Four years later, Herndon returned to a theme that had intrigued and puzzled him for decades. “Let me say to you,” he wrote to a young man interested in Lincoln, “that he had a double consciousness—if not a treble consciousness. First he was a terribly gloomy—sad man at times—2dly he was at times full of humor—‘joky’—witty & happy. Gloom & sadness were his predominant state—3dly at times he was neither sad nor humorous, but was simply in a pleasant mood—ie he was not in a gloomy nor a mirthful fit—was kindly thoughtful, not serious ever—a state of thought & good feeling united for the moment . . . This last state was not of long duration. Lincoln was a curious—mysterious—quite an incomprehensible man. Do not think that I exaggerate.” Just three weeks later, Herndon died.
Perhaps the mystery is that Lincoln joined qualities that, though we well understand that they exist separately, confound us when united. There is something so real about this union that it awakens what is real in us when we encounter it. Yet there is something mystical in it, and distant. “I am sure,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson in his eulogy of Lincoln, “if this man had ruled in a period of less facility of printing, he would have become mythological in a very few years, like Aesop or Pilpay, or one of the Seven Wise Masters.” Searching and struggling with the real records of his life, we try to see him as a real man. As we ruminate, finally, on the lessons of his life, we try to remove it from the airy realms of myth and bring it into the reality of our lives. I have struggled to do this. I’ve looked for the grand meanings with a telescope aimed at the night sky. But my vision often failed me, and the nights often got cloudy, and I took refuge, always, in the details—the black walnut and honey locust trees that made up the rails Lincoln split as a young man; the brown ink and trembling hand on the “Meditation on Divine Will”; the way that, when he told a story, he planted his feet on the ground, lifting his right leg slightly, then throwing it over his left leg as he laughed uproariously.
When I went to Beckley, West Virginia, to join the Association of Lincoln Presenters at their annual convention, my mind was full of big questions. These men who dressed up as Lincoln day after day, did they feel something? Could they help me see something as abstract as melancholy? But from the moment I arrived, my mission went awry. I hadn’t realized that I’d be the only civilian. The Lincolns didn’t know what to make of me. They kept asking, “Are you a new Lincoln?” I tried to explain why I was there, but I didn’t really know myself, and “I’m writing a book” didn’t seem to satisfy the men in black who were hovering around me in the lobby of the Country Inn and Suites. Finally, when Jim Sayre, a veteran presenter from Lawrenceburg, Kentucky, said to me, “Are you a new Lincoln?” I muttered something about not having had time to get my outfit together. “Come on, then,” Jim said, and he took me upstairs to lend me his spare. I put on the white shirt (“Wal-Mart special,” Sayre said), clipped on the flat bow tie, and pulled on the black trousers. “Always travel with a spare,” Sayre said. I said okay, and put on the hat.
I spent the weekend wandering around the convention’s events, learning what I could. I gazed up to look for the meaning of it all, but kept stumbling and going back to the details. Did you know that Lincoln wore top hats of silk for fine occasions and of beaver for everyday? It’s true, the rain rolls right off beaverskin. Maybe I expected a group of eccentrics, but it was a pretty ordinary convention. The Lincolns talked about who was getting which gigs and how much they paid. Reenactments and conventions are good. Weddings pay well, and you get a good feed. The staple of their work, of course, is visits to schools. Just as book writers wonder how to interest television and radio shows, who help them interest readers, the Lincolns constantly look to interest teachers, who will put them in front of rooms full of children.
Near the end of the weekend, I sat down on the hotel’s porch and had a talk with Cranston “Bud” Green, from Versailles, Missouri. He was seventy-six years old. He had come to the convention fresh from open-heart surgery, and he walked with a slight stoop, leaning on his sassafras cane. After I had suited up, most of the Lincolns assumed I was one of them and started right in with the unsolicited advice—mainly, “There’s good work for beardless Lincolns.” But when Bud Green asked me what I was doing there, I told him I was writing a book on Lincoln’s depression. “I have manic depression,” he said. He told me about growing up during the Great Depression, raising Christmas trees and working as a pitchman at fairs. He told me about the time, many years later, when he pulled off an interstate and checked into a motel intending to hang himself. Then he thought of his kids and steered his car back on the road. When he finished the story, suffering lingered in the air between us. I asked him, “Does being Lincoln help?” He answered me quickly: “Yes, it helps. But it can hurt, too. It hurts when the teachers don’t call.”
Maybe trying to find meaning in our ordinary lives by learning about Lincoln is as absurd as dressing up in the kind of clothes he wore, but in that moment I felt the connection. A man I didn’t know had the courage to tell me that he suffered, and he had the power to tell me what he was after. Lincoln might be far away and gone, but something runs unbroken through the present and the past. Bud Green wants the teachers to call; I want NPR to call, and The Oprah Winfrey Show. On April 14, Lincoln wanted Sherman to call, and while he waited, he told his cabinet about a dream he’d had the night before.
February 24, 2005
Afterword
“What Everybody Knows”:
A Historiography of Lincoln’s Melancholy
AS GRAND AND IMMOVABLE as history can seem, it comes to us through ordinary people who make mistakes even as they make progress. This explains, in short, how a subject such as Lincoln’s melancholy could be neglected and obscured for many decades, and how, more recently, it has been excavated and restored to its rightful place as an important aspect of his life and character.
The first biographical works on Lincoln came from his contemporaries, who for the most part looked upon his depression with frank curiosity. It seemed not a matter of shame but an intriguing aspect of his character, and indeed an aspect of his grand nature. These works, we should say, did not dwell inordinately on the melancholy. Nor did most of them seek to extract its essence by using medical theory or philosophy. They tended, rather, to note the facts of Lincoln’s gloomy nature, usually in a straightforward manner, and move on.
The man who studied the melancholy most closely—because he studied everything about Lincoln closely—was William Henry Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner from 1844 to 1861. Technically, the partnership continued until Lincoln’s death in April 1865. Soon after that, Herndon began to solicit material from men and women who had known Lincoln. By mid-November 1866, he had collected roughly four hundred testimonials, plus original letters, newspaper clippings, and court files. Herndon hired a clerk to have his “Lincoln Record” copied out by hand. He had the copied items bound in leather in three legal-size volumes. He placed them in a bank vault. “If I die,” he wrote, “the record is safe.”
It wasn’t theft or fire or flood that threatened the record’s legacy, but a war over Lincoln’s memory, fueled in part by changing ideas about mental health and illness. The first battles began when Herndon attempted to connect Lincoln’s profound suffering as a young man to his genius as a mature leader. Instead he set in motion a chain of events that would not only obscure the connection for later generations but cause Lincoln’s melancholy to practically disappear.
Herndon loved Lincoln and thought history should have a full knowledge of him. He detested hagiography, the kind of biography that treats a subject with glassy-eyed reverence. Herndon had known Lincoln as a man with human strengths and frailties. The full story of his life, he argued, would not diminish but magnify appreciation of his excellence. In any case, he believed that, as a practical matter, what was covered up by Lincoln’s friends would be set upon by his enemies. “Is any man so insane,” he wrote to a mutual friend of the late president, “as to suppose that any trut
h concerning Lincoln will be hid and buried out of human view? Folly! The best way is to tell the whole truth and let it burn up lies. Lincoln is above reproach, thank God; let no one fear to have all the truth about him brought clearly to light.”
Early in his research, Herndon began to hear from people who had lived with Lincoln at New Salem, where, when he was twenty-six, he had collapsed in depression. It had something to do with his law studies, Herndon heard. And it came right after the death of a young woman named Ann Rutledge. Herndon eventually gathered testimony from twenty-four people on this matter. Most of them had seen Lincoln’s breakdown firsthand; all were connected to his intimates at New Salem. Seventeen of them said, at least, that Lincoln had grieved to an unusual degree after Rutledge’s death, and many considered that he had had a brush with insanity. Herndon wrote on June 8, 1865, “I have been searching for the facts & truths of Lincoln’s life—not fictions—not fables—not floating rumors, but facts—solid facts & well attested truths . . . From such an investigation . . . I am satisfied, in connection with my own knowledg of Mr L. for 30 years, that Mr L’s whole early life remains to be written.”
In the late 1860s, William Herndon had graying black hair and a bushy beard. He was, a reporter noted, “disposed to shut one eye for accuracy in conversation, his teeth discolored by tobacco, and over his angular features, which suggest Lincoln’s in ampleness and shape, the same half-tender melancholy.” A curious man and a voracious reader, Herndon aspired to be what we now call a public intellectual. He gobbled up works on philosophy, theology, and psychology. He described Lincoln as a “realist rather than an idealist.” As in many things, Herndon was the opposite, living in the airy realm of thought. He had decided to “write & publish the subjective Mr Lincoln—‘the inner life’ of Mr L. . . . a short little thing—giving him in his passions—appetites—& affections—perceptions—memories—judgements—understanding—will, acting under & by motives, just as he lived, breathed—ate & laughed in this world, clothed in flesh & sinew—bones & meat.”
Herndon worked fiercely to find and depose key witnesses. Among other coups, he conducted a rare interview with Lincoln’s aged stepmother. Trained as a lawyer, Herndon knew how to get information out of people. If he had to pay for help, he did so. When he received some morsel, he responded with more questions. At the end of each interview, he’d read back his notes, make corrections, and ask for a confirming signature. But cogent narrative was not Herndon’s strength. “I sincerely wish I were a competent, a great man to write my friend’s life,” he wrote. “I have not got the capacity to write much at best and not that much well.” When he did speak out about what he’d learned, he did it hastily. He hurried, in part, because he feared that the stories he was uncovering would fall into the hands of a malicious or ignorant writer and be made into a scandal. He began a series of lectures in Springfield on Lincoln’s mind and character. He made arrangements to give a lecture on November 16, 1866, at the courthouse, that would deal with the subject of Lincoln’s prostration after Ann Rutledge’s death.
Later generations would miss the fact that Herndon’s interpretation of Lincoln’s first breakdown must be seen apart from the evidence he had collected. The latter, as is typical of basic evidence, was full of opinions, imperfect memories, vivid details, and conflicting narrative lines, each distinguished by the character of the witness, his or her proximity to Lincoln at important moments, and so on. The interpretation, as with nearly all historical accounts, was the synthesis of and extrapolation from that material by a single mind. It was also the product of a flowery, effusive style, full of sweeping claims and long discursions. In the November 16 lecture, Herndon revealed an important fact of Lincoln’s biography: his first serious depression. But he also created a shroud of confusion around it, first by identifying an ostensible cause—that “Lincoln loved Anna Rutledge better than his own life”—and second by claiming that the grief over her loss was a major factor in his lifelong melancholy. It was a fire, Herndon said, that forged in Lincoln his mature character. “Lincoln first came to himself, after so great grief,” Herndon wrote. Crushed by Rutledge’s death, “he thought and reflected on man and woman, the transient and permanent—love, duty, nature, destiny, the past, present, and the future—of God.”
Impatient with Herndon’s rhapsodic prose, reporters plucked from the lecture its core sensation: that Lincoln had loved this village girl, and that her death played a major role in his life. The New York Times reported that the materials “concerning MR. LINCOLN and MISS RUTLEDGE . . . are exceedingly interesting and throw much light on phases of Mr. Lincoln’s character, and especially on the melancholy and abstracted mood which so many of his friends have observed, and which no one hitherto has attempted to explain.” Note that Lincoln’s melancholy was considered an established fact, on which new light was sought.
Early works on Lincoln, including Francis Carpenter’s Six Months in the White House, published in 1866, gave significant attention to his moods. People were hungry to understand them. It made sense to people that some secret cause lay in his past. “I would like to have you write me what the skeleton was with Lincoln,” one old colleague wrote Herndon. “What gave him that peculiar melancholy? What cancer had he inside?. . . I always thought there was something but never knew what.” Now Herndon had provided an answer, and on the strength of it a legend took shape. In April 1867, the journalist Caroline Dall, who was friendly with Herndon, published a piece in the Atlantic Monthly that declared Lincoln’s love for Rutledge to be “the key to his whole life.” Had she and Lincoln married, Dall said, he would never have gone into politics. “He would have tasted the cup of happiness, and it would have been enough.”
From the start, opinions of Lincoln’s widow played a role in the Ann Rutledge legend. Mary Lincoln had never been a national darling, and after she left the White House she became something of a national villain. As early as 1865 or 1866, her own sister Elizabeth Edwards said, “Mary Lincoln has had much to bear, though she don’t bear it well. She has acted foolishly—unwisely and made the world hate her.”
Much of her unwise behavior had to do with money. Convinced that she was nearly a pauper, “scarcely removed from want,” even after her husband’s estate was settled at $110,000 (roughly $1.9 million in modern terms), she demanded money from Congress—imperiously, many thought—so that she could live in a style that befitted her. When she didn’t get it, she dreamed up a scheme to sell some of her gowns and jewels. She got mixed up with a pair of hucksters who put these goods on public display and planned a traveling show to which they would charge admission. At their encouragement, she wrote letters suggesting that certain politicians should help lest she charge them with corruption. Then the New York World published these letters and the affair blew up in Mary Lincoln’s face. Accusations flew that she had stolen public property from the White House, padded expense accounts, and dealt out patronage, expecting recompense. Newspapers assailed her—a “dreadful woman,” said the Republican of Springfield, Massachusetts, who “persists in forcing her repugnant individuality before the world.” The New York Citizen called the affair “one of the most humiliating revelations in the social life of our country,” and urged that “Mrs. Lincoln, for the honor of the country, should be silenced at whatever cost.”
Herndon didn’t mention Mary Lincoln in his lecture of November 1866. But the implication was clear enough. He said that her husband, after Ann Rutledge’s death, “never addressed another woman, in my opinion, ‘yours affectionately’; and generally and characteristically abstained from the use of the word ‘lover.’ He noted that some in New Salem believed that if Lincoln and Rutledge had married, he would have become “a purely domestic man,” as he needed some “whip and spur” to push him into politics. Finally, he quoted Lincoln as saying, in 1835, that his heart lay buried in Rutledge’s grave. Herndon made his view explicit in a private letter. “Mr. Lincoln was a sad, gloomy, and melancholic man,” he wrote. This temperament sprang
chiefly from “his organism, his make-up and his constitution,” but his “original nature” was intensified by several events, including “the untimely death of Ann Rutledge, and his unfortunate marriage to Miss Mary Todd, and the hell that came of it.”
It is not at all clear, as many scholars assume, that Lincoln’s widow and his former law partner had always hated each other. In fact, Herndon had more sympathy for Mary Lincoln than most, insisting repeatedly that her husband bore much of the responsibility for the quality of their marriage. As late as August 1866, Herndon and Mrs. Lincoln were on cordial terms. That month, after he requested an interview, she sent a fulsome response, recalling “my beloved husband’s truly affectionate regard for you” and assuring Herndon that he was “cherished with the sincerest regard by my sons & myself.” She added, “I have been thinking for some time past that I would like to see you & have a long conversation,” and she sat for an interview in September 1866.
After Herndon’s lecture, however, the widowed First Lady was at his throat, calling him a “dirty dog” and alleging that her husband had worked with him only out of pity. She told one of Lincoln’s colleagues to shut Herndon up, threatening vaguely, “It will not be well with him—if he makes the least disagreeable or false allusion in the future. He will be closely watched.” Mary Lincoln allowed that Lincoln may have had some romance in his early days. “But as my husband was truth itself,” she wrote, “and as he always assured me, he had cared for no one but myself . . . I shall assuredly remain firm in my conviction—that Ann Rutledge, is a myth . . . Nor did his life or his joyous laugh, lead one to suppose his heart, was in any unfortunate woman’s grave—but in the proper place with his loved wife & children.”
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