Lincoln's Quest for Union - A Psychological Profile

[Gene C]

Written by Charles Strozier, second edition published 2000.

He makes some interesting and valued observations in the book, but he started off badly for me with his comments about Lincoln and his mother. Such as...

"Lincoln wrote a humorous letter on April Fools Day 1838 to his good friend and maternal figure, Mrs. Orville Browning. The letter mocks his recent unsuccessful courtship of Mary Owen, whom he could not behold without 'thinking of my mother, and this not from her withered features, for her skin was too full of fat, to permit its contracting into wrinkles; but from her want of front teeth, weather beaten appearance in general, and from a kind of notion that ran in my head that nothing could have commenced at the size of infancy, and reached her present size in bulk in less than thirty five or forty years'. In this letter Lincoln used the image of his mother as a kind of baseline for ugliness. It is true of coarse, that Lincoln called Sarah Lincoln "mother", as he was later to refer to Mary after they had children. but unconsciously "mother" for Lincoln also had to mean Nancy. Perhaps she had become that ugly. Certainly the only form of dentistry in those days was extraction, and on her deathbed she may have looked suddenly old and withered to her young son.
The endurance of this image in Lincoln suggest that it carried some sense of childhood disappointment with his mother. In a part of himself he seemed not to trust her."

But wait, there's more, and it gets more far-fetched....remember the story of Lincoln killing a wild turkey before his eighth birthday? I'll share with you what Strozier has to say about that in another post.