Lincoln's Melancholy

by Joshua Wolf Shenk

  Widmer knew he was watching, as he said, “an able man,” a solid and dependable man, a man capable of great work. The young men of Illinois now chattered about Lincoln, and those who had seen him would always remember the moment. Hardly any of them who left a reminiscence failed to mention his melancholy, and hardly any thought it strange, or inconsistent, or contradictory. They saw him as he was, a full man whose griefs and solaces and talents ran together. They had the feeling that we are still capable of having, though it is rare for ordinary citizens to feel this way about the people in public life, the feeling of recognizing someone full, someone real, someone who has lived and suffered as we have and who has come out stronger for it—willing and able to wield his strength in service.

  Many popular philosophies propose that suffering can be beaten simply, quickly, and clearly. Popular biography often expresses the same view. Many writers, faced with the unhappiness of a heroic figure, make sure to find some crucible in which that bad feeling melted into something new. “Biographies tend conventionally to be structured as crisis-and-recovery narratives,” writes Louis Menand, “in which the subject undergoes a period of disillusionment or adversity, and then has a ‘breakthrough’ or arrives at a ‘turning point’ before going on to achieve whatever sort of greatness obtains.” Lincoln’s melancholy doesn’t lend itself to such a narrative. No point exists after which the melancholy dissolved—not January 1841, not during his “reign of reason” in middle age, and not at his political resurgence beginning in 1854. Some scholars aver that Lincoln’s melancholy abated in the war years, as he was too busy with his work to give space to his own gloom. We’ll see evidence to the contrary. Whatever greatness Lincoln achieved cannot be explained as a triumph over personal suffering. Rather, it must be accounted for as an outgrowth of the same system that produced that suffering. This is not a story of transformation but one of integration. Lincoln didn’t do great work because he solved the problem of his melancholy. The problem of his melancholy was all the more fuel for the fire of his great work.

  In his campaign against Douglas, Lincoln did his best to win, consistent with his principles. He made lists of key legislators to sway, dispatched lieutenants to key districts, and heeded the response of crowds. In the November 1858 election, Illinois Republicans did win the popular vote. But owing to favorable apportionment, the Democrats elected more members to the Assembly, who in turn elected Douglas U.S. senator. According to the lawyer Henry Whitney, Lincoln on that day said his life had been a failure. “I never saw any man so radically and thoroughly depressed,” Whitney wrote, “so completely steeped in the bitter waters of hopeless despair.” Lincoln wrote, “The emotions of defeat . . . are fresh upon me.”

  Nevertheless, his main message was defiance. “The fight must go on,” he wrote to an ally. “The cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one, or even, one hundred defeats.” His own defeat scarcely mattered. “Though I now sink out of view and shall be forgotten,” he wrote to his old friend Anson Henry, “I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after I am gone.” Lincoln again reminded his allies of the long view. “I hope and believe seed has been sown that will yet produce fruit,” he wrote to one colleague. To another he wrote, “You are feeling badly. ‘And this too shall pass away.’ Never fear.”

  Lincoln explained the origin of that phrase in a speech he gave in 1859. At a state fair in Wisconsin, he spoke to the crowd just before farm prizes were to be handed out. “Some of you,” Lincoln said, “will be successful, and such will need but little philosophy to take them home in cheerful spirits; others will be disappointed, and will be in a less happy mood.” To those who did need a philosophy—most of the crowd, since prizes went only to a few—Lincoln offered, “To such, let it be said, ‘Lay it not too much to heart.’ Let them adopt the maxim, ‘Better luck next time,’ and then, by renewed exertion, make that better luck for themselves.” Lincoln then articulated the philosophy that he thought could help those with less than cheerful spirits. This same philosophy, he said, ought be heeded by those who were successful. “Let it be remembered,” he said, “that while occasions like the present, bring their sober and durable benefits, the exultations and mortifications of them, are but temporary; that the victor shall soon be the vanquished, if he relax in his exertion; and that the vanquished this year, may be the victor the next, in spite of all competition.” The point of exertion was not to win a contest and then relax. Work, Lincoln suggested, was its own end, for when one worked for a proper end, neither victory nor defeat could remain; rather, both led to the need for continued effort and diligence. He concluded his speech by citing an old parable, of an Eastern monarch who charged his wise men to invent a sentence that would apply to all times and in all situations. The wise men returned with “And this too shall pass away.”

  Lincoln lingered over the line. “How much it expresses!” he exclaimed. “How chastening in the hour of pride!—how consoling in the depths of affliction! And this, too, shall pass away.” Still, to the wisdom of these wise men from the East he had something to add. “And yet,” he said, “let us hope it is not quite true. Let us hope, rather, that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us; and the intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.” In the face of present disappointments, Lincoln first articulated acknowledgment, then serene resignation, and finally the sad, sweet hope that better times would someday come.

  Chapter 9

  The Fiery Trial Through Which We Pass

  OBSERVERS HAVE LONG noticed how Lincoln combined sets of opposite qualities. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote that he was unsteady but strong, like a wire cable that shakes in storms but tenaciously moves toward its end. Carl Sandburg described Lincoln as “steel and velvet . . . hard as rock and soft as drifting fog.”As these metaphors indicate, Lincoln not only embraced contrasts—self-doubt and confidence, hope and despair—but somehow reconciled them to produce something new and valuable. In this lies the key to his creative work as president—and an enduring lesson.

  Living a good life often requires integrating a bundle of contrasts into a durable whole. The psychiatrist Leston Havens explains, in his book Learning to Be Human, that mental health depends on both freedom and compliance, radical independence and persistent loyalty. “My model will be Lincoln,” Havens writes, “who seemed as hard as granite and as soft as a cloud. I will learn to be as strong and as weak as I need to be.” We began this study of Lincoln by drawing on psychology. Now we find psychology drawing on Lincoln—seeing that his life teaches something that no mere prescription can about how to live a successful life in the face of suffering.

  Lincoln’s rise to the White House was swift and largely unexpected. As late as April 1859, he actively discouraged local admirers who spoke of him as a candidate for the White House. “I must, in candor, say I do not think myself fit for the Presidency,” he wrote. “I certainly am flattered, and gratified, that some partial friends think of me in that connection; but I really think it best for our cause that no concerted effort, such as you suggest, should be made.” His modesty was justified, as he was still largely unknown on the national scene. In the fall of 1859, when his son Robert applied to Harvard College, Lincoln supposedly asked Stephen Douglas to write a recommendation. The administration at Harvard might not have known Abraham Lincoln’s name.

  Then, in October 1859, another man-made earthquake shook the nation. At Harpers Ferry, Virginia, a picturesque town on a bend in the Potomac River, the abolitionist John Brown stormed a federal arsenal with a small corps of armed men. Brown had hoped to initiate a slave revolt. Instead, he was quickly caught, tried, and sentenced to be hanged. The significance of this raid came in the reaction to it—that is, the reaction in the South to the reaction in the North. Brown played the martyr per
fectly. On his way to the gallows he offered a final statement: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away—but with blood.”

  On the day of his hanging, northern church bells tolled and preachers eulogized him as a crusader for liberty. “The death of no man in America has ever produced so profound a sensation,” wrote the editor of the Lawrence (Kansas) Republican, noting the “deep and sorrowful indignation” at Brown’s hanging. Such words drove southerners to rage. Can we “live under a government, the majority of whose subjects regard John Brown as a martyr and a Christian hero?” asked the influential De Bow’s Review. Of course the answer was no. “Thousands of men,” a joint editorial of two rival Richmond, Virginia, newspapers declared, “who, a month ago, scoffed at the idea of a dissolution of the Union . . . now hold the opinion that its days are numbered.” Thus did the nation enter the election year, 1860, so shaken that anything was politically conceivable, even that an obscure, quasi-successful politician might emerge as a national leader.

  On Saturday, February 25,1860, Lincoln stepped off a train in Jersey City, New Jersey. After a journey of 1,200 miles, from Springfield, Illinois, in lurching rail cars that made frequent stops and demanded relentless transfers, he had reached the end of the line. He claimed his trunk and made his way to a crowded pier on the west side of the Hudson River. There he faced Manhattan Island, where two days later, on the strength of a single speech, he would send himself hurtling toward the center of the nation’s mounting crisis.

  Eastern Republicans knew Lincoln for having gamely challenged Stephen Douglas in 1858. However, few outside the prairie states had seen Lincoln or considered him in his own right. That would change on Monday night, when Lincoln was slated to appear at the Great Hall at the Cooper Institute, the largest venue in Manhattan. He would speak as part of a series devoted to western Republicans, sponsored by a group of party insiders who wanted to find someone to challenge William Seward for the presidential nomination. The stakes could not have been higher.

  At Exchange Street in Jersey City, Lincoln caught the Paulus Street Ferry, a service of the Pennsylvania Railroad, which carried its eastbound passengers into New York. (The great city in 1860 had neither bridges nor tunnels.) The ferry docked at Cortlandt Street, only a few blocks from Lincoln’s hotel, the famous Astor House on Broadway—itself around the corner from his first stop in the city: the offices of the antislavery New York Independent. Calling on the editor, Henry C. Bowen, Lincoln sprawled out on the sofa, his long legs dangling over the edge, his clothes rumpled from the long trip, his face, Bowen observed, wearing a “woebegone look.” Bowen invited Lincoln to stay at his house. Lincoln said no, that he would stay at his hotel and continue working on his speech. He said that he feared he’d made a mistake in coming to New York. He’d have to give his whole time before Monday night to the text; “otherwise he was sure he would make a failure.”

  True to his word, Lincoln threw himself at the work. Before he left Springfield, he had laid the foundation for the speech, consulting texts and organizing his ideas into an argument. He had neither speechwriters nor research assistants, unless Herndon, as he sometimes did, found a relevant passage for him or lent him a book. While Lincoln often spoke extemporaneously over the course of his career, most of the great works of his mature years were composed on the page. Going through many drafts, he worked out his thoughts by writing and rewriting.

  For the Cooper Institute speech, Lincoln may have felt a special urgency to revise, since he had originally planned to speak at Henry Ward Beecher’s church in Brooklyn and found out about the move to Manhattan only when he arrived in the city. Lincoln several times articulated his central motivation: he was determined not to fail. On Sunday, February 26, Bowen prevailed upon Lincoln to attend services at Beecher’s church in Brooklyn Heights, but afterward the Illinoisan turned down an invitation to lunch. “Now, look here, Mr. Bowen,” he said, “I am not going to make a failure at the Cooper Institute to-morrow night, if I can help it.” The work, he said, “is on my mind all the time . . . Please excuse me and let me go to my room at the hotel, lock the door, and there think about my lecture.”

  On Monday night, February 27, 1860, a crowd of more than 1,500 people filed into the Great Hall, paying the twenty-five-cent admission and taking seats in the long, rectangular theater, which ran the length of a city block. Lincoln mounted the podium wearing a new suit, but it didn’t fit well. One young Republican called it as “unbecoming” as it could be. “I had a feeling of pity for so ungainly a man,” said a member of the audience. “I said to myself, ‘Old fellow, you won’t do; it’s all very well for the wild West, but this will never go down in New York.’”

  Well aware of the “wild West” stereotype, Lincoln had prepared a speech that drew its core strength not from colorful anecdotes but from solid research. For years, the country had been roiled by the question of whether the federal government could constitutionally regulate slavery in the territories. The Democrats argued that it could not. Although the Dred Scott decision had cited Fifth Amendment protections of property, Stephen Douglas, Lincoln’s ideological sparring partner, cited the Tenth Amendment, which reserved all powers not explicitly delegated to the federal government “to the States respectively, and to the people.” “Our fathers, who framed the Government under which we live,” Douglas said, “understood this question just as well, and even better, than we do now.” Lincoln agreed. But, he asked, what did those fathers think about regulating slavery? The subject hadn’t been raised at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. So Lincoln spent the first portion of his speech examining the opinions on record for each of the thirty-nine signers.

  Lincoln opened with a good idea—a new way into an old question—and did the hard work to draw it out. Had it been easy to discover how all the individuals who signed the Constitution stood on slavery regulation, someone would have done it long before. He began in 1784, when Congress, meeting under the Articles of Confederation, prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory and three of the thirty-nine signers voted for the ban. He continued through the votes for the Missouri Compromise in 1819, when one signer, present in the Congress, voted steadily for the prohibition of slavery in the territories. In total, Lincoln found that of twenty-three signers who voted on the question, twenty-one supported a federal power to regulate slavery in the federal territories. Of the other sixteen, many had expressed opposition to slavery. The case was devastating, all the more so because, in Lincoln’s presentation, it was not opinion but fact. After this speech, to say that the Founders had opposed the regulation of territorial slavery would be like saying the Constitution created six houses of Congress.

  On this foundation, Lincoln built a stirring appeal that tied Republican ideals to the Founders’ vision. Addressing the people of the South, he said, “You say you are conservative—eminently conservative—while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the point in controversy which was adopted by ‘our fathers who framed the Government under which we live’; while you with one accord reject, and scout, and spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new.” Slavery’s extension must be opposed, he insisted, on the principle of slavery being wrong, even while the institution as it existed was tolerated out of devotion to the Union and its laws.

  As Lincoln drew to the end, the hall was so quiet that when he paused, one could hear the sizzle of the gas burners. “Let us stand by our duty fearlessly and effectively,” he said. “Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored—contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong: vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man; such as a policy of ‘don’t care’ on a question about which all true men do care; such
as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous, to repentance . . . Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the government, nor of dungeons to ourselves. LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH LET US TO THE END DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.”

  The crowd whooped, whistled, and stamped their feet. There was little doubt that Abraham Lincoln had made a stunning New York debut. Four city newspapers would carry the full speech. Perhaps the most influential Republican voice in the nation, the New York Tribune, said that Lincoln’s speech “was one of the happiest and most convincing political arguments ever made in this city . . . No man ever before made such an impression on his first appeal to a New York audience.”

  The contrasts on display in New York City help us see Lincoln’s character on the eve of his political ascension. Few orators stood down the slave power more fearlessly than he. Few framed the contest so nakedly—right versus wrong, liberty versus slavery, patriotism versus greed. Yet the man throwing these verbal daggers onstage seemed, before he went on and after he stepped off, diffident, doubtful, and sad. Whisked off to a celebratory dinner at the Athenaeum Club, on Fifth Avenue and Sixteenth Street, Lincoln seemed strangely impervious to the praise ringing in his ears. “No man in all New York,” remembered Charles Nott, “appeared more simple, more unassuming, more modest, more unpretentious, more conscious of his own defects.” After dinner, Nott rode the streetcar downtown with Lincoln. After he got off at his stop, he regretted that he hadn’t accompanied Lincoln to his hotel—“not because he was a distinguished stranger,” Nott said, but because he “seemed a sad and lonely man.” The next morning, when another admirer rushed to congratulate him, Lincoln’s face brightened for a moment at the praise. Then, with a diffident tone, he said, “I am not sure that I made a success.” A few days later he allowed, in a letter home, that the Cooper Institute address “went off passably well,” but said his subsequent speeches were giving him trouble. “I have been unable to escape this toil,” he wrote. “If I had foreseen it, I think I would not have come East at all.”