He would taste this gladness only briefly. In the crowd stood the dashing young actor John Wilkes Booth. In his speech, Lincoln discussed the case of Louisiana, where an argument was under way over whether freed blacks would have the right to vote. Lincoln said he favored suffrage for the sizable population of educated blacks and for Union soldiers. Booth recoiled at the prospect of what he called “nigger citizenship,” and he said, “Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.”
In admiring Lincoln’s spirit we risk lionizing him as a man. We would do well to remember the humble determination with which he lived his final day. On the morning of April 14, Lincoln woke up around 7 A.M., put on his slippers, and read a few pages of the Bible. He had breakfast with his family, did some paperwork, and visited the War Department before his cabinet gathered at eleven. General Grant joined the meeting and gave details of the surrender at Appomattox. Lincoln asked what terms he had given the common soldiers. “I told them,” Grant said, “to go back to their homes and families, and they would not be molested, if they did nothing more.” Lincoln liked the sound of that.
Grant said that he soon expected word from Sherman. With the surrender of Lee’s army, Sherman’s contest remained the last open front of the war. Lincoln hoped to hear from him, too, and he anticipated good news. The reason, he said, was a recurring dream, which he’d had the night before. Lincoln had a long-standing interest in dreams. He spoke of them, interpreted them, and sometimes acted on them. “Think you better put ‘Tad’s’ pistol away,” he had written his wife in June 1863. “I had an ugly dream about him.” While he was in Richmond, he had a dream that the White House was burning, and he sent Mrs. Lincoln back home. But it fit with the times that, on April 14, he thought his dream was a good omen. In it, he was floating away on some vast and indistinct expanse toward an unknown shore. The strange thing was, Lincoln said, the dream was always followed by a great change or disaster. The group chatted about that, speculating on what change might be in store. “I think it must be from Sherman,” Lincoln said.
It was Good Friday, and government offices closed at noon. In the afternoon, Lincoln took a carriage ride with his wife. “I never saw him so supremely cheerful—his manner was even playful,” she said. “Dear Husband,” she said to him, “you almost startle me by your great cheerfulness.” “We must both, be more cheerful in the future,” he answered. “Between the war and the loss of our darling Willie, we have both been very miserable.” Earlier in the week, the two had talked about plans for after the end of his second term. Lincoln said he wanted to see California. And he’d always said that he planned to go back to Springfield and practice law.
When he returned to the White House, Lincoln found two old friends from Illinois walking across the White House lawn. “Come back, boys, come back,” he called. The two men, General Isham N. Haynie and Richard Oglesby, complied. Now the governor of Illinois, Oglesby had five years before organized the meeting of state Republicans in Decatur, where Lincoln became known as the rail-splitter. The men spent an hour together. Lincoln read aloud four chapters from Petroleum Nasby, continuing even after he was called for dinner. Finally, his guests got up to leave. “I’d much rather swap stories than eat,” Lincoln said. At dinner with Mary, Tad, and Robert, Lincoln said he was worn out. Afterward, he walked to the War Department with his bodyguard, William H. Crook. Crook said that Lincoln walked slowly and seemed “more depressed than I had ever seen him.” At the War Department, Lincoln talked briefly with Stanton, dropping his arm over the secretary’s shoulders. There was still no word from Sherman; everyone was waiting for news. On the way back, Lincoln told Crook to go home for the night.
At the White House, the president spent a few minutes working on papers. At some point that day, he inspected the case of a soldier named Patrick Murphy, who had deserted one regiment and joined another under an assumed name. Murphy had been found guilty and sentenced to be shot, but the court-martial recommended that his sentence be commuted because he was mentally ill. On the side of the case paper, Lincoln wrote, “This man is pardoned, and hereby ordered to be discharged from the service.”
A stream of visitors had commenced, but Lincoln had plans to go out. It had been announced in the morning papers. He told his guard that he wanted to keep the plans, because the people expected it. He told his wife that if he stayed home he would have no rest. He dressed and put on his coat and hat. In his pockets he had a penknife, two pairs of spectacles, a Confederate five-dollar bill, and some newspaper clippings, among them a letter from the English reform leader John Bright praising Lincoln’s “grand simplicity of purpose.” As he stepped out onto the White House grounds, Congressman Isaac Arnold approached. “Excuse me now,” Lincoln said to Arnold as he climbed into his carriage. “I am going to the theatre. Come and see me in the morning.”
Epilogue
FOUR YEARS AGO, on a lark, I went to spend a weekend with the Association of Lincoln Presenters, who were having their annual convention in Beckley, West Virginia. Of the several hundred members, forty-four Lincolns showed up that year—men dressed in black suits, with stovepipe hats and beards shaved above the chin. Some of them were short and thin, some were tall and hulking. Some had real beards with gray hair, others had false beards made of black hair. One of the Lincolns was in a wheelchair, with an oxygen tank. One looked like Elvis Presley dressed up as Lincoln—sideburns, sunglasses, everything but the gold lamé.
I went to Beckley because I thought I could learn something from these men that wasn’t in books. For the same reason, over the years I’ve traveled to all the important Lincoln sites, from his birthplace outside Hodgenville, Kentucky, to Ford’s Theatre in Washington. I held in my hands the letters he wrote to Joshua Speed and stood on the dais where he delivered the “House Divided” speech. I saw the bullet that killed him, a .41–caliber lead musket ball, its pieces held together with wire, behind glass at the National Museum of Health and Medicine. I took notes on all kinds of details with no apparent connection to my topic. Did you know that Lincoln liked popcorn, and oysters, and a good strong cup of coffee? It’s true.
These curiosities served to remind me of something that was clear to me at the beginning of this journey but that, as I moved through it, could sometimes get cloudy. What drew me to the story of Lincoln’s melancholy at the start was a sense of connection to him as a person. This man whom I had grown up to think of as a marble statue came alive for me when I first learned about how he suffered, and how he talked about it. I wanted to learn the full story and share it with other people. Doing that meant doing the work of history—lots of time in libraries, filling out call slips, going through manuscript boxes, working the photocopying machine. The difference between the initial sense of interest I had and the work it took to bring it to life was perhaps like the difference between admiring a house and trying to build one. But of course it’s living in the house that makes building it worthwhile. And it’s the connection we have to figures in history that makes it worth learning about them. Whether the connection is moral, emotional, intellectual—or, okay, sexual—it can change who we are. Certainly, spending seven years with Lincoln has changed me. I suspect it will continue to. With good stories, and with wise people, the buds of contact keep blooming.
My own connection with Lincoln is personal and specific, but his story offers lessons that we can share. I am left, then, at the end of seven years of study, wanting to articulate the living wisdom that Lincoln’s life contains.
To start, the essence of this story is that it is a story, not a theory or a principle or a program. It unfolds over time, through peaks and valleys, with conflict and change. The outline of the story appeared to me early in my research. It took much longer to realize its subtleties, some of which, I’m sure, still elude me. Nevertheless, the book is structured according to the three major stages that I’ve observed in Lincoln’s life. I refer to them as fear, engagement, and transcendence.
“Fear�
�� comes from the first word in an age-old definition of melancholia: “fear and sadness without cause.” To be more precise, you could say “without apparent cause, or disproportionate to apparent cause.” While this story is about melancholy throughout, the first part illustrates its dark heart, the querulous, dissatisfied, doubting experience often marked by periods of withdrawal and sometimes by utter collapse. The letter Lincoln wrote on January 23, 1841—rather, its ninety concluding words—perfectly articulates the first stage. Spare, direct, and forceful, it gets to the core of depression, as the Gettysburg Address does the core of the American experiment:
I am now the most miserable man living. If what I felt were distributed to the whole human family there would not be one happy face on the earth. I must die or be better it appears to me. I awfully forebode I shall not. The matter you speak of on my account you may attend to as you see fit, as I fear I shall be unable to attend to business. If I could be myself, I would rather stay here with Judge Logan. I can write no more.
This is what it’s like: to feel not only miserable but the most miserable; to feel a strange, muted sense of awful power; to believe plainly that either the misery must end or life will—and yet to fear the misery will not end. A deeply intimate letter, it is also ice cold. No stories are told, no explanations offered, no thoughts reported from his tortured mind—not even particular feelings. The letter is like a skeleton. Any miserable person who awfully forebodes he shall never be better could add his or her own flesh. Lincoln got to the pure concentrate. The fact that he spoke thus, not to a counselor or dear friend but to his law partner, indicates how relentlessly he insisted on acknowledging his fears. Through the first stage of his melancholy, he drove deeper and deeper into his pain, hovering over what, according to Albert Camus, is the only serious question human beings have to deal with. He asked whether he could live, whether he could face life’s misery, and the first stage ended when he decided that he must.
I call the second stage “engagement” because the word, for me, captures the essence of Lincoln’s melancholy in his middle years. Whereas the first stage is characterized largely by his own private experience, the second stage has him turning to the world around him. From whether he could live, he turned to how he would live. Building bridges out from his lonely self, he engaged with the psychological culture of his time, trying to make himself emotionally and mentally, investigating who he was, what he could do to change, and what he could only accept and endure. Some strategies were apparent—the temple of reason became his place of refuge; humor and poetry gave him relief. Throughout, his work kept him connected to the world around him, and he went at it dutifully, manfully. Still, throughout this stage, questions remained paramount. In large part because of the trials of his depressions, Lincoln knew what he wanted to live for, but for years he suffered without any clear prospect of how he would achieve it. He continued to plod ahead, even as clarity about why eluded him. He lived with paradox: showing in full force both resignation and defiance, pathos and humor, fear and hope.
Before describing Lincoln’s third act, we should note that these stages resonate with the arc of stories throughout time—the descent, ordeal, and return of the hero’s journey; the crisis, struggle, and resolution of spiritual awakenings. But they also shed light on the mundane experience of day-to-day lives, in which our suffering can be felt and acknowledged, then kept in check while we engage and endure, and, finally drawn on for insight or wisdom. The elegance of Lincoln’s story is that it suggests, in its structure, a sense of order and proportion.
For example, depressed people are often unable to get out of bed, feeling a kind of paralysis that seems physical and involuntary, even though, on some level, it’s known to be mental and volitional. Truly, for those in thrall to mental agony, as Andrew Solomon has observed, merely going to brush one’s teeth can feel like a Herculean task. A common argument today has two people standing over the bed. One says, “He can’t help it. He has an illness and should be treated with deference.” The other disputes this, muttering, “He just needs a swift kick in the butt.”
Lincoln’s story allows us to see that both points may be true. First, when overcome by mental agony, he allowed himself to be overcome, and for no small time. He let himself sink to the bottom and feel the scrape. Those who say that we must always buck up should see how Lincoln’s time of illness proved also to be a time of gestation and growth. Those who say we must always frame mental suffering in terms of illness must see how vital it was that Lincoln roused himself when the time came. How might Lincoln have endangered his future, and his potential, had he denied himself the reality of his suffering? How, too, might he have stagnated had he not realized that life waits for those who choose to live it?
When a depressed person does get out of bed, it’s usually not with a sudden insight that life is rich and valuable, but out of some creeping sense of duty or instinct for survival. If collapsing is sometimes vital, so is the brute force of will. To William James we owe the insight that, in the absence of real health, we sometimes must act as if we are healthy. Buoyed by such discipline and habit, we might achieve actual well-being. As Lincoln advised a grumbling general who felt humiliated at having only three thousand men under his command, “‘Act well your part, there all the honor lies.’ He who does something at the head of one Regiment, will eclipse him who does nothing at the head of a hundred.” Two decades before he wrote these words, after the winter of a great depression, Lincoln understood doing something to be as simple as going to work, or just making preparations for it, which he gamely advised Joshua Speed to do if his “mind were not right.” In the small battles of life, brushing one’s teeth, taking a walk—these can be movements in preparation for victory.
A key feature of Lincoln’s story is that in this middle stage, while his labors were picayune, he kept sight of a grand potential. “It is much for the young to know,” he said in his eulogy to Zachary Taylor in 1850, “that treading the hard path of duty, as he trod it, will be noticed, and will lead to high places.” Lincoln said this at a time when his own faith had been sorely tested—for all he knew, his dreams would come to nothing. But the faith itself led him to tread the hard path with a sense of purpose, adjusting to reality but never quite settling. He feared that he would not, but trusted that he would, finally find his way. When he did, everything he had lived through had its purpose.
In mythical stories, a character undertakes a journey, receiving at every step totems that, at the time, have no clear value but at the end turn out to provide the essential tools for a final struggle. We can see this in Lincoln’s journey. In the first stage, he asked the big questions. Why am I here? What is the point? Without the sense of essential purpose he learned by asking these questions, he may not have had the bedrock vision that governed his great work. In the second stage, he developed diligence and discipline, working for the sake of work, learning how to survive and engage. Without the discipline of his middle years, he would not have had the fortitude to endure the disappointments that his great work entailed. In the third stage, he was not just working but doing the work he felt made to do, not only surviving but living for a vital purpose. Yet he constantly faced the same essential challenges that had been presented to him throughout. All through his career fighting the extension of slavery, and all through his presidency, he faced painful fear and doubt—indeed, he faced it on an awful scale. But he repeatedly returned to a sense of purpose; from this purpose he put his head down to work at the mundane tasks of his job; and with his head down, he glanced up, often enough, at the chance to effect something meaningful and lasting. We justly look upon the transcendence of his final days with admiration, noticing the amazing balance between earthly works and self-dissolution. But even then, he was a product of his journey.
The overarching lesson of Lincoln’s life is one of wholeness. Knowing that confidence, clarity, and joy are possible in life, it is easy to be impatient with fear, doubt, and sadness. If one desires to �
��stir up the world,” it is easy to be impatient with work for the sake of work. Yet no story’s end can forsake its beginning and its middle. Perhaps in the inspiration of Lincoln’s end we can receive some fortitude and instruction about all that it took for him to get there, and all that it continues to take. In The Life of Poetry, Muriel Rukeyser writes that the “images of history” can “reach us imaginatively.” She continues: “The life of Jesus; the life of Buddha; the life of Lincoln, or Gandhi, or Saint Francis of Assisi—these give us the intensity that should be felt in a lifetime of concentration, a lifetime which seems to risk the immortal meanings every day . . . These lives, in their search and purpose, offer their form, offer their truths. They reach us as hope.” The hope is not that suffering will go away, for with Lincoln it did not ever go away. The hope is that suffering, plainly acknowledged and endured, can fit us for the surprising challenges that await.
Of all the paradoxes of Lincoln’s life, none is more powerful than the fact that the man who would come to be known throughout the world—from American schoolrooms to the tribal councils of the Caucasus Mountains—was deeply mysterious to the people who knew him best. “Those who have spoken most confidently of their knowledge of his personal qualities,” wrote the Pennsylvania Republican Alexander McClure, “are, as a rule, those who saw least of them below the surface.” After more than two decades of studying Lincoln, following thirty years of direct contact, William Herndon wrote in 1887 to a friend, “In one of your letters you ask me this question in substance—‘Do you think that Lincoln wished to be known—thoroughly known and to which I answer emphatically—No—he was a hidden man and wished to keep his own secrets. As I trail the man step by step, like a dog trails a fox I find many new spots—many new holes—much to admire and much to regret. It nearly kills me in my old age to persist in my search.”
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