Lincoln's Melancholy

by Joshua Wolf Shenk

  Few votes would be as clear-cut as Gillespie’s, though. The breakdown of party loyalties had resulted in a thicket of shifting rivalries and many loci of power. Lincoln sized up allegiances, sought support, made lists of members and their preferences—and, near the end, tried to head off the “double game” of a candidate who was running without having declared so. The actual voting took months even to start. Lincoln led on the early ballots. At various times, forty-seven members went for him, only three short of the majority needed. But he fell shy of a winning margin. It quickly emerged that five key votes were in the hands of Independents who wouldn’t go for him. Lincoln saw that he couldn’t get those votes—and worse, that if he stayed in the fight, the seat might go to the scheming Democratic governor Joel Matteson. To his supporters’ dismay, he told them to fall in behind an anti-Nebraska Democrat named Lyman Trumbull.

  After the election, Lincoln was “cut and mortified,” said Joseph Gillespie, who went home with him after Trumbull’s victory. “I never saw him so dejected,” said Gillespie, who’d known Lincoln since the late 1830s. “He said the fates seemed to be against him and he thought he would never strive for office again. He could bear defeat inflicted by his enemies with pretty good grace, but it was hard to be wounded in the house of his friends.” This episode showed Lincoln’s continuing emotional and cognitive vulnerability. Notice how, as is common with depression, he extrapolated grandly from a single negative stimulus, finding in his defeat evidence that nothing less than fate conspired against him.

  Yet we can also see in Lincoln’s reaction the discipline that he had come to after so many years. “There is no event in Mr. Lincoln’s entire political career,” Washburne said, “that brought him so much disappointment and chagrin as his defeat for United States Senator in 1855, but he accepted the situation uncomplainingly.” While he expressed his disappointment to a close circle of intimates, in public he was the picture of reserve. At a reception for Trumbull, someone asked if he was upset. “Not too upset to congratulate my friend Trumbull,” Lincoln said, extending his hand to the senator-elect.

  At first glance, the discrepancy in these reactions might seem to be the simple difference between private moments and public display. But a closer look shows a dynamic exchange between Lincoln’s disappointment and his renewed dedication to a cause (of which his friend Trumbull was now a chief representative). Lincoln never renounced his belief that “the fates seemed to be against” his winning a good office. To the contrary, as his career grew hotter, he turned all the more to a deeply embedded belief that his life was controlled by a force beyond him. Nor did he discount the real effect that the loss had on him emotionally. In a letter to Washburne, he called it an “agony.” The key question was what he would do with that agony, and how he would direct the energy he had, knowing that the outcome was not in his control. He also said to Washburne, “I regret my defeat moderately, but I am not nervous about it.” “Nervous” here is probably a reference to a disease state. Rather than turn inward and stew in his own regret—missing work, making a “discreditable exhibition” of himself as he had a decade before—Lincoln would draw on his feelings to strengthen his commitment to a cause.

  Indeed, his explanations for why he had dropped out of the race expressly articulated his own subservient role in an important project. “I could not . . . let the whole political result go to ruin,” he wrote, “on a point merely personal to myself.” Elsewhere, he said, “I think the cause in this case is to be preferred to men.” These are things that many politicians say but that Lincoln believed and acted upon. In the many disappointments of the coming years, he would turn to deepen and strengthen his own commitment. Another way to see this is that, when he tumbled momentarily backward, he rubbed his eyes and saw more clearly than before just how fantastic a peak he had engaged to climb. With that, every step forward was imbued with a new significance, for every bit of honest energy he contributed would be drawn upon by others. The altitude he himself reached seemed increasingly insignificant.

  According to Herndon, Lincoln’s loss in 1855 was a crucial moment in the initiation of this dynamic. His ambition had been profoundly awakened by the chance to become senator. “This frustration of Lincoln’s ambition,” he wrote, “had a marked effect on his political views . . . With the strengthening of his faith in a just cause so long held in abeyance he became more defiant each day. But in the very nature of things he dared not be as bold and out spoken as I. With him every word and sentence had to be weighed and its effects calculated, before being uttered.”

  Indeed, the combination of defiance and discipline went far to define Lincoln’s work in the mid-1850s. One rare peek at how his private thoughts rumbled beneath his public work came in an August 1855 letter he wrote to his old friend Joshua Speed. Speed and Lincoln illustrated the divergent paths available to industrious young men in central Illinois. For a time in his young manhood Speed considered making Springfield his permanent home. Instead he returned to Kentucky, married a girl there, and took up life as a planter. He had owned slaves since his father’s death in 1840, and he never again was without them until 1865. His brother James Speed (later Lincoln’s attorney general) had taken up lawyering in Louisville and had freed his few slaves entirely by 1846. But Joshua, even after moving into town and working in business, continued not only to own slaves but to make money in their traffic. His firm acted as a broker in the renting of slaves by their owners.

  In politics, Speed had been a Whig, but by the late 1850s, he had fallen in behind Stephen Douglas. When he wrote to Lincoln in 1855, Speed asked where his old friend stood, told him he expected they differed, and said that while he could admit the abstract wrong of slavery, he denied that any northerner should meddle in something that was exclusively the interest of slave owners. Lincoln’s response cut straight to a personal point. “It is hardly fair for you to assume,” Lincoln objected, “that I have no interest in a thing which has, and continually exercises, the power of making me miserable. You ought rather to appreciate how much the great body of the Northern people do crucify their feelings, in order to maintain their loyalty to the constitution and the Union.”

  In his public utterances, Lincoln spoke first about the immorality of slavery. He spoke only rarely and at the margins about his personal objection to it, let alone an objection that began with an emotional reaction. The reason is not hard to fathom. A public man needs to find universal justifications, even in our own age, in which the cult of personal stories has come to reign. Furthermore, as Lincoln made clear throughout, he believed that the cause required discipline. To effectively oppose slavery’s extension, other differences had to be set aside. Likewise, the cause of the Union, as he said to Speed, required that he and others who object to slavery “crucify their feelings” with respect to its existence in the states.

  While Lincoln stifled his feelings in public, his letter to Speed shows that they lay just beneath the surface, and that at the right moment he could express them sharply. Nearly fifteen years before, after five weeks together at Speed’s Farmington, the two men traveled down the Ohio River on their way back to Springfield. Now Lincoln reminded Speed of that trip, and of the fact that they saw about a dozen slaves shackled together in irons. “That sight was a continual torment to me,” Lincoln wrote, “and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio, or any other slave-border.” “I confess,” he wrote, “I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down, and caught, and carried back to their stripes, and unrewarded toils; but I bite my lip and keep quiet.”

  It has often been suggested that, between 1841 and 1855, Lincoln changed his mind about the scene he had witnessed that day on the Ohio River. In an 1841 letter describing the scene, he said nothing about being miserable. But it is no contradiction to make a new point about an old experience. The letter, to Mary Speed, was a polite, decidedly nonpolitical note to a young lady in a slaveholding family, in which Lincoln concentrated on a philosophical idea about the conditions of hum
an happiness. Lincoln’s 1855 letter to Mary Speed’s brother, on the other hand, was a careful and candid political argument. And it raised the issue of his feelings not only to make the point that he had those feelings, but also to demonstrate how powerfully he worked to subdue them, out of loyalty to the Union. In other words, to allege inconsistency is not only wrong; it obscures something essential that this letter helps reveal. It was central to Lincoln’s view that his personal feelings had always to be put into context and subjugated to his judgment about his responsibilities. The imagery—“bite my lip,” “crucify their feelings”—showed that it was no easy task, but that he was committed inexorably to it.

  With Speed Lincoln opened the vent more than usual. In public, he had been urging people to maintain allegiance to the laws, including the Nebraska bill. To Speed, he called the Nebraska bill not a law but “violence from the beginning. It was conceived in violence, passed in violence, and is maintained in violence.” He seethed about the actions of the proslavery men in Kansas, who had passed a constitution that made it a hanging offense to aid an escaping slave, or even to talk about the rights of black people. This, to Lincoln, recalled the story of Haman, in the Book of Esther, a wicked figure who built gallows intending to kill all the Jews, but ended up, when he was discovered, being hanged himself. “If, like Haman, they should hang upon the gallows of their own building, I shall not be among the mourners for their fate.”

  While Speed’s old friendship meant that Lincoln could trust him to keep the letter private, Speed also stood on ground that inspired Lincoln’s venom. Professing faith in the Union, Speed clung to his slaves, which he said was a right he would never give up, even if the Union had to be dissolved. Speed also said that he would support democracy and a free Kansas if that’s where the votes went. Lincoln practically snarled at his friend. “All decent slave-holders talk that way,” he wrote. “But they never vote that way . . . The slave-breeders and slave-traders are an odious and detested class, among you; and yet in politics, they dictate the course of all of you, and are as completely your masters, as you are the masters of your own negroes.”

  Speed had asked Lincoln where he stood, and Lincoln said he didn’t know, that he still considered himself a Whig, although he understood that the Whig party was dying. He did not believe that his opposition to the extension of slavery placed him outside the Whig mainstream. He continued, “I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal. We now practically read it, ‘all men are created equal, except negroes. When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read, ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics. When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.”

  In public, though, Lincoln bit his lip. He said nothing critical of the Know-Nothings, who by the end of 1855 had elected more than one hundred members of Congress, eight governors, and mayors of several major cities. Most of Lincoln’s old Whig allies in Springfield were at least sympathetic to, if not full-fledged members of, the Know-Nothing group. “Until we can get the elements of this organization,” Lincoln wrote, “there is not sufficient materials to successfully combat the Nebraska democracy with. We can not get them so long as they cling to a hope of success under their own organization; and I fear an open push by us now, may offend them, and tend to prevent our ever getting them.”

  Lincoln had a knack for involving himself in fights where the odds were against him. His campaign against the Mexican War had nearly killed his career in the late 1840s. His irrevocable commitment to emancipation would come near to costing him reelection in 1864. Now, in the mid-1850s, when he began to campaign against slavery’s extension, he had no base and no political home. The Whig party was fading fast. The antislavery Republicans wanted to draft him, but Lincoln could not risk association with a group perceived as radical in central and southern Illinois. In fact, when a Republican group held a meeting following his reply to Douglas on October 4, 1854, they found that Lincoln had quickly left town.

  While he continued to speak against the expansion of slavery and for the restoration of the Missouri Compromise, Lincoln found himself stuck politically. He had no office to run for, no party to run with. His prospects looked exceedingly dim. It was clear that the slave power held the upper hand. The reason was simple. On the slavery question, he wrote that “the people of the South have an immediate palpable and immensely great pecuniary interest; while, with the people of the North, it is merely an abstract question of moral right, with only slight, and remote pecuniary interest added.” He elaborated, “The slaves of the South, at a moderate estimate, are worth a thousand millions of dollars. Let it be permanently settled that this property may extend to new territory, without restraint, and it greatly enhances, perhaps quite doubles, its value at once. This immense, palpable pecuniary interest, on the question of extending slavery, unites the Southern people, as one man. But it can not be demonstrated that the North will gain a dollar by restricting it. Moral principle is all, or nearly all, that unites us of the North. Pity ‘tis, it is so, but this is a looser bond, than pecuniary interest. Right here is the plain cause of their perfect union and our want of it.”

  In his public work, Lincoln rarely departed from the formal, restrained tone of this note. “Pity ‘tis, it is so” could have been an anthem of Lincoln’s political life, so well does the phrase capture not only his basic stance but the spirit of calm resignation he evinced in the face of hardship. Not only did he rarely let on about any vexation or disappointment, but in the exchanges between him and his colleagues, he is often the one bucking them up, trying to lift their spirits, encouraging them that their efforts would have their eventual reward. In this we see that Lincoln was not just a depressive realist. He was what the psychiatrist Victor Frankl calls a “tragic optimist.” Rooted as his ideas were in the imperfection of the past and the danger of the future, he repeatedly invoked a promise as well. The country was capable of improvement because potential lay in the “abundance of man’s heart.” “Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust,” he said. “Let us repurify it. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution . . . Let north and south—let all Americans—let all lovers of liberty everywhere—join in the great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving. We shall have so saved it, that the succeeding millions of free happy people, the world over, shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generations.”

  Lincoln’s greatness owes considerably to his internal growth. But what primarily accounted for his increasing success—and his vital relevance—was not his own growth to a place where he could speak to the country’s needs, but the country’s regression to the place where Lincoln was needed. What deflated the Know-Nothing balloon, and allowed Lincoln to “fuse” with the Republicans on ground that suited him, was an emerging violence and fractiousness that had no peer in the nation’s history. Kansas—one of two states that Douglas’s bill had created out of the Nebraska Territory—became a battleground between proslavery and antislavery forces in 1854 and 1855, as settlers funded by northeastern money poured into the territory and were met by southerners who had come for the same purpose: to organize, win elections, and control the state. Each side set up its own government in its own capital, the slave-friendly minority at Lecompton and the antislavery majority at Lawrence. Violence soon followed. In the spring of 1855, a mob sacked Lawrence, looting buildings and destroying printing presses. In response, a group led by an abolitionist named John Brown murdered five men associated with the proslavery groups.
<
br />   A reaction to Kansas in Washington, D.C., showed how quickly the violence could spread. In May 1856, Charles Sumner, a senator from Massachusetts, gave an outraged speech about the “crimes of Kansas” in which he charged Andrew Butler of South Carolina with taking “a mistress . . . the harlot, Slavery.” Three days later, Butler’s nephew, Preston Brooks, a member of the House of Representatives, came up to Sumner’s desk in the Senate chamber. While a fellow congressman warded off other members of the Senate with a pistol, Brooks beat Sumner to a bloody pulp with his metal-tipped cane until he was unconscious. Sumner became a northern martyr. Brooks became a southern hero.

  In Illinois, the Republican party held sway as the center of opposition to the slave power. As animus to that power increased, its political capital grew. The Know-Nothings had reached their peak in 1856. Now the Republicans were gaining strength. In May of that year, the state party officially formed with a rousing convention in Bloomington. Lincoln joined them, giving his most famous speech that has never been read. The traditional story of the “lost” speech of Bloomington is that people were so moved by what Lincoln said that reporters dropped their pens in their rapture. In fact, the reporters who dropped their pens were Lincoln’s allies. And even if they were moved by the occasion to do so, they had a practical reason, too: the party was still considerably to the left of dominant public sentiment, especially in the center and south of the state. The words Lincoln spoke to animate the party faithful were probably best kept out of the public eye. The hard struggle ahead was clear when the party held a rally in Springfield. Aside from Lincoln and his law partner Herndon, there was one man in the room. “While all seems dead,” Lincoln assured his audience of two, “the age itself is not. It liveth as sure as our Maker liveth. Under all this seeming want of life and motion, the world does move nevertheless. Be hopeful, and now let us adjourn and appeal to the people.”