Lincoln's Melancholy

by Joshua Wolf Shenk

  As this dramatic language suggests, the border between Lincoln’s public responsibilities and his private burdens was porous. Perhaps the best, early illustration of this came at the scene of his departure from Springfield for Washington, D.C. On February 11, 1861, Lincoln arrived at the Great Western Railway sometime after 7 A.M. and entered the red-brick depot. “His face was pale,” observed the New York Herald’s Villard, “and quivered with emotion so deep as to render him almost unable to utter a single word.” At five minutes to eight, Lincoln left the depot building and made his way to the tracks, where he boarded the last of three cars hitched to a wood-fired locomotive. He climbed the rear steps of the car and, on reaching its platform, turned to face the crowd that had gathered despite a cold rain. When Lincoln took off his hat, men in the crowd followed suit. As he prepared to speak, he paused for a few seconds—“till he could control his emotions,” noted a reporter.

  “My friends,” he began. “No one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feelings of sadness at this parting. To this place, and to the kindness of these people, I owe every thing. Here I have lived for a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born and one lies buried. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington.” His farewell was the essence of emotional clarity. Frankly acknowledging his sadness, Lincoln neither lingered on maudlin details nor withdrew into sentimentality but stood anchored in his history, grasping the awful work of his future.

  Never had the conditions for a president-elect been so severe, and never had one seemed, by his credentials, so poorly prepared. Lincoln’s fifteen predecessors had included war hero generals, vice presidents, secretaries of state, and veterans of Congress. His own résumé listed, as he put it, “one term in the lower house of Congress.” He’d had barely a year of formal education; he had few connections in the capital and no executive experience. Before coming to Washington, he had been east of the Alleghenies just a handful of times and still bore the stamp of a man raised on the frontier. Surveying the start of Lincoln’s term, Harriet Beecher Stowe compared the nation to a ship on a perilous passage, at its helm “a plain working man of the people, with no more culture, instruction, or education than any such working man may obtain.” She continued, “The eyes of princes, nobles, aristocrats, of dukes, earls, scholars, statesmen, warriors, all turned on the plain backwoodsman . . . watched him with a fearful curiosity, simply asking, ‘Will that awkward old backwoodsman really get that ship through?’” Edward Everett, the former senator and Harvard president who would share the dais with Lincoln at Gettysburg, offered his blunt assessment in a diary entry on February 15. “The President-elect is making a zigzag progress to Washington,” he wrote, “called out to make short speeches at every important point. These speeches thus far have been of the most ordinary kind, destitute of everything, not merely of felicity and grace, but of common pertinence. He is evidently a person of very inferior cast of character, wholly unequal to the crisis.”

  On the morning of March 4, Lincoln appeared on a platform before the Capitol to take the oath of office. “He was tall and ungainly,” recalled an Associated Press reporter, “wearing a black suit, a black tie beneath a turn-down collar, and a black silk hat. He carried a gold- or silver-headed walking-cane. As we came out into the open . . . he drew from his breast pocket the manuscript I had seen him reading at the hotel, laid it before him, placing the cane upon it as a paper-weight.” As Lincoln took off his hat, Senator Stephen Douglas, his lifelong rival, stepped forward and offered to hold it. Putting on a pair of steel-framed spectacles, Lincoln began to read, his voice, the reporter said, “high pitched, but resonant.”

  Lincoln declared his intention to maintain the Union under the law, simultaneously assuring aggrieved southerners that he harbored no hostile intent and insisting that he would not countenance secession. In a long, careful speech, what stands out is an uncannily mature assessment of the nature of struggle. No one could deny the divisions over slavery, Lincoln said. Eventually these divisions would have to be faced head-on. “A husband and wife may be divorced,” he observed, “and go out of the presence, and beyond the reach of each other; but the different parts of our country cannot do this. They cannot but remain face to face; and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them.” From this domestic metaphor emerged a central strain of Lincoln’s thought. To remain face to face, whether in the midst of hostile differences or amicable agreement, is the human burden. In Springfield, Lincoln once noted how people needed to learn to live with their neighbors’ irritations. If they moved, he said, they would merely trade old annoyances for new ones. In the realm of national affairs this melancholy principle remained. Best to face trouble directly, and in peace. He would not invade the South unless provoked, nor would he withhold lawful protection of slavery as it existed. He would “hold, occupy, and possess” federal property throughout the nation. But, he insisted, “in doing this there needs to be no bloodshed or violence; and there shall be none, unless it be forced upon the national authority.”

  In his original draft, Lincoln closed by emphasizing his hard line: “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war . . . With you, and not with me, is the solemn question of ‘Shall it be peace, or a sword?’” William Seward, his secretary of state designate, had written out his suggestion for a softer ending:

  I close. We are not we must not be aliens or enemies but fellow countrymen and brethren. Although passion has strained our bonds of affection too hardly they must not I am sure they will not be broken. The mystic chords of memory which proceeding from so many battle fields and so many patriot graves pass through all the hearts and all the hearths in this broad continent of ours will yet again harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation.

  Lincoln edited Seward’s passage, and the result gives us a rare glimpse of Lincoln’s literary mind in action. Insertions are shown in italics, deletions in strike-through type:

  I am loth to close. We are not we must not be aliens or enemies, but fellow countrymen and brethren friends. We must not be enemies. AlThough passion may have has strained, it must not break our bonds of affection too hardly they must not, I am sure they will not be broken. The mystic chords of memory, stretching which proceeding from every so many battle-fields, and so many patriot graves, to every living pass through all the hearts and all the hearthstone, all overin this broad land, continent of ours will yet again swell the chorus of the Union, harmonize in their ancient music when again touched breathed upon, as surely they will be, by the guardian angel of the nation. better angels of our nature.

  Lincoln’s choices show his keen rhetorical skills. From Seward’s “I close,” he wrote, “I am loth to close,” reprising a wish to be in open intercourse with his friends and enemies both. From the clunky “We are not we must not be aliens or enemies but fellow countrymen and brethren,” Lincoln wrote simply, “We must not be enemies but friends.” The rhythm in Lincoln’s paragraph better serves the message. Three short, punchy sentences create a tension that mounts through the tight clauses of the final sentence and delivers a breathless listener to the ultimate phrase.

  Lincoln’s most interesting alteration was substantial, not merely rhetorical. Seward had invoked “the guardian angel of the nation.” Lincoln wrote, “the better angels of our nature.” These phrases have much in common: both describe a holy force bringing an end to conflict. But whereas Seward’s words called on some vague deity, a separate and external power, Lincoln’s beckons something within. “Surely,” Lincoln wrote, “the better angels of our nature” will touch us again. He does not suggest that the worse angels will be hounded away or killed. On the contrary, the image contains within it a sense of perpetual complexity, of lasting tension. Individuals and nations are multifaceted, capable of better and prone to wor
se, ever locked in struggle. “Better angels of our nature,” as with many of Lincoln’s phrases, reaches deep into the psyche, because it reflects an experience that every human being knows intuitively, one of division and conflict, brokenness and harmony, suffering and reward, a journey and its challenges. These were ideas that Lincoln lived and grappled with much of his life.

  Upon taking office, as Lincoln faced the prospect of war, the weight lay hard upon him. He said the troubles he felt “were so great that, could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive.” He couldn’t sleep. He said he was in “the dumps.” On March 30, according to a contemporary letter, he “keeled over with sick headache.” Much of the early stress centered on Fort Sumter. An unfinished garrison in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, Sumter had become the symbolic center of the secession crisis. On Lincoln’s first day in office, he learned that the federal garrison couldn’t hold for more than six weeks without relief. To resupply the fort might provoke the South Carolina militia that huddled on the shore. To abandon it, Lincoln thought, would send a signal of capitulation. After agonizing over the question, he chose to alert the state’s governor that he would ship in food but no arms. This turned out to be provocation enough. The first Confederate blasts rang out at 4:30 A.M. on April 12, 1861. Two days later, the American flag went down in surrender. Lincoln said that, with regret, he “found the duty of employing the war power” and called for 75,000 volunteers from the state militias. It would take four years for the flag to be raised again at Sumter. Before then, 3 million soldiers would fall into ranks. More than 620,000 of them would die.

  For Lincoln, the plain physical realities of war rang in his ears and marched in front of his eyes and registered painfully in his melancholy mind. Consider the geography of his position. Washington, D.C., was itself a slave city with a southern culture, a nest for Confederate sympathizers. To the north and east lay Maryland, a slave state that for a time seemed poised to secede. To the south and west lay Virginia, which seceded after Sumter—along with Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arkansas. Active belligerents were posted just across the Potomac River. With a spyglass Lincoln could see an early Confederate flag flying over an Alexandria hotel. When the Confederate States of America moved its capital to Richmond, Jefferson Davis took up residence with his government about a hundred miles away from Lincoln and his.

  As if to underscore the personal toll the war would take on him, the first celebrated death of the conflict was one of Lincoln’s close friends. A slight young man with black hair and hazel eyes, Elmer Ellsworth had clerked for Lincoln in the late 1850s and traveled with him to Washington on the presidential train. In peacetime, Ellsworth had made a great reputation by leading a disciplined, colorful local militia. With the defection of so many talented southern officers, he gave people hope for the Union. Assembling a militia from among New York City firefighters, he paraded them through Washington, lending solace to a beleaguered city. On May 24, 1861, Ellsworth led a raid into Alexandria, Virginia. First seizing the railroad depot, he went on to secure the telegraph office, passing on the way the Marshall Hotel, a three-story brick building, which flew the Rebel flag Lincoln could see from the Executive Mansion. With four men Ellsworth charged up the hotel stairs to a top window, where he leaned out and grabbed the flag. On the way down, the innkeeper, James W. Jackson, shot and killed the young militiaman with a double-barreled shotgun.

  A navy captain, Gustavus V. Fox, delivered the news to President Lincoln in the White House library, an oval room in the center of the mansion’s second floor. Just after Fox left, Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts came in with a reporter for the New York Herald. They found Lincoln looking out the window over the Potomac. When they drew closer, Lincoln spun around, took a step toward them, and extended his hand. “Excuse me,” he said, his voice breaking, “but I cannot talk.” The men were about to ask what was the matter, but before they could say anything, Lincoln began to cry. He put a handkerchief over his face. Then he walked about the room in silence. The surprised guests stepped aside—“not a little moved,” the reporter wrote, “at such an unusual spectacle, in such a man and in such a place.” After a while, Lincoln sat down and invited the men to join him. “I will make no apology, gentlemen, for my weakness,” he said, as reported by the Herald, “but I knew poor Ellsworth well, and held him in great regard. Just as you entered the room, Captain Fox left me, after giving me the painful details of his unfortunate death. The event was so unexpected, and the recital so touching, that it quite unmanned me.” At this the president made what the reporter described as a “violent attempt to restrain his emotion.”

  In one sense, as president, Lincoln regressed emotionally. As a young man, he had often wept in public, loudly proclaimed his despair, and feared that he would break under the weight of his misery. He was, as a friend from New Salem said, an “open souled” man. In his middle years, he ceased making such dramatic displays, seeming more remote and reserved. Now the outwardly emotional style returned, as if intense grief thawed something in him that had been in a deep freeze.

  On July 21, the war’s first major battle left hundreds dead on the fields of Manassas, Virginia, followed by a clash in Missouri that produced 2,600 combined casualties. These battles, both Union defeats, dashed hopes for a quick end to the conflict. Lincoln called for the enlistment of 500,000 men, which he doubled three days later. Among those who stepped up to serve was Edward D. Baker, Lincoln’s old political ally from Illinois. Though a member of the Senate, Baker now took a commission as colonel. On October 21, 1861, he led 1,700 men across the Potomac River from Maryland to Virginia, where they scaled a hundred-foot, nearly perpendicular bank called Ball’s Bluff. At the top waited four Confederate regiments, which opened fire as soon as the Union soldiers clambered onto even ground. “A kind of shiver ran through the huddled mass upon the brow of the cliff,” said a Virginia private. Panicked soldiers rushed backward and fell off the cliff, some onto the bayonets of their comrades. More than half the force was killed, wounded, or captured. Colonel Baker was shot in the head and died immediately.

  Lincoln learned the news by telegraph at the Army of the Potomac’s headquarters. Shortly afterward, the journalist Charles Carlton Coffin saw the president leaving the office. His head was down, his chest was “heaving with emotion,” and he was crying. “He almost fell as he stepped into the street,” Coffin wrote, “and we sprang involuntarily from our seats to render assistance, but he did not fall.” At a memorial service for Baker, Coffin said, “again the tears rolled down his cheeks.” Lincoln later said that Baker’s death smote him like a whirlwind from a desert.

  Another whirlwind soon struck Lincoln’s family. By winter, both sides had dug in for a long conflict. Wartime Washington bulged in population, from 60,000 to 200,000. The Potomac, which was the source of the White House’s drinking water, became fouled with the refuse of army camp latrines and broken sewage mains. In January 1862, William and Thomas, the two Lincoln children at the White House—Robert was at Harvard—took sick from what doctors called bilious fever—probably typhoid, which comes from contaminated water. Before their illnesses, the boys had the run of the Executive Mansion, and playing with them seemed to give Lincoln precious relief. Willie in particular was a gem of a boy. Sensitive, bright, and gentle, he had a sparkle about him and an uncanny poise. Unlike “Tad,” who had a fiery temper and a speech impediment that made him hard to understand, and Bob, who was cold and aloof, Willie seemed to have inherited his father’s best qualities.

  After an illness marked by stomach cramps and diarrhea, Willie fell into a coma on February 18, 1862, and he died two days later. He was eleven years old. Elizabeth Keckly, Mary Lincoln’s dressmaker, was washing the boy’s body when the president came into the room and saw his son dead for the first time. Lincoln walked over to the bed, lifted the cover from Willie’s face, and gazed at it for a long time. He said that the boy was too good for this earth. “It is hard, hard to h
ave him die,” he said, his words choked with sobs. “He buried his head in his hands,” Keckly said, “and his tall frame was convulsed with emotion. I stood at the foot of the bed, my eyes full of tears, looking at the man in silent, awe-stricken wonder. His grief unnerved him, and made him a weak, passive child.”

  In itself, a father’s grief over his son’s death is no evidence of peculiarity or extreme suffering. But Lincoln’s observers immediately saw that his was no reactive or temporary sadness. “He had a Sad Nature,” said one army officer who got to know Lincoln. Edward Dicey, an English journalist who visited Washington in the spring of 1862, noticed the “look of depression” in Lincoln, “which, I am told by those who see him daily, was habitual to him, even before the then recent death of his child, whose loss he felt acutely. You cannot look upon his worn, bilious, anxious countenance, and believe it to be that of a happy man.”

  Lincoln took a risk showing himself so openly. Modern observers tend to see him as a man of little experience but solid character who faced a crisis and rose to great heights of practical and moral power. But many of his contemporaries saw a decent but ill-equipped man who collapsed into incompetence in the face of overwhelming events. Dicey wrote that Lincoln had “sense enough to perceive his own deficiencies” and that he “unites a painful sense of responsibility to a still more painful sense, perhaps that his work is too great for him to grapple with.” The president’s sadness, in other words, could be perceived as weakness—and this when his administration was dangerously weak. After several months in Washington, Dicey wrote a dispatch that summed up the conventional wisdom at the time: “Abraham Lincoln,” Dicey wrote, “was regarded as a failure. Why he, individually, was elected, or rather, selected, nobody, to this day, seems to know.” Surely, had the secession been foretold, Dicey believed, “a very different man would have been chosen.”