The key feature of Lincoln’s life in the 1840s and early 1850s was his hard work at politics and the law. Though major depression is often associated with lethargy to the point of being frozen, many people with chronic depression not only work well but devote more energy to their vocation than to any other endeavor. The psychologist Hagop S. Akiskal, who has written widely on the condition, notes that chronic depressives “seem to derive personal gratification from over-dedication to professions that require greater service and suffering on behalf of other people.” Many chronic depressives say that they feel empty in every realm except their work. Akiskal proposes that two factors might lead to such a “mono-categorical existence.” Depressives might withdraw from social pursuits until work is all that’s left, or work might be a compensatory response—an asset that is conscientiously developed and protected.
Both factors apply to Lincoln. His social network, such as it was, largely radiated around his work. “Friend,” in Lincoln’s letters, is used to refer to political allies and contacts. When he modified the term, as in “personal friend,” “particular friends,” “most highly valued friends,” or “partial friends,” it was to emphasize the depth of ties and loyalty. “The better part of one’s life consists of his friendships,” Lincoln wrote in the midst of a dispute with a man whom he judged “one of the most cherished.” The man was no intimate of Lincoln’s, but a partner of long standing. Political work also provided an outlet for Lincoln’s talent. “Every man is proud of what he does well,” Lincoln said, “and no man is proud of what he does not do well. With the former, his heart is in his work; and he will do twice as much of it with less fatigue. The latter performs a little imperfectly, looks at it in disgust, turns from it, and imagines himself exceedingly tired.” For insight into the melancholy of day-to-day life, Byron and Poe had nothing on Lincoln.
In February 1843, a few days after his thirty-fourth birthday, Lincoln wrote an ally a letter that nicely captured the frankness of his ambition. “Now if you should hear any one say that Lincoln don’t want to go to Congress, I wish you as a personal friend of mine, would tell him you have reason to believe he is mistaken. The truth is, I would like to go very much.” His campaign never got off the ground. He was rebuffed by his own county delegation, which sent the name of Lincoln’s colleague Edward Baker to the district-wide convention. There, another candidate, John Hardin, prevailed. The results meant that Lincoln would have to wait for both men to serve in Congress before he had his own clear shot at the seat. “The people of Sangamon,” Lincoln wrote, “have cast me off.”
Three years later, after great effort, Lincoln did become the Whig nominee for the House of Representatives. (Baker stepped aside to make way for him, and shortly afterward, Lincoln named his son after this special friend.) In the general election, he won with fifty-six percent of the vote. He was thirty-seven years old and headed to Washington, where he would take a seat in the same Congress with such dearly respected elders as John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster. Yet Lincoln’s only extant personal reaction to the victory came in a letter to Joshua Speed. “Being elected to Congress,” he wrote—in the same letter that noted the death by degrees of their friendship—“though I am very grateful to our friends, for having done it, has not pleased me as much as I expected.”
Why would he be less pleased than he expected? Lincoln had, some years before, noted to Speed that they both had the “peculiar misfortune” of dreaming dreams of Elysium “far exceeding all that any thing earthly can realize.” In other words, they wanted things not only beyond what was realistic but beyond what was humanly possible. In itself, such an unquenchable thirst is an old quality, the stuff of countless myths and tragedies. The reverse of a constant desire for more and better is an ennui that comes with achievement. In a famous example, Lincoln’s contemporary John Stuart Mill realized, at age twenty, that if he accomplished all his goals, he would still feel no great joy or happiness. “At this,” he wrote in his autobiography, “my heart sank within me. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means?” He fell into a deep depression that lasted most of a year.
While many people feel a letdown after a success or an achievement, research on chronic depression shows that for dysthymics, the letdowns can be more severe. What looks to the world like a triumph, many depressed people see as merely another step on an unending ladder. In extreme cases, a dramatic achievement can create as strong a sense of dislocation and loneliness as would a dramatic setback, and may lead to suicide.
The period around Lincoln’s election—that is, just after he could reasonably expect to win the seat in Congress—was marked by more than the usual introspection. Just days after he sewed up the nomination, he began to produce poetry concerned with the inevitability of suffering and the elusiveness of emotional peace. All told, one is left with the sense that, rather than the first step toward an illustrious future, Lincoln took his election as another indication that the earthly world had no real pleasure in store for him. Remember, according to his friend Joseph Gillespie, he didn’t merely maintain that the world was full of discomfort and difficulty; he said that such was the case even “under the most favorable circumstances.” The paradox, then, is that a strong step forward could in fact serve to powerfully illustrate the inability of accomplishments to satisfy him.
Lincoln’s experience in Washington tended to underscore rather than dissipate his innate dissatisfaction. The major issue of his first session was the war against Mexico, which the Democratic president, James K. Polk, launched in 1846. Whigs were suspicious of Polk’s motives and questioned his justification for the war—that Mexico had fired on U.S. troops on American soil. Lincoln made himself a visible element of the Whig opposition, giving a speech that accused Polk of lying and warmongering. Opposing a war is rarely good politics. Lincoln’s timing proved to be especially unfortunate. Two weeks after a speech in which he demanded to know precisely where the war had started—by way of challenging Polk’s justification—a courier arrived in Washington with a peace treaty that announced it had ended, with outstanding terms for the United States, which gained a vast swath of new territory.
Lincoln soon heard that his position on the war was hurting him in Illinois. He pronounced some other disappointing political news as “heart-sickening.” Indeed, his work seemed to bring little pleasure. He gave a speech on internal improvements “which,” he wrote, “I shall send home as soon as I can get it written out and printed and which I suppose nobody will read.” The one clearly personal letter of his first term showed a broader sense of displeasure. Though his wife and two boys at first accompanied him to Washington, they decamped after a few months to Lexington, Kentucky, where she had family. In April 1848, Lincoln wrote her a letter that began: “In this troublesome world, we are never quite satisfied. When you were here I thought you hindered me some in attending to business; but now, having nothing but business—no variety—it has grown exceedingly tasteless to me. I hate to sit down and direct documents, and I hate to stay in this old room by myself.”
Even a hot presidential race was strangely depressing. At their convention in the summer of 1848, the Whigs had a chance to nominate two party heroes who were personal favorites of Lincoln’s: Daniel Webster and Henry Clay. However, they passed over these men, choosing instead Zachary Taylor, a general and slave owner whose reputation rested solely on his association with President Polk’s war. On a plank that contained no statement of party principles or policies, the Whigs ran a candidate who had no political record. Knowing that he was the most electable, Lincoln backed Taylor.
When Congress met again in 1849, Lincoln made a move to secure a lasting achievement. He authored a bill that would gradually free slaves in the District of Columbia while providing compensation to their owners. But his support fell away—he was “abandoned,” Lincoln said—even before he introduced the bill. Lincoln went home from Congress with no great standing among voters. He had previously committed h
imself to serve only one term. Had he run again, he probably would have lost. He told Herndon that he had committed “political suicide.” Most scholars see Lincoln’s stint in Congress as a respectable first term. From his own point of view, though, Lincoln found himself in a political hole.
Even the one piece of good political news quickly turned sour. President Taylor, whom Lincoln had backed enthusiastically, won the election in November 1848 and took office in March 1849. Lincoln earnestly sought a position, for himself or one of his allies, as head of the General Land Office. When he learned that a Whig who had opposed Taylor was being considered for the position, he objected strenuously. “It will now mortify me deeply,” he wrote, “if Gen. Taylor’s administration shall trample all my wishes in the dust.” His wishes were trampled in the dust. As a consolation, he was offered the governorship of the newly organized Oregon Territory. His wife opposed the move, and Lincoln turned the job down. He said later that, at this moment, he was “disgusted” with politics and that he’d made up his mind to “retire” and practice law. This was an astonishing claim. For nearly two decades, politics had not been merely an avocation for Lincoln but the center of his existence, the arena where he focused both his day-to-day attention and his longterm hopes to contribute to a lasting good for which he would be remembered. Outside politics, Lincoln had little prospect for achieving that goal.
If Lincoln thought he had hit bottom with his poor showing in Congress, he soon experienced a sharper, personal loss. On February 1, 1850, three-year-old Eddie Lincoln died after a long illness. Given Lincoln’s history, we might expect that the death would have thrown him profoundly off balance. After all, the death of Ann Rutledge, along with other factors, had precipitated his first breakdown fifteen years before. Yet in William Herndon’s voluminous oral histories, in which Rutledge’s death is mentioned scores of times, Eddie’s death comes up not once. This does not mean that Lincoln didn’t express any grief, but it does suggest that he said or did little that registered with his contemporaries. In his writings, there are only two mentions of his son’s death—the second when he left Springfield for Washington, D.C., in 1861, and the first in a brief note to his stepbrother John Johnston. “As you make no mention of it,” Lincoln wrote on February 23, 1850, “I suppose you had not learned that we lost our little boy. He was sick fifty two days & died the morning of the first day of this month. It was not our first, but our second child. We miss him very much.”
Two years later, Lincoln learned that his father was sick and dying. Three letters came to Springfield imploring Lincoln to visit. He finally wrote to his stepbrother that he hadn’t replied “because it appeared to me I could write nothing which could do any good.” He could not visit because he was too busy with his work, but said to give his father this message: “Say to him that if we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant; but that if it be his lot to go now, he will soon have a joyous meeting with many loved ones gone before; and where the rest of us, through the help of God, hope ere-long to join them.” Tom Lincoln died five days later. His son did not attend his funeral or mark his grave.
To some extent, Lincoln’s muted reaction can be accounted for by cultural norms. Death, in the mid-nineteenth century, was much more likely than today to be accepted as a decree of God, to be suffered quietly. Yet even by the standards of his contemporaries, Lincoln became known, as he grew older, as a man of profound emotional reserve. At New Salem in the mid-1830s, he had been seen as frank and “open souled.” In Springfield, a decade later, he appeared—in Herndon’s oft-cited phrase —to be “the most secretive—reticent—shut-mouthed man that ever existed.” Joseph Gillespie, who found his friend to be temperamentally gloomy, said, “If he had griefs he never spoke of them in general conversation,” and “He was tender-hearted without much shew of sensibility.”
Mary Lincoln put her finger on the crucial dynamic. With all of her husband’s “deep feeling,” she said, “he was not, a demonstrative man, when he felt most deeply, he expressed, the least.” Lincoln developed this tendency—or perhaps we should say this tendency developed him—in concert with a range of related qualities. By a combination of idea, effort, and force of experience, he began sometime in his mid- to late thirties actually to live under the “reign of reason” that he had so dramatically called for as a young man. “His reason and his logic,” said his friend James Matheny, “swallowed up all his being.” This captured a dominant visual image of Lincoln by people who knew him well in his middle years, which was perhaps the most profound and frequent indication of his melancholy.
From 1845 to 1847, a young man named Gibson Harris worked with Lincoln and his law partner, William Herndon, as a clerk. Spending his days in the firm’s cluttered second-floor room above the post office on Springfield’s center square, Harris soon noticed that Lincoln would regularly slip away from conversation and fall into what Harris called one of his “blue spells.” His face, Harris wrote, “wore a sad, or more correctly a far-away, expression, that made one long to wake him up, as it were, and bring him back to his accustomed geniality and winning smile.” Harris didn’t consider the spells to be very serious. “It took me no great time,” he said, “to learn that a very slight thing would break up his brooding.”
That brooding—the silent, penetrating mood of melancholy and the look that came with it—became more intense as time went on. “Soberness of thought Commenced Growing on Mr Lincoln I think When he was Elected to Congress,” said his friend Abner Ellis. When Lincoln returned from Washington, Ellis said, he brought back with him “That Star gazing thinking Look, as if Looking at vacancy.” Around the same time, Mary Lincoln’s nephew Presley Edwards observed that one of Lincoln’s chief features was “a far-away, absent minded look, scarcely to be classed as sad, yet falling little short of it.” Three years later, in 1851, Edwards saw Lincoln again and thought the look had intensified.
By the mid-1850s—Lincoln’s mid-forties—the cast of his face and body when in repose suggested deep, abiding gloom to nearly all who crossed his path. The young lawyer Henry C. Whitney first met Lincoln around this time. In his memoirs, Whitney recounted an afternoon in the spring of 1855 at court in Bloomington, Illinois. He had recently arrived in Illinois and was getting to know the characters at the bar. “I was sitting with John T. Stuart”—Lincoln’s first law partner—“while a case was being tried,” Whitney recalled, “and our conversation was, at the moment, about Lincoln, when Stuart remarked that he was a hopeless victim of melancholy. I expressed surprise, to which Stuart replied; ‘Look at him, now.’” Whitney turned and saw Lincoln sitting by himself in a corner of the room, “wrapped in abstraction and gloom.” Whitney watched him for a while. “It appeared,” he wrote, “as if he was pursuing in his mind some specific, sad subject, regularly and systematically through various sinuosities, and his sad face would assume, at times, deeper phases of grief: but no relief came from dark and despairing melancholy, till he was roused by the breaking up of court, when he emerged from his cave of gloom and came back, like one awakened from sleep, to the world in which he lived, again.”
Another time, Whitney shared a bed with Lincoln at a Danville, Illinois, inn on a cold night. Whitney remembered, “One morning, I was awakened early—before daylight—by my companion sitting up in bed, his figure dimly visible by the ghostly firelight, and talking the wildest and most incoherent nonsense all to himself. A stranger to Lincoln would have supposed he had suddenly gone insane. Of course, I knew Lincoln and his idiosyncrasies, and felt no alarm.” Five minutes later, Lincoln jumped out of bed, washed himself, and put on his clothes. Then he laid some wood on the fire and sat beside it, “moodily, dejectedly, in a most somber and gloomy spell,” Whitney observed, “till the breakfast bell rang, when he started, as if from sleep, and went with us to breakfast.”
Descriptions of these moods are a staple of reminiscences of Lincoln. A journalist named Jesse Weik, who interviewed dozens of Lincoln’s clos
e associates, concluded, “The most marked and prominent feature in Lincoln’s organization was his predisposition to melancholy or at least the appearance thereof as indicated by his facial expression when sitting alone and thus shut off from conversation with other people. It was a characteristic peculiar as it was pronounced. Almost every man in Illinois I met . . . reminded me of it . . . My inquiry on this subject among Lincoln’s close friends convinced me that men who never saw him could scarcely realize this tendency to melancholy, not only as reflected in his facial expression, but as it affected his spirits and well being.”
Accounts of Lincoln’s spells have several points in common. First, they portray Lincoln in the company of other people and appearing oblivious to their presence. Jonathan Birch, who knew Lincoln, said that he could often be seen surrounded by a group of men, listening in rapt attention to one of his inimitable stories. His eyes would be lit up with laughter. Just an hour later, Birch recounted, “he might be seen in the same place or in some law office near by, but, alas, how different! His chair, no longer in the center of the room, would be leaning back against the wall; his feet drawn up and resting on the front rounds so that his knees and chair were about on a level; his hat tipped slightly forward as if to shield his face; his eyes no longer sparkling with fun or merriment, but sad and downcast and his hands clasped around his knees. There, drawn up within himself as it were, he would sit, the very picture of dejection and gloom. Thus absorbed have I seen him sit for hours at a time.”
A second common feature of these accounts is that even those close to Lincoln did not approach or interrupt him, but rather left him, as one said, “severely alone.” “No one ever thought of breaking the spell by speech,” said Birch, “for by his moody silence and abstraction he had thrown about him a barrier so dense and impenetrable no one dared to break through.” His colleagues were deeply respectful of his moods, none more so than William Herndon. “I could always realize when he was in distress, without being told,” Herndon recalled. “He was not exactly an early riser, that is, he never appeared at the office till about nine o’clock in the morning. I usually preceded him an hour. Sometimes, however, he would come down as early as seven o’clock—in fact, on one occasion I remember he came down before daylight . . . He would either be lying on the lounge looking skyward, or doubled up in a chair with his feet resting on the sill of a back window. He would not look up on my entering, and only answered my ‘Good morning’ with a grunt.” Herndon would go about his business, “but the evidence of his melancholy and distress was so plain, and his silence so significant, that I would grow restless myself, and finding some excuse to go to the courthouse or elsewhere, would leave the room.”
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