up to play caretaker, Lincoln fell back to the role of a friend in need of care.
Again Lincoln faced the unnerving prospect of marriage to Mary Todd and the turmoil of his own indecision. For a time, it may have appeared to Lincoln that fate would settle the question, whisking away his mightbe bride in the arms of another suitor. Yet one by one Todd’s other suitors dropped away. After several seasons with no interaction, the two were reintroduced at a gathering of friends sometime in the summer of 1842. One of the agents of the reunion was Dr. Anson Henry, who probably thought—this was one of Benjamin Rush’s prescriptions for hypochondriasis in the case of bachelors—that marriage would be good medicine.
Shortly after the first break in their courtship, Lincoln concluded that he would not be happy with Todd, going so far as to tell a confidant that marrying her “would just kill me.” But in addition to the vexing question of his honor—had he made a pledge to this woman? wo
uld he be a knave to forsake her?—Lincoln faced the questions that so often afflict depressives: Could he trust his own judgment? When he made a decision, could he act on it, or would he be hobbled by the divisions within him? “Before I resolve to do the one thing or the other,” he wrote to Speed on July 4, 1842, “I must regain my confidence in my own ability to keep my resolves when they are made. In that ability you know, I once prided myself as the only, or at least the chief, gem of my character; that gem I lost—how, and when, you too well know. I have not yet regained it; and until I do, I can not trust myself in any matter of much importance.”
Though Lincoln had clearly professed his agony at the prospect of marriage to Mary Todd, he now seemed to be wondering whether those emotions were simply the product of his “nervous debility.” With Speed, he’d believed strongly that his friend had found a good woman and that he needed to stiffen his resolve and marry her. “I believe now,” he wrote Speed, “that, had you understood my case at the time”—that is, the winter of 1840–1841—“as well as I understood yours afterwards, by the aid you would have given me, I should have sailed through clear; but that does not now afford me sufficient confidence, to begin that, or the like of that again.” In October, he wrote to Speed again. Eight months into his marriage, Lincoln knew that Speed must be happier, “for without, you would not be living.” Still, he wanted to know: “‘Are you now, in feeling as well as judgment, glad you are married as you are?’ From any body but me, this would be an impudent question not to be tolerated; but I know you will pardon it in me. Please answer it quickly as I feel impatient to know.”
Lincoln's Melancholy Page 12