reviewed by Phyllis Vine

Abraham Lincoln "forged meaning from his affliction so that it became not merely an obstacle to overcome, but a factor in his good life," writes Joshua Wolf Shenk in a paperback release of Lincoln’s Melancholy. Although books about Lincoln fill our library shelves, few biographers have credited the impact of his life-long depression with more than a passing reference and then usually just to mention a single moment in the 1830s.

Shenk buries doubts, if any lingered, about the severity of depression spanning most of Lincoln’s adult life. His discussion of depression before it was marked by a powerful stigma conveys how Lincoln’s friends responded to his so-called "blue days" by standing suicide watch over the lanky, small-town lawyer living without the comforts of family in New Salem, Illinois.

Shenk steeps this powerful biography in a culture where the social recognition of melancholy - the 19th century equivalent of chronic depression - was deeply embedded. Herman Melville gave it texture in the opening lines of Moby Dick as a "damp, drizzly November in my soul." Poe, Byron and Emerson wrote of a "fitful storm," "a fearful gift" and "the pale cast of thought." The successful transit to adulthood presumed a man would conquer melancholy, at which point it became a sign of nobility, an element of manliness.

With rich detail, Shenk creates an indelible image of the moods Lincoln's friends observed. Much of the detail resides in oral histories collected by his law partner, William Herndon, after the assassination, when contemporaries described their memories of the slain president. They form a picture of someone who was withdrawn, lonely, somewhat emaciated, and almost obsessively preoccupied with reading law as a young men. Friends feared "he would craze himself - make himself derange." His talk turned to suicide, and his circle remained watchful. In New Salem, Illinois. "These men did not consider Lincoln’s melancholy a mere liability, nor did they distance themselves from Lincoln because of it," Shenk writes. "Indeed, when Lincoln was in distress, he could count on receiving aid." Fearing the worst, friends also removed razors from his room.

Feelings of misery, social isolation, and morbid preoccupations were companion to the 16th President. He approached his marriage to Mary Todd with dread, and expressed little joy in his election to Congress for the single term he served in the House of Representatives. And it wasn't just his own assessment of his mood, his affect was conspicuous even to strangers. A reporter sent by the Chicago Tribune in 1854 to cover Senator Stephen Douglas's debating tour over the Kansas-Nebraska Act compared Lincoln's sadness to a Shakespearean figure. The day following his nomination as presidential candidate for the new Republican Party he was gloomy and sullen.

Lincoln was fortunate that his mood disorder, severe as it was, never led onlookers to presume he had crossed the threshold into lunacy or imbecility. His efforts to find help may have led to debilitating medical treatments with purgatives, leaches, or blood lettings that were, as the cliché goes, worse than the illness, but his reputation and his community provided a modicum of shelter. Little by little, struggle by struggle, with an instinct to see the world darkly, he was able to focus his energies undaunted even if ungratified. His mood, Shenk argues, led to a "temperamental inclination to see and prepare for the worst" an advantage that humbled this war-time president, and also predisposed him to see the nation’s crisis as one requiring the reconciliation of clashing interests, a test of fiery and incompatible goals, capable of redemption from the deepest suffering. "With malice toward none; with charity for all" -- the spirit of the Gettysburgh Address - was rooted in the internal struggle that comprised his very being. According to Shenk, "These words were a peroration, not just to the speech but to Lincoln’s whole career," which, as he promises on the field of Gettysburgh, "to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan - to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations."

Today we are not surprised to learn that talking about his sadness, characterizing his loneliness and despair, actually helped Lincoln survive. But however much his symptoms fit a recognized category for chronic depression, he was more than a bundle of items to check off on a list, more than the diagnosis that would most likely deliver a label along with the consternation of employers, landlords, even of family. Shenk is mindful of this modern phenomenon, noting how treatment for depression demolished prospects for Tom Eagleton, George McGovern's running mate who dropped off the ticket after it was disclosed he suffered from depression and had been treated with electric shock therapies. In 1972, at the beginning of the revolving door to community-based mental health treatments, the nation was not helped to understand the prevalence of depression, or its treatments. Unlike the embrace of Lincoln, Eagleton was scorned, his reputation suspect, his political future shredded.

Shenk is no stranger to depression. And he well knew how Lincoln used his suffering as an insight to greater wisdom, not purposefully, not willfully, but consequential to his inner turmoil. The power of this story, however, is not only as the back-story to Lincoln and elements of his leadership style. Rather it points to major differences in how the medicalization of depression, actually of all the mental illnesses, has inadvertently drawn a line between the healthy and the troubled, and placed the person who suffers on the "other" side of an artificial boundary of worth. By watching how Lincoln's loyal and dedicated friends held him dear within their circle, we can begin to see how elements of community promote healing and how insights from that process can change the world as we, or as Lincoln, knew it.