Lincoln's Melancholy

by Joshua Wolf Shenk

  [>] “It would be worth much”: Joshua F. Speed to WHH, November 30, 1866, Herndon’s Informants, 430.

  [>] “Benjamin Franklin of the West”: Charles D. Aring, “Daniel Drake and Medical Education,” Journal of the American Medical Association 254, no. 15 (October 18, 1985): 2120.

  “the long and frightful train”: Daniel Drake, Discourse on Intemperance (Cincinnati: Locker & Reynolds, 1828), 21.

  [>] He found his own case: Details of the burn story and quotations from Daniel Drake that follow are from Drake, “History of Two Cases of Burn,” 48–60.

  “the medicine of the mind”: Rush, Medical Inquiries, 103.

  [>] “I have, within the last”: AL to John Stuart, January 20, 1841, CWL, vol. 1, 228.

  “From the deplorable”: AL to John Stuart, January 23, 1841, CWL, vol. 1,229. I have examined the original letter in the ISHL with Kim Bauer, the library’s curator of Lincoln manuscripts. On beige paper, about six inches wide and ten inches high, it is written with a rich blue ink, probably from an indigo die, Bauer said. The first part of the letter, which dispassionately recites recent political news, is written in small, neat script. The handwriting grows larger and messier at the top of the second page. Then there is a long, slightly smeared dash. “He’s obviously laboring a little bit when he finishes this letter,” Bauer said. “Possibly he left and came back. I don’t know if he left, but he stopped. You can see that the writing changes.” Indeed, beginning with the words “For not giving you a general summary of news, you must pardon me,” the ink gets significantly darker, as though the heaviness of the moment took physical expression in the pressure Lincoln exerted with his pen.

  worst of the cold weather lifted: Jane D. Bell to Ann Bell, January 27, 1841, in Wilson, Honor’s Voice, 237.

  “You see by this”: AL to John T. Stuart, February 3, 1841, CWL, First Supplement, 18321865, 6.

  his “embrigglement”: Wilson, Honor’s Voice, 231. This word is attributed to Jesse K. Dubois in Milton Hay to John Hay, February 8, 1887, “Recollection of Lincoln: Three Letters of Intimate Friends,” Bulletin of the Abraham Lincoln Association 25 (December 1931): 9.

  “hanging about—moody”: Turner R. King, interview with WHH, 1865–66, Herndon’s Informants, 464.

  “sick head ache and hypo”: Joshua F. Speed to Mary L. Speed, February 2, 1841, Speed Family Papers, University of Louisville Archives.

  “All feeling is dead and dust”: Joshua F. Speed to Eliza Speed, March 12, 1841, ISHL. another attack of the hypo: Wilson, Honor’s Voice, 245, citing Joshua F. Speed to William Butler, May 18, 1841.

  [>] posting overseas: Claude Moore Fuess, Daniel Webster, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1930), vol. 2, 94n.2, citing John T. Stuart to Daniel Webster, March 5, 1841, in the private collection of Wilson Olney.

  “the gay world”: Mary Todd to Mercy Levering, June 1841, MTL, Life and Letters, 27.

  In a move: Ninian Edwards, interview with WHH, September 22, 1865, Herndon’s Informants, 133.

  “moody & hypochondriac”: Joshua F. Speed to WHH, January 12, 1866, Herndon’s Informants, 158.

  Approaching it from Bardstown Road: The description of Farmington, and Lincoln’s experiences there, unless otherwise noted, are drawn from the author’s tour of the estate and from Kincaid, Joshua Fry Speed; “Lincoln Talked to Uncle and Joshua Made Love,” Louisville Courier-Journal, February 13, 1938; and AL to Mary Speed, September 27, 1841, CWL, vol. 1, 259–61.

  saddle of mutton: Mildred Bullitt to Tom [?], January 2, 1861, Bullitt Papers, Filson Historical Society.

  peaches and cream: AL to Mary Speed, September 27, 1841, CWL, vol. 1, 261.

  [>] Anthony Storr: Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988), 33–34, 62.

  “If architects want to strengthen”: Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (New York: Washington Square Press, 1985; orig. 1946), 127–28.

  “irrepressible desire”: Speed, Reminiscences, p. 39.

  “desired to live for”: Joshua F. Speed to WHH, February 7, 1866, Herndon’s Informants, 196. For more on the sources for this exchange, see note on pages 288–89.

  4. A SELF-MADE MAN

  [>] “It does not depend on the start”: Stephen T. Logan, interview with John G. Nicolay, July 6, 1875, An Oral History, 38.

  “self-made man”: Simon, Lincoln’s Preparation for Greatness, 231, citing Quincy Whig, January 1, 1841. “Abraham Lincoln of Sangamon is emphatically a man of high standing,” the paper declared, “being about six feet four in his stockings, slender, and loosely built. He is, I suppose, over 30 years old, has been in the legislature repeatedly, and was run as one of the Whig electors in the late election. Mr. L. is a self-made man, and one of the ablest, whether a lawyer or legislator, in the State. As a speaker, he is characterized by a sincerity, frankness and evident honesty calculated to win attention and gain the confidence of the hearer.”

  In Lincoln’s time: Winkle, The Young Eagle, 125,133–34. For more on the advent of “self-made” men, see Joyce Appleby, “New Cultural Heroes in the Early National Period,” in Thomas L. Haskell and Richard F. Teichgraeber, eds., Culture of the Market Historical Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 163–88.

  [>] “What hath God wrought”: For an account of this message, sent on May 24, 1844, see Jill Lepore, A Is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States (New York: Knopf, 2002), 152. The code is from the Web site of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, www.acmi.net.au. Various sources give different capitalization and punctuation. By the time of the Civil War, the United States had 50,000 miles of telegraph line and 1,400 stations. For more on the culture generated by the telegraph, see Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998).

  the church had censored: See Edward S. Reed, From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology from Erasmus Darwin to William James (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) 9 A.M. on October 23, 4004 B.C.: Sir John Lightfoot, an eminent Hebrew scholar at Cambridge, gave this date after a thorough study of Scriptures. See Andrew D. White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (New York: D. Appleton, 1897), 9.

  [>] Then geologists: For a discussion of geology’s role in the early-nineteenth-century intellectual landscape—and Lincoln’s interest in the subject—see Guelzo, Redeemer President, 108. The major work was Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, published in three volumes from 1830 to 1833.

  Lincoln became a proponent: Herndon’s Lincoln, vol. 3, 438.

  “in which a people reshapes”: Fuller, Alternative Medicine, 19–20, citing William McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings and Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

  [>] “Human beings need to organize”: Delbanco, The Real American Dream, 1.

  the independent self For an excellent treatment of the ethos of the mid-nineteenth century, see ibid., 47–80.

  “Individualism is a novel expression”: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. The text of this classic work is online at the University of Virginia’s Hypertext Projects. The quotation appears in vol. 2, sec. 2, “Of Individualism in Democratic Countries,” http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/ch2_02.htm, April 1, 2005. For more on the emergence of individualism, see Winkle, Young Eagle, 125.

  [>] “Push along. Push hard”: Illinois State Journal, January 8, 1853.

  later portrayed as a shiftless: For a concise treatment of the historiography on Thomas Lincoln, see Neely, The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia, 187–88.

  satisfied with his life: Nathaniel Grigsby, interview with WHH, September 12, 1865, Herndon’s Informants, 113. “Thomas Lincoln was not a lazy man—but a tinker[?]—a piddler—always doing but doing nothing great—was happy—lived easy—& contented. had but few wants and Supplied these.”

  “I could scarcely believe”: F. B. Carpenter, The Inner Life of Abraham Lincoln: Six Mont
hs at the White House (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995; orig. Six Months at the White House with Abraham Lincoln, 1866), 96–98.

  [>] He could visit New Orleans: AL traveled to the Crescent City when he was nineteen and twenty-two. AL, “Autobiography Written for John L. Scripps,” c. June 1860, CWL, vol. 4, 62–63.

  Lawyers made it so: In the famous phrase of the historian Charles Sellers, lawyers were the “shock troops of capitalism,” creating and enforcing the mechanisms of a market economy. See Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 47.

  “I want in all cases to do right”: AL to Marry S. Owens, August 16, 1837, CWL, vol. 1,94.

  “Honest Abe”: Lincoln first got the nickname after judging horse races in New Salem in the early 1830s. Douglas L. Wilson, “Young Man Lincoln,” paper presented at Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, Pa., September 1999.

  “physical assets and strength of character”: ibid.

  “let the whole thing go”: James Short to WHH, July 7, 1865, Herndon’s Informants 74.

  [>] “I feel like a failure”: Sandage, Born Losers, 5.

  “We never knew a man”: Illinois State Journal, January 8, 1853.

  “the mass of men”: Henry David Thoreau, Walden, in Carl Bode, ed., The Portable Thoreau (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 263.

  “I cannot help counting”: Sandage, Born Losers, 1.

  “Many of his friends feared”: Robert B. Rutledge to WHH, c. November 1, 1866, Herndon’s Informants, 383.

  “The Doctors say”: Jane D. Bell to Ann Bell, January 27, 1841, in Wilson, Honors Voice, 237.

  “more persons are attacked”: Pliny Earle, Visit to Thirteen Asylums for the Insane in Europe (Philadelphia: Dobson, 1841), 127.

  [>] dominant thinking on inheritance: See Charles Rosenberg, “The Bitter Fruit: Heredity, Disease, and Social Thought,” in No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 25–53.

  “agreeable enough to people”: Unless otherwise noted, quotations on asylums are from David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 112–16, 126, 130.

  [>] “We might at first refuse”: C. B. Hayden, “On the Distribution of Insanity in the United States,” Southern Literary Messenger 10, no. 3 (March 1844): 178–81.

  visit from Dorothea Dix: In the summer of 1846, Dix stopped at Springfield during a three-month tour of Illinois, in which she inspected the conditions of the state’s mentally ill. She returned to the capital in December 1846. In January 1847 she submitted a report on the state’s insane and urged the legislature to commission an asylum. David L. Lightner, ed., Asylum, Prison, and Poorhouse: The Writings and Reform Work of Dorothea Dix in Illinois (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 1, 8, 103.

  [>] “These fears”: Lauren Slater, interview with author, August 24, 2001.

  “rather a bright lad”: AL to Andrew Johnston, April 18, 1846, CWL, vol. 1, 377–78. For the text of the poem, see CWL, vol. 1, 384–85. I made a great effort to learn more about Matthew Gentry, to little avail. I did find that he was the oldest of eight children, with three brothers and four sisters. Born around 1806, he married Hetty Fisher on March 18, 1827. They had no children. (“Family Group Sheet” on the children of James Gentry, Sr., and Elizabeth Hornbeck, on file at the Spencer County Public Library, Rockport, Indiana.) Matthew was clearly alive in 1844, when Lincoln saw him “lingering in this wretched condition.” He had probably died by 1850; the census of that year made no mention of him. According to the History of Warrick, Spencer, and Perry Counties Indiana (Chicago: Goodspeed Bros., 1885), under the entry for James Gentry, Sr., Matthew died at his father’s home.

  [>] His first cousin Mordecai Lincoln: Facts on Mordecai Lincoln here are drawn from Berenice V. Lovely to William Barton, October 18, 1921, Barton Papers; Walter B. Stevens, A Reporters Lincoln, edited by Michael Burlingame (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998; orig. 1916), 217–24; Robert W. McClaughrey, “Mordecai Lincoln and His Dog Grampus,” in Intimate Memories, 55–58; and Mordecai’s own letters and notes in the Barton Papers.

  “quite attached”: Intimate Memories, 56.

  5. A MISFORTUNE, NOT A FAULT

  [>] Separate Baptism: Guelzo, Redeemer President, 36.

  [>] “out-Calvined Calvin”: William E. Barton, The Life of Abraham Lincoln, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1925), vol. 2, 460. Bound to have an effect in any case, for Abe Lincoln the impact of such messages was amplified because he had scant exposure to other points of view. Even after he learned to read, for years he had access to only two books, the Bible and John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. In a sketchbook that contains his earliest known writing, he copied a verse from the Calvinist hymn writer Isaac Watts, which began, “Time what an empty vaper ‘tis . . . “CWL, vol. 1, 1.

  “acedia”: The victim, Cassian said, “frequently gazes up at the sun, as if it was too slow in setting, and so a kind of unreasonable confusion of mind takes possession of him like some foul darkness, and makes him idle and useless for every spiritual work.” According to Cassian, many elders considered that acedia was the “noonday demon” of Psalm 90. Andrew Solomon took this phrase as the title for his award-winning book. Cassian’s description of the disease is in Radden, The Nature of Melancholy, 71–72. For the way acedia blended with melancholy, see Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (New York: Scribner, 2001), 287. For the requirement of penitence and confession, see Jackson, Melancholia and Depression, 69.

  “Some Devil is often very Busy”: Radden, The Nature of Melancholy, 165, citing Cotton Mather, The Angel of Bethesda (1724).

  “For the godly”: Harley, “Explaining Salem,” 310.

  He recited: “Burns helped him to be an infidel as I think—at least he found in Burns a like thinker and feeler.” James H. Matheny, interview with WHH, by March 2, 1870, Herndon’s Informants, 577.

  He carried around: Herndon’s Lincoln, vol. 3, 439–40.

  hurt Lincoln politically: James H. Matheny (interview with WHH, November 1866, Herndon’s Informants, 432) said that his father “with all his soul hated to vote for him because he heard that Lincoln was an infidel . . . Many Religious—Christian whigs hated to vote for Lincoln on that account.” This was no secret to Lincoln. In 1837, he noted that a political opponent had gone around asking people if they “ever heard Lincoln say he was a deist.” AL, “Second Reply to Adams,” October 19, 1837, CWL, vol. 1, 106. By 1843, Lincoln knew that some people refused to vote for him for Congress because they heard he was a deist. AL to Martin S. Morris, March 26, 1843, CWL, vol. 1, 320.

  When Lincoln put his ideas: John Hill to WHH, June 27, 1865, Herndon’s Informants, 61–62.

  [>] a kind of august tradition: This discussion relies heavily on Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004), especially 4–5, 19, 32, 35–36, 63–64.

  Dozens of new Christian sects: Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 80, citing Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 3–4.

  [>] “heavenly black eyes”: AL to Joshua F. Speed, January 3?, 1842, CWL, vol. 1, 266.

  “In the winter of 40 & 41”: Joshua F. Speed to WHH, November 30, 1866, Herndon’s Informants, 430.

  “Feeling, as you know I do”: AL to Joshua F. Speed, January 3?, 1842, CWL, vol. 1, 26566.

  [>] “almost crazy”: Susan P. Bullitt to John C. Bullitt, April 8, 1841, Bullitt Family Papers, Filson Historical Society.

  [>] disease wasn’t a product: Here I draw principally from Robert C. Fuller, Alternative Medicine, 20, 23, 30–31, and from Fuller’s Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 31, 44.

  H. L. Mencken joked: George H. Douglas, H. L. Mencken, Critic of American
Life (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1978), 87.

  “a profound stir”: Sophie Bledsoe Herrick, “The First Lincoln Baby and a Friend’s Sound Advice,” Intimate Memories, 61–62, reprinting articles from Century Magazine (March 1892) and Methodist Review (October 1915). The story that follows is drawn entirely from Herrick. Is her version reliable? A young child at the time, she almost certainly heard the story from her father, who in his later years became a bitter political opponent of Lincoln’s. Yet it’s hard to imagine that the story was made up to slight Lincoln, for any slight intended would fall just as heavily, if not more so, on Bledsoe himself. Furthermore, I have examined Herrick’s other work and judge her to be a credible source.

  [>] “Mrs. B”: Though described by Herrick as a boarder at the Globe Tavern, this unidentified woman resembles Sarah Beck, the house’s owner and proprietor.

  per capita consumption: W J Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 10. Rorabaugh points out that “after reaching this peak, consumption fell sharply under the influence of the temperance movement, and since 1840 its highest levels have been under 2 gallons—less than half the rate of consumption in the 1820s” (10). Though Lincoln connected the cessation of drink to good health, a strong tradition connected good health to drinking. “At the beginning of the eighteenth century, tradition taught, and Americans, like Englishmen and Europeans, universally believed, that rum, gin, and brandy were nutritious and healthful. Distilled sprits were viewed as foods that supplemented limited and monotonous diets, as medications that could cure colds, fevers, snakebites, frosted toes, and broken legs, and as relaxants that would relieve depression, reduce tension, and enable hardworking laborers to enjoy a moment of happy, frivolous camaraderie” (23). Lincoln probably had in mind the healthful aspects of alcohol—along with the fun—when he wrote, of the old view of alcohol, “It is true, that even then, it was known and acknowledged, that many were greatly injured by it; but none seemed to think the injury arose from the use of a bad thing, but from the abuse of a very good thing.” AL, “Temperance Address,” February 22, 1842, CWL, vol. 1, 274.