THIS FAILURE of Lincoln"s political ambition coincided with a series of crises in his personal life. Despite his humor, intellectual pa.s.sion, and oratorical eloquence, he had always been awkward and self-conscious in the presence of women. "He was not very fond of girls," his stepmother remembered. His gangly appearance and uncouth behavior did little to recommend him to the ladies. "He would burst into a ball," recalled a friend, "with his big heavy Conestoga boots on, and exclaim aloud-"Oh-boys, how clean those girls look."" This was undoubtedly not the compliment the girls were looking for. Lincoln"s friend Henry Whitney provides a comic recollection of leaving Lincoln alone with some women at a social gathering and returning to discover him "as demoralized and ill at ease as a bashful country boy. He would put his arms behind him, and bring them to the front again, as if trying to hide them, and he tried apparently but in vain to get his long legs out of sight." His female friendships were confined mostly to older, safely married women.
Never at ease talking with women, Lincoln found writing to them equally awkward, "a business which I do not understand." In Stephen Vincent Benet"s epic poem John Brown"s Body, Lincoln expresses his difficulties with the fairer s.e.x.
...when the genius of the water moves,
And that"s the woman"s genius, I"m at sea
In every sense and meaning of the word,
With nothing but old patience for my chart,
And patience doesn"t always please a woman.
His awkwardness did not imply a lack of s.e.xual desire. "Lincoln had terribly strong pa.s.sions for women-could scarcely keep his hands off them," said his law partner, William Herndon, who added that his "honor and a strong will...enabled him to put out the fires of his terrible pa.s.sion." Judge David Davis, Lincoln"s companion on the circuit, agreed with this a.s.sessment, noting that "his Conscience Kept him from seduction-this saved many-many a woman." Before his marriage Lincoln enjoyed close relations with young women and almost certainly found outlets for his s.e.xual urges among the prost.i.tutes who were readily available on the frontier.
A year after Ann Rutledge"s death, Lincoln courted Mary Owens, the sister of his friend Mrs. Elizabeth Abell. Mary Owens was said to be "handsome," with dark blue eyes and "much vivacity." Well educated, she hailed from a comfortably affluent family in Kentucky and was noted as "a good conversationalist and a splendid reader."
Lincoln had met Miss Owens several years earlier when she visited her sister for a month in New Salem. In the aftermath of Ann Rutledge"s death, Elizabeth Abell told Lincoln she thought the young pair would make a good match and proposed going to Kentucky to bring her sister back. Lincoln was "confoundedly well pleased" with the idea. He remembered that she was likable, smart, and a good companion, although somewhat "oversize."
When the twenty-eight-year-old Mary Owens returned to Illinois, however, a disturbing transformation had taken place. "She now appeared," he later wrote, with perhaps some exaggeration, "a fair match for Falstaff," with a "want of teeth, weather-beaten appearance," and a size unattainable in "less than thirtyfive or forty years." He tried in vain to persuade himself "that the mind was much more to be valued than the person." He attempted "to imagine she was handsome, which, but for her unfortunate corpulency, was actually true." He conjured up ways he "might procrastinate the evil day" when he had to make good on his promise of marriage, but finally felt honor-bound to keep his word.
His proposal, written on May 7, 1837, may well be one of the most curiously unappealing ever penned. "This thing of living in Springfield is rather a dull business after all," he observed of the dismal life she might share. "I am afraid you would not be satisfied. There is a great deal of flourishing about in carriages here, which it would be your doom to see without shareing in it. You would have to be poor without the means of hiding your poverty. Do you believe you could bear that patiently?...What I have said I will most positively abide by, provided you wish it. My opinion is that you had better not do it. You have not been accustomed to hardship, and it may be more severe than you now immagine. Yours, &c.-Lincoln."
Not surprisingly, Mary Owens turned him down. Her rejection prompted Lincoln to write a humorous, self-deprecating letter to his friend Eliza Browning, Orville Browning"s wife. He acknowledged that he was "mortified almost beyond endurance" to think that "she whom I had taught myself to believe no body else would have, had actually rejected me with all my fancied greatness; and to cap the whole, I then, for the first time, began to suspect that I was really a little in love with her." He resolved "never again to think of marrying; and for this reason; I can never be satisfied with any one who would be block-head enough to have me."
Despite his disclaimer, eighteen months later, the thirty-one-year-old Lincoln became engaged to the lively and intelligent Mary Todd. The Edwards mansion on the hill, where Mary had come to stay with her sister, Elizabeth, was the center of Springfield society. Lincoln was among the many young men who gathered in the Edwards parlor, where the girls, dressed in the latest fashion, shared food, drink, and merry conversation.
To their friends and relatives, Mary and Abe seemed "the exact reverse" of each other-"physically, temperamentally, emotionally." She was short and voluptuous, her ample bosom accentuated by stays; he was uncommonly tall and cadaverous. While Mary possessed an open, pa.s.sionate, and impulsive nature, "her face an index to every pa.s.sing emotion," he was, even Mary admitted, a self-controlled man. What "he felt most deeply," Mary observed, "he expressed, the least." She was in her element at social gatherings, "the very creature of excitement." Vivacious and talkative, she was capable of making "a Bishop forget his prayers." While Lincoln"s good nature made him "a welcome guest everywhere," one Springfield woman recalled, "he rarely danced," much preferring a position amid the men he could entertain effortlessly with his amusing stories.
For all their differences, the couple had much in common. Lincoln had always been attracted to intelligent women, and Mary was a woman of intellectual gifts who had earned "the highest marks" in school and taken home "the biggest prizes." Endowed with an excellent memory, a quick wit, and a voracious appet.i.te for learning, she shared Lincoln"s love for discussing books and poetry. Like Lincoln, she could recite substantial pa.s.sages of poetry from memory, and they shared a love of Robert Burns. Indeed, four years after Lincoln"s death, Mary journeyed to the poet"s birthplace in Scotland, where, recalling one of her favorite poems about a lost love, she "sighed over poor "Highland Mary"s" grave."
Also, like Lincoln, she was fascinated by politics, having grown up in a political household. Among her happiest childhood memories were the sparkling dinner parties at her elegant brick house in Lexington, hosted by her father, Robert Todd, a Whig loyalist who had served in both the Kentucky House and Senate. At these sumptuous feasts, Lincoln"s idol Henry Clay was a frequent guest, along with members of Congress, cabinet members, governors, and foreign ministers. Mesmerized by their discussions, Mary became, her sisters recalled, "a violent little Whig," convinced that she was "destined to be the wife of some future President."
Undoubtedly, Mary told Lincoln of her many personal contacts with Clay, including how she once proudly rode her new pony to the statesman"s house. And she shared with him a vital interest in the political struggles of the day. "I suppose like the rest of us Whigs," she wrote a close friend in 1840, "you have been rejoicing in the recent election of Gen [William Henry] Harrison, a cause that has excited such deep interest in the nation and one of such vital importance to our prosperity-This fall I became quite a politician, rather an unladylike profession, yet at such a crisis, whose heart could remain untouched while the energies of all were called in question?" Lincoln was deeply engaged at the same time in "the great cause" of electing the "Old hero."
Beyond their love of poetry and politics, Mary and Abraham had both lost their mothers at an early age. Mary was only six when her thirty-one-year-old mother, Eliza Parker Todd, died giving birth to her seventh child. Eliza"s death, unlike the death of Nancy Hanks, did not disrupt the physical stability of the household. The Todd slaves continued to cook the meals, care for the children, fetch the wood, bank the fires, and drive the carriages as they had always done. If Lincoln was fortunate in his father"s choice of a second wife, however, Mary"s loss was aggravated by her father"s remarriage. Elizabeth Humphreys, a severe stepmother with cold blue eyes, gave birth to nine additional children, openly preferring her brood of Todds to the original clan. From the moment her stepmother moved in, Mary later recalled, her childhood turned "desolate." Henceforth, she lamented, her only real home was the boarding school to which she was exiled at the age of fourteen.
This estrangement, combined with a family history of mental instability and a tendency toward severe migraines, produced in Mary what one friend described as "an emotional temperament much like an April day, sunning all over with laughter one moment, the next crying as though her heart would break." She could be affectionate, generous, and optimistic one day; vengeful, depressed, and irritable the next. In the colloquial language of her friends, she was "either in the garret or cellar." In either mood, she needed attention, something the self-contained Lincoln was not always able to provide.
As their courtship proceeded, the very qualities that had first attracted the couple to each other may have become sources of conflict. Initially drawn to Mary by her ability to command any gathering with her intense energy, Lincoln may well have determined that this reflected a tiresome and compulsive need. Mary may have come to define Lincoln"s patience and objectivity as aloofness and inconsiderateness. We know only that at some point in the winter of 184041, as they approached marriage, a break occurred in their relationship.
While the inner lives of men and women living long ago are never easy to recover, the difficulty is compounded here by the absence of intimate letters between Mary and Abraham. Seward, Chase, and Bates disclosed their deepest feelings in their diaries and letters, but not a single letter survives from the days of the Lincolns" courtship, and only a precious few remain from the years of their marriage. While the emotional lives of Lincoln"s rivals still seem alive to us more than a century and a half after their deaths, the truth about Lincoln"s courtship is harder to recapture. Inevitably, in the vacuum created by the absence of doc.u.ments, gossip and speculation flourish.
Mary may have precipitated the break, influenced by the objections of her sister, Elizabeth, and her brother-in-law, Ninian Edwards, who believed she was marrying beneath her. Elizabeth warned Mary that she did not think that "Mr. L. & [she] were Suitable to Each other." The couple considered that Mary and Abraham"s "natures, mind-Education-raising &c were So different they Could not live happy as husband & wife." Mary had other suitors, including Edwin Webb, a well-to-do widower; Stephen Douglas, the up-and-coming Democratic politician; and, as Mary wrote her friend, Mercy Ann Levering, "an agreeable lawyer & grandson of Patrick Henry-what an honor!" Still, she insisted, "I love him not, & my hand will never be given, where my heart is not." With several good men to choose from, Mary may have decided she needed time to think through her family"s pointed reservations about Lincoln.
Far more likely, Lincoln"s own misgivings prompted a retreat from this second engagement. Though physically attracted to Mary, he seemed to question the strength of his love for her as he approached a final commitment. Joshua Speed recalled that "in the winter of 40 & 41," Lincoln "was very unhappy about his engagement to [Mary]-Not being entirely satisfied that his heart was going with his hand." Speed"s choice of the same phrase that Mary used suggests that it must have been a common expression to indicate an embrace of marriage without the proper romantic feelings. "How much [Lincoln] suffered," Speed recalled, "none Know so well as myself-He disclosed his whole heart to me."
Recent scholarship has suggested that Lincoln"s change of heart was influenced by his affection for Ninian Edwards"s cousin Matilda Edwards, who had come to spend the winter in Springfield. "A lovelier girl I never saw," Mary herself conceded upon first meeting Matilda. Orville Browning traced Lincoln"s "aberration of mind" to the predicament in which he found himself: "engaged to Miss Todd, and in love with Miss Edwards, and his conscience troubled him dreadfully for the supposed injustice he had done, and the supposed violation of his word." While there is no evidence that Lincoln ever made his feelings known to Matilda, Browning"s observation is supported by an acquaintance"s letter describing the complicated situation. Though Lincoln was committed to Mary, Springfield resident Jane Bell observed, he could "never bear to leave Miss Edward"s side in company." He thought her so perfect that if "he had it in his power he would not have one feature in her face altered." His indiscreet behavior drew criticism from his friends, Bell claimed, who "thought he was acting very wrong and very imprudently and told him so and he went crazy on the strength of it."
Possibly, Lincoln"s infatuation with Matilda was merely a distraction from the anxiety surrounding his impending marriage to Mary. According to Elizabeth Edwards, Lincoln was apprehensive about "his ability and Capacity to please and support a wife," and doubtful about the inst.i.tution of marriage itself. He likely feared that a wife and family would undermine his concentration and purpose. He would be responsible for the life and happiness of a woman accustomed to wealth and luxury; he would be unable to read late into the nights, pursuing new knowledge and the mastery of law and politics.
His fear that marriage might hinder his career was a common one. The uncertainties of establishing a legal practice in the new-market economy of the mid-nineteenth century caused many young lawyers to delay wedlock, driving up the marriage age. The Harvard law professor Joseph Story is famously quoted as saying that the law "is a jealous mistress, and requires a long and constant courtship." What applied to the law applied still more to politics. For Lincoln, struggling to establish himself in both, marriage must have presented pitfalls for his enormous ambitions.
Lincoln drafted a letter to Mary ending the engagement. He asked Speed to deliver it, but Speed refused, warning that he should talk to her instead, for "once put your words in writing and they Stand as a living & eternal Monument against you." Lincoln did go to see Mary and, according to Speed, told her that he did not love her. As soon as she began to weep, he lost his nerve. "To tell you the truth Speed, it was too much for me. I found the tears trickling down my own cheeks. I caught her in my arms and kissed her." The engagement was temporarily renewed, and Lincoln was forced into another meeting to sever the engagement. This second confrontation left him devastated-both because he had hurt Mary and because he had long held his "ability to keep [his] resolves when they are made...as the only, or at least the chief, gem of [his] character."
DURING THIS GRIM WINTER, sorrows came to Lincoln "not single spies/But in battalions." Joshua Speed announced his intention to return in a few months" time to his family"s plantation in Louisville, Kentucky. Speed"s father had died, and he felt responsible for his grieving mother. On January 1, 1841, he sold his interest in the general store where he had lived and worked for seven years. Speed"s departure would bring an end to the pleasant evenings around the fireplace, where the young men of Springfield had gathered to discuss politics. More discouraging for Lincoln, Speed"s departure meant the loss of the one friend to whom he had opened his heart in free and easy communion. "I shall be verry lonesome without you," Lincoln told Speed. "How miserably things seem to be arranged in this world. If we have no friends, we have no pleasure; and if we have them, we are sure to lose them, and be doubly pained by the loss."
The awkward dissolution of his engagement to Mary and the antic.i.p.ated loss of his best friend combined with the collapse of the internal improvement projects and the consequent damage to his reputation to induce a state of mourning that deepened for weeks. He stopped attending the legislature and withdrew from the lively social life he had enjoyed. His friends worried that he was suicidal. According to Speed, "Lincoln went Crazy-had to remove razors from his room-take away all Knives and other such dangerous things-&c-it was terrible." He was "delirious to the extent of not knowing what he was doing," Orville Browning recalled, and for a period of time was incapable of talking coherently. "Poor L!" James Conkling wrote to his future wife, Mercy Ann Levering; "he is reduced and emaciated in appearance and seems scarcely to possess strength enough to speak above a whisper. His case at present is truly deplorable."
In Lincoln"s time, this combination of symptoms-feelings of hopelessness and listlessness, thoughts of death and suicide-was called hypochondriasis ("the hypo") or "the vapours." Its source was thought to be in the hypochondria, that portion of the abdomen which was then considered the seat of emotions, containing the liver, gallbladder, and spleen. Treatment for the liver and digestive system was recommended.
"I have, within the last few days, been making a most discreditable exhibition of myself in the way of hypochondriaism," Lincoln confessed to his law partner and friend John Stuart on January 20, 1841. Desperately, he sought a post office job for Dr. Anson Henry, who would leave Springfield if the job did not materialize. His presence, Lincoln told Stuart, was "necessary to my existence."
Three days later, Lincoln wrote Stuart again. "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."
Hoping medical treatment might a.s.suage his sorrow, Lincoln consulted not only Dr. Henry but Dr. Daniel Drake at the medical college in Cincinnati; Drake was perhaps the most eminent medical scientist in the West. Lincoln described his condition at length in a letter and asked for counsel. The doctor wisely replied that he could not offer a diagnosis for Lincoln "without a personal interview."
Throughout the nadir of Lincoln"s depression, Speed stayed at his friend"s side. In a conversation both men would remember as long as they lived, Speed warned Lincoln that if he did not rally, he would most certainly die. Lincoln replied that he was more than willing to die, but that he had "done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived, and that to connect his name with the events transpiring in his day and generation and so impress himself upon them as to link his name with something that would redound to the interest of his fellow man was what he desired to live for."
Even in this moment of despair, the strength of Lincoln"s desire to engrave his name in history carried him forward. Like the ancient Greeks, Lincoln seemed to believe that "ideas of a person"s worth are tied to the way others, both contemporaries and future generations, perceive him." Unable to find comfort in the idea of a literal afterlife in heaven, he found consolation in the conviction that in the memories of others, some part of us remains alive. "To see memory as the essence of life came naturally to Lincoln," Robert Bruce observes, for he was a man who "seemed to live most intensely through the process of thought, the expression of thought, and the exchange of thought with others." Indeed, in a poem inspired by a visit to his childhood home, Lincoln emphasized the centrality of memory, which he described as "thou midway world/"Twixt Earth and paradise."
Fueled by his resilience, conviction, and strength of will, Lincoln gradually recovered from his depression. He understood, he told Speed later, that in times of anxiety it is critical to "avoid being idle," that "business and conversation of friends" were necessary to give the mind "rest from that intensity of thought, which will some times wear the sweetest idea threadbare and turn it to the bitterness of death." He returned to his law practice and his duties in the legislature, resuming his work on behalf of the Whig Party. That summer of 1841, he remedied the absence of good conversation and intimate friendship with a monthlong visit to Speed in Kentucky. The following February, he delivered an eloquent address to a temperance society in Springfield. This speech not only revealed a man in full command of his powers; it ill.u.s.trated Lincoln"s masterful approach to leadership: he counseled temperance advocates that if they continued to denounce the dram seller and the drinker in "thundering tones of anathema and denunciation," nothing would be accomplished. Far better to employ the approach of "erring man to an erring brother," guided by the old adage that a "drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall."
Mental health, contemporary psychiatrists tell us, consists of the ability to adapt to the inevitable stresses and misfortunes of life. It does not mean freedom from anxiety and depression, but only the ability to cope with these afflictions in a healthy way. "An outstanding feature of successful adaptation," writes George Vaillant, "is that it leaves the way open for future growth." Of course, Abraham Lincoln"s capacity for growth would prove enormous.
In the same month that he delivered his temperance address, Lincoln reported to Speed that he was "quite clear of the hypo" and "even better than I was along in the fall." So long as he remained unsure of his feelings, however, he kept himself apart from Mary. During the long months of their separation, Mary missed him tremendously. In a letter to a friend she lamented that she had been "much alone of late," having not seen Lincoln "in the gay world for months."
She whimsically considered taking up Lyman Trumbull-a former beau of her friend Mercy Ann-a Democrat who was then serving as secretary of state for Illinois. "I feel much disposed in your absence, to lay in my claims, as he is talented & agreeable & sometimes countenances me," she told Mercy Ann. But in fact, she had no serious desire to take up with someone else, so long as Lincoln remained a possibility. Her patience paid off. During the summer of 1842, after the couple had gone nearly eighteen months without personal contact, mutual friends conspired to bring Mary and Abraham back together.
This time around, thanks in part to the wise counsel Lincoln had provided Speed regarding his friend"s tortured love affair with a young woman he had met in Kentucky, Lincoln recognized in his own forebodings "the worst sort of nonsense." Learning that Speed was plagued with doubts following his betrothal to f.a.n.n.y Henning, Lincoln labored to convince him that he truly loved the young woman. The problem, he told Speed, was simply an unrealistic expectation of what love was supposed to be like. Speaking of himself as well, Lincoln rhapsodized: "It is the peculiar misfortune of both you and me, to dream dreams of Elysium far exceeding all that any thing earthly can realize." Indeed, Lincoln mused, had he understood his own muddled courtship as well as he understood Speed"s, he might have "sailed through clear."
His doubts about marriage beginning to fade, he searched for final rea.s.surance from his newly married friend. ""Are you now, in feeling as well as in judgement, glad you are married as you are?" From any body but me, this would be an impudent question not to be tolerated; but I know you will pardon it in me. Please answer it quickly as I feel impatient to know." a.s.sured that his closest friend had survived the ordeal of marriage and was, in fact, very happy, Lincoln summoned the courage to renew his commitment to Mary.
On the evening of November 4, 1842, before a small group of friends and relatives in the parlor of the Edwards mansion, Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd were married. "Nothing new here," Lincoln wrote a friend a week later, "except my marrying, which to me, is a matter of profound wonder." Three days short of nine months after the marriage, a son, Robert Todd, was born to the Lincolns, to be followed three years later by a second son, Edward.
LOOKING BACK to the winter of Lincoln"s discontent, there is little doubt that he suffered what would later be called an incapacitating depression. While biographers have rightly looked to the twin losses of Mary Todd and Joshua Speed to explain Lincoln"s descent into depression, less attention has been paid to the blow he must have suffered with the seeming disintegration of the political dreams that had sustained him for so many years. Manifestations of despair after Ann Rutledge"s death had been awful to endure, but this episode was compounded by the shadow of a damaged reputation and diminished hope for the future.
Conscious of his superior powers and the extraordinary reach of his mind and sensibilities, Lincoln had feared from his earliest days that these qualities would never find fulfillment or bring him recognition among his fellows. Periodically, when the distance between his lofty ambition and the reality of his circ.u.mstances seemed unbridgeable, he was engulfed by tremendous sadness. If he rarely spoke of his inner feelings, he often expressed emotions through the poetry he admired. Gray"s "Elegy," which Lincoln quoted in his small autobiography to explain his att.i.tude toward his childhood poverty, a.s.serts that "Full many a flower is born to blush unseen/And waste its sweetness on the desert air." The poet laments a dead young villager of immense but untapped talent. "Here rests his head upon the lap of earth/A youth to fortune and to fame unknown/Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth/And Melancholy marked him for her own." Lincoln"s life had been a continuing struggle to escape such a destiny. In that troubling winter of 1841, he must have felt, at least for the moment, that his long struggle had been fruitless.
Some students of Lincoln have suggested that he suffered from chronic depression. One confusion in making this designation is the interchangeable use of the terms "sadness," "melancholy," and "depression." To be sure, Lincoln was a melancholy man. "His melancholy dript from him as he walked," said his law partner, William Herndon, an observation echoed by dozens of others. "No element of Mr. Lincoln"s character was so marked, obvious and ingrained as his mysterious and profound melancholy," recalled Henry Whitney. "This melancholy was stamped on him while in the period of his gestation. It was part of his nature and could no more be shaken off than he could part with his brains."
At times Lincoln"s melancholy signaled a withdrawal to the solitude of thought. As a child, he would retreat from others to read. In later life, he would work a problem through in private-whether a proof of Euclidean geometry or the meaning of the Declaration of Independence. Only when he had resolved the problems and issues in his own mind did he display the results of his private meditations. It is little wonder that others saw these withdrawals as evidence of melancholy. Furthermore, the very contours of Lincoln"s face in repose lent him a sorrowful aspect. One observer remarked that "his face was about the saddest I ever looked upon." Another contemporary described his face as "slightly wrinkled about the brows, but not from trouble. It was intense, constant thought that planted the wrinkles there."
Unlike depression, melancholy does not have a specific cause. It is an aspect of temperament, perhaps genetically based. One may emerge from the hypo, as Lincoln did, but melancholy is an indelible part of one"s nature. Lincoln understood this: "a tendency to melancholly," he told Joshua"s sister, Mary, "is a misfortune not a fault."
"Melancholy," writes the modern novelist Thomas Pynchon, "is a far richer and more complex ailment than simple depression. There is a generous amplitude of possibility, chances for productive behavior, even what may be identified as a sense of humor." And, as everyone connected with Lincoln testified, he was an extraordinarily funny man. "When he first came among us," wrote a Springfield friend, "his wit & humor boiled over." When he told his humorous stories, Henry Whitney marveled, "he emerged from his cave of gloom and came back, like one awakened from sleep, to the world in which he lived, again." His storytelling, Speed believed, was "necessary to his very existence-Most men who have been great students such as he was in their hours of idleness have taken to the bottle, to cards or dice-He had no fondness for any of these-Hence he sought relaxation in anecdotes." Lincoln himself recognized that humor was an essential aspect of his temperament. He laughed, he explained, so he did not weep. He saw laughter as the "joyous, universal evergreen of life." His stories were intended "to whistle off sadness."
Modern psychiatry regards humor as probably the most mature and healthy means of adapting to melancholy. "Humor, like hope, permits one to focus upon and to bear what is too terrible to be borne," writes George Valliant. "Humor can be marvelously therapeutic," adds another observer. "It can deflate without destroying; it can instruct while it entertains; it saves us from our pretensions; and it provides an outlet for feeling that expressed another way would be corrosive."