Lincoln’s Great Depression

Apologies, readers, for the prolonged silence on this blog. In Lincoln’s words below, I have been “not very well”. A short bout of depression left me all the more amazed at how Lincoln was able to soldier on, and accomplish as much as he did: I couldn’t muster the strength to write a blog, much less save a country.

The upside to this is that it caused me to seek out an absolutely fantastic article about Lincoln’s depressive states and his friends’ and acquaintances’ observations thereof. Enjoy, and be heartened!

The next day the convention closed. The crowds dispersed, leaving behind cigar stubs and handbills and the smells of sweat and whiskey. Later the lieutenant governor of Illinois, William J. Bross, walked the floor. He saw Lincoln sitting alone at the end of the hall, his head bowed, his gangly arms bent at the elbows, his hands pressed to his face. As Bross approached, Lincoln noticed him and said, "I’m not very well."

Lincoln’s look at that moment—the classic image of gloom—was familiar to everyone who knew him well. Such spells were just one thread in a curious fabric of behavior and thought that his friends called his "melancholy." He often wept in public and recited maudlin poetry. He told jokes and stories at odd times—he needed the laughs, he said, for his survival. As a young man he talked more than once of suicide, and as he grew older he said he saw the world as hard and grim, full of misery, made that way by fate and the forces of God. "No element of Mr. Lincoln’s character," declared his colleague Henry Whitney, "was so marked, obvious and ingrained as his mysterious and profound melancholy." His law partner William Herndon said, "His melancholy dripped from him as he walked."

via Lincoln’s Great Depression – Joshua Wolf Shenk – The Atlantic.

Clara Barton’s Inner War

Many of my favorite historical figures (Lincoln, Sherman, Meriwether Lewis among them) appear to have suffered from debilitating depression, which makes it all the more stunning that they went on to drag themselves up and change their worlds. Another of my favorite tough broads, Clara Barton, was listed amongst the black dog owners, too.

“I am depressed and feel dissatisfied with myself,” she wrote in fine, tiny script in diaries now stored on microfilm in the Library of Congress. With so little to do, she paradoxically couldn’t rest, and so “rose not refreshed, but cold and languid.” For neither the first nor last time, she considered suicide.

“All the world appears selfish and treacherous,” she wrote on April 14. “I can get no hold on a good noble sentiment any where. I have scanned over and over the whole moral horizon and it is all dark. The night clouds seem to have shut down — so stagnant, so dead, so selfish, so calculating. . . . Shall the world move on in all this weight of dead, morbid meanness?” A few days later, she fantasized again about killing herself.

But then, as Elizabeth Brown Pryor wrote in her 1987 biography, “Clara Barton: Professional Angel,” the self-made philanthropist’s “dejection was lifted finally by her only true remedy — a need for her services. The Union army’s spring campaign had started early.”

via Clara Barton’s inner war — Health — Bangor Daily News — BDN Maine.

Southern Suicides

The New York Times’ Disunion (which I’ll be referencing a lot less thanks to the stingier paywall limits) examines suicides in the Confederate army, which it seems was more prevalent than in the Union army. Some excellent points are put forth.  (One not suggested was “the cause”; if Emancipation could breathe new life into the Northern ranks, is it not fair to suggest an equal and opposite reaction on the other side?)

Each suicide is a thing unto itself, but we can offer a few conjectures. Importantly, men, especially white men in the South, well understood the expectations Victorian society demanded of them in wartime. Honor and duty required their martial participation. So in the wake of the firing on Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s call for troops, Southern white men heeded their new nation’s call to arms and flocked to recruiting stations.

The “Boys of ’61” were pulled into military service by rage militaire a sense of adventure, but they were also pushed into service by patriotic womenfolk who, despite reservations, implored their husbands and sons to enlist. To resist would raise questions about one’s manhood as well as commitment to nation. Consequently, thousands reflexively rushed off to war without much deliberation or contemplation.

As Southern recruits mustered in camps, the reality of what they faced set in. While many a green soldier longed to “see the elephant” – a colloquial term referring to engaging in battle – eagerness often gave way to anxiety and a plethora of fears: of dying, of killing, of failure, of the unknown. If any of those fears were made manifest, a soldier’s courage would be called into question…

via A Burden Too Heavy to Bear – NYTimes.com.

“Poor Bill Christian”

A strict disciplinarian who served during the Mexican-American War and as drillmaster for the Utica, New York, city militia, William Henry Christian certainly had the credentials of an officer. A surveyor and engineer by trade, Christian sought to make his mark in the military and got off to a promising start. As events proved, however, Christian was never cut out for battlefield command. As colonel of the 26th New York Infantry, he stayed out of the action at Second Bull Run, claiming illness. Then as a brigade commander at the battle of Antietam, he became unnerved and fled in the face of the enemy. He grew increasingly despondent afterwards and ultimately slipped into a state of insanity, dying an inmate of a New York asylum. His story is truly a sad one.

A sad tale indeed. Shell shock, or soldier’s heart, as it was known in that war, must have affected far more men that we ever got to hear about.  Sherman’s depression seems negligible compared to Christian’s meltdown.

via The 48th Pennsylvania Infantry. . .: Poor Bill Christian. . ..

Civil War Humor

Disunion discusses how the war was filtered through comedy (mainly of the sarcastic bent) at the time.

Abraham Lincoln became the war’s most notorious jester, known for his backcountry yarns and goofy, self-deprecating style. Washington socialites complained that he simply would not stop telling jokes at their dinner parties. His cabinet – stiff, bearded, capable men, whom Navy Secretary Gideon Welles called “destitute of wit” – met his enthusiastic joking with blank stares and awkward sneezes; William P. Fessenden, the secretary of the Treasury, objected that comedy was “hardly a proper subject.” Lincoln ignored them, introducing his plan for emancipation by reading aloud a routine by his favorite humorist. He often joked with citizens who sought his aid: when a businessman requested a pass through Union lines to Richmond, Lincoln chuckled that he had already sent 250,000 men in that direction, but “not one has got there yet.”

Disunion: Sherman’s Demons

The New York Times’ Disunion series has a great entry on Cump Sherman and his mental illness. Sherman has long been my favourite Civil War personality, due in large part to his personality, and his personality was hugely determined by his bipolar disorder. Luckily for him – and us – he shared Lincoln’s ability to pull himself out of a major depressive episode to change the course of American history.

In letters to his wife, Ellen Ewing Sherman, Sherman himself confirmed and amplified what others observed. Everyone around him seemed poised to betray him, he wrote her. “I am up all night.” He had lost his appetite. Viewing his situation from the perspective of this mental turmoil, he was convinced that he was caught in an impossible military contradiction where “to advance would be madness and to stand still folly.” And he entirely lacked the means to lead others and to control himself: “I find myself riding a whirlwind unable to guide the storm.” In the near future he anticipated total “failure and humiliation,” an onrushing infamy that “nearly makes me crazy — indeed I may be so now.”

This chronicle of his breakdown also sheds more light on Sherman’s deep loathing of reporters!

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/shermans-demons/?smid=fb-disunion