A First-Rate Madness (10 page)

 

REGARDING
FAMILY HISTORY,
insanity and melancholy abounded in the Lincoln clan. Lincoln's father was gloomy; a neighbor commented that he “often got the ‘blues,' and had some strange sort of spells, and wanted to be alone all he could when he had them.” As Shenk recounts, other Lincolns also suffered:

Regarding the
course
of his illness, Lincoln suffered his first severe depressive episode early in life, at age twenty-six, which is typical for this disease. He would recover from each episode (also typical), be well for a time, and then suffer another episode. (The next severe depression occurred at age thirty-two.) Life experiences triggered the episodes (the death of his love interest in the first episode, the refusal of a marriage proposal in the second, his imminent marriage in a third). For a century, historians mistook these environmental triggers as the sole causes of Lincoln's melancholy. In middle age, his depressive episodes tapered off, leaving him at a mildly depressed baseline personality. As the Civil War dragged on, he became more morose, and then, after he lost his eleven-year-old son Willie to typhoid fever in 1862, he probably went into a final severe depression. In April 1865, when he went to see a play at Ford's Theater, he was only beginning to recover.

Doctors also
treated
Lincoln's mental illness. In 1841, Dr. Anson Henry intensively medicated the thirty-two-year-old state legislator. A friend related, “The Doctors say he is within an inch of being a perfect lunatic for life. He was perfectly crazy for some time, not able to attend to his business at all. They say he don't look like the same person.” Doctors apparently told Lincoln that he suffered from “hypochondriasm,” then as now a descriptor of physical symptoms originating from mental causes. In an age of “great and dangerous cures” based on little science, the most common treatment for mental illness—whether termed hypochondriasis, melancholia, or insanity—was
bleeding:
the removal of blood by the application of leeches to suck, or by using a lancet to cut. The theory, going back to the ancient Roman physician Galen, was that bleeding would put the body's “humors” (fluids or substances: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile) back into balance. Other approaches that sought to balance the humors involved purgatives (which induced vomiting) or laxatives. Doctors also recommended extremely cold showers. Dr. Henry adhered to these views and prescribed mercury tablets (Lincoln called them “my blue pills”) for their purgative and laxative effects. He probably also bled Lincoln. Doctors treated Lincoln intensively, but they could not help him; no Prozac existed to lift his gloom even for a day, and he knew it. He wrote in 1841, “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.”

 

 

LINCOLN SUFFERED FROM severe depression, probably a version of manic-depressive illness (as was common in his relatives), more severe on the depressive side, with only mild symptoms, in his younger years, of high energy and “fun and hilarity without restraint” (according to a fellow politician).

Most of the time, Lincoln was a highly depressed, even suicidal man. Yet his depression conferred upon him, I believe, realism and empathy that helped make him a superb crisis leader. In his personal letters of the 1850s, one sees Lincoln's notable empathy when he describes seeing shackled slaves on a steamboat in 1841, and when he reacts to the white supremacist attitudes of the 1840s “Know-Nothing” movement:

This natural empathy was tempered with hardy realism, even ruthlessness. The great man was not a consistent abolitionist. Lincoln opposed slavery, but until 1863 he also opposed abolishing it. He was the compromise Republican candidate in 1860, seen as a moderate who might still reach a peaceful accord with the South.

Lincoln saw a harsh and complex reality: the Constitution specifically sanctioned slavery. The South was fully within its constitutional rights to insist that slavery be protected. Lincoln the lawyer understood the law; but Lincoln the man believed that slavery was wrong; and Lincoln the politician realized that abolitionist views were spreading. Sooner or later, the Constitution would have to be altered and slavery outlawed;
how
was the problem.

Lincoln strongly opposed what actually happened, the violent ending of slavery in the South. He had preferred a containment strategy, preventing its expansion to the West, after which it would die out gradually. In a counterfactual world, if there had been no Civil War, slavery probably would have withered away within a few decades. It had been outlawed in the British Commonwealth by the 1840s after public opinion gradually but inevitably turned against it, and it ended in its last outpost, Brazil, by 1888. It would have died in the South eventually, with or without war. Lincoln was realistic in his attempt to compromise: his policy of “containment” might well have worked if given a chance.

It is no accident that Lincoln's greatest political hero was Senator Henry Clay, from the border state of Kentucky, the great compromiser of 1850. Lincoln, like Gandhi, admired compromise. Gandhi thought that sincere negotiation—extensive efforts at compromise—needed to fail fully before any nonviolent action began. Nonviolent resistance, like war, was a last resort, not an initial tactic. Lincoln pursued a similar philosophy throughout the 1850s, to the exasperation of abolitionists. After Fort Sumter, he realized that compromise was lost. He had hoped that slavery could be ended peacefully, but he was not given that option.

Before the war, then, Lincoln tried to be a truly national leader, sympathizing with both North and South, and thus distrusted by both. Despite his efforts, and a realistic assessment of what could have been, both extremes in North and South united to bring on a war that Lincoln had feverishly striven to avoid. When it came, Lincoln realistically turned to winning it.

 

 

LIKE MOST NORTHERNERS, the new president initially hoped the war could end speedily—an aberrant revolt quickly put down, like the Whiskey Rebellion of 1786. So he continued to push his moderate agenda: maintain the Union; limit, but do not abolish, slavery. He tried not to provoke greater Southern resentment than already existed, especially in the border states. Said the realist president, “I would like to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky.” (Kentucky remained in the Union, despite being a slave state.) He believed that though slavery was evil, its solution did not entail equal civil rights. Instead, he proposed returning American blacks to their “homeland,” the new state of Liberia in West Africa. In August 1862, black leaders who met with Lincoln in the White House were struck by his insensitivity. He called slavery the “greatest wrong inflicted on any people,” but denied any possibility of racial equality. It was a fact, he stated, not a matter for debate that “you and we are different. . . . It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.” His visitors felt he was lecturing them on this subject, rather than discussing it with them. Frederick Douglass wasn't present at this meeting, but when he was told about it, he felt compelled to write a scathing attack on Lincoln.

This is not the Abraham Lincoln of schoolbook lore: this realistic president was shrewd, even harsh. He was the ultimate politician, trying to keep all sides happy. He also could be a ruthless politician, willing to sacrifice his natural allies to mollify his strident enemies.

Yet one year after this meeting, Lincoln would issue the Emancipation Proclamation; he would give up all pretense of saving slavery anywhere or of avoiding hurt feelings among its sympathizers; he never spoke of repatriation to Africa again; and beginning in 1863, he began to arm American blacks, eventually putting about 150,000 former slaves in the Union army, along with another 40,000 blacks who had been free before the war; in total, blacks would eventually compose more than 10 percent of the Union force. Douglass became a Lincoln supporter, and in 1864 the first black invitee to a presidential inaugural ball. In the East Room of the White House, amid many prominent celebrants, Lincoln called out, “Here comes my friend Douglass. I am glad to see you. I saw you in the crowd today, listening to my inaugural address; how did you like it?” When Douglass briefly replied positively, Lincoln announced to all around him, “There is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours.”

Lincoln's power should not be overstated: Congress, pushed by the abolitionist radicals, led the way on emancipation. Emancipation was already a reality: tens of thousands of Southern slaves liberated themselves by deserting to the Union lines. But Lincoln saw this reality, and he was enough of a realist to know that he must change his position quickly to adapt to it.

Some historians think the war changed Lincoln, making him more empathic with American blacks. Equally important, I think, was Lincoln's evolving realistic assessment of what racial relations would become in postwar America. Between the cold 1862 meeting with black leaders and the Emancipation Proclamation a year later, much blood was shed: Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg, Antietam. Lincoln realized that this war had only just begun, and that no rapid resolution and reconstruction was possible. The Union had been dissolved, as a matter of fact, and it would not be restored easily.

LINCOLN CLEARLY EMPATHIZED with slaves, yet his equally strong realism had prevented him from subscribing to radical abolitionism. His war experiences, in particular the gallantry of black soldiers in the Union army, made him empathize even more with blacks. In March 1864, he gave a speech to Indiana soldiers in which he commented, “Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.” Meanwhile, the real political and social facts had also changed forever.

By 1864, Lincoln knew that the status quo ante could not be restored: Southern slavery could never return. And yet the South would not accept pure equality. How were these two opposing realities to be reconciled? Lincoln struggled with this conundrum in his final year, as all of America would for decades thereafter.

Perhaps Lincoln would have done no better than Andrew Johnson and President Grant and others. We cannot say. There were so many problems to wrestle with: profound racial hatred, an exhausted nation, a demobilizing army; so many wounds, so little balm. But Lincoln's second inaugural address at least suggests a general line of thinking that seems to interweave realism and empathy in a manner rarely seen among American presidents. Even after Gettysburg and Vicksburg and the destruction of Atlanta, in the face of approaching military victory, Lincoln unfurled no “Mission Accomplished” banners. He did not bask in success; instead, he reached out to his enemies, tried to commune with them, presaging Martin Luther King's advice that when your enemy is most vulnerable, when you could hurt him badly,
that
is when you must not do it. A psychological wisdom, a mix of realism and empathy, lay behind these classic words: