Lincoln's Melancholy

by Joshua Wolf Shenk

  It is common sense that some situations call for pessimism, but as a culture Americans have strangely decided to endow optimism with unqualified favor. Politicians today compete to be the most optimistic, and accuse their opponents of pessimism, as if it were a defect. This trend is visible in psychology as well. Whereas “melancholy” in Lincoln’s time was understood to be a multifaceted phenemenon that conferred potential advantages along with grave dangers, today we tend to discount its complexities. Psychiatrists see only a biological brain disease. Psychologists see only errors in thinking. That is, if you don’t like yourself, or you feel hopeless, or you see life as fundamentally dissatisfying, you’ve fallen victim to what researchers call “learned helplessness.” By some blend of bad genes and bad experience, you have come to see the world in dark hues. Therapy and medication can help you see the world the way healthy optimists do.

  In fact, a wide range of research has painted a much richer portrait of depression. None of this research discounts the real trouble that depression can bring. It can be a serious, and sometimes fatal, disease. At the same time, depression often springs from fundamentally accurate perceptions that, in some situations, can be an advantage. This understanding of “depressive realism” emerged in a landmark laboratory experiment by Lyn Abramson and Lauren Alloy in 1979. Abramson and Alloy wanted to know whether depressed subjects perceived reality differently from nondepressed subjects. So they set up a simple game-show-like experiment in their lab: Individual subjects were placed in front of a panel with a green light, a yellow light, and a spring-loaded button and were instructed to try to make the green light flash as often as possible. In one segment, they would win money every time the green light went on. In another, they would lose money when it didn’t. A screen in the room showed their score. Afterward, the subjects were asked how much control they had. Their answers differed according to several variables. Among the “normal,” nondepressed subjects, it depended on whether they were losing money or making money. When they were winning money, they thought they had considerable control, between 60 and 65 on a scale where 0 indicates no control and 100 indicates total control. When they were losing money, they thought they had virtually no control. In other words, these subjects took credit for good scores and dished off blame when scores were poor.

  The depressed subjects saw things differently. Whether they were winning or losing money, they tended to believe that they had no control. And they were correct. Abramson and Alloy were carefully limiting the extent of real control. The “game” was a fiction. “The results of these now classic, 1979, experiments constitute some of the most controversial, and fascinating, findings in depression research from the past few decades,” writes the science journalist Kyla Dunn. “Previously, depressed people were believed to be drawing conclusions about themselves and their experiences that were unrealistically distorted towards the negative. Yet as this research suggests, one cognitive symptom of depression may be the loss of optimistic, self-enhancing biases that normally protect healthy people against assaults to their self-esteem. In many instances, depressives may simply be judging themselves and the world much more accurately than non-depressed people, and finding it not a pretty place.”

  Abramson and Alloy termed the benefit that depressed people showed in the experiment the “Depressive Realism” or the “Sadder but Wiser” effect. Since then, these phrases have come to represent a perspective on depression that raises a whole host of unsettling questions. For example, one standard definition of mental health is the ability to maintain close and accurate contact with reality. “The perception of reality is called mentally healthy,” one textbook declares, “when what the individual sees corresponds to what is actually there.” But research shows that, by this definition, happiness itself could be considered a mental disorder. “We have a tendency to regard people in their ordinary moods as rational information processors, relatively free of systematic bias and distorted judgments,” Alloy writes. In fact, “much research suggests that when they are not depressed, people are highly vulnerable to illusions, including unrealistic optimism, overestimation of themselves, and an exaggerated sense of their capacity to control events. The same research indicates that depressed people’s perceptions and judgments are often less biased.” The psychologist Richard Bentall has taken this research to its extreme conclusion, humorously proposing to classify happiness as a psychiatric disorder—“major affective disorder (pleasant type).”

  In Lincoln’s time, people understood the obvious point that this research bears out: every cognitive style has assets and defects, which change according to circumstances. This seems surprising today because, by some quirk of culture, some cognitive styles are held to be superior and others inferior; one emotion (joy) is “positive” and all others (sadness, fear, anger, and shame) are “negative.” If we value accurate perception, however, we must qualify our worship of joy and happiness. People actively seek to filter out painful stimuli, and while this may help them limit distress, it can also sharply distort their actual environment. “If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves,” wrote Aldous Huxley, “it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.”

  Certain people—Lincoln was one of them—break through illusion and experience that painful self-knowledge. This helps explain the widely acknowledged but poorly understood phenomenon of melancholic success. “Throughout history,” writes the psychiatrist Peter Kramer, “it has been known that melancholics, though they have little energy, use their energy well; they tend to work hard in a focused area, do great things, and derive little pleasure from their accomplishments. Much of the insight and creative achievement of the human race is due to the discontent, guilt, and critical eye of dysthymics.” Note the word “insight.” In many cases, insight is precisely what depressed people lack: they fail to see the clearly good things about their lives. But the same forces that hold comfort at bay can lead, in the right circumstances, to valuable perspectives on the world.

  People who have experienced depression often note the way that episodes give way to insight. Herman Melville, Lincoln’s contemporary and fellow melancholic, wrote, “The intensest light of reason and revelation combined can not shed such blazonings upon the deeper truths in man, as will sometimes proceed from his own profoundest gloom. Utter darkness is then his light, and cat-like he distinctly sees all objects through a medium which is mere blindness to common vision.” Of course, such “cat-like” vision is not always appreciated in its time. Melville died in obscurity, his works languishing while sunnier artists thrived. But his writings received their acclaim when later generations came to value the way he pierced the bubbles of American life and character, telling bleak and truthful tales of mad one-legged captains and stubborn introverted clerks and mutinous slaves on a ship. Similarly, where the optimists of his time would fail, Lincoln would succeed, by articulating a durable idea of free society and exposing the fallacies in which many of his contemporaries tried to find comfort.

  It is no coincidence that Lincoln found his power at a time when the skies turned dark in the United States. His power came in part because he quickly saw the approaching storm. In his opponent Lincoln faced a preternatural optimist. Popular sovereignty, Stephen Douglas believed, solved the slavery problem. The United States could now expand from the Arctic Ocean to the tip of South America. Some regions would be free, some would be slave; all would be part of a perfect Union.

  The physical contrast between the two men underlined their political differences. Douglas stood five feet four inches tall, a foot shorter than Lincoln, and seemed packed in every inch with charisma. He had penetrating blue eyes and dark hair that he styled in a pompadour. He dressed like a dandy, drank the finest liquor, and smoked the best cigars. He could afford these luxuries, because he owned large chunks of Chicago and a 2,500–acre Mississippi plantation to boot—left to him by his father-in-law, along with more than one hundred slaves. Lincoln, on the other hand, was not just t
all and gaunt but a truly odd physical specimen, with cartoonishly long arms and legs that made him look as if he wore stilts under his trousers. He never seemed to have a decent-fitting suit. He spoke with a kind of high-piping voice, but at the pace of a Kentucky drawl. He was deeply sad and often had a faraway, dreamy look in his eye.

  Speaking on that hot afternoon at the Hall of Representatives in Springfield, in a “thin, high-pitched falsetto,” Lincoln explained that the United States had been founded with a great idea and a grave imperfection. The idea—liberty was the natural right of all people. The flaw—the “cancer” in the nation’s body—was the gross violation of liberty by human slavery. The Founders recognized the evil, Lincoln said, and made accommodation to restrict it, believing that the very experiment in liberty could be spoiled if they acted to end it too quickly. “Thus, the thing is hid away, in the constitution,” Lincoln explained, “just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death; with the promise, nevertheless, that the cutting may begin at the end of a given time.” Indeed, the Constitution made several provisions that were clearly understood to refer to slavery but used the phrase “persons held to service or labor,” thus preserving the text for a day when slavery would be abolished. In the nation’s first decades, leaders banned the foreign slave trade, then made violation of the ban punishable by death; and they prohibited slavery in large swaths of territory. To Lincoln, these were but patches in an overall principle. “We see the plain unmistakable spirit of that age, towards slavery,” he said, “was hostility to the PRINCIPLE, and toleration, ONLY BY NECESSITY.”

  Lincoln found the clearest statement of that spirit in the Declaration of Independence, with its claim for the self-evident truth that “all men are created equal.” Lincoln’s interpretation of the phrase became the centerpiece of his narrative about the nation. The Founders, Lincoln said, in adopting the Declaration, did not declare that all people were at that time living in a state of equality. To say so would have been absurd, given not only the widespread bondage of black people but the restricted suffrage of many whites and the legal inequality of women. Nor did the Founders declare that they intended to secure complete equality in their lifetimes. The spirit of the Declaration, Lincoln said, was meant to be realized—to the greatest extent possible—by each succeeding generation. The Founders cast off despotism and created the framework for a free republic, invoking, as they did, not arguments of mere self-interest but the ideal of natural, universal, God-given rights. “They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society,” Lincoln said, “which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for . . . even though never perfectly attained.”

  The idea expressed here shows up at many points in Lincoln’s life. He often argued that one needed to work hard, trusting that rewards would come in due time. To succeed in “the great struggle of life,” he said, one had to endure failures and plod on. The wisdom of what he called his own “severe experience” taught him so. We need not dally over such impossible questions as cause and effect. “Which comes first, personal temperament or the political philosophy?” is much like the question of the chicken and the egg. But there was a plain relationship between the private thoughts and the public ideas. Just as his own life had been a struggle, with pain that he recognized and had to tolerate and contain, Lincoln viewed all of American history as a struggle—one that the Founders foresaw and made contingencies for. “The assertion that ‘all men are created equal’ was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain,” Lincoln explained, “and it was placed in the Declaration, not for that, but for future use. Its authors meant it to be, thank God, it is now proving itself, a stumbling block to those who in after times might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despotism. They knew the proneness of prosperity to breed tyrants, and they meant when such should re-appear in this fair land and commence their vocation they should find left for them at least one hard nut to crack.” Slavery, Lincoln argued, presented just such a temptation, “now when we have grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves.” He argued that the South, in its advocacy of slavery, and the Douglas Democrats, in their apology for it, followed the same logic as that of kings and despots throughout the world who said that one group should work and another should benefit from it.

  While he called slavery a “moral, social, and political evil,” Lincoln did not propose its eradication. To the contrary, he said it had to be left alone where it existed. The core question of the United States, he thought, was whether it could steadily advance the liberty of its white citizens while moving slowly toward emancipation. Slavery must be set on a path to “eventual extinction,” he said. A peaceful, lawful end to it, he said at one point, might take one hundred years. Also, while favoring legal freedom for blacks, Lincoln did not support social and political rights—the full range of what we call civil rights. After legal freedom, he proposed, dreamily, that black people would migrate to Africa or other foreign lands.

  This was a widely shared white fantasy, adopted by Henry Clay, among others. A founder of the American Colonization Society, whose voyages to Africa led to the establishment of Liberia, Clay wrote, “There is a moral fitness in the idea of returning to Africa her children, whose ancestors have been torn from her by the ruthless hand of fraud and violence.” In an 1852 eulogy for Clay, Lincoln enthusiastically endorsed his vision, saluting his “deep devotion to the cause of human liberty—a strong sympathy with the oppressed every where, and an ardent wish for their elevation.”

  The primary mechanism with which to lift the “oppressed,” Lincoln believed, was to maintain and protect the American experiment. To some extent, the success of that experiment hinders our appreciation of its role in Lincoln’s imagination. Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, argued that an age-old struggle over the proper forms of government was giving way to a global consensus on American-style “liberal democracy” as a superior system. Though the thesis remains controversial, it nevertheless articulated a widespread idea that a form of governance considered revolutionary at the end of the eighteenth century had triumphed at the end of the twentieth. In the world Lincoln saw, by contrast, monarchy remained the default setting throughout Europe and Asia. The British were moving slowly toward representative government, but with most power retained by the aristocracy. The Greeks proclaimed their independence in 1829—and promptly set up a monarchy. Probably the most influential lesson in the minds of American politicians was that of France. The French Revolution in 1789 went much further than its American counterpart in 1776, declaring itself for universal liberty, brotherhood, and equality. Yet it quickly dissolved into violent factional rivalries. By 1799, Napoleon had established his imperium.

  Lincoln had long insisted that the gravest threat for the United States lay at home. He did not expect a foreign nation to conquer it. “If destruction be our lot,” he wrote in 1838, “we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” For a good part of his career, he saw a real threat in abolitionism. These opponents of slavery spoke of tearing apart the Union to create an all-free nation unsullied by the abomination of bondage. Lincoln answered that the evil could not be cast off so easily. It had to be continually restricted, not by force of guns but by the peaceful measures of democracy. The United States could not instantly realize universal freedom. For the time being, it had to bear the burden of preventing the erosion of freedom.

  But nothing the abolitionists had done could be compared to the threat of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. This, to Lincoln, was nothing less than a knife held to the nation’s throat. Previous compromises on slavery had allowed it some new land in return for restrictions. From Lincoln’s perspective, they maintained the principle of slavery’s wrong. Douglas, though, professed not to care about slavery one way or the other—a sure path, Li
ncoln thought, to domination by those who cared dearly about it. Douglas argued that he’d come to his views by his own commitment to democracy. But what Lincoln suspected, history has borne out. The Kansas-Nebraska Act followed a “deal you can’t refuse” offer to Douglas from a key bloc of southern senators. He wanted to organize the territory, to build a railroad through it. They told him that he’d never get their support without repealing the Missouri Compromise. He agreed to their demand.

  As Lincoln understood, the political power of slavery was disproportionate, for the wealthiest interests had the most invested in the institution. What troubled him more than such brazen power plays, though, was that Douglas acquiesced to them. Grant this extension to the Nebraska Territory, Lincoln said, and what would keep the slave power from insisting that northern free laws were another abrogation of their rights? “Popular sovereignty” was no more than a fancy phrase for surrender to slavery. Without clearly banning it from the start, nothing would stop slave owners from moving to a territory. And once slavery took root in a place, it could not be easily dug out.

  For a short time, Lincoln had good reason to believe that he would be rewarded for his work with the job he prized above all others: United States senator from Illinois. “At that time it was the height of his ambition to get into the U.S. Senate,” said one of his colleagues. Even years later he said he’d prefer a full term in the Senate to one as president, no surprise in an age when the great orator-statesmen—Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John Calhoun—had served in the upper house of Congress. Senators at the time were not directly elected but sent to Washington by the state legislatures. To win the seat, then, Lincoln first had to assemble a like-minded majority—and he did. When the Illinois General Assembly convened in January 1855, it had a majority of anti-Nebraska members, many of whom owed their election to Lincoln’s work in the fall campaign. The term of James Shields, a Democrat, was up, and he was expected to get the boot. “It was agreed that . . . Mr. Lincoln would succeed General Shields,” remembered Elihu Washburne, a congressman from Illinois. “I know that he himself expected it.” Lincoln lobbied hard for the post. “I have really got it into my head to try to be United States Senator,” he wrote to Joseph Gillespie, “and if I could have your support my chances would be reasonably good.”