Was Abe’s Depression a Boon?

The next time you handle a $5 bill, take a look at Abraham Lincoln’s face. His expression suggests a gloomy disposition, even depression—an illness that today might be a political liability.

That image of Lincoln is historically accurate, according to Joshua Wolf Shenk ’93, author of the new book “Lincoln’s Melancholy.” But Shenk argues that, instead of being a tragic flaw, the Great Emancipator’s depression was a key source of his success.

Shenk, also a Crimson editor, got this idea seven years ago when he saw a reference to Lincoln’s melancholy in a sociologist’s essay about suicide.

Although Lincoln’s “melancholy” was well known among his contemporaries, it has been largely ignored by historians.

“There’s never been a book to focus on Lincoln’s melancholy and to gather together all of the material related to the melancholy and make sense of it,” Shenk says in a phone interview.

Shenk took both a professional and personal interest in the topic of mental illness. “I was used to studying politics and culture and history and was also really depressed myself,” he says, adding that since his late teens he has struggled to manage depression. “I thought that I could chart a course for my own self by studying the subject in my professional work.”

Shenk’s personal experience with depression gives his version of Lincoln an underlying sympathy and sensitivity toward Lincoln’s forlorn thinking. But Shenk says that he has no personal agenda with this book other than to present a new view of Lincoln.

“I haven’t been using Lincoln to understand myself,” he says. “I’ve learned many things that are helpful to me, but they’ve all come from setting myself aside and looking at Lincoln on his own terms.”

Shenk’s ability to weave a compelling narrative is indeed the book’s greatest strength. He offers a sort of “E! True Hollywood Story” behind nearly every major event so famously associated with Lincoln.

The character of Lincoln in Shenk’s book is one who deprecated himself after his hugely successful speech to financial leaders at Cooper Union’s Great Hall in New York in 1860, who wrote dismal verses about death and suicide, who emanated sorrow that at once frightened and attracted people near him.

However, this is also a man who translated his “depressive realism,” a term Shenk quotes from psychological literature, into a passion for finding and accomplishing a greater purpose while weathering life’s tribulations.

Like this version of the book’s hero, Shenk is humble, recognizing his own limits as a historian. Referring to some historians’ claims that Lincoln was homosexual, Shenk doesn’t rule out such a possibility, but writes that “with people in history, our understanding is limited by available texts. Intuition and common sense can help, but only if they’re leavened by an awareness that the world we see ‘onstage’ is different from the world we live in.” The fact that Lincoln and companion Joshua Speed were bedmates was not unusual in the nineteenth century, and “a frank avowal of our ignorance is the first step in honestly dealing with Lincoln’s sexuality,” Shenk writes.

When he writes of Lincoln’s views on slavery, Shenk is just as sensitive to Lincoln’s cultural environment. Shenk acknowledges that Lincoln was in no way fighting in favor of equal rights for African-Americans—only for the abolition of slavery as an institution.

But despite the focus on Lincoln’s depression, particularly in the discussion of his life before the presidency, Shenk’s book becomes more about Lincoln’s admirable character traits than his mental illness. Shenk’s eloquent explications of Lincoln’s speeches—as well as anecdotes of Lincoln’s kindness and good sense of humor—become more intriguing than the book’s argument that his great asset was his melancholy.

Perhaps this is because Lincoln tempered his depressive episodes as a public figure and older man. But the reader is left with the impression that many qualities separate from Lincoln’s depression—including his persistence and his famous lack of malice toward the South—contributed more to his greatness.

Ultimately, Shenk just wrote another book about the Lincoln legend. To his credit, Shenk does bring modern psychological knowledge to bear on our understanding of the sixteenth president.

And his book adds another nuance to our romanticized portrait of the Illinois Rail-Splitter. But the argument that Lincoln’s mental condition was central to his greatness loses steam.

That said, Shenk believes that Lincoln’s depression cannot be separated from his personality, and that the modern tendency to see depression as distinctly separate from ordinary mental states isn’t accurate.

“My sense is that Lincoln came to understand that he had a condition that was somehow organically connected to his constitution—something he was born with that was not going away,” says Shenk.

Lincoln’s contemporaries, Shenk says, saw melancholy as a temperamental style, as part of someone’s character. Those afflicted by melancholy might have been more prone to nervous states or debilitating disease. But melancholy was part of a spectrum.

Shenk says that even if readers see Lincoln’s contemporaries’ views on mental illness as inferior to modern psychology, “it makes you think that these things are in flux, that our relationship to depression is a relationship of ideas. We’re developing and thinking about these things, and they can shift over time.”

And so, too, is our view of Lincoln ever-evolving.

—Staff writer Katherine M. Gray can be reached at kmgray@fas.harvard.edu.