Lincoln's Melancholy

by Joshua Wolf Shenk

  The door of their office had a window, with a calico curtain hung on brass rings. Leaving, Herndon drew the curtain across the glass, leaving Lincoln “alone in his gloom.” He continued, “I would stay away—say an hour, and then I would go into the office on one pretense or another and if Lincoln did not then speak I did as before—go away &c. In the course of another hour I would go back and if Lincoln spoke I knew it was all over.” Thus did Lincoln move through middle age, evincing a melancholy that, as Henry Whitney said, “was part of his nature and could no more be shaken off than he could part with his brains.”

  In all the accounts of Lincoln’s gloomy spells, there exists not a single instance in which one of his friends or colleagues asked him what he was thinking about. If the true experience of his melancholy is a canvas, the details of what people saw are but dabs of color surrounded by a gaping white space. The feelings that emanated from him, which set off such strong feelings in others, undeniably show that he was suffering—but from what? We could theorize, but it would be like taking a brush to a grand, haunting work by an old master. Better to stand back and observe.

  As we do so, it’s worth pointing out that his “blue spells,” while in one sense an indication of melancholy, may also have represented a response to it. Paradoxically, such obvious suffering may actually have been the visible side of Lincoln’s effort to contain his dark feelings and thoughts—to wrestle privately with his moods until they passed or lightened. “With depression,” writes the psychologist David B. Cohen, “recovery may be a matter of shifting from protest to more effective ways of mastering helplessness.” Lincoln was indeed extremely effective. He worked consistently and well in his law practice, representing a range of clients from railroads to needy old friends. Though not the kind of work that generally gets into the history books, it did bring the prosaic satisfactions of everyday contact and at times the stirring sense of justice done. Lincoln also worked assiduously to develop his mind, carrying with him around the circuit, in the early 1850s, the first six books of Euclid’s Elements, which move from definitions to postulates to axioms to proofs. In Lincoln’s time, this text represented the apex of logical rigor. Studying such topics as the side-angle-side proof of triangle congruency, the Pythagorean theorem and its converse, and the properties of circles, he came to master them, a quiet triumph of reason in an unreasonable world.

  Chapter 7

  The Vents of My Moods and Gloom

  AT A TIME WHEN newspapers were stuffed with ads for substances to cure all manner of ailments, it wouldn’t have been unusual for Lincoln to seek help at the pharmacy. In at least one case he did, taking a pill known as the “blue mass,” a ubiquitous treatment prescribed for everything from tuberculosis to hypochondriasis. These small round pills, about the size of a peppercorn, were made of pure ground mercury with a bit of rosewater and honey added for flavor. The blue mass was supposed to ameliorate melancholy by clearing black bile out of the body—laxative and antidepressant all at once.

  Lincoln may have tried other medicines for his melancholy over the years. He didn’t drink alcohol for pleasure, but he did drink occasionally for medicinal reasons. In the vernacular of his time, he “drank his dram.” At least once in Washington, he drank a glass of champagne for his nerves, at a doctor’s recommendation. Lincoln also had a charge account at the Corneau and Diller drugstore, at 122 South Sixth Street in Springfield, where he bought a number of substances, including opiates, camphor, sarsaparilla, and, on one occasion, fifty cents’ worth of cocaine. In 1899, when Merck & Company published its first Manual of the Materia Medica, these substances were all listed as treatments for melancholia. It would have been unexceptional for Lincoln to have taken such medicines for ongoing pain in body and mind. Opium in particular was considered indispensable, in small doses, for chronic mental conditions. And all medicines were what we now consider to be “over the counter,” since the federal government didn’t regulate food or drugs until 1906. Still, while the charge account is suggestive, no record exists of Lincoln’s actually using these substances. He may have bought them for his wife or children.

  To whatever extent Lincoln used medicines, his essential view of melancholy discounted the possibility of transformation by an external agent. He believed that his suffering proceeded inexorably from his constitution, that it was his lot to bear. “You flaxen men with broad faces are born with cheer, and don’t know a cloud from a star,” he once said to a visitor at the White House. “I am of another temperament.” The main therapies Lincoln employed reflected this understanding. He told stories and jokes, studiously gathering new material from talented peers and printed sources. And he gave voice to his melancholy, reading, reciting, and composing poetry that dwelled on themes of death, despair, and human futility. These strategies offered him relief, sustenance, and a movement toward wisdom.

  Still, he neither cured his underlying problem nor eliminated his symptoms. Somewhat in the way that insulin allows diabetics to maintain their lives without eliminating the underlying problem, humor and poetry gave Lincoln succor without taking away his need for it. Rather than quash his conflicts, his therapies may actually have heightened them, for these were not medical strategies but moral and existential ones. Faced with questions about the meaning of his life, Lincoln chose responses that engaged many of the same questions. Thus did “therapy” and “malady” come together in Lincoln’s journey toward wholeness.

  The idea of humor as a therapy has deep roots. “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine,” instructs Proverbs. In The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare wrote, “And frame your mind to mirth and merriment, which bars a thousand harms.” The mid-nineteenth-century Manual of Psychological Medicine refers to the case of a French actor who, despairing and melancholy, seeks help from a physician. The doctor recommends that his patient see a comic play for relief—preferably something with the infectious humor of an actor named Carlini. “Your distemper must be rooted indeed,” the doctor says, “if the acting of the lively Carlini does not remove it.” This oft-told anecdote identifies humor as an essential weapon against distress, which has been borne out by modern research. Yet the Carlini story also captured how, when applied to melancholy, the medicine shared something essential with the disease. In the story, the patient replies to the doctor, “I am the very Carlini whom you recommend me to see; and, while I am capable of filling Paris with mirth and laughter, I am myself the dejected victim of melancholy and chagrin!”

  Though we associate humor with pleasure—and for good reason—it’s not necessarily a sign of joy to laugh, or to provoke laughter in others. The fact that people laugh when they’re sad and cry when they’re happy points to a physiological relationship between mirth and sadness. Both are social phenomena. The neuroscientist Robert Provine has shown, for example, that laughter practically disappears in isolation—no matter how happy someone is, she’s not likely to laugh alone. And it flowers in groups, though laughing people aren’t necessarily in a good mood. Similarly, professional comics, whose job it is to find humor in life, are not typically happy people. “The core of all humor,” says Robert Mankoff, the cartoon editor of The New Yorker, “the reason for it all, is unhappiness.” Many comic legends—including Buster Keaton, Rodney Dangerfield, and John Belushi—had regular and severe depressions. In a study of professional clowns and comedians, the psychologists Rhoda and Seymour Fisher found these performers often deeply unhappy and alienated, even compared with a control group of noncomic actors. Nor does professional success make the pain go away. Profoundly alienated, comics often described themselves to the Fishers as set apart from life, as though watching it on a movie screen. They channeled this perspective into their work.

  Being funny is more than telling jokes. Comics achieve their effect largely by the way they present themselves—the way they see the world, the way they speak and act. A good “bit” is not necessarily a joke. Words that bring on howls of laughter when told by a talented comic might draw awkward silenc
e if told by anyone else. While the style of self-presentation can be cultivated, the basic drive to be funny, for many comics, begins at a young age. This was the case for Lincoln. When he was a teenager, neighbors remembered him commanding crowds with his humor. Once he was at a house-raising and he determined that it was time for work to stop. He started cracking jokes and telling stories, and soon enough the men had all stopped to listen, laughing so hard they cried.

  Lincoln learned the art of storytelling in Kentucky and Indiana, by watching his father, the Hanks boys, and his stepbrothers—or perhaps simply by absorbing from the soil what they had absorbed before him. The best stories, he said, came from rural areas and the “country boys” there. A country boy himself, he brought the voice, rhythm, and manner of that place wherever he went. His images were rooted in the realities of rural life. As president, when he heard complaints that masters couldn’t make a living without their slaves, Lincoln was reminded of an old Illinois farmer who had the bright idea to turn his hogs into the potato patch, saving the labor of both feeding the hogs and digging up the potatoes. A neighbor asked him what the hogs would do when the ground froze. “Well,” the farmer said, “it may come pretty hard on their snouts, but I guess it will be ‘root, hog, or die!’” It’s poignant to consider that Lincoln, estranged from his father, so often practiced an art he learned, in part, from the old man—“Thomas Lincoln . . . could beat his son telling a story, cracking a joke,” said Lincoln’s cousin Dennis Hanks—and that a man who traveled so far and suffered so much found his simplest comfort by going home in the landscape of his imagination.

  At New Salem, Lincoln quickly established himself as a premier humorist, even in a region known for conspicuous talent. His well of stories never ran dry because he was always refilling it. He gathered material from other people and from books. Though he was saturated in the ethos of the backcountry, the laconic Yankee style also influenced his humor. Once he told a story about an extremely ugly man walking on a narrow road. A woman came by and examined him closely. “You,” she said, “are the ugliest man I ever saw.” Sadly, the man answered, “Perhaps so, but I can’t help that.” “No,” the woman allowed, “but you might stay at home.”

  Though many of them were retold, and collected into books during Lincoln’s lifetime, the heart of his stories eludes reproduction. You could get down every word, period, and comma, said the lawyer Henry Whitney, “but the real humor perished with Lincoln.” The humor came from his voice—he could mimic any accent or vernacular—his timing, his ludicrous facial expressions, his body movements, and his masterly use of the English language. The other reason the stories perished is that so many of them were, as one friend of Lincoln’s said, “dirty and smutty,” their charge coming from brushing up against taboos. These, of course, were not written down.

  He had a great sense of the ludicrous. One time, a fellow lawyer split his pants, and his colleagues, to rib him, began passing around a sheet of paper soliciting donations to buy the “poor but worthy young man” a new pair of trousers. A few people put down their names and pledges before the paper reached Lincoln. He glanced at it, then wrote after his name, “I can contribute nothing to the end in view.” In a storytelling session where one witticism led to another, he might have told the one about the man at the theater who put his hat on the adjoining seat, open side up. Becoming engrossed in the play, he failed to note the approach of a well-dressed, heavyset woman. Before he knew it, she had plumped down on his hat. Gazing ruefully at her, he said, “Madam, I could have told you the hat wouldn’t fit before you tried it on.” A hint of the other kind of jokes he told came in a letter to Lincoln from a colleague in the Thirtieth Congress. “Do you remember the story of the old Virginian stropping his razor on a certain member of a young negro’s body which you told and connected it with my mission to Brazil . . .”Asking for help getting a job, the man went on, “I want this application to be like your story of the old womans fish—get larger, the more it is handled.”

  Lincoln’s jokes often played on racial and ethnic stereotypes, a sobering fact today, when such jokes make us wince rather than laugh. “It was the wit he was after,” said his lawyer friend Leonard Swett, “the pure jewel, and he would pick it up out of the mud or dirt just as readily as he would from a parlor table.”

  After his melancholy emerged in his mid-twenties, and took a deeper hold in his thirties, Lincoln turned to humor for help. “Fun and gravity,” said his friend Abner Ellis, “grew on him alike.” “The ground work of his social nature was Sad,” added the lawyer John M. Scott. “But from the fact that he studiously cultivated the humorous it would have been very sad indeed.” The phrase “coping mechanism” comes from the function served by a coping, the top of a wall that protects against the elements. Humor gave Lincoln some protection from his mental storms. It distracted him and gave him relief and pleasure. A good story, he said, “has the same effect on me that I think a good square drink of whisky has to the old roper. It puts new life into me . . . good for both the mental and physical digestion.” And he often said, “If it were not for these stories—jokes—jests I should die; they give vent—are the vents of my moods & gloom.”

  Humor also gave Lincoln a way to connect with people. Withdrawal is an essential feature of depression, and once withdrawn a person can grow steadily more awkward in company. Many chronic depressives find simple small talk to be a Herculean challenge. By his late thirties and early forties, Lincoln frequently withdrew into spells of gloom, but he had a sure-fire method to socialize when he wanted to. Herndon, who poignantly described how Lincoln fell into depressions at the law office, said that these spells often ended with him gathering himself up, saying something or other, and then continuing, “Billy, that reminds me of a story.” “He would tell it,” Herndon remembered, “walk up and down the room laughing the while and now the dark clouds would pass off his withered and wrinkled face.”

  In repose, Lincoln’s face had a cold, chiseled look. When he began a story, however, his eyes lit up and his face twisted and molded itself to capture the character of the tale. He would often be sitting on a dry goods box, and he’d have his legs planted on the floor. But as he went on, he’d draw up his right leg. At the climax or punch line, he would throw his head back, lift his right leg over his left, and let out an unrestrained laugh—“in which,” said Robert Wilson, “every one present willing or unwilling were compelled to take part.” This picture of a mirthful, storytelling Lincoln played a role in making his melancholy so shocking. No one could truly appreciate the gloom, said the lawyer Orlando B. Ficklin, without seeing the awful contrast between his face in pleasure and in agony. Using shorthand, people often said that Lincoln had two distinct moods. But those who knew him well saw, as Ficklin did, that he “was naturally despondent and sad.” It’s not that his moods turned in a cycle, as day gives way to night, but that he lived in the night and made a strong effort to bring the sun in. “Gloom and sadness were his predominant state,” said Herndon. Another colleague, Ward Lamon, explained that Lincoln would “in special times become cheerful with chums.” Then, when they left him, Lamon said, “he would relapse.”

  Lincoln always laughed at his own jokes. Many comics maintain a strict distance from their own humor, noticing its effect but not really experiencing it. Lincoln ate the meals he made. Actually, it’s not clear how much he cared about making other people laugh, but he couldn’t do it alone. We associate groups of laughing people with intimacy, but David Davis, Lincoln’s longtime colleague, hastened to point out that he remained essentially a solitary man. Noting that Lincoln swapped jokes with all kinds of people, Davis insisted, “It was wit & joke meeting & loving wit & Jokes—not the man for the men. Lincoln used these men merely to whistle off sadness—gloom & unhappiness . . . He used such men as a tool—a thing to satisfy him—to feed his desires, &c.”

  However naturally humor came to Lincoln, he worked to use it. One time, his sister-in-law Frances Wallace came to the house on Ei
ghth and Jackson and found Lincoln in his rocking chair, abstracted and blue. After twenty minutes or so, Wallace recalled, he “all at once burst out in a joke—though his thoughts were not on a joke.” “His mirth to me,” said John M. Scott, “always seemed to be put on and did not properly belong there. Like a plant produced in the hot-bed it had an unnatural and luxuriant growth.” In other words, the humor wasn’t always a complete covering for Lincoln’s gloom—keeping it entirely out of view. But it did keep him active. That’s why his image of a “vent” is so apt, for his humor served largely to let what was within him circulate, keeping his system in a kind of equilibrium with the environment.

  The psychologist George Vaillant, a student of adaptations, or strategies used to combat depression and anxiety, identifies humor as the most effective of all, even among a handful of other “mature strategies.” The reason, he explains, is that one can be lively without pushing from one’s mind what’s painful and real. Indeed, the best jokes often draw on the worst conceivable scenarios. Lincoln once told the tale of a traveler on the frontier who found himself in rough terrain one night. A terrific thunderstorm broke out. His horse refused to go on, and so the man had to proceed on foot in the dark. The peals of thunder were frightful, and only the lightning afforded him clues to find his way. One bolt, which seemed to shatter the earth beneath him, brought the man to his knees. He wasn’t a praying man, but he issued a short and clear petition: “O Lord, if it is all the same to you, give us a little more light and a little less noise.”