“What is Hell to One Like Me...?” (August/September 2004 | Volume: 55, Issue: 4)

“What is Hell to One Like Me...?”

AH article image

Authors: Richard Lawrence Miller

Historic Era: Era 4: Expansion and Reform (1801-1861)

Historic Theme:

Subject:

August/September 2004 | Volume 55, Issue 4

Lincoln’s melancholy is famous. Less well-known is that he not only penned thoughts about suicide, but published them in a newspaper. Scholars have long believed that the only copy in the newspaper’s files was mutilated to hide those thoughts from posterity. But the composition has apparently always been in plain sight—and unrecognized.

How did such a thing come to be written? How was it lost? Why should we think it has been found? And what does it reveal about its author?

Both of Lincoln’s parents suffered periods of bleakness often enough to attract comment from their Kentucky neighbors. Said one: “Thomas Lincoln was a real nice, agreeable man, who often got the ‘blues,’ and had some strange sort of spell, and wanted to be alone all he could when he had them. He would walk away out on the barrens alone, and stay out sometimes half a day. . . . Some of us was afear’d he was losin’ his mind.” Similar behavior was observed in his young son. In 1862, an elderly woman told a visitor to his boyhood home: “Abe moped round an’ had spells, an’ we all got mighty feared that he was losin’ hisself, but he did n’t. He was all right agin in a day or two, and peart as ever.”

Abraham Lincoln’s vacillation between gaiety and gloom continued to be noticed throughout his life. Someone who saw him in his 40s telling stories while attending court in Bloomington, Illinois recollected that “his eyes would sparkle with fun,... and nobody’s enjoyment was greater than his. An hour later, he might be seen in the same place or in some law office nearby, but alas, how different! His chair, no longer in the center of the room, would be leaning back against the wall; his feet drawn up and resting on the front rounds so that his knees and chin were about on a level; his hat tipped sightly forward, as if to shield or hide his face; his eyes no longer sparkling with fun and merriment, but sad and downcast, and his hands clasped around his knees. There, drawn up within himself, as it were, he would sit, the very picture of dejection and gloom. Thus absorbed, have I seen him sit for hours at a time, defying the interruptions of even his closest friends. . . . By his moody silence and abstraction, he had thrown about him a barrier so dense and impenetrable that no one dared to break through. It was a strange picture, and one I have never forgotten.” Leonard Swett, a colleague of Lincoln in law and politics, asked: “What gave him that peculiar melancholy? What cancer had he inside?”

Lincoln “told me that he was so overcome with mental depression that he never dare carry a knife in his pocket. And, as long as I was intimately acquainted with him,... he never carried a pocket knife.”

Lincoln’s sadness probably had multiple causes. Given the occasional dejection observed in his