Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder (14 page)

T
HERE ARE FEW FACES BETTER KNOWN
than that of our 16th president. One hundred and fifty years after his death, Abraham Lincoln's famous visage remains ever-present, filling our children's piggy banks with pennies and gazing out from our five-dollar bills. He stands amid Civil War ruins at Rogers State University in Claremore, Oklahoma, and leans against a tree stump, a young boy cast in bronze, in Hodgenville, Kentucky. In the U.S. Capitol, he wears a bow tie and cloak. At the Lincoln Memorial, he looms 19 feet above us. At Mount Rushmore, in the Black Hills of South Dakota, he erupts dramatically out of granite.

With his prominent nose, bushy eyebrows, and stormy hair (he once tousled it deliberately after a photographer combed it flat),
Lincoln had a distinct and memorable look. After a political rival called him two-faced at a debate, the story famously goes, Lincoln quipped, “If I had another face, do you think I'd wear this one?” But what was going on beneath? What lurked in the depths of his mind and his spirit? It is a question Lincoln's contemporaries and historians have debated for more than a century. The president was often funny and sometimes even jovial. He was inarguably ambitious and enormously accomplished, writing some of the most memorable and elegant prose ever crafted by a politician, leading a country through the greatest internal strife it had known, and ending slavery.

What is less appreciated is that Lincoln was also deeply distressed and likely suffered from clinical depression. Throughout his life, he had endured numerous tragedies: watching his beloved mother die when he was nine years old; losing two young sons to infectious disease; and presiding over the nation's bloody Civil War, with its staggering death toll of more than 620,000 men—a far greater loss than the United States experienced in any other war, before or since.

But even beyond the external traumas life threw at him, Lincoln seems to have been wired for melancholy, both genetically and somewhere deep in his soul. He talked about his “nervous temperament” and, stunningly, his desire, at times, to end his life.

Historical records are filled with Lincoln's contemporaries describing a notable gloom that seeped out from within. William Herndon, Lincoln's law partner, observed that “his melancholy dripped from him as he walked.” Another man, after seeing Lincoln for the first time, made note of his long, pale face and his enormous hands and feet. But what struck him most of all, he said, was the look in Lincoln's eyes: “Lincoln had the saddest eyes of any human being that I have ever seen.”

L
INCOLN
'
S EARLY LIFE WAS A MIX
of happy sojourns in the woods and family tragedy spurred by the difficult times in which he lived. Born in a log cabin with a dirt floor near Hodgenville, Kentucky, on February 12, 1809, he was an enthusiastic learner, an avid reader, and a decent farmhand, wielding his ax proficiently and harvesting corn for the family. The deaths in his family were sudden—but, sadly, not uncommon. There were, of course, no antibiotics to treat infectious diseases in the 19th century; women died regularly during childbirth; and many children never lived to see their fifth birthdays, succumbing to poor nutrition and disease spread through contaminated milk and water.

Lincoln's father, Thomas, a carpenter and farmer, would live to be 73 years old. But in 1818, when Lincoln was nine, his mother, Nancy, contracted “milk sickness,” an illness believed to be caused by a poisonous plant toxin that tainted milk. For days, she writhed with fever and chills before summoning her children to her deathbed to tell them to be “good and kind” to their father. She was just 34 years old. Nine years later, Lincoln's older sister, Sarah, died after delivering a stillborn baby. A neighbor saw Lincoln bury his face in his hands as the “tears slowly trickled from between his bony fingers and his gaunt frame shook with sobs.”

It is almost certain that these traumas had a deep impact on Lincoln—possibly even influencing his later onset of depression—but they did not eviscerate his spirit. He emerged from his teenage years a likable, friendly, and good-natured young fellow. His contemporaries took special delight in his extraordinary gift for storytelling. Ida Tarbell, the muckraking journalist, interviewed a man named John Roll who remembered meeting Lincoln when he was 22 years old in the old town of Sangamon, Illinois, near the Sangamon River. Tall and lanky by then (he would reach the then unusual height of six feet four inches), Lincoln had come to
build a flatboat—and, as it turned out, to entertain other laborers during rest time.

In Tarbell's account, published in
McClure's Magazine
in 1895, she describes workers assembling on a long log to whittle, talk, and listen to Lincoln's “irresistibly droll” yarns. His stories were so funny, Roll said, that “the boys on the log would whoop and roll off” repeatedly, leaving the wood polished up like a mirror. “It took four weeks to build the raft, and in that period Lincoln succeeded in captivating the entire village by his storytelling,” wrote Tarbell. Long after Lincoln left Sangamon—the county he would later represent in the Illinois state legislature—“Abe's log” was preserved in his memory until it finally rotted away.

Depression often strikes in early adulthood. In the summer of 1835, when Lincoln was 26 years old, grave concerns about his emotional health began to surface, according to journalist and biographer Joshua Wolf Shenk, who presents a meticulous case for Lincoln's depression in his book
Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness
. By then, Lincoln had been elected to his first term in the Illinois state legislature, and was studying law as a means to a full-fledged profession and income. He threw himself into his legal studies so exhaustively that he lost weight and alienated himself from his friends. Lincoln's closest companions “were afraid that he would craze himself—make himself derange[d],” one acquaintance in the area recalled.

It was the death of a young woman named Ann Rutledge, whom Lincoln had met at her father's tavern and boardinghouse, that seemed to send him into the depths of true desperation. To this day, the extent of their relationship is unclear. Were they friends? In love? Engaged? Nobody knows for sure, but Lincoln clearly had strong feelings for her. When Rutledge became ill with “bilious fever,” most likely typhoid, and died at the age of 22 in
August 1835, Lincoln suffered what Shenk describes as his first major depressive episode. He isolated himself, took to wandering off into the woods alone with his gun, and was so overwrought that even a bout of cold, rainy weather sent him into a tailspin as he worried about Rutledge's grave getting wet. “The effect upon Mr. Lincoln's mind was terrible,” one of Rutledge's brothers wrote at the time. “He became plunged in despair.” Most worrisome, Lincoln began talking about suicide, prompting his anxious friends to rally around him to be sure he stayed safe. “That was the time the community said he was crazy,” one neighbor recalled.

One could legitimately speculate that Lincoln was simply grieving, a state that can look like depression. But even after seeming to recover from Rutledge's death, he continued to wrestle with misery. Robert L. Wilson, a fellow politician who served with Lincoln in the Illinois state legislature in 1836 and 1837, later recalled Lincoln telling him that “although he appeared to enjoy life rapturously, still he was the victim of terrible melancholy.” When he was alone, Lincoln told Wilson, “he was so overcome with mental depression, that he never dare[d] carry a knife in his pocket.”

In the winter of 1840, five years after Rutledge's death, Lincoln would succumb to another bout of deep anguish, even though nobody had died. In the days and months leading up to this second breakdown, he was saddled with professional and personal turmoil. It was a particularly trying time in his career. By the late 1830s, Lincoln had become a respected and popular politician, winning reelection to the state legislature three times. But after supporting a program that derailed the state's economy, he almost lost his bid for a fourth term in 1840, shaking his confidence. At the same time, Lincoln had campaigned exhaustively and unsuccessfully for a political ally, adding to an already heavy workload, with multiple cases to be argued before the state supreme court.

Lincoln's love life was in disarray as well. He had broken his engagement to Mary Todd, the woman he would later marry, because of significant misgivings that the two were ill suited. But severing the relationship affected him at a profoundly moral level, and he was troubled by his decision. Lincoln's old friend and closest confidant, Joshua Speed, said he was so worried about his friend that he “had to remove razors from his room—take away all Knives and other such dangerous things.”

Over the first few weeks of January, in 1841, Lincoln failed to attend legislative sessions and missed numerous political votes. “By this time, Lincoln's illness was the talk of the town,” Shenk writes, and a local newspaper “poked fun at his indisposition.” Lincoln was confined to bed, though he did manage to seek treatment for “hypochondriasis,” a term used then to describe a milder form of melancholia that had the potential to get worse. Around this time, Lincoln wrote to one of his law partners, saying, “I am now the most miserable man living.” In a note to his friend Speed, Lincoln mused, “if what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth.”

Tragedy and misfortune do not define a person's mental health, nor do they determine a diagnosis. You can grieve without needing Prozac. You can be miserable without being depressed. Even today, it can be difficult to accurately assess depression—and of course, we cannot sit Lincoln down for a 21st-century screening test to determine how often he experienced poor appetite, low energy, and hopelessness. Never? Sometimes? Always?

Nevertheless, the symptoms Lincoln suffered during his two initial breakdowns are consistent with today's definition of depression. Key features include a depressed mood for at least two weeks, a loss of interest or pleasure in everyday activities, weight loss or gain, fatigue, feelings of guilt, indecisiveness or worthlessness, and
thoughts of death or suicide. One bout of the blues does not add up to clinical depression, says Dr. Nassir Ghaemi, director of the Mood Disorders Program at Tufts Medical Center in Boston. But “if it recurs repeatedly, it's a disease.”

Depression, like autism, addiction, and other mental health conditions, exists on a continuum. The severity of the disorder can be gleaned in part from the number of episodes a person suffers and the intensity of each. Most people fall into the mild to moderate range, says Ghaemi, and he believes that Lincoln's depression would qualify as moderate. Lincoln's first two episodes, when he was suicidal, were clearly debilitating. Later bouts appear to have been less overwhelming and shorter in duration; nonetheless, they had a profound impact on his outlook and behavior.

Accounts of Lincoln's penetrating melancholy are abundant and consistent throughout his life. Herndon, Lincoln's law partner and early biographer, kept extraordinarily detailed notes and described a man often overtaken by misery. In the course of a single day, Lincoln's mood could shift from cheerful and good-natured to “a sad terribly gloomy state,” Herndon reported. During these periods, Lincoln often rested his chin on the palm of his left hand and gazed off into the distance. Some mornings, Herndon would find Lincoln lying on the couch looking up toward the sky or sitting in a chair with his feet on the windowsill, so completely withdrawn that he failed to acknowledge his colleague's arrival. Herndon's “good morning” was received with nothing more than a grunt. “I at once busied myself with pen and paper, or ran through the leaves of some books,” Herndon wrote, “but the evidence of his melancholy and distress was so plain, and his silence so significant, that I would grow restless myself.” At these moments, Herndon would find an excuse to leave the office for a while, he recalled, “and before I reached the bottom of the
stairs I could hear the key turn in the lock, and Lincoln was alone in his gloom.”