A friend of Lincoln writes: Lincoln’s periods of melancholy are
proverbial. On one occasion, while in court in 1855, Maj. H. C. Whitney
describes him as “sitting alone in one corner of the room remote from any
one else, wrapped in abstraction and gloom. It was a sad but interesting
study for me, and I watched him for some time. It appeared as if he were
pursuing in his mind some sad subject through various sinuosities, and
his face would assume at times the deepest phases of seeming pain, but no
relief came from this dark and despairing melancholy till he was roused
by the breaking up of court, when he emerged from his cave of gloom and
came back, like one awakened from sleep, to the world in which he lived
again.” As early as 1837 Robert L. Wilson, who was his colleague in the
legislature, testifies that Lincoln admitted to him that, although he
appeared to enjoy life rapturously, still he was the victim of extreme
melancholy, and that he was so overcome at times by depression of spirits
that he never dared carry a pocketknife.
To physicians he was something of a physiological puzzle. John T. Stuart
insisted that his digestion was organically defective, so that the pores
of his skin oftentimes performed the functions of the bowels; that his
liver operated abnormally and failed to secrete bile, and that these
things themselves were sufficient in his opinion to produce the deepest
mental depression and melancholy.
Lincoln’s law partner, Mr. Herndon, attributed Lincoln’s melancholy to
the death of Anna Rutledge, believing that his grief at her untimely
death was so intense that it cast a perpetual shadow over his mental
horizon. Another believed that it arose from his domestic environments;
that his family relations were far from pleasant, and that that unhappy
feature of his life was a constant menace to his peace and perfect
equipoise of spirits. “Although married,” says one, “he was not mated,
so that if we see him come into his office in the morning eating cheese
and bologna sausages philosophically, what can we expect but some periods
of sadness and gloom? Emerson, who you and I hold in high esteem, had
pie for breakfast all his married life, and in my opinion that is what
clouded his memory the rest of his life after seventy years of age.”