Lincoln's Melancholy

by Joshua Wolf Shenk

  [>] “The perception of reality”: David A. Jopling, “‘Take Away the Life-Lie . . .’: Positive Illusions and Creative Self-Deception,” Philosophical Psychology 9, no. 4 (December 1996): 525, citing Marie Johoda, Current Concepts of Positive Mental Health (New York: Basic Books, 1958), 6.

  “major affective disorder (pleasant type)”: Richard P. Bentall, “A Proposal to Classify Happiness as a Psychiatric Disorder,” Journal of Medical Ethics 18 (1992): 94.

  [>] People actively seek to filter: As the psychologist Tom Pyszczynski points out, many influential theories come to this conclusion. Psychoanalytic theory holds that “a great deal of ordinary thought and behavior functions to keep painful or unacceptable emotions out of consciousness.” Similarly, “cognitive dissonance theory” suggests that people change their ideas to bring them in line with their behavior, to reduce the tension that arises when their view of the world and their behavior are out of sync. “Terror management theory” explains many social behaviors as strategies to shield people from the anxiety that would come if they saw their real vulnerability. “The point that all of these theories have in common,” Pyszczynski writes, “is that many common, nonpathological forms of social behavior function to keep unacceptable emotions out of consciousness.” Tom Pyszczynski et al., “Emotional Expression and the Reduction of Motivated Cognitive Bias: Evidence from Cognitive Dissonance and Distancing from Victims’ Paradigms,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 64, no. 2 (February 1993): 177.

  “If most of us”: William T. Vollmann, Rising Up, Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means (New York: Ecco Press, 2004), 5, citing Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy.

  “Throughout history”: Peter D. Kramer, Listening to Prozac (New York: Viking, 1993), 165.

  “The intensest light”: Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (New York: Free Press, 1993), 216.

  [>] He could afford these luxuries: Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas, 211.

  “thin, high-pitched falsetto”: White, “Lincoln in 1854,” 724.

  “Thus, the thing is hid away”: AL, “Speech at Peoria, Illinois,” October 16, 1854, CWL, vol. 2, 274.

  [>] “the great struggle of life”: AL to George C. Latham, July 22, 1860, CWL, vol. 4, 87.

  “now when we have grown fat”: AL to George Robertson, August 15, 1855, CWL, vol. 2, 318.

  [>] A peaceful, lawful: “I do not suppose that in the most peaceful way ultimate extinction would occur in less than a hundred years at the least; but that it will occur in the best way for both races in God’s own good time, I have no doubt.” AL, “Fourth Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Charleston, Illinois,” September 18, 1858, CWL, vol. 3, 181.

  “There is a moral fitness”: AL, “Eulogy on Henry Clay,” July 6, 1852, CWL, vol. 2, 126. In the world Lincoln saw: As late as 1900, no country in the world had a government elected by universal adult suffrage. At the end of the century, 119 countries—sixty-two percent of the nations in the world—had universal suffrage. Freedom House, “Democracy’s Century: A Survey of Global Political Change in the 20th Century,” http://freedomhouse.org/reports/century.html, March 24, 2005.

  [>] “If destruction be our lot”: AL, “Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois,” January 27, 1838, CWL, vol. 1, 109.

  For the time being: There has been, of late, a great debate between those who assail Lincoln as a racist and those who defend him as a devoted servant of civil rights, albeit one limited by practical necessity. In fact, Lincoln considered full equality to be an absurdity. “Negro equality!” he wrote to himself at one point. “Fudge!! How long, in the government of a God, great enough to make and maintain this Universe, shall there continue knaves to vend, and fools to gulp, so low a piece of demagougeism as this.” AL, “Fragments: Notes for Speeches,” c. September 1859?, CWL, vol. 3, 399. The demagoguery lay in posing a scenario that was far from the public sentiment. All but a small minority considered the prospect of a multiracial society with full equality to be out of the question. Lincoln at times compared Negro slaves in the United States to Hebrew slaves in ancient Egypt. The fighting cry, then, was “Let my people go,” not “Let my people stay on terms of equality with you.”

  This, to Lincoln: Lincoln used this imagery, warning in 1859 against Republicans’ joining with Stephen Douglas. “All who deprecate that consummation, and yet are seduced into his support, do but cut their own throats.” AL to W. H. Wells, January 8, 1859, CWL, vol. 3, 349.

  But what Lincoln suspected: For a thorough treatment of the politics of the KansasNebraska Act, see Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, 167–217.

  [>] “At that time”: Samuel C. Parks, statement for WHH, 1866?, Herndon’s Informants, 538.

  Even years later: AL to Norman Judd, December 9, 1859, CWL, vol. 3, 505.

  When the Illinois General Assembly: For a detailed treatment of this election, see Matthew Pinsker, “Senator Abraham Lincoln,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 14, no. 2 (Summer 1993), http://jala.press.uiuc.edu/14.2/pinsker.html, March 31, 2005.

  “It was agreed that”: Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln, 21.

  “I have really got it”: AL to Joseph Gillespie, December 1, 1854, CWL, vol. 2, 290.

  At various times: AL to Elihu B. Washburne, February 9, 1855, CWL, vol. 2, 304.

  To his supporters dismay: “I remember that judge S. T. Logan gave up Mr Lincoln with great reluctance,” Joseph Gillespie recalled. “He begged hard to try him on one or two ballots more, but Mr Lincoln urged us not to risk it longer.” Joseph Gillespie to WHH, September 19, 1866, Herndon’s Informants, 344.

  “cut and mortified”: Joseph Gillespie to Isaac Arnold, April 22, 1880, Isaac A. Arnold Papers, Chicago Historical Society.

  [>] “There is no event”: Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln, 22.

  “agony”: AL to Elihu B. Washburne, February 9, 1855, CWL, vol. 2, 304.

  “I could not.. .let”: AL to William H. Henderson, February 21, 1855, CWL, vol. 2, 307.

  [>] “This frustration of Lincoln’s ambition”: Herndon’s Lincoln, vol. 2, 377–78.

  He had owned: Pen Bogert, slave data on Joshua F. Speed and on James Speed, in the vertical file, “Farmington—African Americans,” Filson Historical Society Library, 1997.

  [>] “the people of the South”: AL, “Fragment on Sectionalism,” c. July 23, 1856, CWL, vol. 2, 351–52.

  [>] “tragic optimist”: Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 162.

  “abundance of man’s heart”: “Repeal the Missouri compromise—repeal all compromises—repeal the declaration of independence—repeal all past history, you still can not repeal human nature. It still will be the abundance of man’s heart, that slavery extension is wrong; and out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth will continue to speak.” AL, “Speech at Peoria, Illinois,” October 16, 1854, CWL, vol. 2, 271.

  [>] “crimes of Kansas”: Charles Sumner, “The Crime Against Kansas: The Apologies for the Crime; the True Remedy,” delivered before the U.S. Senate, May 19–20, 1856. Excerpts from this famous speech are online at http://www.sewanee.edu/faculty/Willis/Civil_War/documents/Crime.html, April 1, 2005.

  “While all seems dead”: Herndon’s Lincoln, vol. 2, 386.

  [>] “With me, the race”: AL, “Fragment on Stephen A. Douglas, December 1856?, CWL, vol. 2, 383.

  Just after President Buchanan: The case actually pitted Dred Scott against John Sanford, but the slave owner’s name was misspelled in the records.

  [>] “What does the New-York Tribune”: AL to Lyman Trumbull, December 28, 1857, CWL, vol. 2, 430.

  “The Republican standard”: Herndon’s Lincoln, vol. 2, 395, citing WHH to AL, March 24, 1858.

  “a veritable dodger”: Herndon’s Lincoln, vol. 2, p. 391.

  In other words: AL, “Address at Cooper Institute, New York City,” February 27, 1860, CWL, vol. 3, 538.

  “evil genius”: AL, “Second Debate with
Stephen A. Douglas at Freeport, Illinois,” August 27, 1858, CWL, vol. 3, 44.

  “What will Douglas do now?”: AL, “Fragments: Notes for Speeches,” c. September 1859, CWL, vol. 3, 397–98.

  [>] Two of the main: Granville Sharp died before seeing any victories in the antislavery fight. William Wilberforce was on his deathbed when the slavery abolition bill passed the House of Commons; he died a month before it became law. See Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005).

  “I can not but regard”: AL, “Fragment on the Struggle Against Slavery,” c. July 1858, CWL, vol. 2, 482.

  “Whoever heard”: Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln, 303.

  “strike home to the minds”: Herndon’s Lincoln, vol. 2, 400.

  “If we could first know”: AL, “‘A House Divided’: Speech at Springfield, Illinois,” June 16, 1858, CWL, vol. 2, 461–62.

  [>] Freeport Doctrine: For a cogent account of this exchange, see McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 184.

  “I am after larger game”: Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926), vol. 2, 155.

  [>] “when these poor tongues”: AL, “Seventh and Last Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Alton, Illinois,” October 15, 1858, CWL, vol. 2, 315.

  “Think nothing of me”: AL, “Speech at Lewistown, Illinois,” August 17, 1858, CWL, vol. 2, 547.

  “I am not, nor ever have been”: AL, “Fourth Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Charleston, Illinois,” September 18, 1858, CWL, vol. 3, 145.

  A growing number of critics: A charged presentation of Lincoln as a racist, Lerone Bennett, Jr.’s Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (Chicago: Johnson Publishing, 2000) tells of a Lincoln who liked “nigger” jokes, found blackface minstrel shows amusing, and defended slaveowners in court. Bennett finds Lincoln more an enemy than a friend to African Americans. For one response, see William Lee Miller, Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography (New York: Knopf, 2002).

  [>] “There is no reason”: AL, “First Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Ottawa, Illinois,” August 21, 1858, CWL, vol. 3, 16.

  “I am a living witness”: AL, “Speech to One Hundred Sixty-sixth Ohio Regiment,” August 22, 1864, CWL, vol. 7, 512.

  “were utterly unconscious”: AL, “Second Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions,” February 11, 1859, CWL, vol. 3, 362–63.

  [>] Reports of these spells: Many of the most dramatic reports of Lincoln’s gloomy spells came from men who only met him after 1854—including, for example, Jonathan Birch, Lawrence Weldon, Joseph Wilson Fifer, and Henry C. Whitney.

  What had looked like a sad: Compare Gibson Harris’s view of “blue spells” in the mid-1840s, which could be easily broken by “a very slight thing,” with Jonathan Birch’s view in the late 1850s, of a man sitting “for hours at a time defying the interruption of even his closest friends. No one ever thought of breaking the spell by speech; for by his moody silence and abstraction he had thrown about him a barrier so dense and impenetrable no one dared to break through.” Jonathan Birch, interview with Jesse Weik, 1887?, Herndon’s Informants, 727–28.

  “The pictures we see”: Stevens, Reporter’s Lincoln, 163.

  “Abe Lincoln is up from Springfield”: John H. Widmer, n.d., Tarbell Papers.

  [>] “Biographies tend conventionally”: Menand made this point in an essay that examines a supposed crisis and recovery in the life of William James. James’s biographers have long assumed that an episode of panic fear—in which, he wrote, “suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence”—preceded a diary entry in which James resolved to believe in free will. The appeal of the interpretation is undeniable: James brought his youthful melancholia under the control of his “resolution and self-confidence”; he got sick and got better. However, as Menand demonstrates, no good evidence exists to link the two episodes. The conclusion was simply an assumption that one biographer (James’s son) made, a second biographer (Ralph Barton Perry) repeated, and others accepted as truth. As with many melancholics, William James had many moments of relief, but no final recovery. Every February, he had what he called an “annual collapse.” “The fact is,” he wrote in 1901, when he was fifty-nine years old, “that my nervous system is utter trash, and always was so. It has been a hard burden to bear all these years, the more so as I have seemed to others perfectly well; and now it is on top and ‘I’ am under.” Louis Menand, “William James and the Case of the Epileptic Patient,” New York Review of Books, December 17, 1998.

  But owing to favorable: Thomas, Abraham Lincoln, 194.

  [>] “I never saw any man”: Whitney, Life on the Circuit, 27.

  “The emotions of defeat”: AL to John J. Crittenden, November 4, 1858, CWL, vol. 3, 335.

  “The fight must go on”: AL to Henry Asbury, November 19, 1858, CWL, vol. 3, 339.

  “Though I now sink out of view”: AL to Anson G. Henry, November 19, 1858, CWL, vol. 3, 339.

  “I hope and believe”: AL to Charles H. Ray, November 20, 1858, CWL, vol. 3, 342.

  “You are feeling badly”: AL to Norman B. Judd, November 16, 1858, CWL, vol. 3, 337.

  “Some of you will be successful”: AL, “Address Before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, Milwaukee, Wisconsin,” September 30, 1859, CWL, vol. 3, 481–82.

  9. THE FIERY TRIAL THROUGH WHICH WE PASS

  [>] like a wire cable: Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Abraham Lincoln,” Living Age, January 2, 1864, 284.

  “steel and velvet”: A recording of Sandburg’s address to a joint session of Congress on February 12, 1959, the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth, is available at the State University of New York at Albany’s “Talking History” Web site: http://talkinghistory.org.

  “My model will be”: Leston Havens, Learning to Be Human (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994), 17.

  “I must, in candor”: AL to Thomas J. Pickett, April 16, 1859, CWL, vol. 3, 377.

  [>] Lincoln actually asked: Gerald M. Capers, Stephen A. Douglas: Defender of the Union (Boston: Little, Brown, 1959), 182–83.

  “I, John Brown”: F. B. Sanborn, The Life and Letters of John Brown (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1891), 620.

  “The death of no man”: Facts in this paragraph follow McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 209–11.

  On Saturday, February 25: Details in this paragraph are from Harold Holzer, Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 64–65.

  [>] “woe-begone look”: H. C. Bowen, “Recollections of Abraham Lincoln,” New York Independent, February 11, 1909, 292.

  a special urgency to revise: Richard C. McCormick recalled Lincoln saying that he “must review his address if it was to be delivered in New York,” for what he had prepared for Beecher’s church “might not be altogether appropriate to a miscellaneous political audience.” Holzer, Lincoln at Cooper Union, 73.

  [>] “unbecoming”: Charles C. Nott, statement in George Haven Putnam, Abraham Lincoln: The People’s Leader in the Struggle for National Existence (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1909), 220.

  “I had a feeling of pity”: Noah Brooks, Abraham Lincoln and the Downfall of American Slavery (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1894), 186–87.

  “Our fathers, who framed”: This quotation from Douglas, and the facts and quotations from Lincoln that follow, are in AL, “Address at Cooper Institute, New York City,” February 27, 1860, CWL, vol. 3, 523–31.

  [>] As Lincoln drew to the end: Brooks, Abraham Lincoln and the Downfall of American Slavery, 186–87.

  Four city newspapers: Holzer, Lincoln at Cooper Union, 149.

  “was one of the happiest”: Robert S. Harper, Lincoln and the Press (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951), 46–47.

  [>] Whisked off: Holzer, Lincoln at Cooper Union, 152. The Athenaeum Club was on the site of the present-day Judge Building, 110 Fifth Avenue. �
��New York Songlines: Virtual Walking Tours of Manhattan Streets, 5th Avenue,” http://home.nyc.rr.com/jkn/nysong lines/5av.htm, October 13, 2004.

  “seemed a sad and lonely man”: Putnam, Abraham Lincoln, 221.

  “I am not sure”: A. J. Dittenhoefer, How We Elected Lincoln: Personal Recollections of Lincoln and Men of His Time (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1916), 14–18.

  “I have been unable”: AL to Mary Lincoln, March 4, 1860, CWL, vol. 3, 555.

  “Creativity doesn’t happen”: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 23.

  “Some of the people”: ibid., 25–26.

  [>] complexity: ibid., 57.

  “There is a great deal”: Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (New York: Free Press, 1993), 97.

  One in-depth study . . . Another well-known study: ibid., 59–60, 72–73.

  John Quincy Adams: P. C. Nagel, John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, a Private Life (New York: Knopf, 1997); Charles Darwin: John Bowlby, Charles Darwin: A New Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991); Emily Dickinson: Jane Donahue Eberwein, ed., An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998), 137; Benjamin Disraeli: Stanley Weintraub, Disraeli: A Biography (New York: Dutton, 1993); William James: Linda Simon, Genuine Reality: A Life of William James (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998); William Tecumseh Sherman: Nassir Ghaemi, “General Sherman’s Illness,” unpublished ms.; Leo Tolstoy: Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy, My Confession (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983); Queen Victoria: M. Reid, Ask Sir James: Sir James Reid, Personal Physician to Queen Victoria and Physician-in-Ordinary to Three Monarchs (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1987).