As hard as Lincoln had worked to dissect the nature of suffering and mental health, he found himself in much the same place he’d been around that “fatal first of Jany. ‘41” Beset by the big questions about his future, the travails of ordinary life came hard upon him. Bowling Green, his friend and mentor from New Salem, died in 1842, and Green’s Masonic lodge held a funeral in early September. Lincoln came to deliver a eulogy, but soon after he stood up and began to speak, he “commenced choaking & sobbing,” said one observer. He told the mourners that he was “un-manned” and could not proceed. Other scenes made Lincoln’s friends look on him with alarm. James Matheny, who worked across the hall from Lincoln, often saw him alone in his law office, deep in thought, and with a tortured look on his face—the word Matheny used was “glooming.” He worried that Lincoln would kill himself.
It was the first election-year fall in ten years in which Lincoln had no campaign to run, no stump speeches to give, no constituents to court. He had plenty of time to think, which may have done him more harm than good. “I think if I were you,” he had written Speed, “in case my mind were not exactly right, I would avoid being idle; I would immediately engage in some business, or go to making preparation for it, which would be the same thing.” This age-old prescription for melancholy has been often repeated. The idea is to try to set the mind on a concrete project, something outside oneself. Otherwise, the morbid, self-accusing, hopeless thoughts can take on a life of their own, creating a frenetic powerlessness, the mental equivalent of an insect trying to work its way out of a spider’s web.
Trapped by temperament and circumstance, Lincoln chose a way out, not with relief but with resignation. In early November, he went to his friend James Matheny and said to him, “Jim, I shall have to marry that girl.” Other incidents round out the picture of Lincoln’s attitude toward his matrimony. A boy who saw Lincoln dressing for his wedding asked him where he was going. Lincoln answered, “To Hell, I suppose.” According to Matheny, who was his best man, “Lincoln looked and acted as if he was going to the Slaughter.” Nevertheless, as he had advised Speed earlier in the year, he got through the ceremony calmly, at least calmly enough not to excite alarm in any present. At Ninian and Elizabeth Edwards’s mansion on the hill—where, three years before, Lincoln had first come to know Mary Todd—they stood as bride and groom. Charles Dresser, an Episcopalian minister, presided. Lincoln offered up a ring engraved “A. L. to Mary, Nov 4. 1842, Love is Eternal.”
Chapter 6
The Reign of Reason
ACCORDING TO A POPULAR psychological theory of Lincoln’s day, the human mind had three powers, called “faculties.” In good health, they fell into line in a strict hierarchy. The highest faculty, called reason, regulated both the “mechanical faculties,” including reflexes and instincts, and the “animal faculties,” including desires and emotions. The catchall term for everything that needed subduing was “passions.” A good life demanded cultivating the virtues of reason and keeping unruly passions in check, with the aim of constructing a balanced character.
As a young man, Lincoln loudly declared his allegiance to the powers of reason, which were especially valued in the moral and political program of the American Whigs. In a speech delivered in 1838, “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” Lincoln considered the benefits brought by the American Revolution, in which people had let out much deep-rooted hate and a wish for revenge, channeling these passions into a fight against the British for civil and religious liberty. Heirs to the Revolution, Lincoln said, must see that passion could help them no more. “It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence.”
In 1842, Lincoln returned to the theme, this time in a discussion of intemperance. With kind words for those in the grip of their passions, he urged that the “most powerful moral effort” be summoned to counteract them. Instructing drunkards to subdue their “fixed habits, or burning appetites” and others to aid them by taking the temperance pledge, Lincoln said that such concerted action could lead to a “moral freedom” surpassing the political freedom gained by the Revolution. With judicious self-control, he said, “every son of earth shall drink in rich fruition the sorrow-quenching draughts of perfect liberty.” “Happy day,” he concluded his speech, “when—all appetites controlled, all poisons subdued, all matter subjected—mind, all conquering mind, shall live and move, the monarch of the world. Glorious consummation! Hail, fall of Fury! Reign of Reason, all hail!”
But as he spoke these encomiums to reason, his own passions were running wild. During his first breakdown, said Robert B. Rutledge, “many of his friends feared that reason would desert her throne,” using a common image for insanity. In his courtships with Mary Owens and Mary Todd, Lincoln bemoaned his inability to control himself. He often gave way to physical and emotional impulses. In 1840, he once mocked an opponent so mercilessly that the man left the scene crying, an episode Lincoln sorely regretted. Another pang of regret came when he heaped such disdain on a political opponent that the man challenged him to a duel. His reign of reason had not yet begun.
His decision to marry was a big turning point. And the miserable reserve Lincoln exhibited at the ceremony itself was the very picture of the manly self-denial he would come to embody. James Matheny observed that as a young man Lincoln showed “fancy, emotion, and imagination,” but as he got older he grew more abstracted and contemplative. This development was tied to a change in the nature of his melancholy. In Lincoln’s middle years, a loud insistence on his own woe evolved into a quiet, disciplined yearning. He yoked his feelings to a style of severe self-control, articulating a melancholy that was, more than anything, philosophical. He saw the world as a sad, difficult place from which he expected considerable suffering. “There was a strong tinge of sadness in Mr Lincolns composition,” said his friend Joseph Gillespie. “He felt very strongly that there was more of discomfort than real happiness in human existence under the most favorable circumstances and the general current of his reflections was in that channel.” In the late 1850s, a girl named Rosa Haggard, the daughter of a hotel proprietor in Winchester, Illinois, asked Lincoln to sign her autograph album. Lincoln took the book and wrote:
To Rosa—
You are young, and I am older;
You are hopeful, I am not—
Enjoy life, ere it grows colder—
Pluck the roses ere they rot.
From the perspective of modern clinicians, the persistence and quality of Lincoln’s symptoms call for a new diagnostic framework. Major depressive disorder, which applies to Lincoln’s earlier years, best describes a series of discrete episodes, even if they go on for many months at a time. But when a condition lasts for more than two years, even with some breaks in symptoms, it is considered to be a chronic depression. Episodic and chronic depressions have much in common, but the distinction matters. Imagine a person who begins to travel abroad as a tourist. The first few trips are memorable—when they started, how long they lasted. But if the trips grow in frequency and duration, at some point the tourist would become known as an expatriate. The destination need not have changed, but the nature of the journey would call for a qualitative, not just a quantitative, distinction.
As it turns out, the “land” of chronic depression is one for which few guidebooks have been written. The psychologist James P. McCullough, Jr., one authority on the condition, describes it as “grossly misdiagnosed, understudied, and undertreated.” This poses both a challenge and an opportunity in the study of Lincoln. The existing literature can’t definitively contextualize his experience. But his life, supplemented with the shards of knowledge on chronic depression, can offer a new and valuable context. In particular, it shows how depression, for good and for ill, can blend slowly, subtly, but surely with a person as he works to bring himself into balance.
One crucial distinction between major depression and chronic depression is that, in the la
tter, one largely ceases to howl in protest that the world is hard or painful. Rather, one becomes accustomed to it, expecting such hardship and greeting it with, at best, a stoic determination. As the influential psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin wrote in 1921, people with a depressive temperament see life as “a burden which they habitually bear with dutiful self-denial without being compensated by the pleasure(s) of existence.”
This phrase captures a quality that began to show up increasingly in Lincoln in the years following his marriage. It was no coincidence. For many men in the early nineteenth century, as we have seen, marriage brought a sharply new material environment (the man had to lead and provide for his family) and a new emotional environment. Before marriage, young men had a fair amount of latitude when it came to expressing the “feminine” qualities of tenderness, vulnerability, and emotional volatility. After marriage, though, the reins of expectation tightened. According to the 1828 Webster’s, females were the “humane, tender” sex, while the male was “master of his mental powers.” A married man had to act like a man.
Abraham and Mary Lincoln took these sex-specific cultural roles almost to the point of caricature. As a single young woman, Mary Todd had been known as bright, studious, and ambitious. Insistently and playfully, she defied society’s rigid expectations for a southern belle. She openly participated in politics, though she admitted it to be “rather an unladylike profession.” She flirted with men she liked, regardless of their background. (Many women of her class would have seen Lincoln as unsuitable.) Once she caused twitters in Springfield when, unable to walk the muddy streets, she hitched a ride in the back of a horse-drawn cart, allowing herself to be delivered home like a bale of hay. Such avenues for self-assertion and idiosyncrasy were closed to her after marriage. By law, she became an extension of her husband. By tradition, she became the steward of their household. They moved into a small room in the Globe Tavern, a boarding house that served communal meals for a weekly fee. Mary Lincoln—historians always call her Mary Todd Lincoln, though she never again used her maiden name—quickly became pregnant, perhaps as soon as her wedding night. This considerably augmented the major change in her circumstances. A woman with child was not supposed to be seen in public. For this twenty-four-year-old so used to gallivanting about, it may have been a shock. Even her private life had always been social: dining at her father’s table, going to fancy schools in Lexington, attending parties at her sister’s home in Springfield. Now she had only one steady companion, her husband, and he was gone for many weeks of the year on business.
The Lincolns had their first child in August 1843, a boy they named Robert Todd Lincoln, known as Bob. In 1844, they bought a cottage at Eighth and Jackson streets in Springfield. It had three rooms on the ground floor and two rooms in a half loft upstairs. The house was painted light brown with dark green shutters. The back yard had a small stable and a privy. A white picket fence ran around the property. In 1846, they had a second son, Edward Baker Lincoln, whom they called Eddie. As the family grew, Lincoln’s time at home shrank. Twice a year, he traveled the eighth judicial circuit, an 830–mile journey through fourteen counties, with a group of lawyers and judges who held court sessions in town after town. “Riding the circuit” was no small project. In the year Eddie was born, he was gone all of April, most of May, a week in June, a week in July, three weeks in October, and a week each in November and December. In 1850, records place him in Springfield for only 100 days, while he was away for at least 175 days. In a rare but touching acknowledgment of the distance between them, Mary Lincoln once said that if her husband had spent more time at home, she could “love him better.”
Even those who know next to nothing about Lincoln do know that he had a troubled wife who was eventually committed to an asylum. Upon hearing of Lincoln’s melancholy, many people ask whether his marriage caused it. Clearly not. As we have seen, his melancholy emerged before he met his future wife. But as in any long-standing relationship, the partners influenced each other. The influence he had on her, and the intricacies of Mary Lincoln’s psychological life, deserve their own study. Considering her influence on him, we should not take for granted its prosaic and salutary aspects. She presided over a well-run home, taking care of chores, supervising a servant (they usually kept one), and raising the boys. This was hard work that, when done best, got little attention. She also was widely regarded to have been a spur to her husband’s career, prompting him to keep at his youthful ambitions. We know from William Herndon that Lincoln’s ambition was a “little engine that knew no rest,” but we also know from Herndon that the engine was continually retooled at home, for his wife was “in fact endowed with a more restless ambition than he.”
The same qualities that drew the couple together in the first place—a shared love of poetry, for instance—animated their lives. Both cared deeply for their boys. The few letters from him to her that survive—an unknown number were burned—show glimpses of affection, albeit couched in paternalistic endearments. Once while away from home, Lincoln heard that his wife wished to join him. He wrote to her, “Will you be a good girl in all things, if I consent? Then come along, and that as soon as possible. Having got the idea in my head, I shall be impatient till I see you . . . Come on just as soon as you can. I want to see you, and our dear—dear boys very much.” When he was president, she was often away, and he once sent a similar message: “I really wish to see you.” As Michael Burlingame has pointed out, these are mere spoonfuls compared to the ladles of romance doled out by many of Lincoln’s colleagues to their wives.
And the Lincolns’ marriage had barrels of difficulties, exacerbated by her volatility and his withdrawal. She had long teetered between emotional extremes. “She was very highly strung, nervous, impulsive, excitable,” said her cousin Margaret Stuart, who grew up with her, “having an emotional temperament much like an April day, sunning all over with laughter one moment, the next crying as though her heart would break.” In Springfield, she became known for these mood swings. “As we used familiarly to state it,” said O. H. Browning, “she was always ‘either in the garret or cellar.’” After her marriage, she seemed to have a kind of tripwire surrounding her. Easily triggered, it set off tantrums of sadness, fear, and anger veering toward rage. She often shouted at her servants and at her husband, and even struck him for, say, bringing home a poor cut of meat or ignoring her call to tend the fire. She had a “very violent temper,” said her cousin John Stuart.
Lincoln’s main strategy was to ignore her. Sometimes, when she had what he called “one of her nervous spells,” he would stay away for days at a time. He kept a couch in his office that was long enough for him to sleep on. “If she became excited or troublesome,” explained their neighbor James Gourley, “. . . he would apparently pay no attention to her. Frequently, he would laugh at her, which is a risky thing to do in the face of an infuriated wife; but generally, if her impatience continued, he would pick up one of the children and deliberately leave home as if to take a walk.” The withdrawal seems to have provoked his wife further—as Gourley understood, the last thing an angry person wants is to be scoffed at or ignored.
But Lincoln put his stock in enduring domestic trouble without complaint. Once Mary Lincoln slapped a servant girl whose work dissatisfied her. The girl went home and complained to her father, a man named Jacob Taggart, who came to investigate. Soon enough, he, too, provoked Mrs. Lincoln’s wrath, and she struck him with a broom. Taggart stormed out and went looking for Lincoln, to whom he angrily recounted what had happened. Hearing the story, Lincoln hung his head and said something to the effect of, “Can’t you endure this one wrong done you while I have had to bear it without complaint for lo these many years?” Sympathetic, Taggart immediately dropped the matter.
Lincoln did little to cultivate intimacy with his wife, or with any other person. His colleagues on the circuit, though they liked and admired him, also felt an impassable distance from him. The one relationship that had obviously transcended business, w
ith Joshua Speed, was by the late 1840s clearly a thing of the past. Physical separation ruled out the kind of day-to-day intimacy that they had once enjoyed. And their letters grew increasingly infrequent. Lincoln identified a reason in an 1846 letter to Speed: “You, no doubt, assign the suspension of our correspondence to the true philosophical cause.” Speed had become a Kentucky planter and a slave owner, which created the conditions for all kinds of ideological divides from an Illinois Whig. Without more details on this “philosophical cause,” though, the significance of the letter is the dissipation of their bond. Lincoln wrote to Speed: “It must be confessed, by both of us, that this is rather a cold reason for allowing a friendship, such as ours, to die by degrees.” By then the friendship seemed mostly dead.
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