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 institution 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 anticipated 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 assuage 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 illustrated 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 Fanny 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 reassurance 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.” Assured 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 circumstances 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 attitude toward his childhood poverty, asserts 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, t
he 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.”