Honest Abe's Suicidal Tendencies and Depression

The Great Emancipator's Lifelong Struggle with “Melancholy”

Lincoln had depression 

We know that Abraham Lincoln was killed by an armed assassin. But not many people know that he almost died twenty years earlier when he nearly turned a gun on himself.

Lincoln is often lionized in popular history as a strong and stoic man. He was strong, but his strength did not come from stunting his emotional responses. It came from enduring a lifelong battle with deep depression, including two complete mental breakdowns.

The man who guided America through its darkest hour could do so, in part, because he had been through the darkness of his own soul and the terrors of the human mind.

In Joshua Wolf Shenk’s book, Lincoln’s Melancholy[i], a complete portrait of the larger-than-life figure shows him as he was — a man haunted by deep mental health issues that many of us struggle with in the modern day.

Today, Lincoln's Depression, or "Melancholy," as it was called then, has been erased from much of history. However, during Lincoln’s life, everybody around him knew that he was prone to mood swings and severe depression. It was also well-known that he had suffered at least two breakdowns. He didn’t try to hide it. His law partner (and later biographer) William Herndon said that Lincoln’s “melancholy dripped from him as he walked.”[ii]

Another colleague said that “no element of Mr. Lincoln’s character was so marked, obvious, and ingrained as his mysterious and profound melancholy.”[iii]

Mental Health in the 1800s was less stigmatized

Today, a candidate with a chronic mental health issue would have difficulty winning the presidency. But Lincoln won because even his opponents were open-minded about mental struggles. Even his two suicidal breakdowns were no secret. During his first breakdown in 1835, he was “locked up by his friends … to prevent derangement or suicide.”[iv]

It may seem odd, but in the 1800s, people were actually more understanding of what we call today “mental illness” than people in the late 1900s and early 2000s. It's hard to know why this is. Maybe life was just harder back then, and people broke down more often, so there was no stigma to it. Regardless, Lincoln's emotional and mental problems were well known by rivals, but they didn’t use that to say he wasn’t fit for the job.

When a newspaper from the opposite party, the Democrats, wrote a story about his breakdowns, it was positive. The author was a rival of Lincoln's named John Hill. Rather than questioning Lincoln’s ability, to lead a nation, as we'd expect a rival to do today, Hill praised Lincoln. He celebrated Lincoln’s triumph over his first breakdown when he was in his 20s. He encouraged young people that they, like Lincoln, could become great if they “await the occasions which shall rule their destinies.”[v]

Lincoln’s severe melancholy, what we would call today a deep clinical depression, was so well known that it was often considered his most prominent attribute. So, why weren’t we taught about it?

Erasing History

Lincoln’s mood swings, mental breakdowns, and general melancholy were well-known throughout his life and for many years after. But much of Lincoln’s mental health struggle, and life in general, was rewritten by historians in the mid-twentieth century, especially J.G. Randall (1881-1953). Randall dismissed all oral history even though much of what we know about Lincoln comes to us from recorded oral histories.[vi]

In fact, perhaps the most important book about Lincoln, Herndon’s Informant, includes a collection of interviews conducted by William H. Herndon. Herndon was Lincoln's law partner. In the years immediately following Lincoln's death, he interviewed colleagues, friends, and rivals, and collected them in Herndon's Informant. Despite the painstaking work that Herndon put into this project over the 25 years, it was dismissed by people like Randall. He believed good historical information only came from official documents like court papers and censuses.[vii]  These sources are valuable but do very little to depict the personality of a person.

Because of this, Randall and his successors have effectively destroyed the portrait of Lincoln's character. By the 1970s students were taught that Lincoln’s first suicidal breakdown was a “myth,” and the second one was ignored.[viii]

Now, historians are once again incorporating oral sources into their research. Many of the original sources that gave us information on Lincoln’s life — his colleagues, friends, and family — have once again been given a voice.

Next week, I'll cover some of the ways that Lincoln coped with his "Melancholy," what we call Depression. I'll compare his methods to ones used by psychologists today, so make sure to Subscribe so you don't miss it!

I’ll also be making a video that covers this topic.

Thanks for reading.

[i] Joshua Wolf Shenk, Lincoln’s Melancholy, (New York: First Mariner Books, 2006)

[ii] Henry C Whitney, Life on the Circuit with Lincoln (Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1892), p 139.

[iii] William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik, Herndon’s Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life, vol 3, p 588

[iv] William G. Greene, interview with WHH, May 29, 1865, Herndon’s Informants

[v] John Hill, “A Romance of Reality,” Menard Axis, February 15 1862.

[vi] Shenk, Lincoln’s Melancholy, p 3.

[vii] Shenk, Lincoln’s Melancholy, p 5.

[viii] Shenk, Lincoln’s Melancholy p 5