Lincoln's Melancholy

by Joshua Wolf Shenk

  From that assignment came an appendix in Randall’s second volume, Lincoln the President, titled, “Sifting the Ann Rutledge Evidence”—a piece not credited to, but apparently written by, Ruth Painter Randall. (“It is very largely her work,” J. G. Randall wrote of the appendix, in a private letter.) It is a seminal work in Lincoln studies, not only because it served to demolish the traditional romance but because it did so by attacking its foundation in Herndon’s records. The professional historians—“scientific historians,” they sometimes called themselves—distrusted what they called “reminiscence” and what has recently been received more favorably as “oral history.” The fact that Herndon took down the memories of people in 1866 about events that happened in 1835 already made his records suspect. Herndon, moreover, had come to symbolize to the professional historians all that they disliked about amateur history. David Herbert Donald’s biography of Herndon portrayed him as a drunkard and a dreamer. Herndon’s records were, Ruth Painter Randall wrote, a grab bag of “misty” memories given by “old settlers” who had been “induced under suggestion, or psychological stimulus.” In other words, Herndon had coaxed people to remember things that probably never happened, then embellished their memories in his notes.

  Why would Herndon do it? To Ruth Painter Randall, the motive was clear: he “disliked and feared Mary Lincoln” and wished to embarrass her and undermine her significance. For the same reason, he sought to mar her marriage to Lincoln, beginning with a fiction about a failed wedding and continuing with a twisted tale that, during their courtship, Lincoln loved another woman; that Mary had flirted with other men; that Lincoln, tortured by doubt over his obligations and desires, collapsed into a profound depression. As a matter of fact, these elements are attested to by a wide array of sources. But in Randall’s version it was just another part of Herndon’s “frame-up” of Mary Lincoln. The truth, Randall argued, was that Lincoln never loved another woman, nor did he doubt his love for Todd. On the contrary, when Lincoln found her, his life took on “a joyous new focus and vitality”; he walked in a “golden haze.” Then, owing to her family’s opposition, the engagement was broken off amicably, peacefully, on January 1, 1841. As a result, Lincoln suffered “emotional agony”: “This sweet, newly discovered world was shattered. Mr. Lincoln had barely tasted the joy of having someone of his very own to love when that joy was taken from him, leaving him in a gray and flavorless world.”

  Having attacked Herndon for his use of reminiscence, Ruth Painter Randall now used it herself. But where Herndon had relied on memories to illuminate a period with scarce contemporary material, Randall dismissed not only recollections from many sources but a bevy of contemporary documents. She called them the made-up stories of “gossiping tongues.” She preferred an explanation by the son of Ninian and Elizabeth Edwards, which he gave sixty-some years after the events in question, which took place when he was an infant. “I wish I had a better—that is, a more direct—source,” Randall admitted privately, but she used it anyway.

  The first two volumes of J. G. Randall’s Lincoln the President were published in 1945 to great fanfare. The Saturday Review put Randall on its cover, his face superimposed over Lincoln’s. The biography was a major work by a revered scholar. But the core ideas of Randall’s books—for example, that the Civil War could have been avoided and that abolitionists had exaggerated the risk of slavery’s spread—had less long-term influence than two chapters ghostwritten by his wife. Almost overnight, the Ann Rutledge “myth,” as it became known, was excised from the record. In a 1952 Lincoln biography, Benjamin Thomas decried that Lincoln’s romance with Ann Rutledge was a “legend for which no shred of contemporary evidence has been found.” Most scholars, he said, found it “improbable and reject utterly its supposed enduring influence on Lincoln.” That same year, Ralph McGill wrote an Atlanta Constitution column that dealt—rather judiciously—with Ann Rutledge and promptly received a letter from James Harvey Young, a professor of history at Emory University and a former student of Randall’s. “Romantic mythology surrounding the lives of our great men, I suppose, can never be completely dispelled by the work of scholars,” Young began. Noting “Herndon’s hatred for Mrs. Lincoln,” he explained, “Out of this animosity and his strange views of what history needed to do for Lincoln’s early career, Herndon created the myth of the Ann Rutledge romance and, by the use of leading questions, elicited from New Salem old-timers what has passed for evidence, giving the tale a seeming validity. If, because of Herndon, mythology has overstressed the role of Ann, so too, also because of Herndon, mythology has been unduly harsh with Mary.”

  This letter sums up fairly well what happened over the next four decades, as scholars not only accepted that Ann Rutledge was a “myth” but used the fact as an index of professional rigor. In their haste to fall into line, none disputed or even checked the work attributed to J. G. Randall. The “greatest Lincoln scholar of all time” had passed his edict, and it would be adhered to strictly. What happened next is best explained in the words of Randall himself. Cited in the Introduction of this book, the passage bears repeating here: “What happens over and over is that a certain idea gets started in association with an event or figure. It is repeated by speakers and editors. It soon becomes a part of that superficial aggregation of concepts that goes under the heading ‘what everybody knows.’ It may take decades before a stock picture is even questioned as to its validity.”

  Beginning in the late 1940s and early 1950s, “everybody knew” that the Rutledge story was a myth. Scholarly works—and, soon, the popular works that took their cues from them—mentioned Ann Rutledge only to take a jab at Herndon. A 1972 edition of Mary Lincoln’s letters, for example, noted that “Herndon’s cruelest offense against Mrs. Lincoln was his invention of the Ann Rutledge romance.” It became conventional wisdom that his interviews were not trustworthy. In a book on Lincoln’s legislative career, the future U.S. senator Paul Simon declaimed, “Herndon did not hesitate to change interviews to make them fit his preconceived theories.” The most radical charge had become accepted as fact.

  It is a sad fact that the momentum of a necessary correction often sweeps away valuable substance along with errors. The cliché “throwing the baby out with the bath water” applies. The myth of how Ann Rutledge’s death shaped Lincoln’s whole life, and the fictional dross, such as her specter hovering over his shoulder at Gettysburg, ought well to have been shucked, and the Randalls and their colleagues did it. But they threw out the baby. Beginning in the late 1940s, for about the next forty years, no discussion took place of Lincoln’s breakdown in his mid-twenties. The whole thing was assigned the status of myth. With that leg kicked from under the table, the evidence of how he began to manifest his melancholy in the late 1830s slid off and crashed to the floor.

  And in what would prove the final blow to the subject of Lincoln’s melancholy, the second breakdown was squeezed to a pittance. Ruth Painter Randall, in Mary Todd Lincoln: Biography of a Marriage and other books and articles, made Herndon’s invention of the failed wedding the symbol of the poor widow maligned by the vicious lawyer. Now scholars took note that the wedding story had been concocted, passing over the other material from that winter with a yawn. Yes, Lincoln had been depressed, but only because he and Mary Todd had split up. It was a discrete episode with a simple cause and a happy ending. As Ruth Painter Randall had explained, “All the evidence is that Lincoln’s condition was that of severe mental distress with accompanying effects upon his health, that the interrupted courtship was the cause of it, and that he was making a conscious and deliberate effort towards restoration of a normal life.”

  A word in that sentence opens the door to a crucial and heretofore unexplored aspect of the Randalls’ campaign against William Herndon. The campaign, as we have seen, was waged on grounds of proper historical method. To be sure, this played a significant role in the minds of the husband-and-wife team, though not so much as they claimed. There was another factor in their work, ho
wever, that can be understood only by seeing the vexing intersection of history and psychology, and the ferocious battle that began in the early twentieth century over whether certain historical figures were “normal” or “ill.”

  The late nineteenth century saw the birth of experimental psychology and the spread of secular “moral therapies,” an increase in asylums and other healing centers, and advances in the study of the brain. Psychology and psychiatry had come into their own. Sigmund Freud developed psychoanalysis, and Emil Kraepelin, Freud’s great rival, created a diagnostic system for mental disorders (the forerunner of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual). To Freud and his protégés can be traced modern psychotherapy, to Kraepelin and his followers, biological psychiatry.

  As earthshaking as these individual developments were, they were mere tremors compared to the single idea that joined together all psychologists and psychiatrists. For millennia—from Aristotle to Descartes to Kant—scientists and philosophers had agreed that the human psyche was, at its core, a mystery. Aspects of it could be understood, but in the end humans would have to adjust to a reality beyond their ability to know. The new psychologists argued that the mind could be understood, its ailments repaired, and its ordinary functions fine-tuned.

  In this new psychology tension arose between the experimental method—which sought universal truths by impartial study of large numbers of people—and individual observation, which admitted of uniqueness and idiosyncrasy. Freud, whose bravado knew few bounds, wanted both to write the laws of human nature and to show how they played out in the lives of unique figures. Thus he turned to history, subjecting Leonardo da Vinci to a postmortem psychoanalysis. In October 1909, Freud wrote to his colleague Carl Jung that “the riddle of Leonardo da Vinci’s character has suddenly become transparent to me.” He added, “Biography, too, must become ours.”

  Just as mesmerism, in the early nineteenth century, originated in Vienna and flowered in the United States, so too did Freudian psychoanalysis. After Freud’s famous lectures at Clark University in 1909—coincidentally, the centennial of Lincoln’s birth—the new psychology became all the rage. And many new analysts, spending their days with patients on couches, turned at night to psychobiography. Lincoln, of course, was a prime subject. In 1922, Nathaniel Stevenson’s Lincoln: An Account of His Personal Life, Especially of Its Springs of Action as Revealed and Deepened by the Ordeal of War drew on the typical Freudian motifs, as when Stevenson asserted that the “ghost” of Lincoln’s father was always “lurking somewhere, waiting to seize upon him, when his energies were in ebb.” It was only a matter of time before psychobiographers assigned diagnostic labels. In 1931, Dr. A. A. Brill, the editor and translator of The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud and the top psychoanalyst in America, told the American Psychiatric Association that Lincoln had a “schizoid manic personality, now and then harassed by schizoid manic moods.” In substance, the paper he presented was a recitation of familiar Lincoln stories. But the clinical language he used provoked a storm of protest. A Brooklyn physician accused Brill of “blaspheming the memory of the immortal dead.” Thereafter, writers would be forced to take a stand: Was Lincoln “normal” or “ill”?

  In the early thirties, when J. G. Randall began his work on Lincoln, he received the galleys of Lincoln: A Psycho-Biography, by the well-known New York analyst L. Pierce Clark. In his seminal 1934 lecture, Randall cited Clark’s book in his second paragraph as an example of the dross that passed for history. From then on, he made clear his strong dislike of psychobiography. And here we find an explanation for the deep hostility that the Randalls and their colleagues had for Lincoln’s law partner. J. G. Randall wrote in his introduction to Lincoln the President, “Herndon was a self-made psychoanalyst long before that somewhat modern art became known.” In her chapter on the Ann Rutledge evidence Ruth Painter Randall repeatedly linked Herndon in a pejorative way to Freudian psychiatry: his writing style was “soaring psychoanalysis with glowing language”; the Rutledge story “appealed to all the sentimentalizing and psychoanalyzing impulses of Herndon’s nature”; he added his “irrepressible contribution of psychoanalysis” to it. “Herndon,” she elaborated, “was a rough-hewn man, given to drunkenness and certain mental quirks. He was firmly convinced, as he often asserted, that he could read people’s minds and that he knew what was truth by his own power of intuition. The result was that he usually believed what he wanted to believe.”

  These attacks made a silly caricature of a complex man. It is true that Herndon believed in his intuition, and he believed he learned things about people, Lincoln included, by being in close proximity to them. It is also true that he fell into some excesses of fancy—none more marked than the original Ann Rutledge lecture. But on the whole, his career as a student of Lincoln was marked by a dedication to trustworthy facts. His bold conclusions were balanced with humility. Just weeks before he died, Herndon said that he’d spent his whole life trying to understand Lincoln but that he was “mysterious, quite an incomprehensible man.” If anything, the tension in Herndon between the fruits of intuition (not “clairvoyance”) and the fruits of research makes for a good case study of the tension that inevitably inflicts biographers. The irony is that, failing to see that tension, and making Herndon into a caricature, the Randalls committed the very violations of which they accused Herndon. Intoxicated with their own powers of intuition, they went well beyond the evidence at hand.

  To some extent, it is an inherent flaw of biography that, in order to wrestle a figure onto the page, three dimensions get turned into two. Rough spots are ironed out. Minor conflicts are magnified to suit the needs of a dramatic narrative. There is good reason to speak of “Herndon’s Lincoln” or “Sandburg’s Lincoln,” because the real man can only be approximated in any of these works, and the imagination of the biographer obviously plays a large role. J. G. Randall and Ruth Painter Randall, for all their keen insights, had a glaring blind spot when it came to the sadness and pain in Lincoln’s life. Ruth Painter Randall probably put her finger on the origin of the blind spot when she wrote that, in Lincoln’s time, “the mental climate was quite different then from what it is now: it was considered quite the thing to do, in writing a friend, to dwell on one’s emotions without restraint and even analyze them to what seems at present a ridiculous extent. Few today would let themselves go to the extent that Abraham did in writing his law partner three weeks after the parting from Mary ‘I am now the most miserable man living. I must die or be better. I awfully forebode I shall not. If what I felt were distributed to the entire human family, there would not be one happy face on the earth.’” Historians tell stories from material they take seriously, and perhaps—influenced by the repressed style of the time—she did not take melancholy seriously.

  The irony is that, by casting aside actual evidence as “ridiculous” or “small-town gossip” or “invented,” the Randalls ensured that Lincoln’s inner life would be little studied by serious historians. The 1940s and 1950s were a golden era for the introduction of basic evidence on Lincoln into the public domain. In 1947, the Library of Congress opened access to the papers that had been held by Robert Todd Lincoln. Herndon’s papers also became available for inspection. Diaries from the Lincoln period poured into the public realm. This could have been the time to consolidate the gains, turn aside the faults of the previous century, and build a study on solid sources. Instead, with the two breakdowns virtually eliminated from the canon, there was no foundation on which to build an evidence-driven story.

  Thus was the subject left to the psychoanalysts. In the 1957 work Lincoln’s Emotional Life, Dr. Milton Shutes made no effort to discuss the substance of Lincoln’s early depressions, and mentioned Herndon only to dismiss him. His interest was in Lincoln’s childhood: “There are many unanswerable questions. For example: whether an overlong weaning caused too great mother dependence; or whether the father took the mother’s attention away too soon, leaving an angry baby with rebellious feelings of mother privation and f
ather jealousy.” These were important questions only if one assumes—as does Freudian theory—that adult neurosis springs from childhood trauma in general, and Oedipal tensions in particular.

  It has always been trouble for psychobiographers that so little is known about Lincoln’s early childhood. But for several decades prominent authors made do by wringing blood from stones. Dr. Edward J. Kempf produced, in 1965, a three-volume “analytical biography of a great mind,” indiscriminately mixing serious evidence and obviously bogus stories, such as the claim that Lincoln’s father once slaughtered Abraham’s pet pig, leaving the boy traumatized and, as Kempf explained, “conditioned to resent, more intensely than normal, unnecessary violations of human and animal rights, to hate tyrannical injustice, and to be deeply inclined to see life as a tragic fatalist.”

  Another type of psychobiography found insight in the close reading of reliable texts. Lincoln’s 1838 Lyceum speech, in which he warned of the “towering genius” who could be satisfied only by dictatorship, proved fodder for a famous 1962 essay by Edmund Wilson, which concludes, “It is evident that Lincoln has projected himself into the role against which he is warning.” This view of a young Lincoln seized with guilt and ambition influenced George Forgie, who found Lincoln displacing these characteristics onto Stephen Douglas (whom he then “murders” politically to expiate his own guilt), and Dwight Anderson, who found Lincoln to be the “bad son.” Anderson had a new take on Lincoln’s well-known White House dream in which he saw a dead president lying in state. This president wasn’t Lincoln, Anderson declared, but George Washington, who “haunted him [Lincoln] like Banquo’s ghost.”