Lincoln's Melancholy

by Joshua Wolf Shenk

  Yet Lincoln continued to utter profoundly dark thoughts with seeming equanimity. Early in the war, he wondered aloud why anyone would want to be president, complaining about the incessant demands made by office seekers. Gazing out at the south lawn of the White House, he told a friend that he sometimes thought his only escape would be to hang himself from a tree. Perhaps because our society is so influenced by advertising, which blurs the distinction between perception and reality, there is a sense today that people in positions of strength must never waver, never doubt themselves. God forbid they should speak thoughts of suicide. But Lincoln, by whatever combination of habit and choice, took his own path. He did not pretend to be anything other than he was.

  Paradoxically, his expressions of pain also conveyed how much pain he could tolerate while continuing to function. We have seen how, at the tail end of his second breakdown as a young man—and this following years of severe melancholy—Lincoln came away with a new clarity about what he would live for and suffer for. This resolve underlay his every move as president. “I expect to maintain this contest until successful, or till I die, or am conquered, or my term expires, or Congress or the country forsakes me,” he wrote in the early summer of 1862.

  He needed every ounce of this resolve. Though the Union had made some potent military gains, especially with its navy, the battle of Shiloh in February 1862 left twenty thousand total killed and wounded and raised the specter of total war. General William T. Sherman described the shocking piles of “mangled bodies,” limbs and heads ripped from bloody trunks. “The scenes on this field would have cured anybody of war,” Sherman said, yet he thought that only ruthless destruction would bring a Confederate surrender.

  General George B. McClellan was considerably more cautious. A compact, red-headed, wellborn man, McClellan had known only success in his career as a railroad executive and military officer. Shortly after the war broke out, McClellan, only thirty-four, won an important victory in western Virginia, and Lincoln called on him to command the Army of the Potomac in the fall of 1861. His troops, fond of his dashing style and prodigious organizational skills, called him “the Little Napoleon.” Within months of his arrival in the East, McClellan had deposed the Union’s chief general, the aged Winfield Scott, and took control of the whole war effort. But while he built a great army, he seemed reluctant to use it. After months of prodding, he began a movement to Richmond. Marshaling 400 boats, he took 112,000 men, 1,200 vehicles, and 15,000 horses by sea to a narrow peninsula between the York and James rivers in Virginia. From there, his armies crossed the muddy fields toward the Confederate capital. He dug in for a siege, then clashed with Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in a miserable seven days of fighting. Finally McClellan withdrew. Lincoln said that when the campaign ended, “I was as nearly inconsolable as I could be and live.” He wrote to his secretary of state that he would ask for more men “were it not that I fear a general panic and stampede would follow—so hard is it to have a thing understood as it really is.”

  Lincoln often observed, in a resigned tone, how people were too optimistic, expected too much. For some, perhaps, it was the burden of their own constitutions—“pathological optimism” as opposed to Lincoln’s “depressive realism.” Others, like McClellan, teetered between unfounded pessimism and hysterical grandiosity. The general constantly portrayed his position as weaker than it really was—once, for example, insisting that the enemy had 150,000 men when the real number was 45,000, a third of McClellan’s force. In the face of his own failures, McClellan heaped scorn all around—the president was an “idiot” and a “baboon,” Secretary of State Seward an “officious, incompetent little puppy,” Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles “a garrulous old woman”—while indulging in self-pity: “I am thwarted and deceived by these incapables at every turn.” “Perhaps,” observes James McPherson, “McClellan’s career had been too successful. He had never known . . . the despair of defeat or the humiliation of failure. He had never learned the lessons of adversity and humility.” Lincoln had clearly learned those lessons.

  Yet his ability to see into the dark heart of the matter might have derailed him were it not for an uncanny resilience. If comparison with McClellan highlights Lincoln’s realism, a vivid character closer to home highlights his capacity for self-control. Like her husband, Mary Lincoln faced grave challenges from the start. Suspicious of her Kentucky heritage—of her fourteen brothers and half-brothers, eight supported the Confederacy—the northern press was merciless with her. She worked hard to restore the White House and preside over the nation as its First Lady, a term coined to describe her. But she quickly showed signs of erratic judgment, once buying eighty-four pairs of kid gloves in less than a month. Her profligate spending and her dealings with dubious characters led to rumors of corruption. According to O. H. Browning, an old friend of the Lincolns who now served as senator from Illinois, the president said several times “that he was constantly under great apprehension lest his wife should do something which would bring him into disgrace.” After their boy Willie’s death, Lincoln faced an even greater fear—that his wife would go insane. She spent three weeks in bed, and when she rose, she wore nothing but mourning clothes for a year. She regularly had what her biographer Ruth Painter Randall describes as “paroxysms of convulsive weeping.” In the midst of one, the president led her by the arm to a window and pointed across the Anacostia River to the Government Hospital for the Insane. “Mother,” he said to her, “do you see that large white building on the hill yonder? Try and control your grief, or it will drive you mad, and we may have to send you there.”

  To keep himself sane, Lincoln drew on familiar strategies. He turned first to poetry, often repeating his favorite, “Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud.” The tragedies of Shakespeare were a constant companion. Once, in a spell of melancholy, he rang his bell and asked a secretary to bring him a book of poetry by Thomas Hood. “It was brought to him,” said O. H. Browning, “and he read to me several of those sad pathetic pieces—I suppose because they were accurate pictures of his own experiences and feelings. I remained with [him] about an hour & a half, and left in high spirits, and a very genial mood but as he said a crowd was buzzing about the door like bees, ready to pounce upon him as soon as I should take my departure, and bring him back to a realization of the annoyances and harrassments of his position.”

  In the face of both annoyance and sadness, nothing comforted Lincoln more than his jokes and stories. He spent much of his leisure time reading humor, with favorite volumes at the ready on his desk or in his coat pocket. His favorites included Charles Farrar Browne (who wrote as “Artemus Ward”), David Locke (“Petroleum V. Nasby”), and Robert H. Newell (“Orpheus C. Kerr”). These were first-class literary artists in the tradition that produced Mark Twain, and they sometimes poked fun at “Linkin.” More often, they took aim at the arrogance, hypocrisy, and pieties that always make good fodder for a sharp comic eye. Locke’s Nasby, for example, was an indolent and confused “Dimekrat”—“No man hez drunk more whiskey than I hev for the party—none hez dun it moar willingly”—who was always applying for office. Using the character, Locke dissected everything from northern fears of racial equality to draft dodgers to secessionists. Lincoln not only enjoyed these stories for himself but often read them aloud to visitors. David Locke noted, “He offended many of the great men of the Republican party this way.” Imagine a distinguished visitor encountering a chief executive today, in the aftermath of a disaster or in the midst of a crisis, cracking up at The Daily Show or The Onion. “Grave and reverend Senators,” said Locke, “who came charged to the brim with important business . . . took it ill that the president should postpone the consideration thereof while he read them a letter from ‘Saint’s Rest, wich is in the state uv Noo Jersey.’” Lincoln said repeatedly that he didn’t care. An exchange with James Ashley was typical. When the Ohio Republican objected to one of Lincoln’s yarns, the president said, “Ashley, I have great confidence i
n you and great respect for you, and I know how sincere you are. But if I couldn’t tell these stories, I would die. Now you sit down.”

  The stories were not mere amusement or relief. He also used them to ease friction and make a point. Once Lincoln told a Kentucky delegation that he couldn’t satisfy any of their demands. It reminded him of a story about a family that was constantly moving. The chickens got so used to being moved that when they saw the wagons being readied, they’d lie on their backs and cross their legs. “If I listen to every committee that comes in at that door,” Lincoln said, “I had just as well cross my hands and let you tie me.” The visitors left empty-handed, but in good humor.

  Sometimes Lincoln, like a black belt in karate, used others’ thrusts to disarm them. Urged to give an office in Hawaii to a man whose friends said he needed the good climate for his health, Lincoln answered, “Gentlemen, there are eight other applicants for that position and they are all sicker’n your man.” Though Lincoln’s melancholy didn’t take hold in popular culture, his humor did. One joke had two old ladies talking about the war. One said, “I think Jefferson Davis will succeed because he is a praying man.” The other replied, “But so is Lincoln.” The first responded, “Yes, but when Abraham prays, the Lord will think he’s joking.” Lincoln said this was the best story about himself that he ever read in the newspapers.

  The psychiatrist George Vaillant has shown that the bedrock of character comes not by good fortune but by how people deal with problems. Through longitudinal studies of generally healthy subjects, Vaillant has identified a series of discrete adaptations, or defenses, that people repeatedly turn to. “If we use defenses well,” Vaillant writes, “we are deemed mentally healthy, conscientious, funny, creative, and altruistic. If we use them badly, the psychiatrist diagnoses us ill, our neighbors label us unpleasant, and society brands us immoral.” What’s striking is that all five of the “mature” defenses Vaillant identifies were present in Lincoln as he managed the country and himself. Humor, as we’ve seen, allows a person to fully engage with reality while enjoying its absurdities. Healthy people also practice suppression, which, quite unlike denial, is the selective, forceful act of pushing away oppressive stimuli; anticipation, which involves dealing with the moment in part by looking ahead to the good and the bad that lie in the future; altruism, or placing the welfare of others above oneself; and sublimation, which involves channeling passions into art.

  Viewing Lincoln through the lens of his adaptations allows us to throw off the restrictive view of illness versus health. An attempt to label Lincoln is an exercise in frustration. Consider the scene that unfolded when, not long after McClellan’s calamities at the Peninsula, O. H. Browning came to the White House. The president was in his library, writing, and had left instructions that he was not to be disturbed. Browning went in anyway and found the president looking terrible—“weary, care-worn, and troubled.” Browning wrote in his diary, “I remarked that I felt concerned about him—regretted that troubles crowded so heavily upon him, and feared his health was suffering.” Lincoln took his friend’s hand and said, with a deep cadence of sadness, “Browning, I must die sometime.” “He looked very sad,” Browning wrote. “We parted I believe both of us with tears in our eyes.” A clinician reading this passage could easily identify mental pathology in a man who looked haggard and distressed and volunteered morbid thoughts. However, one crucial detail upsets such a simple picture: Browning found Lincoln writing—doing the work that not only helped guide his nation through its immediate struggle but also became the guidepost for future generations. “The struggle of today, is not altogether for today,” Lincoln wrote, “it is for a vast future also.”

  Like the compass of a sailor in a mounting storm, Lincoln’s eye on the future became increasingly vital as the war dragged on and slavery—which, as Lincoln said, everyone knew to be the true cause of the war—became inextricably bound up with it. In the flush of the war’s first months, many in the North desired a direct strike at the peculiar institution. General John C. Frémont, who commanded the Western Department of the military, took it upon himself to issue a general emancipation order in Missouri. But Fréemont’s decree sent loyal Kentuckians into spasms at a time when the Union was no stronger than its weak links to the border states. “I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game,” Lincoln wrote, explaining his decision to rescind Fremont’s emancipation decree. “Kentucky gone, we can not hold Missouri, nor, as I think, Maryland. These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us. We would as well consent to separation at once, including the surrender of this capitol.”

  By the beginning of 1862, the slavery question created three distinct Republican camps. Radicals—a powerful bloc, especially in Congress—were with Frémont, wanting to confiscate slaves under martial law. Conservatives spoke of a long-term solution, with voluntary emancipation tied to a plan to send freed slaves abroad. Moderates sympathized with radicals as to the desired end—wanting freedom sooner rather than later—but leaned toward conservatives as to the means. Lincoln was a consummate moderate, trying to balance not only Republican factions but Democrats as well, who, combined with the slave border states, could turn him out of office, cripple resistance to secession, or both. Throughout his first year as president, Lincoln held to the line of his inaugural address that he wouldn’t interfere with slavery where it existed. “I have been anxious and careful,” he wrote in December 1861, “that the inevitable conflict for this purpose shall not degenerate into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle. I have, therefore, in every case, thought it proper to keep the integrity of the Union prominent as the primary object of the contest on our part, leaving all questions which are not of vital military importance to the more deliberate action of the legislature.” Deferring on slavery and to Congress, he conveyed a dedication to restoring the Union to its condition before the breakup.

  The events of the spring and summer of 1862 pulled Lincoln away from what had been a steady ideological course, not just as president but throughout his political career. Up to this point, he had ruled out emancipation by decree. But he came to allow that it could be done under military authority, if “it shall have become a necessity indispensable to the maintenance of the government.” He preferred, however, to see loyal slave states emancipate slaves on their own, on a gradual schedule and in exchange for federal compensation. This middle-of-the-road position displeased almost everyone. Frederick Douglass said that Lincoln “is no more fit for the place he holds than was JAMES BUCHANNAN, and the latter was no more the miserable tool of traitors and rebels than the former is allowing himself to be.” At the same time, Democrats began to coalesce around an anti-emancipation plank, including an increasing number of Copperheads, or Peace Democrats, who sought to end the war by negotiation, widely seen as a sop to secession.

  On Sunday, July 13, 1862, riding in a carriage with Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles and Secretary of State Seward on their way to a funeral, Lincoln said that unless the Rebels ceased the war—and he saw no evidence they would—he would take a drastic step. “He had given it much thought,” Welles wrote, “and had about come to the conclusion that it was a military necessity absolutely essential for the salvation of the Union, that we must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.” Emancipation would help the Union strategically by draining a southern asset, the labor of its slaves, and turning it to work for the Union. “This is not a question of sentiment or taste,” Lincoln wrote, “but one of physical force which may be measured and estimated as horse-power and Steam-power are measured and estimated.” Scores of thousands of people currently enslaved were ready to fight for the Union. “Keep [that force] and you can save the Union,” Lincoln wrote. “Throw it away, and the Union goes with it.”

  On July 22, Lincoln read his cabinet the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation. On Seward’s suggestion, he decided to hold the proclamation until after a Union victory, lest it seem a desperation move. T
he wait proved quite painful. After promoting, then demoting, then firing, then reinstating McClellan, Lincoln called on him to command the Army of the Potomac when southern troops threatened Washington, D.C. Five of his cabinet secretaries formally disapproved of the move. At a cabinet meeting, wrote Attorney General Edward Bates, “The Prest. was in deep distress . . . he seemed wrung by bitterest anguish—said he felt almost ready to hang himself.” Bates went on, “He was manifestly alarmed for the safety of the City.” Three weeks later, McClellan stopped a drive of southern forces at Antietam, Maryland. Hardly a triumph, it was the deadliest day in the history of the United States military. Twenty-six thousand men were killed or wounded or went missing. Still, it was victory enough, and on September 22, Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, to take effect on January 1, 1863.

  Lincoln’s decree of freedom, an object of reverence for succeeding generations, has lost some of its shine under the scrutiny of recent years. Critics notice the dry, technical language, the absence of any moral claim, and most of all the limited nature of the order itself. No one would be freed upon its issue, since it applied only to slaves in areas of Confederate control. But as Allen Guelzo has argued, these criticisms miss the point. The language is dry and technical because the proclamation was an act of law, which Lincoln expected to be tested in court. The same conditions made moral claims potentially dangerous to the moral cause. Reasonable critics have sought to correct excesses of the “Great Emancipator” myth —insisting, for example, that hundreds of thousands of slaves freed themselves, running away from their masters and fighting for the Union. Still, few Americans were more aware, and more grateful, for the bravery and sacrifice of formerly enslaved African Americans than President Lincoln.