Lincoln's Melancholy

by Joshua Wolf Shenk

  It was not what we would call a recovery, and certainly not what we would call a cure. Lincoln’s story confounds those who see depression as a collection of symptoms to be eliminated. But it resonates with those who see suffering as a potential catalyst of emotional growth. “What man actually needs,” the psychiatrist Victor Frankl argued, “is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal.” Many believe that psychological health comes with the relief of distress. But Frankl proposed that all people—and particularly those under some emotional weight—need a purpose that will both draw on their talents and transcend their lives. For Lincoln, this sense of purpose was indeed the key that unlocked the gates of a mental prison. This doesn’t mean his suffering went away. In fact, as his life became richer and more satisfying, his melancholy exerted a stronger pull. He now responded to that pull by tying it to his newly defined sense of purpose. From a place of trouble, he looked for meaning. He looked at imperfection and sought redemption.

  The keenness with which Lincoln understood the world around him and his place in it had long been a source of pain. In the early 1850s, William Herndon remembered a day when “Lincoln was speculating with me about the deadness and despair of things and deeply regretting that his human strength and power were limited by his nature to rouse and stir up the world. He said gloomily, despairing, sadly: ‘How hard, oh, how hard it is to die and leave one’s country no better than if one had never lived for it.’” In retrospect, this moment stands out as a fulcrum in Lincoln’s life in which he was able to articulate both his pain and his potential. He was desperate because, after more than four decades, he still had no apparent prospect to contribute anything significant to the world around him. Yet it was a kind of strength that he could look the reality straight in the eye. Humbled as he had been by years of obscurity, Lincoln held on to his hope to “stir up the world.” It’s no wonder that the dream brought him pain. Perhaps the wonder is that he tolerated the pain long enough and well enough that he could keep his hope alive and stay ready.

  In 1854, the debate over American slavery, long dominated by the extremes on both sides, moved squarely to the political center. Lincoln had previously said little on the subject, but he quickly came forward with a vigorous argument that slavery must be restricted as a moral, social, and political wrong. In his rhetoric, he tore the subject down to its foundations, exposing his core beliefs. “Slavery,” he said, “is founded in the selfishness of man’s nature—opposition to it, is his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely, as slavery extension brings them, shocks, and throes, and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.” More than a statement of mere policy, Lincoln laid before audiences a narrative that explained where the country had come from, where it stood, and where it might go. This narrative resonated with the story of his own life. The ethic that he proposed for his country—continued struggle to realize an ideal, knowing that it could never be perfectly attained—was the same ethic he had used to govern himself.

  The first enslaved Africans in North America were purchased in 1619 from a Dutch ship that had wandered off course and found its way to Jamestown, Virginia. By the end of the seventeenth century, slave labor was a staple of southern tobacco plantations. It had a marked presence in the North as well. On July 4, 1776, the day the Continental Congress issued the Declaration of Independence, slavery was legal throughout the thirteen colonies. But shortly after the Constitution took effect in 1789, Pennsylvania became the first state to enact gradual emancipation. The other northern states soon followed. In contrast, southern states not only retained slavery but built an entire economy and culture around it.

  A fault line now ran through the country, which would be aggravated by economic change and westward expansion. The market and industrial revolutions that so affected the psychological landscape of Lincoln’s America also played a major role in heightening sectional differences. Northern states developed an economy best served by wage labor. The South grew rich from cotton, which was planted, picked, and processed by slaves. Strangely, the very interdependence of the regions fueled their conflict. In the North, mills made products from southern cotton and sold them to a voracious consumer market. This helped create a wealthy elite and a class of free workers, both of whom began to see slavery as a threat. In the South, meanwhile, cotton wealth drove the culture in the opposite direction. Aided by the cotton gin and the mechanical reaper, U.S. cotton production rose at an astonishing rate—from two million pounds in 1791 to a billion pounds in 1860. The southern press and clergy, which had once tolerated slavery as a necessary evil, now declared it a positive good.

  Westward expansion forced sectional differences to the foreground. At independence, the country extended only to the Mississippi River. The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 took it west to the Rocky Mountains. With the annexation of Texas in 1845, a treaty with Great Britain over Oregon in 1846, and war cessions from Mexico in 1848, the United States elbowed its way west to the Pacific Ocean, south to the Rio Grande, and north to the 49th parallel.

  How would slavery be regulated in the new land? Would it be slave or free? Who would decide? The stress of these questions—and the underlying differences they exposed—would crack the Union. The first sign of trouble came in 1819, when Missouri—a territory gained with the Louisiana Purchase—asked to come into the Union as a slave state. Northern senators refused, provoking outrage among their southern counterparts. What business, they asked, had Congress with the domestic institutions of a (soon-to-be) state? Crisis was averted only with the acrobatic diplomacy of a young senator from Kentucky named Henry Clay. With the Missouri Compromise he drew a line to the western edge of the Louisiana Territory. Slavery could exist south of it, but not north, excepting Missouri itself, which was admitted as a slave state.

  The Missouri Compromise held fast even in the midst of contentious arguments over the gains from Mexico, which came to a head in 1850. By then, relations between North and South were so strained that talk of war was already in the air. South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun told the Senate that northern “acts of aggression and encroachment” justified southerners to take “all means necessary” in self-defense. Once again Clay attempted a compromise. The old lion, now in his eighth decade, authored a measure that included admission of California as a free state, abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia, and a strong Fugitive Slave Law that commissioned federal marshals to act as slave catchers in free states.

  The law did nothing but exacerbate the conflict. In the North, it brought the violence of slavery into the direct view of people for whom it had previously been an abstraction. This prompted Harriet Beecher Stowe to write an antislavery parable that, after serial publication, was issued as a book: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or, Life Among the Lowly. Released in 1852, it sold 20,000 copies in three weeks. In a year, it sold 300,000 copies in the United States and ten times that internationally. When, in Boston, a captured fugitive slave named Anthony Burns was escorted by federal troops to a Virginia-bound ship, a textile magnate named Amos A. Lawrence said, “We went to bed one night old fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs & waked up stark mad Abolitionists.”

  Still, centrists regarded bellicose words from both sections as the ideological extremes. President Millard Fillmore said the slavery problem had, with the 1850 compromise, reached its “final settlement”—which phrase, James M. McPherson observes, in Battle Cry of Freedom, “became the hallmark of political orthodoxy.” Indeed, the major outstanding questions of slavery’s reach had been settled. With the exception of some scraggly desert in the Southwest, where local voters would decide on slavery for themselves, every piece of the United States had been declared slave or free.

  Aside from a handful of statements and one attempt at legislation while in Congress, Lincoln had sat out the fight over slavery. He called it “both injustice and bad policy” in 1837, an “evil” in 1845, and in 1850 he
saw that slavery presented “the one great question of the day.” But he hadn’t done much to press his point of view. Why not? Put plainly, Lincoln was a politician, building a public life on points that could be sustained by popular opinion—or, in extreme cases, sustained despite popular opinion. Doing good depended on winning elections. Not incidentally, his work as a lawyer nurtured this perspective, bringing him before panels that decided guilt and innocence, truth and falsehood. Lincoln had to constantly keep in mind the predilections and prejudices of ordinary people in Illinois—especially central Illinois, a region thick with hostility to antislavery agitation.

  But in 1854, the politics of slavery changed dramatically. On January 4, Stephen Douglas introduced in the Senate a bill to organize governments in the Nebraska Territory. This huge swath of land, including most of present-day Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado, was covered by the Missouri Compromise, which would have banned slavery in the entire territory. Douglas’s bill would repeal the Missouri Compromise. Douglas knew it would “raise a hell of a storm,” but he built in a clever political shelter. He divided the territory into two prospective states, Kansas and Nebraska. Rather than dictate from Congress where slavery should go, voters in the territories themselves would decide. He called his plan “popular sovereignty” and said it put the power where it belonged, with the people. In May 1854, the bill became law.

  There has been nothing quite like the Kansas-Nebraska Act in modern times. It killed one major political party, the Whigs; permanently split another, the Democrats; and led in short order to actual violence. The law (often referred to as “Nebraska”) was a transformative event, on par with the September 11 attacks or the stock market crash that signaled the Great Depression. In all three cases, long-standing trends led to the seismic moment. But that didn’t make them any less shocking at the time. “[Douglas] took us by surprise—astounded us—by this measure,” Lincoln said. “We were thunderstruck and stunned; and we reeled and fell in utter confusion. But we rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver. We struck in the direction of the sound; and we are rapidly closing in upon him.” Lincoln would come to articulate precisely where the disparate groups could be most strongly joined. And he would help hold the center of a new coalition until, amazingly, it came to national rule, with Lincoln as its leader.

  In retrospect, all opposition to slavery tends to be remembered as “abolitionism,” but that name, in the mid-nineteenth century, referred to a radical minority who not only opposed slavery but questioned the legitimacy of a government that would allow it. A more moderate group of antislavery opponents sought to work within the system to restrict it. Both groups hated the Kansas-Nebraska Act, but a huge number of opponents of the act were not, strictly speaking, antislavery at all. They simply opposed the extension of slavery into the West.

  To moderate northerners, remember, the West had tremendous practical and symbolic significance. When the New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley advised, in 1854, “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country,” he invoked the basic promise that every American could improve his prospects with hard work. Hemmed in by low wages or scarce work? Go west. The region was a “safety valve,” Greeley said, for anyone fallen on hard times or captivated by new ambition. In part because of the gold rush in California, the early 1850s saw great numbers of people push west, past Iowa and Missouri into the Nebraska Territory. Since 1820, it had been guaranteed free, which meant that labor would be king. But Douglas’s bill changed that. Now slave plantations threatened to edge out industrial projects and family farms. Self-interested northerners took notice. Oliver Morton, the future Indiana governor, put it succinctly: “If we do not exclude slavery from the Territories, it will exclude us.”

  It is tempting to imagine that northerners harbored both a deep animosity toward slavery and a deep sympathy for the enslaved. In fact, the “free labor” ideology was strongly tied to a staunch racism that sought the exclusion not just of slavery but of anyone with dark skin. Lincoln’s own Illinois adopted a constitution in 1847 that forbade free black people from entering the state. Those who did live there could not vote, serve on juries, or testify in court. The state’s “black laws,” said an Illinois Negro leader named H. Ford Douglass, “would disgrace any Barbary state, or any uncivilized people in the far-off islands at sea.”

  The selfish interest of whites in blocking slavery’s extension, along with a moral opposition to slavery itself, created a political opportunity in 1854. Even fierce rivals can join to fight a common enemy. Senator Stephen Douglas presented just such an enemy. On his train ride home from Washington to Illinois, he saw his figure burning in effigy. When he rose to speak in Chicago, crowds hollered insults and threw things at him. But Douglas was no man to be shouted down. Only forty-one years old, the “Little Giant” had recently won his second Senate term and was widely hailed as a future president. No crowd of rabble-rousers could stifle him. To rally his supporters and subdue his opponents, Douglas went on a tour of the state, which eventually brought him to Springfield in early October. The town was in the midst of a state agricultural fair, with competitions for prize crops and livestock, horse races, and booths displaying new breeds and machines. “It is estimated that over 15,000 persons were on the Fair Grounds today,” reported the Illinois Daily Journal—this in a town of about seven thousand. Many had come to see Douglas, who spoke before a packed Hall of Representatives on Wednesday afternoon, October 3.

  In addition to Lincoln, a number of other prominent politicians in Springfield that week would respond to Douglas, including Lyman Trumbull, Sidney Breese, and John Calhoun. As an opposition coalition, they had a steep uphill climb. Douglas had one of the best-organized political operations in history; his opponents had no experience working together. The Whigs and Democrats who opposed the Nebraska bill had long clashed on other issues. Two new organizations, meanwhile, were going in sharply different directions. The American party, or Know-Nothings, had grown out of anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic secret societies into a serious political force. It sought to limit slavery, along with the rights of anyone who wasn’t a white, native-born Protestant. A second new organization, the Republican party, centered on abolitionists and antislavery politicians, devoted itself to ending slavery throughout the country.

  Among all the talented people rising to challenge Douglas, how did Abraham Lincoln become the one we remember? It was by no means inevitable. When Lincoln stood at the podium on October 4, 1854, wearing just a short-sleeved shirt on that unseasonably warm day, he seemed an uncharismatic challenger. Horace White, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, observed Lincoln closely before he began to speak. “It was a marked face,” White said, “but so overspread with sadness that I thought that Shakespeare’s melancholy Jacques had been translated from the forest of Arden to the capital of Illinois.” White saw soon enough that the man’s gloom came from a depth of character. “His speaking went to the heart,” White said, “because it came from the heart.” Whereas other orators could hit all the right notes and spark thunderous applause, few had Lincoln’s ability to change people’s minds. “Mr. Lincoln’s eloquence was of the higher type,” he explained, “which produced conviction in others because of the conviction of the speaker himself. His listeners felt that he believed every word he said, and that, like Martin Luther, he would go to the stake rather than abate one jot or tittle of it.”

  White’s comparison of Lincoln with Martin Luther captures something about how Lincoln appeared to those who saw him in person and how an individual temperament infused a public identity. Lincoln didn’t need to explain in detail how his personal experience related to the ideas he expressed in public. Today we often expect aspiring politicians to make known their deepest and most private motives. Lincoln was reserved in personal details but quite open in showing his true emotional self, including the suffering that sometimes ove
rtook him. Reporters, allies, and ordinary citizens who watched Lincoln rarely came away thinking they knew his secrets, but they often came away thinking they’d seen the man. And they were right. He brought into the public realm, and into the argument about public questions, a vision that had been nurtured in him over many years, and to which he still turned in his own hour of need. Lincoln saw the world as a deeply flawed, even tragic, place where imperfect people had to make the best of poor materials. At his worst, the burdens of this vision pressed him into ruts and troughs. At his best, it fueled a passion for redemption.

  Lincoln’s reputation for looking on the dark side of things politically ran through his career. “You know I am never sanguine,” he wrote in 1840. In 1864, he complained, “The most trying thing in all of this war is that the people are too sanguine; they expect too much at once.” The tendency to see the darkness was ingrained in him, a political instinct that his friends connected to his personal temperament. Some people, Lincoln’s partner William Herndon observed, see the world “ornamented with beauty, life, and action.” Lincoln, on the other hand, “crushed the unreal, the inexact, the hollow, and the sham . . . Everything came to him in its precise shape and color.” Herndon continued, “His fault, if any, was that he saw things less than they really were; less beautiful and more frigid.” Notice that at first Herndon praises Lincoln for cutting through ornament, but then he acknowledges that there was some fault in his perception. In other words, in some situations Lincoln was like the sourpuss at a picnic, seeing only ants and grass stains amid baskets full of bread and wine. We call such a person a pessimist—usually pejoratively. But looking on the dark side, in some scenarios, is valuable. In the midst of a disaster, the man who loudly proclaims the coming trouble will surely be more valuable than the optimist who sits dreamily admiring the daisies.