Lincoln's Melancholy

[Rob Wick]

I said yesterday that there was enough evidence to convince me that Lincoln suffered from some form of mental illness, i.e., likely a mlld form of clinical depression. Let's look over the evidence that supports this belief.

1). Lincoln's loss of his mother at such a young age. I pointed out that my father died when I was five. He was 39 and had a massive heart attack, so his death was unexpected. My mother did all she could to try to raise us and keep food on the table, but she was unaware of the psychological effects that a child losing a parent at such a young age can have. Throughout my life I have done research on those effects, and I can say that from personal experience the early death of a parent has a great impact on a child. Look at this article that I recently found. I was particularly struck by this fact.

Psychiatrists and others have generally been struck by how often major childhood loss seems to result in psychopathology. Studies of adults with various mental disorders, especially depression, frequently reveal childhood bereavement, suggesting that such loss may precipitate or contribute to the development of a variety of psychiatric disorders and that this experience can render a person emotionally vulnerable for life. This special vulnerability of children is attributed to developmental immaturity and insufficiently developed coping capacities.

2)The death of Lincoln's sister. Ten years after the death of Nancy Hanks Lincoln, Sarah Grigsby died in childbirth. Although he was 19 by this time, it wouldn't take a great deal of imagination to see the closeness that Abraham and Sarah would have developed after Nancy died and Thomas went back to Kentucky to marry Sarah Bush Johnston. That Sarah died while giving birth to the stillborn nephew of Lincoln surely added to the grief at what should have been a time of joy. According to the National Park Service, one source is quoted as saying "They were close companions and were a great deal alike in temperament."

3)His relationship to his father. A child who experienced the early death of a parent clings to the surviving parent as a buffer against the grief that such a death naturally causes. It is well known that Lincoln's relationship to his father was very strained, to the point that he did not attend his funeral. The feeling of abandonment that Lincoln must have felt when Thomas left for Kentucky and Abraham's feelings that Thomas treated him like a slave certainly contributed to the estrangement. How else can one explain how quickly Abraham disassociated himself from Thomas when he legally could.

4)The New Salem evidence. Regardless of what one believes of the Ann Rutledge story, there is no question that in 1835, Lincoln suffered a major event that caused his neighbors concern. As Joshua Shenk writes "As the original accounts make clear, his breakdown was impossible to miss. Nearly everyone in the community who gave testimony spoke of it, remembering its contours even decades later. Lincoln, after all, had become immensely popular, loved by young ruffians and old families alike. Now, all of a sudden he was openly moping and threatening to kill himself. Why? people asked. What accounted for the great change?"

5)The Suicide Soliloquy. Although it has never been conclusively proven that Lincoln wrote this, most scholars agree it fits Lincoln's style, tone and syntax.

Here, where the lonely hooting owl
Sends forth his midnight moans,
Fierce wolves shall o'er my carcase growl,
Or buzzards pick my bones.

No fellow-man shall learn my fate,
Or where my ashes lie;
Unless by beasts drawn round their bait,
Or by the ravens' cry.

Yes! I've resolved the deed to do,
And this the place to do it:
This heart I'll rush a dagger through
Though I in hell should rue it!

Add to this the poem I alluded to concerning Matthew Gentry, and this suggests a strong, almost pathological, feeling of despair and a deep, abiding interest in psychological issues enhanced by his own mental struggles.

6)"Lincoln went Crazy." It is the years 1840-41 that seem to me the strongest evidence that Lincoln suffered from a mental illness. I quote at length from Shenk:
For Lincoln in this winter many things were awry. Even as he faced the possibility that his political career was sunk, it seemed likely that he was inextricably bound to a woman he didn't love (Mary Todd) and that Joshua Speed was going to either move away to Kentucky or stay in Illinois and marry Matilda Edwards, the young woman whom Lincoln said he really wanted but could not even approach, because of his bond with Todd. Then came a stretch of intensely cold weather, which, Lincoln later wrote, "my experience clearly proves to be verry severe on defective nerves." Once again he began to speak openly about his misery, hopelessness, and thoughts of suicide—alarming his friends. "Lincoln went Crazy," Speed recalled. "—had to remove razors from his room—take away all Knives and other such dangerous things—&—it was terrible."

In January of 1841 Lincoln submitted himself to the care of a medical doctor, spending several hours a day with Dr. Anson Henry, whom he called "necessary to my existence." Although few details of the treatment are extant, he probably went through what a prominent physician of the time called "the desolating tortures of officious medication." When he emerged, on January 20, he was "reduced and emaciated in appearance," wrote a young lawyer in town named James Conkling. On January 23 Lincoln wrote to his law partner in Washington: "I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I can not tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me."

Add to that the Drake letter, which I again remind everyone came from Speed, and it seems self-evident this was more than a case of the "blues."

7)Roland Diller's interview with Ida Tarbell. All this so far points to depressive behavior up to Lincoln's early 30s. Yet, people in Springfield, long after Lincoln's assassination remembered the "melancholic" nature of Lincoln. As I stated the other day, one of the most powerful (in my mind) came from Ida Tarbell's interview with Roland Diller. “He had to do that cause he was melancholic like. He had shadows over him. We used to say when we saw him broodin’ ‘What’s the use Abe? Nothing ain’t your fault. What’s the use?’ but he couldn’t help it.” What I didn't mention before was that Diller offered this information without Tarbell's prompting. It had made such an impression on him that he brought it up on his own accord.

I'm going to stop here, because I have other work that I have to get to, but I urge you to read through these pieces of evidence. None in and of itself is absolutely conclusive, but taken together, they point to a pretty strong case that Lincoln suffered from a mental illness.

Oh, and Gene, I got a headache just from reading your last post. Thanks.

Best
Rob