Born 215 years ago today, ‘epochal’ president struggled with depression

By Peter Fernandez

In 1860 and 1864, the voters of Vermont delivered Abraham Lincoln his most significant margins of election victories, with the Republican Presidential nominee receiving three-quarters of the Green Mountain State’s ballots. He pardoned the executions of 64 Union soldiers, including Private William Scott of Groton, for falling asleep on guard duty, but in seeking stories of Lincoln visiting the 14th state, you will be disappointed since there is no record of his ever-setting size 14 boots up here. At the war’s end, he also pardoned the entire Confederate Army. 

But the overburdened father of a sprawling and brawling adolescent nation of twin sons fighting with each other was a formidable commission for the Sixteenth President. He endured perpetual guilt and shame for mandating and mustering innumerable youths to a premature death, as evidenced at war’s end by how his complicated appearance was further tilled into wrinkled furrows and hardened by a leaden pall. Perhaps no other mortal could have weathered such a dreadful position without the ‘benefit’ of having already passed through his own psychological crucible. 

Long before he ambled out of the backwoods, depression haunted the gangling 6’4” yokel, whose tempest-tossed black hair shaded an admitted “ugly” face patched and nailed to the tilted frame of a scarecrow.

As of May 2021, according to Microsoft Bing Co-pilot, there exist sixteen thousand biographies of Lincoln, and Joshua Wolf Shank’s 2005 biography, Lincoln’s Melancholy, wasn’t the first nor will it be the last that profiles the epochal president’s mental health. “For some people, psychological health is a birthright,” writes Shenk. “For many others, like Abraham Lincoln, it is the realization of great labor.” 

Perhaps the most accurate definition of Melancholia/Depression is  “sadness and fear without cause.” Still, it was also the future potentate’s life experience that provoked a daily battle with clinical depression. When Lincoln was four, a brother died in infancy; at nine, his beloved mother perished in 1818 of “milk sickness,” an equally loved sister, Sarah, died at 21, and his “sweetheart” Ann Rutledge, 22, perished of typhoid in 1835. The medical profession did not replace “Melancholia” until the early 20th century with the sterile, appropriately accurate, and dismal term “Depression.” 

Shenk believed Lincoln unquestionably “meets the US surgeon general’s definition of mental illness since he experienced ‘alterations in thinking, mood, or behavior’  that were associated with ‘distress and/or impaired functioning.’” But he also met the surgeon general’s positive criteria  “‘with the successful performance of mental function, result- ing in productive activities, fulfilling relationships with other people, and the ability to adapt to change and to cope with adversity.’” 

Also, according to the author, Henry McHenry, a farmer who lived in the New Salem, Illinois area, recalled, “After that event he (Lincoln) seemed quite changed and retired, & loved solitude, he seemed wrapped in profound thought, indifferent, to transpiring Events, had but Little to say, but would take his gun and wander off into the woods by himself…this gloom seemed to deepen for some time, so as to give anxiety to his friends in regard to his Mind.”

Mentor Graham, a schoolteacher, recalled that his friend “Told me that he felt like committing suicide often.” The young Lincoln was an ambitious daydreamer, a seeming misnomer, but he would have to overcome the poverty of his frontier cultivation beneath the stern gaze of a distant father who didn’t care a lick for books or learning. An intrinsic  introspection and forlornness would forge a well around his cavernous psyche, stone by rock by brick, but also pour into it the sweet groundwater of kindness and the refreshing rain of discernment.  

During the winter of 1840-41, while studying law and working full-time in a general store he co-owned with his friend, Joshua Speed, Lincoln underwent another break-down.”He was trying to keep the debt-ridden State of Illinois from collapsing (and his political career with it)… inextricably bound to a woman he didn’t love (Mary Todd).” writes Shenk. His business partner Joshua Speed was moving away and marrying Matilda Edwards, the woman Lincoln loved but dared not speak with. “My experience,” Lincoln later wrote,  “clearly proves to be very severe on defective nerves,”

Speed later documented that “Lincoln went crazy-had to remove razors from his room-take away all knives and other such dangerous things- and it was terrible.’ That winter, the suffering sequoian servant sought the assistance of Dr. Anson Henry, “spending several hours a day” with him, but medical records were unavailable.   

Historical documents authenticate Lincoln’s possession of a charge account at a Springfield, Illinois, drugstore. “On one occasion he bought fifty cents’ worth of cocaine,” logs Shenk, “and he sometimes took the ‘blue mass’- a mercury pill that was believed to clear the body of black bile.” No, the future President was not a thrill-seeking addict, for then cocaine was a legal, ordinary tincture for the painkilling/stimulant narcotic had not yet become the societal bane that it is today. Lincoln purchased other soothing medications such as sarsaparilla, camphor, and opiates, probably laudanum.

Ahead of his time, Lincoln’s proactive approach to mental health was largely overlooked by historians and biographers until the 21st century, when such awareness became the clinical trend. His willingness to speak to friends and medical professionals about uncovering and healing painful emotions may have saved his life. Had Lincoln capituated to the depression and not fulfilled his boundless potential, one shudders what might have happened to our divided Union. 

The author is a children’s book author and Vermont resident.