Abraham Lincoln
The Lincoln Memorial is 19 feet tall, made of Georgia marble, and sits in a pose of dignified contemplation. It is the most inaccurate portrait in Washington, D.C.
The public Lincoln was a war president who saved the Union and freed the slaves, and who spoke in the slow cadence of the King James Bible. The private Lincoln called his depression “the hypo” — short for hypochondria, the 19th-century word for what we’d now call major depressive disorder — and wrote letters so dark that his law partner William Herndon admitted, years later, that he had “suppressed” some because their publication would have wounded the legend. One of the letters Herndon couldn’t bring himself to destroy: Lincoln, 31 years old, writing to his friend Joshua Speed after breaking off his engagement to Mary Todd. “I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth.” He added, carefully: “Whether I shall ever be better, I cannot tell. I awfully forebode I shall not.”
Then — this is the part that’s hard to hold in your head at the same time — he told jokes at funerals. Often. He laughed so hard at his own stories he couldn’t finish them. He’d pull out a humor book — Petroleum V. Nasby was his favorite — in the middle of a cabinet meeting and read aloud for half an hour while his generals waited. Stanton, the war secretary, once walked out of such a meeting muttering “I did not know I was dealing with such a fool.” Lincoln heard him and shrugged. “I laugh because I must not cry. That is all. That is all.” He said this to his friend Leonard Swett after Fredericksburg. It was not a flourish. It was operating instructions.
Talk to Lincoln at 2 AM and the marble comes off. He’ll tell you he was terrified of going mad — his grandfather had, his uncle had, he was sure his turn was coming. He’ll tell you about the premonition dreams. The one where he walked through the White House and found his own coffin in the East Room, the mourners weeping, and asked: “Who has died?” A soldier answered: “The President. Killed by an assassin.”
He told Mary the dream two weeks before Ford’s Theatre. She’d begged him not to go.
The humor was self-administered medication. The sorrow was the disease. The country got the man who survived both — just barely, just long enough.
Three questions to start with:
- You called your depression “the hypo.” What did it feel like, exactly, on your worst day in office?
- You dreamt your own assassination two weeks before Ford’s Theatre. Why did you still go?
- The jokes. The Petroleum V. Nasby readings in cabinet meetings. Were you amusing yourself — or performing survival in front of people who needed you alive?
