The burden: Jennifer Radden, “Melancholy and Melancholia,” in David Michael Levin, ed., Pathologies of the Modern Self: Postmodern Studies on Narcissism, Schizophrenia, and Depression (New York: New York University Press, 1972), 231–50.
Springfield might have seemed: For a portrait of Springfield, see Paul Angle, “Here I Have Lived”: A History of Lincoln’s Springfield, 1821–1865 (Chicago: Abraham Lincoln Book Shop, 1971; orig. 1935). The goods mentioned are drawn from advertisements in the Sangamo Journal in the early 1840s.
[>] “every thing that the country needed”: Joshua F. Speed, Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln and Notes of a Visit to California (Louisville: John P. Morton, 1884), 21.
He had green eyes so light: “Gray” was the common description. AL to Jesse W. Fell, enclosing autobiography, December 20, 1859, CWL, vol. 3, 511.
Speed was twenty-two years old: Remarkably, no thorough biography exists on Joshua Speed, a gaping hole in the literature on Lincoln and his time. For now, the best works are Robert L. Kincaid, Joshua Fry Speed: Lincoln’s Most Intimate Friend (Harrogate, Tenn.: Lincoln Memorial University, 1943), and Gary Lee Williams, “James and Joshua Speed: Lincoln’s Kentucky Friends,” Ph.D. thesis, Duke University, 1971.
“if my experiment here as a lawyer”: Details about Speed’s store, and Lincoln’s exchange with Speed there, come from two accounts: Joshua F. Speed, statement for WHH, by 1882, Herndon’s Informants, 588–91, and Speed, Reminiscences, 21–22.
“He was a sad looking man”: WHH statement, Herndon-Weik Ms.
“constitutional melancholy”: O. H. Browning, interview with John G. Nicolay, June 17, 1875, An Oral History, 6–7.
“a settled form of melancholy”: Ida M. Tarbell, Abraham Lincoln and His Ancestors (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977; orig. 1924), 226–27.
[>] “I could not have slept tonight”: Joshua F. Speed, statement for WHH, by 1882, Herndon’s Informants, 590.
There were other stories: See, for example, Jesse K. Dubois, interview with WHH, December 1, 1888, Herndon’s Informants, 718.
“In many things he was sensitive”: Mary Owens Vineyard to WHH, July 22, 1866, Herndon’s Informants, 262.
“Men at once, at first blush”: Herndon’s Lincoln, vol. 3, 473–74.
[>] “The contest on this Bill”: Robert L. Wilson to WHH, February 10, 1866, Herndon’s Informants, 204.
“He told me that he was whipped”: Jesse K. Dubois, interview with John G. Nicolay, July 4, 1875, An Oral History, 30–31.
“vied with each other”: WHH to C. O. Poole, January 5, 1886, Hidden Lincoln, 123.
“Well, I will tell you”: William Butler, interview with John G. Nicolay, June 1875, An Oral History, 22–23. For a discussion of Butler’s reliability, see Wilson, Honor’s Voice, 171, 346–7n.1.
Lincoln owned and used: Stewart Winger, Lincoln, Religion, and Romantic Cultural Politics (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), 53.
“Each has its advantages”: Francis Lieber, ed., Encyclopaedia Americana (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey, 1829–1847), vol. 12,174.
[>] “A fitful stain of melancholy”: Edgar Allan Poe, “The Assignation,” in Philip Van Doren Stern, ed., The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Penguin Books, 1973), 205. Lord Byron was all the rage: For an excellent treatment of Lincoln’s interest in Byron, see Wilson, Honor’s Voice, 190–93.
“Sorrow is Knowledge”: Frank D. McConnell, ed., Byron’s Poetry (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 125.
a favorite of Lincoln’s: Wilson, Honor’s Voice, 191. For the text of this poem, see ibid., citing Ernest Hartley Coleridge, ed., The Poetical Works of Lord Byron (New York: Scribner, 1905), 146.
“age of Introversion”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” August 31, 1837, in Brooks Atkinson, ed., The Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 60.
twice as many women as men: “Nearly twice as many women (12.0 percent) as men (6.6 percent) are affected by a depressive disorder each year.” National Institutes of Mental Health, “The Numbers Count: Mental Disorders in America, 2001,” www .nimh.nih.gov/publicat/numbers.cfm#5, August 29, 2004, citing D. A. Regier et al., “The De Facto Mental and Addictive Disorders Service System,” Archives of General Psychiatry 50, no. 2 (1993): 85–94.
“Men are not supposed”: Terrence Real, I Don’t Want to Talk about It Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression (New York: Fireside, 1998), 23.
[>] While only half as many: Kay Redfield Jamison, Night Falls Fast Understanding Suicide (New York: Knopf, 1999), 46. Men, Jamison writes, “may have a more aggressive and volatile component to their depression” and “are also less likely to seek medical help for psychiatric problems” (46–47).
“halve themselves”: Real, I Don’t Want to Talk about It, 23.
“human, redeeming, ambiguous”: Radden, The Nature of Melancholy, 48.
physical strength and athletic prowess: For example, Lincoln was an impressive wrestler and, according to James Short, could lift “1000 pounds of shot by main strength.” James Short to WHH, July 7, 1865, Herndon’s Informants, 74.
vowed to whip anyone: Herndon’s Lincoln, vol. 1, 195–96.
“That gives me the hypo”: AL to Marry S. Owens, May 7, 1837, CWL, vol. 1, 79.
“Whenever I find myself”: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (New York: Penguin Books, 1980; orig. 1851), 21.
[>] “Take my word for it”: ibid., 82–83.
“I have suffered so much”: Joshua F. Speed to Mary L. Speed, February 2, 1841, Speed Family Papers, University of Louisville Archives.
Lincoln later used: For example, see Recollected Words, 9.
“to break or subdue”: Webster’s Dictionary, 1895.
“Lovely Boy” and “Dearly Beloved”: E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 56–57.
“You know my desire to befriend”: AL to Joshua F. Speed, February 13, 1842, CWL, vol. 1, 269.
[>] no par in his life: For example, John Hay and John G. Nicolay, Lincoln’s White House secretaries, wrote that “Speed was the only—as he was certainly the last—intimate friend that Lincoln ever had.” John Hay and John G. Nicolay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 vols. (New York: Century, 1890), vol. 1, 193.
“No two men”: Joshua F. Speed to Josiah G. Holland, June 22, 1865, Holland Papers.
“the peculiar misfortune”: AL to Joshua F. Speed, February 25, 1842, CWL, vol. 1, 280.
“like the rich fruit”: Joshua F. Speed to Mary L. Speed, October 31, 1841, Filson Historical Society.
“excessive pleasure”: AL to Joshua F. Speed, February 13, 1842, CWL, vol. 1, 269.
“outing”: “Abe Lincoln’s Home Town Outraged at His ‘Outing,’” Independent, June 27, 1999. Other headlines included: “Ready to Rewrite Lincoln’s Love Life?” Ottawa Citizen, July 5, 1999; “All They Did Was Sleep, Say Lincoln’s Straight Shooters,” Courier Mail (Queensland, Australia), May 17, 1999; “Maybe He Wasn’t Honest about Everything,” Oregonian, May 12, 1999.
Kramer has since quietly: Larry Kramer, interview with author, June 11, 2003.
Lincoln measured a “5”: C. A. Tripp, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Free Press, 2005), 20.
“I to your assistance”: Macbeth, act 3, scene 1.
[>] “anxious”: “anxious” and “anxiously” appear 193 times in the Collected Works.
deprecating what would follow: For example: “Having resolved to write to some of your mother’s family and not having the express permission of anyone of them to do so, I have had some little difficulty in determining on which to inflict the task of reading what I now feel must be a most dull and silly letter,” AL to Mary Speed, September 27, 1841, CWL, vol. 1, 259.
straw, horsehair, and feather: Elizabeth Cater, “The History of the Real Mattress and Base Co,” August—October 1999, www.realbeds.com.au/b_h.html, March 20, 2005. Not only families: As the historian Christine Stansell writes, “Travelers piled in with each
other at inns; siblings routinely shared beds; women friends often slept with each other as readily on an overnight visit as they took their tea together in the kitchen—and sometimes displaced husbands to do so. Civil War soldiers ‘spooned’ for comfort and warmth (and Civil War reenactors now do the same for accuracy’s sake).” Christine Stansell, “What Stuff!” New Republic, January 17, 2005.
Jonathan Ned Katz: Two articles by Katz serve to introduce male-male sexuality in the nineteenth century: “Coming to Terms: Conceptualizing Men’s Erotic and Affectional Relations with Men in the United States, 1820–1892,” and “‘Homosexual’ and ‘Heterosexual’: Questioning the Terms,” both in Martin Duberman, ed., A Queer World: The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, 216–35, 177–80. For the quotation beginning “I do start” and for the origin of “homosexual” and “heterosexual,” see “Coming to Terms,” 216–17. The point that these words are relatively new is not pedantic. Rather, it raises the broader issue of what Katz calls our “epistemological hubris and ontological chutzpah,” which “prevent us from understanding the varieties of sexuality and gender within their own social structure and time . . . Though presented to us as words marking an external fact of nature, the terms ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ constitute a normative sexual ethic, a sexual-political ideology, and one historically specific way of categorizing the relationships of the sexes.” They “also arise out of and help maintain a historically specific way of socially ordering gender and eroticism. ‘Heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’ refer to groups, identities, and even behaviors and experiences that are time-limited, specifically modern phenomena, contingent on a peculiar institutional structuring of masculinity, femininity, and lust.” Katz, “‘Homosexual’ and ‘Heterosexual,’” 177–78.
[>] ‘there wasn’t a line in the sand’: E. Anthony Rotundo, interview with author, October 21, 2001. See also Rotundo, American Manhood, 75–91. In his chapter “Youth and Male Intimacy,” Rotundo writes of young men in the early to mid-nineteenth century: “Friendship was based on intimacy, on a sharing of thought and emotion. The friend was now a partner in sentiment as well as action. While boys had little interest in ‘the social feelings of the heart,’ young men like Daniel Webster [and like Lincoln and Speed] cultivated those same emotions. The gentle (even ‘feminine’) emotions of the heart replaced the rough aggressions of boyhood. Young men might even express their fondness for each other in affectionate physical gestures. All together, these friendships inverted familiar patterns of male behavior—they were intimate attachments that verged on romance” (75). See also Roy Morris, Jr., The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 133, 150.
Speed also slept: Speed told Herndon that in 1839 and 1840 he was “keeping a pretty woman in this City.” Joshua F. Speed, interview with WHH, January 5, 1889, Herndon’s Informants, 719. According to Abner Y. Ellis, Lincoln had “many opportunities” to be with prostitutes “while in Company with J.F.S. and Wm B two old rats in that way.” Abner Y. Ellis, statement for WHH, c. January 23, 1866, Herndon’s Informants, 171.
Lincoln may well have slept: John T. Stuart told WHH that during the Black Hawk War he and Lincoln “went to the hoar houses.” John T. Stuart, interview with WHH, 1865–66, Herndon’s Informants, 719. For his part, Speed told a story to William Herndon about the “pretty woman” he was keeping. Herndon’s notes read: “Lincoln desirous to have a little said to Speed—‘Speed, do you know where I can get some; and in reply Speed said—‘Yes I do, & if you will wait a moment or so I’ll send you to the place with a note. You cant get it without a note or by my apperance.’ Speed wrote the note and Lincoln took it and went to see the girl—handed her the note . . . Lincoln told his business and the girl, after some protestations, agreed to satisfy him. Things went on right—Lincoln and the girl stript off and went to bed.” But trouble arose when Lincoln found out the charge would be five dollars, when he had only three. “Lincoln went out of the house, bidding the girl good evening and went to the store of Speed, saying nothing . . . Speed had occasion to go and see the girl in a few days, and she told him just what was said and done.” Joshua F. Speed, interview with WHH, January 5, 1889, Herndon’s Informants, 719.
“The twentieth-century tendency”: Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Disorderly Conduct Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Knopf, 1985), 58–59. This essay, originally in the journal Signs in 1975, is a classic in the study of nineteenth-century same-sex relationships. “An abundance of manuscript evidence,” Smith-Rosenberg writes, “suggests that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women routinely formed emotional ties with other women. Such deeply felt same-sex friendships were casually accepted in American society. Indeed, from at least the late eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth century, a female world of varied and yet highly structured relationships appears to have been an essential aspect of American society. These relationships ranged from the supportive love of sisters, through the enthusiasms of adolescent girls, to sensual avowals of love by mature women” (59). Letters cited by Smith-Rosenberg show not only an emotional intensity but also a sensual and physical longing.
“If I was asked what it was”: Speed, Reminiscences, 34.
“I was fresh from Kentucky”: ibid., 17–18.
[>] “If ever I feel the soul”: AL, “Speech on the Sub-Treasury,” December [26], 1839, CWL, vol. 1, 178.
“left the stump literally whipped”: Wilson, Honor’s Voice, 199, citing Illinois State Register, November 23, 1839.
“Lincoln did not come up”: Joseph Gillespie to WHH, January 31, 1866, Herndon’s Informants, 181.
“peculiarly embarassing”: AL, “Speech on the Sub-Treasury,” December [26], 1839, CWL, vol. 1, 159.
“Well, I made a big speech”: AL to John T. Stuart, January 20, 1840, CWL, vol. 1, 184. he felt destined: WHH to Ward Hill Lamon, February 25, 1870, Hidden Lincoln, 68. “Mr. Lincoln told me that his ideas of something burst in him in 1840 . . . This was the exact time that his convictions developed into a religious fervor. He always had a conviction more or less of ruin. This sprang from his physical organization, as I think, and yet it grew on him all his life—so he told me, often spoke of it to me in my office and on the circuit when we traveled together.”
One theory of evolutionary psychology: A good introduction to evolutionary psychology and depression is “The Evolution of Depression—Does It Have a Role?” All in the Mind, with Natasha Mitchell and guests Drs. Edward Hagen, Paul J. Watson, and Daniel Nettle, April 3, 2004. A transcript is available at www.abc.net.au/rn/science/mind/stories/s1261396.htm. An authoritative work on evolutionary psychology is Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life (New York: Pantheon, 1994).
[>] “If destruction be our lot”: AL, “Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois,” January 27, 1838, CWL, vol. 1,108.
According to Joshua Speed: In a brief interview with Herndon in early June 1865, Speed mentioned, and Herndon noted, “Lincoln on Suicide—about 1840—see journal 1840.” Herndon apparently queried Speed for more, and Speed replied, in September 1866: “My recollection is that the Poem on Suicide was written in the Spring of 1840 or Summer of 1841. It was published in the Sangamo Journal soon after it was written.” Six years after this interview, Herndon reported to his colleague Ward Hill Lamon, “As to the Lincoln poem on suicide, I found out from Speed that it was written in 1838, and I hunted up the Journal and found where the poem was, what day published, etc., etc., but someone had cut it out—supposed to be Lincoln. I could never find another copy, and so there is an end of that.” Joshua F. Speed, interview with WHH, by June 10, 1865, Herndon’s Informants, 30; Joshua F. Speed to WHH, September 13, 1866, ibid., 337; and WHH to Ward Hill Lamon, February 25, 1870, Hidden Lincoln, 67.
Two questions arise. First, why did Speed associate the poem with three separate period
s and what do these periods have in common? The answer may lie not in Lincoln’s life but in Speed’s. In 1838, in the spring of 1840, and in the summer of 1841, Speed went on lengthy trips away from Springfield. He may well have remembered that Lincoln had written and/or published the poem when he was away, and that he saw it only upon his return. The second question—did someone really cut the poem out of the newspaper?—endures. There is at least one other example of Lincoln material being excised. The R. G. Dun & Company Collection, in the Baker Library at Harvard Business School, contains field reports sent, beginning in 1841, to the Mercantile Agency—later R. G. Dun & Co., the forerunner of Dun & Bradstreet. These reports, used by businesses and merchants to size up potential clients and partners, often contained gossip and hearsay. The entry on Lincoln would be fascinating. But as the historian Scott Sandage found when he studied one of the record books, the contents had been scraped off the page, apparently with a razor blade. Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 156–58.
One reason: Ward Hill Lamon’s The Life of Abraham Lincoln (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999; orig. 1872), 241, places the suicide poem sometime in 1841. Herndon’s Lincoln, in a passage apparently written by Jesse W. Weik, followed Lamon’s date (vol. 1, 216).
recently an independent scholar: For an announcement of the find and a cogent analysis of the poem, see Richard Lawrence Miller, “Lincoln’s ‘Suicide’ Poem: Has It Been Found?” For the People: The Newsletter of the Abraham Lincoln Association 6 (Spring 2004): 1.
[>] William Styron: “As one who has suffered from the malady in extremis yet returned to tell the tale, I would lobby for a truly arresting designation. ‘Brainstorm,’ for instance, has unfortunately been preempted . . . Told that someone’s mood disorder has evolved into a storm—a veritable howling tempest in the brain, which is indeed what a clinical depression resembles like nothing else—even the uninformed layman might display sympathy.” Styron, Darkness Visible, 37–38.
Lincoln's Melancholy Page 34