Lincoln's Melancholy

by Joshua Wolf Shenk

  Today the connection between spiritual and psychological well-being is often passed over by psychologists and psychiatrists, who consider themselves a branch of secular medicine and science. For most of Lincoln’s lifetime, scientists assumed there was some relationship between mental and spiritual life. In the 1830s, when Johannes Müller and other physiologists identified the function of nerves in human sensation and perception, they held that these observable phenomena owed their vitality to a mysterious “life force.” Things began to change when, in the 1850s, Hermann Helmholtz showed that the workings of the nervous system could be empirically measured, and he rejected Müller’s vitalism for a principle of mechanism. Helmholtz and his circle even composed and swore to an oath that began, “No other forces than the common physical-chemical ones are active within the organism.” The groundwork was being laid for a major conceptual shift.

  In 1860, Gustav Fechner published an experiment showing that the phenomenal world could be measured against the material, external world. In 1879, the first laboratory was established for the quantitative study of the senses. And in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Emil Kraepelin founded what we now call biological psychiatry, and Sigmund Freud developed psychoanalysis. Both Kraepelin and Freud sharply distinguished their endeavors from religion. But their contemporary William James, the great philosopher and psychologist, objected to the rigid separation of religion and psychology. Having written the standard psychology textbook, James turned to study how spirituality could benefit suffering people. In the masterpiece that resulted, The Varieties of Religious Experience, James defined religion broadly, giving equal value to such diverse systems as Christianity, Emersonian transcendentalism, Buddhist mysticism, and civic or personal ideals. The essence of religious experience, he wrote, is “the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.”

  James describes two basic spiritual paths. For optimistic people—James calls them “healthy-minded”—religion can affirm core beliefs about the goodness of the world and ward off doubt and dismay. For healthy minds, belief in God serves like a moat around a castle, providing order and protection. When difficulties arise—troubling thoughts, painful events—rituals of prayer and repentance can help set the world right again. But another group of people, dogged by doubt and discord, lack the sense that the world is right in the first place. James calls them “sick souls” and proposes that religion has frequently provided a way out of mental agony. Through what James describes as an awakening or a “re-birth,” the weight of suffering can become a source of power and vitality. Such rebirths are characterized by a simple progression. First, the recognition of an innate problem—“a sense,” James writes, “that there is something wrong with us as we naturally stand.” Second, “we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers.”

  Modern studies confirm the salutary effect of faith on depression. For example, one study of 271 religious and nonreligious adults in treatment for depression found that the former had an edge in their recovery, largely because their beliefs gave them something that depression tends to strip away—hope. A meta-analysis of depression and spirituality came to a similar conclusion, with two important caveats. First, what psychologists call “negative religious coping”—blaming God for one’s trouble or refusing to deal with difficulties while taking refuge in religious activities—is associated with higher levels of depressive symptoms. Second, “extrinsic motivation”—doing outwardly pious things for the sake of show—was found to do little good. The benefit lies in “intrinsic motivation,” the thirst for connection to something beyond the self. If one seeks belief merely to feel better, that very interest in self-advantage might well keep belief and its benefits at bay.

  As a young man, Lincoln saw how religion could ameliorate life’s blows. Joshua Speed remembered Lincoln saying that the most ambitious man could see every hope fail, but the earnest Christian could never fail, because fulfillment lay beyond life on earth. “When I knew him,” Speed said, “in early life . . . he had tried hard to be a believer, but his reason could not grasp and solve the great problem of redemption as taught.” Although Lincoln’s doubts have often been mistaken for lack of interest in religious matters, the reverse is probably true. Many of history’s greatest believers have also been the fiercest doubters. “It’s hard to imagine what religious tradition would be,” says the scholar Jennifer Michael Hecht, author of Doubt: A History, “if there weren’t people looking up and saying that they disagreed with what had come before.”

  According to Isaac Cogdal, who talked theology with Lincoln and Herndon in their law office, “His mind was full of terrible Enquiry.” The inquiry seems to have intensified around points of stress in Lincoln’s life, like his breakdown in 1841, when Speed’s mother recommended the Bible as the “best cure for the ‘Blues’” and Lincoln agreed, “could one,” he said, “but take it according to the truth.” After Eddie Lincoln’s death in 1850, a recently arrived minister in Springfield, the Reverend James Smith, conducted the boy’s funeral. Smith often visited the Lincoln home at the corner of Eighth and Jackson. Like Lincoln, Smith had been a skeptic, but after he converted to Christianity, he published a book, The Christian’s Defense, that aimed to draw other freethinkers into his flock. According to Smith, Lincoln read his book and found it convincing. “He examined the Arguments as a lawyer who is anxious to reach the truth investigates testimony,” Smith recounted. “The result was the announcement by himself that the argument in favor of the Divine Authority and inspiration of the Scripture was unanswerable.” The Lincolns later rented a pew at Smith’s First Presbyterian Church—which reserved them space for services but did not bind them to accept the church’s creed, as membership would. This arrangement, which Lincoln repeated in Washington, nicely represented his relationship with traditional religion in his mature years. He visited, but he didn’t move in.

  One difference between his ideas and the dominant Christian ones is worth close attention. Lincoln discounted the notion that sin could be wiped out through confession or repentance. “Lincoln maintained,” said William Herndon, “that God could not forgive; that punishment has to follow the sin.” This view fitted with both the stern, unforgiving God of Calvinism, with which Lincoln had been raised, and the mechanistic notion of a universe governed by fixed laws. But unlike the Calvinists, who disclaimed any possibility of grace for human beings not chosen for that fate, Lincoln did see a chance of improvement. And unlike some fatalists, who renounced any claim to a moral order, Lincoln saw how man’s reason could discern purpose even in the movement of a vast machine that grinds and cuts and mashes all who interfere with it. Just as a child learns to pull his hand from a fire when it is hot, people can learn when they are doing something that is not in accord with the wider, unseen order. To Lincoln, Herndon explained, “suffering was medicinal & educational.” In other words, it could be an agent of growth.

  After Lincoln’s election in 1860 and the crisis that followed, what he described as a “process of crystallization” began in his mind on the subject of faith. The burden of his work brought home to him a visceral and fundamental connection with something greater than he. When friends said they feared his assassination, he said, “God’s will be done. I am in his hands.” He repeatedly called himself an “instrument” of a larger power—which he sometimes described as the people of the United States, and other times as God—and said he had been charged with “so vast, and so sacred a trust” that “he felt that he had no moral right to shrink; nor even to count the chances of his own life, in what might follow.”

  The next turning point came with Willie Lincoln’s death in February 1862. Mary Lincoln said that, though Lincoln “was a religious man always,” his ideas about “hope” and “faith” began to change, by which she probably meant hope and faith in the afterlife. After Willie was interred, Lincoln went several times to look at his body in its tomb
. He asked an army officer, “Did you ever dream of a lost friend & feel that you were having a direct communion with that friend & yet a consciousness that it was not a reality?” The man said yes; he thought “all may have had such an experience.” Lincoln said, “So do I dream of my boy Willie,” sobbing and shaking with emotion. In this vulnerable period, Lincoln was influenced by the Reverend Phineas D. Gurley, whose Presbyterian church he attended. In his eulogy over Willie, Gurley preached that “in the hour of trial” one must look to “Him who sees the end from the beginning and doeth all things well.” With confidence in God, Gurley said, “our sorrows will be sanctified and made a blessing to our souls, and by and by we shall have occasion to say with blended gratitude and rejoicing, ‘It is good for us that we have been afflicted.’” Lincoln asked Gurley to write out a copy of the eulogy. In the trials ahead, he would hold to this idea as if it were a life raft.

  Lincoln’s humility certainly brought him comfort. “There was something touching,” said the journalist Noah Brooks, “in his childlike and simple reliance upon Divine aid, especially when in such extremities as he sometimes fell into . . . he more earnestly than ever sought that strength which is promised when mortal help faileth.” One time Lincoln said, in Brooks’s hearing, “I am very sure that if I do not go away from here a wiser man, I shall go away a better man, for having learned here what a very poor sort of man I am.” It was all the more powerful that Lincoln said this cheerfully.

  Yet Lincoln’s spiritual view did not relieve him of responsibility. Every day presented scores of decisions—on personnel, on policy, on the movement of troops and the direction of executive departments. So much of what today is delegated to political staffs and civil servants then required a direct decision from the president. He controlled patronage, from the embassy in China to the post office in St. Louis. He personally reviewed every case of a soldier sentenced to death. In all these matters he had to exercise his judgment in accordance with law, custom, prudence, and compassion. The paradox is that, as much as his attention focused on an unseen realm, Lincoln’s emphasis remained strictly on the material world of cause and effect. “These are not . . . the days of miracles,” he said, “and I suppose it will be granted that I am not to expect a direct revelation.” Lincoln did not expect God to take him by the hand. On the contrary, he said, “I must study the plain physical facts of the case, ascertain what is possible and learn what appears to be wise and right.”

  Typical of “sick souls” in the way he turned, from a sense of wrongness, to a power greater than he, Lincoln was also an original theological thinker. For centuries, settlers on the North American continent had been assured that they were special in God’s eyes. They were the “City upon a Hill,” in John Winthrop’s phrase, decidedly chosen, like the Israelites of old. Lincoln turned this on its head when he said, “I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people, for perpetuating the object of that great struggle.” The country, Lincoln said, was almost chosen—that is, not yet chosen, not in fact, but very close to being, chosen. Out of that phrase emerged a strain of Lincoln’s thinking that grew stronger and clearer as his presidency wore on. As others invoked the favor of God, Lincoln opened a dynamic space between mortal works and divine intention. Among his papers, after his death, his secretaries found this undated statement that has come to be known as the “Meditation on the Divine Will.”

  The will of God prevails—In great contests each party claims to act in accordence with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong. God can not be for, and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party—and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect this

  After this first passage, the handwriting grows shakier; the words practically tremble with the thoughts they express. First, Lincoln crossed out the last word he had written.

  this His purpose. I am almost ready to say this is probably true—that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet—By his mere quiet power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest—Yet the contest began—And having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day—Yet the contest proceeds—

  Lincoln’s clarity came in part from his uncertainty. It is hard to overestimate just how unusual this was. Most religious thinkers, explains the historian of religion Mark Noll in America’s God, not only assumed God’s favor but assumed they could read His will. Of course, both assumptions often were no more than a high-minded statement of partisan interests. A fantastic outpouring of religious expression came with the beginning of hostilities. Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” captured the mood in the North:

  Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:

  He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

  He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:

  His truth is marching on.

  As these lyrics made the rounds of Union troops, southern soldiers fashioned their own God’s army. The seal of the Confederacy contained the inscription Deo Vindice—God Will Vindicate. When the Rebels fared well in early fighting, they plainly saw God’s hand.

  Lincoln cut straight to the contradiction of both sides’ assuming that God was on their side. “Both may be, and one must be wrong.” No one—not he, not Julia Ward Howe, not Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, that pious and fierce southern warrior—knew just what God intended. “We must work earnestly in the best light He gives us,” Lincoln wrote, “trusting that so working still conduces to the great ends He ordains.” Once a minister remarked to Lincoln something along the lines of “I hope the Lord is on our side.” Lincoln said he didn’t agree, adding, in substance, “I hope we are on the Lord’s side.”

  “How was it,” asks Mark Noll, “that this man who never joined a church and who read only a little theology could, on occasion, give expression to profound theological interpretations of the War between the States?” Viewing Lincoln through the lens of his melancholy, we see one cogent explanation: he was always inclined to look at the full truth of a situation, assessing both what could be known and what remained in doubt. When times were hard, he had the patience, endurance, and vigor to stay in that place of tension. With this in mind, we return to the summer of 1863, to the time when Lincoln found comfort in the Book of Job. It is instructive that he would turn to Job in a moment of darkness, for it is about the value of questioning one’s faith, even to the point of emotional agony.

  As the story goes, God has gathered his angels around him, and he boasts of his pious servant Job. Satan scoffs at this, saying that Job’s piety merely reflects his good fortune. To settle the argument, God permits Satan to take away Job’s possessions, kill his children, and afflict him with boils. Job at first struggles to stay pious, then lashes out in anger at God and demands to know the reason for his afflictions. Finally God rewards Job, praising his skepticism and his demands for the truth, while punishing those who tried to comfort Job with the usual bromides. Faith, the story suggests, means getting worked up, asking tough questions. Commenting on the Book of Job, the prominent nineteenth-century theologian Mark Rutherford wrote, “God is great, we know not his ways. He takes from us all we have, but yet if we possess our souls in patience, we may pass the valley of the shadow, and come out in sunlight again.”

  Lincoln probably saw the parallels: Job lost his family. Lincoln lost his child, many friends, and vast numbers of soldiers in his charge. Job lost his great estate. Lincoln, in a real sense, had lost his country, for by 1863 the war was no longer about preserving the Union; it was about building something new. What distinguished Lincoln was his willingness to cry out to the heavens in pain and despair, and then turn, humbly and determinedly, to the wor
k that lay before him.

  After the battle at Gettysburg, the project of burying the dead became a major public work. An attorney named David Wills headed up the effort, planning a dedication ceremony and securing the services of Edward Everett to deliver a formal oration. Two and a half weeks before the ceremony, Wills wrote to Lincoln requesting that, after the oration, he “formally set apart these grounds to their Sacred use by a few appropriate remarks.” Wills’s idea of the cemetery’s “sacred use” was to hold dead bodies. Lincoln would pay homage to that conventional notion of sacred, then articulate his own. Mary Lincoln would remark that he “felt religious More than Ever about the time he went to Gettysburg.” And indeed, the speech he gave was filled with his own brand of religious sentiment, though the only mention of the deity came with “this nation under God.” The holy entity Lincoln discussed at Gettysburg was a national idea. This speech, probably as widely read as any piece of prose in history, is nevertheless worth repeating, for it rewards renewed attention.

  Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

  Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.