Lincoln's Melancholy | Depression | The Brighter Side of Terminal Depression

Shenk's thesis can be stated briefly. That Abraham Lincoln was, for most of his life, a profound depressive, even at times considering suicide; that "melancholics" of his time --- the mid-19th Century --- were not considered to be strange nor incapable; that Lincoln's moods may have helped him to center himself, made him more contemplative and creative; that he and the country may have benefited thereby.

However, there are others who suspect that our president was quite mad. The thought that he (and America) were made better through his excesses of black bile is quite mad as well.

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Psychiatrists and psychologists know that depressives like Lincoln are dangerous to themselves, certainly to people around them ... mainly because of their fixation on the self, supposing that their personal tragedies exceed the normal woes of others around them. Shenk tells us that Lincoln's story demonstrates "its dark heart, the querulous, dissatisfied, doubting experience often marked by periods of withdrawal and sometimes utter collapse." He then goes on to quote Lincoln's famous letter, written while he was courting (or being captured by) Mary Todd:

I am now the most miserable man living. If what I felt were distributed to the whole human family there would not be one happy face on the earth. I must die or be better it appears to me. I awfully forbode I shall not.

Sheesh. And this came from the pen of the man who became the sixteenth President of a nation teetering on the edge of disaster?

Those of us who are depressives know that these mood swings are, indeed, awful. We also know that many of us will do anything to prevent their occurrence or (even worse) their reoccurrence. When I went through my first breakdown, there was nothing on the horizon to splay the dreadful feelings that subsumed my soul (no Prozac in 1970). I remember sitting and looking at the wall, a very bleak wall, for months --- knowing there was nothing to be done, thinking perhaps I had best end it all. One of my friends told me I should "snap out of it," and I remember --- for the first time in a long time --- having an upswelling of anger. "If she only knew, if she only knew what was really going on in my heart, she would never in a hundred years have said that," I thought. Thus the monstrous egos of those of us who experience deep melancholy.

Shenk suggests that Lincoln's strengths came out of his emotional pain in early 1841. Perhaps he was some kind of a precursor to Freud, with a self-analysis that provided him with grave wisdom, one that was to guide him for the rest of his life. The author even presents us with research that suggests that depressives "may simply be judging themselves and the world much more accurately than non-depressed people, and finding it not a pretty place." To put it another way, those who are relentlessly happy may be suffering from a "major afflictive disorder."

God that it were so. From my own experience, I learned that we depressives are capable of some profoundly senseless acts. Van Gogh's ear; Leonardo's crabby battles with the Pope; Meriwether Lewis's suicide; William Styron's self-serving biography of his own breakdown, Darkness Visible; Hermann Melville's lunatic statement that we depressives are wiser: "Utter darkness is then his light, and cat-like he distinctly sees all objects through a medium which is mere blindness to common vision."

Anyone who is as bent on self-destruct as Lincoln was should not be running a country, much less a republic on the edge of war. His decade-long fixation on the question of slavery should have been a warning bell to friends and foes alike. We paranoiacs will often take on fraught causes that should be treated with care and balance. Because of our own inner turmoil, we will often turn them into either/or, black-and-white questions that can trample the rights of our less hysterical fellows.

In an early review in this magazine (of A Photographic Picture of the Civil War), our reviewer wrote that the hostilities of 1861 - 1865 were

nakedly and shamelessly futile: slavery was on the decline, and would have gone out of existence by the start of the 20th Century from determinism (the economic structure of the industrial revolution and the ownership of humans are incompatible).

Our writer went on to point out that the Civil War

made a hero out of one who should be considered one of the most misdirected, moody rapscallions in American history --- Abraham Lincoln. And it unjustly vilified one who was the most noble and self-effacing --- Jefferson Davis.

Like many depressives, Lincoln overcame his own supposed "tragedy" by involving himself in the national tragedy, the division between the North and the South (a split not unlike his own schizophrenia).

Instead of being a statesman, seeking a peaceful resolution of the issue, he elected violence, in the same way that he committed violence on himself by his miserable marriage and the general course of his contentious life. Depressives pose many dangers to others. As one writer pointed out --- see the introduction to Edmund Wilson's appropriately named Patriotic Gore --- in terms of sheer quantity of blood leeched into the ground, the conflict between the American North and South was a doozy.

It should have been a quick in-and-out fight. But, as with World War I (for which, technologically, it was the precursor) it fed on itself, went on and on, draining resources, ruining the land, killing almost 650,000 men, wounding another 200,000. The tolls for death and disfigurement were four times greater than those of World Wars I and II.

The sixteenth president of the United States has for over a century been glorified as another Washington or Jefferson. Shenk is a member of this sorry cult. Lincoln's Melancholy starts off with a quote from Leo Tolstoy, about his meeting with a "Caucasian chief of the Circassians, who, living far away from civilized life in the mountains, had but a fragmentary and childish comprehension of the world and its history." This man's hero?

His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived.

Historians, politicians, fundamentalists and other simple folk continue to this day to lionize one who damped, forever, America's chance to be the home to honor, liberty, and hope. The history of our national government after the Civil War is scandalous. As our reviewer pointed out, Lincoln's war

put an end to a natural sectional evolution that could have been immensely beneficial to the tolerance and the ease of America. The division of the country into the northern tier of states and The South would have been a boon --- psychologically, physically, socially, economically.
Had this been allowed to come to pass, the continent would have been divided into several more appropriately-sized countries. In addition to the Northern Republic and the Confederacy, there would've been the Republic of Texas, the Union of the Middle West, the States of the Upper West, the large country we now call California, and the Washington/Oregon Territories.

Smaller nation-states are uniformly more efficient, more encouraging of civil liberties, less subject to the inefficiency of grandiosity. Thus we would have ended up with six or seven nations which would have grown independent politically --- but which would have been nicely married in language, commerce, and the arts.

To put it more succinctly: compare the present government in Washington to the governments of Copenhagen, Bern, Oslo, or Helsinki. Look at Denmark, the Benelux Countries, Switzerland, Scandinavia --- not to say Costa Rica, New Zealand, and Japan: all of them end up at the top of a list compiled by The Economist of those nations which observe a greater degree of civil liberties and personal freedom as opposed to, say, Russia, China, India, Brazil, the United States. Small size and hegemony, in other words, are the key to those freedoms idealized in the United Nations' "Declaration of Human Rights."

--- Lolita Lark